Jimmy Higgins
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America was never the same after Howard the Duck.
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Which movie did you watch today and how would you rate it?
- Thread starter C_Mucius_Scaevola
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DrZoidberg
Contributor
Nooooooooooooo he doesn't.
Archimedes
Member
Resident Evil: Retribution
Jesus fucking wept.
Watched this tonight just because it happened to come on TV after a football game I was watching.
Without a doubt, the worst movie I have seen in a long time. After it finished, I channel surfed for a while to find that The Fast and the Furious (the original movie) had just started so I'm watching it now. It's a fucking masterclass in filmmaking by comparison.
I've never seen such poorly directed action scenes in my life. Every single gunfight and melee fight was shot the exact same stupid fucking way. Every single gunfight had a scene where Milla Jovovich aims her gun at the camera and it then suddenly goes slow mo as the obviously CGI bullet comes toward us and the camera moves such as to see the bullet slow-mo pan through the frame. And the melee fights had the same thing where every time a character threw a knife, axe, spear, etc. it would do the same lame ass slow-mo shit with crap coming at the camera. Remember the crappy 1950s 3D B-movies where random crap would come at the camera to emphasize the 3D nature of the film. This was just like that. There must have been at least a dozen scenes with bullets or thrown projectiles thrown at the camera in slow-mo done this way.
Every fight scene involved the same seizure inducing cuts between regular speed, slow-mo and high-speed camera work. Scene starts off in regular speed. One character lunges at the other. Immediately cut to slow-mo as they launch a kick or jump over another character or whatever. After a second of slow-mo, cut to a high speed shot to finish off the move. Do that again and again and again and again and again and again, cutting as fast as possible between the different speeds, for 30 seconds until the fight is over. Every single fight scene in the movie played out that way. And there was a LOT of fight scenes.
I'll be fucked if I knew what was actually going on. I gathered that the protagonist was trapped in some sort of facility that allowed the evil MegaCorp to simulate zombie outbreaks in various parts of the world. It had these gigantic simulations of various cities and a cloning facility to populate them with people and zombies. I'm sure there was some motivation or goal behind this but I missed it. A bunch of commandos are sent in to rescue the protagonist for some reason. By a character whose motivations I didn't understand. Who I recognised as an antagonist from the video games. And who has now turned good for some reason. Every so often the screen turned red and it showed some sort of computer interface with a little girl on the screen. Who ordered bad people to do bad things. For some reason. If this was explained I didn't get it. Or at least I stopped caring enough to pay attention to any exposition that might have been going on during the movie.
To get an idea of the unholy confusing mess of a plot the movie has, just read the plot section of the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil:_Retribution
The character I mentioned I recognised from the games is Albert Wesker who people who have played the games might recognise. He originally turned up in the original 1997 Resident Evil game. What's laughable is that the filmmakers seemed to have gone out of their way to make him look and act like a character from a 1997 PlayStation game. And I don't mean that as a joke as to the script or acting. He genuinely look and acted like the kind of CGI character you used to see in see in PlayStation FMV scenes back in the 1990s and it can't have been an accident in 2012 to have such a bizarre and shitty looking human character in a movie. Remember how characters in FMV footage looked like animated wax models? He looked and moved like that. Even at the end when he is briefly scene full body and walking he looked like he had been animated by a computer. For the rest of the movie he's an onscreen talking head, the kind of which you see in video games as your CO or inside man or whatever giving you orders as to what to do.
There's a scene in the middle of the movie with a random movie monster kidnapping the protagonists surrogate daughter, takes them to their lair, and the surrogate mother has to go rescue the girl from the monster's lair, where they find the girl caught up in a cocoon. It's such a rip-off of the famous scene from Aliens that it's hard to imagine it wasn't deliberate. In Aliens, however, we know why the aliens are capturing people alive so we know why the little girl (Newt) was taken alive. We know why they are trapped in cocoon like traps. We understand the horror that will likely horror from the scenario of being taken alive. When we see the alien queen, we know exactly what she is and what she's up to. It's good story telling and good movie making the whole sequence fits naturally into the movie as a whole. In this piece of shit however, the monster is some dumb looking random thing that turns up for no reason. We don't know what it is or where it came from. We don't know why it goes out of its way to capture the little girl alive. We don't know why the girl is put in a cocoon. We don't know what the monster's plans are for the girl. The whole thing is really awkwardly shoehorned into the middle of the movie for no fucking reason at all.
