I watched 40 movies from 2017 which I didn’t forget the moment they were over, and here is what I think of them.
Urobutcher does it again and creates another terrible movie about talking heads and shock factor. When Hideaki Anno made a movie about Godzilla a year before, it was amazing. When this so-called best writer of all times makes a movie about Godzilla, you are once again wondering why is this terrible writer considered to be the best anime has to offer.
Project Ito was a complete disaster and the only good thing about Genocidal Organ was it being the last of these horribly unappealing sci-fi trash that were just a fancy concept with zero character charisma.
Hey, Hollywood, can you please make an adaptation than somewhat resembles the source material instead of making random bullshit? Death Note and Ghost in the Shell follow the tradition of the west removing everything that was great about an anime and replacing them with generic plots and boring characters.
And don’t think I am going easier on you, Japan. What was the point of making an adaptation of Full Metal Alchemist when you are just going to skim over all the events? Yes, it was faithful, but the acting was lifeless and there was no emotional weight if there is no time spent on the build-up of every incident.
Blade Runner defined the cyberpunk genre. Its sequel is a generic mystery flick that doesn’t know what to do with its own material. It mutated into a done to death evil corporation that victimizes the poor androids, and they form a rebellion to fight back. Plus it ends in a cliffhanger so they can milk the crap out of it later on. Completely tasteless.
The original Starship Troopers was one of the greatest satires of military dictatorships. With one exception, all its sequels are mindless action flicks with nothing memorable about them, besides the senseless violence. Traitor of Mars is not that exception. They did a great job with the CGI and bothered to use the actors from the original movie, but it’s otherwise braindead to the point of insulting your intelligence.
Baywatch was a show everybody was watching to jerk off during the 90s, when free internet porn was still not a thing. It was never smart or funny, and the new version of it goes for completely unfunny dick jokes which make you stop watching after a few minutes.
The Mummy begun its own cinematic universe, and did it in the most boring way imaginable. It wasn’t scary or exciting, the plot made no sense, and it gives you no motivation to look forward to more movies about painfully uninteresting monsters.
The Dark Tower is the adaptation of a long series of books, which are full of bizarre and morbid imagery. It throws away 95% of the plot and treats the rest as a generic, PG13 action adventure that you don’t give a shit about by the time they reach the final showdown. By the way, the books make no sense.
Inferior DC stops trying to be its own thing and finally tries to imitate the superior in everything Marvel. And it still fails miserably because its heroes have no charisma if they are not Batman, and can’t do shit if they are not Superman.
Outside of writing and pacing issues, every Alien movie had a bittersweet ending. It was offering relief after all the horrible things the characters were going through. Alien Covenant does not do that. It’s two hours of torture porn, ending in a way that is showing you a middle finger by basically saying everyone was a plot device for a sinister mastermind with a god complex. Awful and tasteless.
For some reason, Hollywood believed people will adore the mutation of the Power Rangers from a campy action show about men in spandex fighting in giant robots, to a depressing teen flick, where everybody is mentally challenged, costumes and robots look horrible, and there is no action until the last 15 minutes. Fuck you!
The epic tale of King Arthur has received several movie interpretations over the decades, but none of them was as bad as this one. The plot is closer to Robin Hood, and the CGI makes most of the battles to look like you are playing Shadow of Mordor. It has no relation to the original myth, it could have easily been called something else and you wouldn’t tell the difference. But no, they thought it would sell based on the name alone, and it backfired horribly.
Strangely enough, there was a second movie about King Arthur in 2017. Yeah, the Bayformers were there to help Arthur and Merlin. And it doesn’t matter much, because it’s just background lore that doesn’t affect the plot. The previous movie, Age of Extinction, was good not for the plot but for treating every faction as its own thing. This abomination doesn’t do that and is just mindless explosions as usual. Optimus Prime acts like an easily manipulated idiot, for crying out loud. And the revelation of Earth being Unicron is just sequelbait. Plain terrible.
Valerian is yet another example of how all the pretty colors in the world are not enough to save bad writing and dull acting. The plot makes absolutely no sense, with half of it being practically skip-able filler, and none of the characters seem to give a shit about the crisis at large. There is no engagement for everything that is going on, and the gorgeous sceneries are as hollow as explosions in Michael Bay movies.
Kong: Skull Island suffers from serious tonal whiplashes. It tries to be a serious military operation full of death and mayhem on one hand, and a dumb action flick with cartoony military officers and monsters who want to eat humanity on the other. Without sticking to either side too much, it fails to be either gritty or dumb fun. You can’t have both.
The Emoji Movie proves that even a generic kids movie with a done to death message about being yourself, can be very insulting if not presented properly. Making it seem like emojis have personalities and you should be treating them with respect or something, is subconsciously depressing you when you want to use them. Also, there was no organic evolution of the conflict, as was the case with Inside Out. The boy wanting to reset his cell-phone because it had issues, instead of just shutting it off or not taking it to school made no sense, and saving the cell-phone applications didn’t feel important if you can always get another phone.
The original Jumanji was somewhat special for gradually bringing the dangers of the jungle into the real world. This pseudo-sequel is not doing that. It just traps the players into a videogame, which has been done to death. Everyone has multiple lives, so death lost its importance. Every character in the game is an NPC who can only repeat the same three lines, making them fake and uninteresting. And since it’s a videogame, no matter what happens in it has no effect on the real world, thus erasing any sense of consequence. Minus the reset ending; that was bullshit even in the first one.
Bright is a fine example of what happens when you slap a theme on a mundane setting, instead of integrating in a plausible way. Thousands of casuals loved the theme of racism through fantasy races, but as most critics pointed out, it doesn’t make any sense in the way it is presented. If orcs and elves existed along with humans since forever, the world wouldn’t look the same, nor would it have the exact same history and pop references. Whatever it was going for came off as hollow and lazy. Plus the plot was bullshit because everybody was hunting a magic wand they couldn’t even touch (much less use) if they weren’t special. And guess who was the special one all along.
To be continued