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Movie Reviews

Review: The Last Jedi (Spoilerrific)


There was so much wrong with this movie that I’m having trouble deciding if it was or worse than the last one. On reflection I can think of only a handful of scenes I really enjoyed:

1) Rose’s introduction where she meets Fin. Her switch from star-struck to professional was great.

2) Luke’s confrontation with Kylo and overall fakeout. It was the perfect rollercoaster of emotions, from anticipation to shock to confusion to suspicion to elated confirmation.

3) The slicer (or whatever they called him)’s “betrayal”: it was nice to see a mercenary really act like a mercenary and not end up siding with the good guys. I actually look forward to his character in the third movie. I suspect he will end up being good eventually, but would be happy to be surprised.

4) Corny as it was, the caretakers on the island made me laugh, particularly when Rey sliced the rocks and knocked away their cart. Something about their resigned body language was perfectly humorous to me.

5) Yoda’s conversation with Luke was good, and I particularly liked his remark about the ancient texts being rather dry and basic compared to what modern Jedi have learned and could teach.

6) Music overall was great, as usual. Not even the prequels could drag down the score for these films.

7) The lightsaber battle with Kylo and Rey, and their subsequent conversation, was good. Kylo’s goals were subversive and persuasive enough to actually make me think Rey would side with him, which would have cemented the movie as the spiritual successor to Empire’s “bad ending.” Pretty disappointed that didn’t turn out to be the case.

8) The movie at various points seems self-aware of the criticism the first movie got, like Snoke asking Kylo to take off his “ridiculous” helmet. Unfortunately, it did not take this self-awareness into any actually constructive directions…

With that I’ll get to my list of things I disliked, which are far, far greater. I’ll try to summarize to the really important stuff in plot or character missteps:

1) The intro for Rose was subsequently ruined by the two of them finishing each other’s sentences about how the ship was tracked through hyperspace, as if such a unique and shocking thing to everyone else would be immediately apparent to two people at once, neither of which I’ve been given any reason to believe have a thorough understanding of the mechanics or physics involved. I would have been more okay with it if she had figured it out herself, but it still bothers me how quickly this idea was introduced, solved, and never actually explained in any way. Is tracking through hyperspace something everyone will know how to do, now? Won’t that fundamentally change the very nature of warfare in the Star Wars universe? I know the heroes have more pressing matters to address, but like the hyperspace-into-planet-‘s-atmosphere trick in the last movie, I’ve seen this kind of playing fast-and-loose with the rules of the universe inevitably end up coming back to bite writers, and I don’t have any reason to suspect future Star Wars will avoid the plot holes that will arise from things like this.

2) The entire plotline with the ship chase bothered me, not the least because its conflict came from stupidity-through-miscommunication, the lowest level of idiot-ball holding. The lady who took over after Leia made my brain feel like it was melting. I want heroes to make mistakes and suffer consequences, but I have trouble rooting for people who make mistakes as basic as “don’t tell a hotheaded and charismatic underling that I have a plan” and then “don’t tell him the plan even while they’re holding me at gunpoint while staging a coup.” Poe is an idiot, but he’s an idiot within the narrowly acceptable confines of his character archetype and potential arc for growth. The lady with the pink hair was actively immersion breaking to me, in part because she kept getting talked up as some great commander.

3) Let’s talk more about that chase. A whole fleet is chasing 3 ships in a straight line for hours because they somehow can stay just out of range, and not once does the New Order call for reinforcements from elsewhere to jump into the system and cut them off? Again, they were chasing them for hours. Is that all the ships they have in the New Order? Fuck, why not just have a couple of them jump forward, then turn around and jump back just ahead of the Resistance ships? This whole plotline was mind-mindbogglingly stupid and the fact that it got through writing, editing, and shooting without someone in charge going “Hey, are our villains just colossally dumb? Like too stupid to be believably threatening?” makes me mark this movie as Prequel levels of mismanaged.