After the monster takes the girl, Alice, the protagonist, says she's going to rescue her and one of the commandos who are there to rescue her says "You can't go. We need you." to which she responds something along the line of how she has to go. And those lines are delivered in the most wooden emotionless way you can possibly imagine.
All in all, a fucking pathetic mess of a movie that I refuse to give a rating to. Fuck you whoever made this piece of shit.
Jesus fucking wept.
Watched this tonight just because it happened to come on TV after a football game I was watching.
Without a doubt, the worst movie I have seen in a long time. After it finished, I channel surfed for a while to find that The Fast and the Furious (the original movie) had just started so I'm watching it now. It's a fucking masterclass in filmmaking by comparison.
I've never seen such poorly directed action scenes in my life. Every single gunfight and melee fight was shot the exact same stupid fucking way. Every single gunfight had a scene where Milla Jovovich aims her gun at the camera and it then suddenly goes slow mo as the obviously CGI bullet comes toward us and the camera moves such as to see the bullet slow-mo pan through the frame. And the melee fights had the same thing where every time a character threw a knife, axe, spear, etc. it would do the same lame ass slow-mo shit with crap coming at the camera. Remember the crappy 1950s 3D B-movies where random crap would come at the camera to emphasize the 3D nature of the film. This was just like that. There must have been at least a dozen scenes with bullets or thrown projectiles thrown at the camera in slow-mo done this way.
Every fight scene involved the same seizure inducing cuts between regular speed, slow-mo and high-speed camera work. Scene starts off in regular speed. One character lunges at the other. Immediately cut to slow-mo as they launch a kick or jump over another character or whatever. After a second of slow-mo, cut to a high speed shot to finish off the move. Do that again and again and again and again and again and again, cutting as fast as possible between the different speeds, for 30 seconds until the fight is over. Every single fight scene in the movie played out that way. And there was a LOT of fight scenes.
I'll be fucked if I knew what was actually going on. I gathered that the protagonist was trapped in some sort of facility that allowed the evil MegaCorp to simulate zombie outbreaks in various parts of the world. It had these gigantic simulations of various cities and a cloning facility to populate them with people and zombies. I'm sure there was some motivation or goal behind this but I missed it. A bunch of commandos are sent in to rescue the protagonist for some reason. By a character whose motivations I didn't understand. Who I recognised as an antagonist from the video games. And who has now turned good for some reason. Every so often the screen turned red and it showed some sort of computer interface with a little girl on the screen. Who ordered bad people to do bad things. For some reason. If this was explained I didn't get it. Or at least I stopped caring enough to pay attention to any exposition that might have been going on during the movie.
To get an idea of the unholy confusing mess of a plot the movie has, just read the plot section of the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil:_Retribution
The character I mentioned I recognised from the games is Albert Wesker who people who have played the games might recognise. He originally turned up in the original 1997 Resident Evil game. What's laughable is that the filmmakers seemed to have gone out of their way to make him look and act like a character from a 1997 PlayStation game. And I don't mean that as a joke as to the script or acting. He genuinely look and acted like the kind of CGI character you used to see in see in PlayStation FMV scenes back in the 1990s and it can't have been an accident in 2012 to have such a bizarre and shitty looking human character in a movie. Remember how characters in FMV footage looked like animated wax models? He looked and moved like that. Even at the end when he is briefly scene full body and walking he looked like he had been animated by a computer. For the rest of the movie he's an onscreen talking head, the kind of which you see in video games as your CO or inside man or whatever giving you orders as to what to do.
There's a scene in the middle of the movie with a random movie monster kidnapping the protagonists surrogate daughter, takes them to their lair, and the surrogate mother has to go rescue the girl from the monster's lair, where they find the girl caught up in a cocoon. It's such a rip-off of the famous scene from Aliens that it's hard to imagine it wasn't deliberate. In Aliens, however, we know why the aliens are capturing people alive so we know why the little girl (Newt) was taken alive. We know why they are trapped in cocoon like traps. We understand the horror that will likely horror from the scenario of being taken alive. When we see the alien queen, we know exactly what she is and what she's up to. It's good story telling and good movie making the whole sequence fits naturally into the movie as a whole. In this piece of shit however, the monster is some dumb looking random thing that turns up for no reason. We don't know what it is or where it came from. We don't know why it goes out of its way to capture the little girl alive. We don't know why the girl is put in a cocoon. We don't know what the monster's plans are for the girl. The whole thing is really awkwardly shoehorned into the middle of the movie for no fucking reason at all.