4) Speaking of which, no one anywhere in the Star Wars universe above the age of 10 should be surprised by someone using hyper-speed as a weapon, if that’s a thing that people can actually get away with doing, let alone anyone in a military, let alone someone in charge of one. For Hux to be made aware that they were charging their hyperspace engines, then choose to ignore the ship turning toward them until it was too late was utterly immersion breaking. When the villains remain dumb-as-doorknobs throughout the movie, something I was hoping would change after they got their asses handed to them so badly in the last movie, I have trouble taking any threats or heroics seriously. Why is Hux still in charge of ANYTHING at this point? He has made terrible calls during pretty much every single job he’s been given: if there was something specific from him that made their plan to destroy the New Republic planets a success, it was never shown. If Snoke wasn’t dead I would suspect him of being a Jedi plant who’s trying to bring down the First Order from within by keeping some bumbling idiot in charge of its military. The scene of the ship being destroyed was amazing, and showing it in silence was a great choice by the director, but seeing villains be so easily made fools of makes it hard for me to remain interested in a movie.

5) I’m dissatisfied with Han’s dice remaining just long enough for Kylo to find them, as it happened after Luke faded away. Then again, we just saw Yoda return as a spirit yet again and CALL LIGHTNING FROM THE SKY WTF YODA MAYBE YOU COULD HAVE HELPED OUT ON ENDOR WITH SOME OF THAT SHIT so who knows what powers Luke will retain as a spirit and whether he maintained the illusion/construct purposefully to mess with Kylo.

6) Fin’s role in these movies still continues to disappoint and irritate me. Part of it is remaining from the first movie, his character could have been SO MUCH MORE, he could have been an actual storm trooper who had his stomach turned from violence/The Empire after years of slaughter and losing his friend, but no, that was just some random guy who put blood on his helmet, it was Fin’s first mission apparently, he was a JANITOR before then, and so he’s morally in the clear and doesn’t have to have any interesting character arcs other than that of being a coward, which has yet to have any actual impact on the story, especially since Rose stopped him from sacrificing himself with an utterly nonsensical line about “saving what we love” rather than “destroying what we hate” which irritated me even more because they should totally have been captured or killed after crashing a few meters away from an advancing Imperial armada, but whatever, I’ve already harped on the bad guys being laughably incompetent.

7) Goddammit I can’t believe they actually brought Phasma back after throwing her into a trash chute on a planet that exploded less than an hour (?) later, and she STILL accomplished nothing of any importance whatsoever. How she even got out of the trash chute in the last movie, knew to get off planet, and managed to do so in time will forever remain a mystery, unless maybe they bring her back from pointless death yet again. It irritates me all over again that apparently her armor is the only set ever made to actually do something, and they gave it to a coward who capitulated as soon as someone stuck a gun to her head, a gun whose blasts would RICOCHET OFF IF THEY’D SHOT HER ANYWAY APPARENTLY ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME ARRGHIWIFIAOAIWOAWQEI-

*coughs*

Anyway…

8) The casino scene was soulless. Felt like I was watching the prequels again. Not everything in Star Wars has to be grungy, but the aesops were so forced and heavy handed and the setting was just really underutilized. Also the movie seemed to treat it like some great victory when they “saved” the animals, even though they would all surely quickly be returned, but… they left the slave children behind. What made this a good decision? The whole thing felt like empty window dressing. Same goes for the high speed chase and eventual rescue by BB-8 and the slicer.

9) BB-8 incapacitating guards by shooting coins at them, then piloting an AT-ST, makes me once again wonder why droids aren’t regularly doing more in this universe. I’m pretty sure he has a higher kill-count than any of the heroes do at this point, just from on-screen effectiveness anyway. Again I was reminded of the prequels, watching Jar-Jar save the day through slapstick. BB-8 is at least doing things intentionally, but if I’m supposed to take him seriously as an action hero, I don’t understand why no one else in the movie is doing so. Hell it was an enemy droid that spotted them! How did BB-8 get away and why was he not immediately deactivated for re-programming? Did they want to torture him too?