After the monster takes the girl, Alice, the protagonist, says she's going to rescue her and one of the commandos who are there to rescue her says "You can't go. We need you." to which she responds something along the line of how she has to go. And those lines are delivered in the most wooden emotionless way you can possibly imagine.
All in all, a fucking pathetic mess of a movie that I refuse to give a rating to. Fuck you whoever made this piece of shit.
credoconsolans
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I just wanted to let you know that the Alice character is feeling less than human and more programmed, so she's supposed to sound like that.
- - - Updated - - -
Lucas has vision...not much talent in directing or writing dialogue...or designing costumes.
MarkW
Senior Member
Man of Steel
5/10
I didn't enjoy this one all that much. Yet another superhero "origins" story, weighed down by a tone so dark that it's a bit oppressive at times. Someone needs to tell whoever at Time Warner is deciding these things that, just because Christopher Nolan made some "superhero movie as film noir" Batman films that made lots of money, that doesn't mean that every DC Comics adaptation has to be similarly dark and brooding--especially if you're going to have someone less adept than Nolan in the director's chair. Throw in action sequences that are often unimaginative and seldom truly exciting, and you have a movie that I almost gave up on. I probably would have if it weren't for Amy Adams, a good Lois Lane who deserved to be in a better movie.
5/10
I didn't enjoy this one all that much. Yet another superhero "origins" story, weighed down by a tone so dark that it's a bit oppressive at times. Someone needs to tell whoever at Time Warner is deciding these things that, just because Christopher Nolan made some "superhero movie as film noir" Batman films that made lots of money, that doesn't mean that every DC Comics adaptation has to be similarly dark and brooding--especially if you're going to have someone less adept than Nolan in the director's chair. Throw in action sequences that are often unimaginative and seldom truly exciting, and you have a movie that I almost gave up on. I probably would have if it weren't for Amy Adams, a good Lois Lane who deserved to be in a better movie.
MarkW
Senior Member
Tengoku to Jigoku/High and Low
8/10
This Kurosawa film is an adaptation of the novel King's Ransom, one of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels. It's quite good, although some viewers might be put off by the way it almost comes across as two films. The first 50 minutes or so seems almost like a filmed stage play, with almost all the action confined to a single set, and the focus on the moral dilemma faced by a Japanese businessman (Toshiro Mifune) when kidnappers, trying to abduct his son, take the son of his chauffeur instead. A little over one-third of the way in, things abruptly switch gears and the movie becomes the police procedural that you'd expect a McBain adaptation to be.
8/10
This Kurosawa film is an adaptation of the novel King's Ransom, one of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels. It's quite good, although some viewers might be put off by the way it almost comes across as two films. The first 50 minutes or so seems almost like a filmed stage play, with almost all the action confined to a single set, and the focus on the moral dilemma faced by a Japanese businessman (Toshiro Mifune) when kidnappers, trying to abduct his son, take the son of his chauffeur instead. A little over one-third of the way in, things abruptly switch gears and the movie becomes the police procedural that you'd expect a McBain adaptation to be.
Bacillus anthracis
Member
I commend you for venting so much about that shitty movie and for actually watching the whole thing. I've seen it too (well, at least the first half hour or so) and I really do think it's one of the worst movies ever made. It's insulting that people got paid to make it.
Bacillus anthracis
Member
It's because she needed money and then suddenly was getting paid $$$ to perform weird surgery on people. So she quit school.
I watched this out of curiosity after reading your post and I agree, it's pretty terrible. ugh.
The Martian - 0/10
This movie sucked. Matt Damon was supposed to be playing a Martian, but he wasn't green and had zero tentacles - and in a film which billed itself as being scientifically accurate. What utter bulshit.
Seriously, though, this movie is a ten. It's one of the most awesome films I've seen in a long time. It's visually stunning, the acting and action is amazing and they made as realistic an account of such an occurrence would be like as I think they'd be able to do. It's just incredible.