There’s more I can say of substance and a lot more I could say that were just minor irritations, but I’m going to limit myself to just one nitpick, since it was truly distracting:

10) Rey’s makeup. She’s on a practically deserted island trying to learn how to be a Jedi but she has time for lipstick and eyeliner? Did she have such obvious makeup in the last movie? I don’t remember it, but there’s nothing in her past as a scrappy desert-scavenger to demonstrate where and why she acquired and learned to use makeup.

I’m probably going to end up ranting about this more at some point and adding to this list. But those are the things most immediately irritating to me right now.

Movie Reviews

Review: Under the Skin


Under the Skin, with Scarlett Johansson, got glowing reviews by /r/movies most of the times I saw it come up, and even by reviewers I generally trust, like YMS. I was pretty excited to go into it knowing as little as possible, as is my preferred custom. That means accepting  getting burned once in awhile, and unfortunately, this was one of those times. Under the Skin turned out to be one of the most boring and pointless movies I’ve ever seen.

Spoiler Free:

The main problem with Under the Skin is that it has no plot. By which I mean, the protagonist’s goal is completely opaque, there is no conflict or opposition to her actions, there is no antagonist, and there are no answers to any of the dozens of questions the viewer will be left with.

There is something that can loosely be described as a story, in that a series of events occur in chronological order, but it’s a series of events which, stripped of their weirdness, are about as engaging as watching someone go to the store to buy paint with which to paint their wall and watch it dry. That isn’t an exaggeration, by the way: some of the scenes in the movie are literally just the woman (none of the characters have names) doing completely mundane things, in excruciatingly slow detail, or staring contemplatively at scenery.

I’m not someone that can only be entertained by explosions and gunshots, fun as those can be. I often enjoy “thinking” stories, films or novels about themes rather than spectacle and dialogue rather than action. The problem is this movie has neither. The characters don’t even approach one dimensional, and the acting isn’t just non-memorable, but outright nonexistent at times. Staring blankly out a window, or asking people on the street for directions, is not acting by any definition I find useful.

The movie is often billed as a horror film, but that’s laughable. I love both cerebral horror and a good monster film when done well, but this couldn’t manage the appeal of either. Any sense of fear or dread was quickly drowned out by the mundanity of the majority of the film, and eventually the utter lack of any sensible plot or context for what was happening on screen. If it were a 30 minute art piece, it would be far more effective and engaging than the 108 minutes of suspenseless non-acting that I had to endure just so it could be billed as a “feature film.”

I’ve seen and heard people praise the movie on its directing or “vision,” but any comparisons to directors like Stanley Kubrik (which come up often) are, frankly, insulting. It clearly tries to mimic him in places, like the opening of the movie, but while its score is good and the imagery of certain scenes are memorable, a cinematic masterpiece this is not.

If I had to give it a rating, it just barely makes a 1/10 instead of a 0. 2/10 if I’m feeling generous, which, so close to the viewing, I’m not.

Spoileriffic:

Ok, so this movie is about an alien (supposedly, it’s not explained) who wears an attractive human skin to pick up men and take them back to a special house where she can trap them in some kind of water containment thing so they will eventually get their insides sucked out by… something.

Where she comes from, why she’s doing it, never get answered. That’s fine. There is occasionally a guy on a motorcycle who goes around cleaning up any evidence left behind by disappeared guys, or witnesses. Presumably he’s also an alien, but that’s also never explained. Also fine. There’s hints that there are more than just one of each of them, but no elaboration whatsoever on that point. Well and good.

The first 40 minutes of the film are just her going around the city, talking to guys, and leading 2 or 3 of them back to the house to watch them get naked and walk into a black pool of water, seemingly unaware that they’re even doing it. At no point is there any chance to get to know or empathize with any of them. At no point do they seem aware of the danger they’re in. It’s just exactly what it sounds like: ScarJo drives around, chats up dudes, and eventually finds an unattached one to drive back to her place. At one point she goes shopping, which we watch. At another point she listens to the radio, which briefly comments on something related to a disappearance she was involved in. Again, which we watch.