This movie sucked. Matt Damon was supposed to be playing a Martian, but he wasn't green and had zero tentacles - and in a film which billed itself as being scientifically accurate. What utter bulshit.
Seriously, though, this movie is a ten. It's one of the most awesome films I've seen in a long time. It's visually stunning, the acting and action is amazing and they made as realistic an account of such an occurrence would be like as I think they'd be able to do. It's just incredible.
James Brown
Veteran Member
Incredibly, I've seen science nerds pan it as being unrealistic.
bilby
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Well if the guy is supposed to be alone on Mars, who is operating the cameras? Huh? So unrealistic. Worst. Movie. Ever.
The biggest complaint that I've heard is that a 100mph wind on Mars would be the equivalent of a 10mph wind on Earth due to the decreased air pressue. So, instead of huddling in his habitat while heavy things get thrown around outside, he could wander out and fly a kite.
Also, he worked for the US government and they have allies on Mars. There's absolutely no reason he couldn't have just wandered over to the lizard people's outpost and hitched a ride back to Earth with them on the next supply ship they sent over to give their tribute payments to the Dark Lord Obama.
beero1000
Veteran Member
I thought The Martian was great. Given all the science they got right, I can forgive one plot-central contrivance that was in the source material to begin with. I was more (but still not really) annoyed that it took so long for cliched nerd stereotype Donald Glover to figure out that using a gravity assist was a potential plan. After all, that's pretty much SOP for travel to the outer planets...
And the reason it's SOP is because of the guy and situation that character was based on.
CJW
Member
The Martian 8/10
Visually beautiful film! Well paced and engaging. Lots of good tense moments, even for someone who had read the book. Took my 13 & 11 yr old girls to see it and now the younger one eats potatoes for breakfast lunch and dinner. I got a chuckle out of the whole "code name Elrond" bit, especially considering Sean Bean was involved! I was the the only one who out and out laughed at Jeff Daniel's line:
Visually beautiful film! Well paced and engaging. Lots of good tense moments, even for someone who had read the book. Took my 13 & 11 yr old girls to see it and now the younger one eats potatoes for breakfast lunch and dinner. I got a chuckle out of the whole "code name Elrond" bit, especially considering Sean Bean was involved! I was the the only one who out and out laughed at Jeff Daniel's line:
CJW
Member
Back to the Future 9/10
Just about as perfect a movie as you could make. Great performances by Fox, Crispin Glover and Christopher Lloyd. Great in-jokes "Hey Chuck, it's your cousin Marvin..."
Back to the Future 2 2/10
Yikes - what a piece of crap. The performances, especially by the leads are just flat, the dialogue seems more like a string of one-liners and throw-away wisecracks, than anything approaching normal conversations and the plot tries too hard to shoe-horn itself into recreating the first movie. But what really irked me is the basic recreating of Marty McFly's character with the whole "No one calls me chicken" bit. Don't waste your time!
Just about as perfect a movie as you could make. Great performances by Fox, Crispin Glover and Christopher Lloyd. Great in-jokes "Hey Chuck, it's your cousin Marvin..."
Back to the Future 2 2/10
Yikes - what a piece of crap. The performances, especially by the leads are just flat, the dialogue seems more like a string of one-liners and throw-away wisecracks, than anything approaching normal conversations and the plot tries too hard to shoe-horn itself into recreating the first movie. But what really irked me is the basic recreating of Marty McFly's character with the whole "No one calls me chicken" bit. Don't waste your time!
Last edited:
Jimmy Higgins
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Trade Winds - Some old movie about a fugitive on the run. A pair of detectives go after her. The typical love angle ensues between the fugitive and one of the detectives. Things happen. More things happen. I was kind of in and out of the movie due to a toddler, so it was hard to tell if the final resolution was a half-cocked bullshit ending (think Murder by Death ending) or whether they had planted the proper seeds beforehand to make it work.
Overall, found the movie enjoyable and the twists were reasonably thought out, though the ending resolution, would need to rewatch to find out. Granted, at best, the movie does gloss over a consequence her and there at the end, but hey, who am I to judge.
3 of 4
Overall, found the movie enjoyable and the twists were reasonably thought out, though the ending resolution, would need to rewatch to find out. Granted, at best, the movie does gloss over a consequence her and there at the end, but hey, who am I to judge.
3 of 4