I want you to imagine all these things I’m describing, then add about 10 minutes of lingering camera shots on people milling around in the city, or the landscape, or ScarJo’s face, or whatever for each of them, because that’s, again, basically all that happens for roughly 40 minutes. One of the guys she encounters almost drowns trying to save someone at the beach, and she knocks him on the head with a rock and drags him away. This is the closest thing to unusual human interactions that we get for the first 40 minutes.

As someone expecting a story, you might think that at some point there will be dialogue between her and the motorcycle guy that gives you a better understanding of these strange beings and what they want, or how they feel about… anything. You’d be wrong. You might expect the police to eventually take notice, some kind of effort by others to find out who she is and what she’s doing. Nothing of the sort occurs.

Instead, after being treated to one of the few visually memorable scenes in the movie, where one of the trapped men watches another of the previously trapped men get his insides sucked out (by nothing visible, they’re just hanging in suspended liquid) and reduced to a floating skin-suit, finally something different happens. She picks up a guy with a very blatant physical deformity of the face: think Elephant Man. She has more interaction with him than any previous marks, but that just means that the movie spends an extra two minutes on her convincing him to go with her before she succeeds.

It seems she has a change of heart though, because after leading him into the black room as normal, we then see her stare at herself in the mirror and let the man go. As for why, that’s never explained, because the creators of the film had delusions of artistic grandeur, I guess.

So she lets him run home naked (it’s mentioned that it was a 30 minute drive to get there, but apparently he ran all the way home naked in an eyeblink) and drives off somewhere. The motorcycle guy gets to his house just as he arrives and kills him and stuffs him in a trunk, just to make sure nothing interesting happens in the movie. An old lady watches it happen, and the motorcycle guy seems to notice her noticing it, but that never gets revisited either, because again, that would bring it perilously close to having a plot.

ScarJo appears to have developed a conscience, because instead of picking up more men, she just… wanders around. A lot. First she drives aimlessly, then she walks aimlessly, then she takes the bus aimlessly. Seriously, this goes on for like 10 minutes. Oh she also falls down once while walking on the sidewalk. Some people help her up. She keeps walking.

It’s all extremely tedious, but finally she meets a man who asks her if she’s okay and needs help. He takes her to his place, makes her some food, takes her sightseeing, and eventually they have sex.

(By the way, this whole time, we’re treated to quick scenes of the motorcycle guys looking for her. Spoiler alert: they never find her. I managed to be amused by these scenes after imagining that each time they were shown, the motorcycle guys were in some other country, just becoming more and more frustrated by their utter inability to find someone by simply… you know… driving around randomly and eyeballing the scenery)

Except they don’t actually have sex, because apparently she doesn’t have a fully working anatomy, which seems as much a surprise to her as him. This is seriously the only moment in the entire movie where ScarJo does anything remotely resembling acting, rather than just looking vaguely sad, blankly emotionless, or putting on a polite smile while picking up men.

And yet again, instead of something interesting happening, like him exclaiming “WTF?” and the two getting into a conversation about what she is and so on, she just runs away into the woods, wanders around for another goddamn 10 minutes, and gets assaulted by some rapist woodsman. He pulls some of her “skin” off, then runs away in fright. She takes off the rest of her skin, including her face, and you see the alien beneath: basically a humanoid with chrome-black skin and no distinct features. The woodsman comes back with a can of gasoline. He pours some on her, then lights her on fire. She runs a bit, falls over, and burns up. The camera pans up to the sky as the smoke goes up, and the movie ends.

If that sounds remotely interesting or entertaining to you, I would like to do my best to assure you, again, that it’s not. I know it sounds like it might be unique or interesting, but again, each of those scenes I just mentioned? Imagine 10 minutes of ScarJo looking at herself in the mirror, or staring at a piece of cake, or walking down the street, or going grocery shopping, or walking down some castle stairs. In any other movie I would call it mood setting, but in this one the only mood it sets is one of absolute boredom.

If you’re one of those people who watched it and enjoyed it though, kudos. Seriously, I’m happy for you. After the 10 years of development that apparently went into it, it would be an even greater tragedy if no one did.