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Reviews
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)
G Fan says "Its Good Actually!"
I've been a fan of Godzilla since I was a little boy, and I must say, I'm really enjoying the current Big G renaissance that is happening right now.
I went in to this one with pretty mitigated expectations, the Legendary movies have been good dumb fun, but have been, thus far, lagging behind recent Toho entries in the artistic department.
I have to say, I think this is probably the best one of the bunch. Legendary has fully and completely embraced the attitude of the late Showa era films, with a blockbuster budget.
At points watching this movie, I was reminded of the gleeful insanity of watching Destroy All Monster or Final Wars. Its a gross out, gore fest special effects extravaganza that looks at every Monsterverse movie thus far and says, "Hold My Beer!". They have now abandon any pretense of seriousness, and are leaning into the camp, and its perfect, exactly where this series needs to go. These aren't serious or deep characters, and, lets face it, we're here for the Kaiju, and boy, do you get plenty of fights!
I think this is the Legendary movie that "Works" the best tonally, and, I predict it will become a modern cult classic because it is just joyfully silly and gross and unhinged.
Prey (2022)
In the Jungle, Fundamentals win fights
Back to basics for the Predator series, after a long slow slide from the original, someone in the writers room finally remembered why people like the original. Stripped down of all the super technology, bloated casting and autistic super powers (wtf Shane Black?), this is easily the second best one (I just rewatched #2 to be sure.) Like the original, it starts out as one kind of movie and slowly turns into another. With the great tension of being hunted by an unstoppable and unfathomable force, and having to tactically outwit it to save yourself. They should do more hunter v hunter period peice stuff with the series, infinitely more enjoyable than the focused grouped Hollywood cash grabs that dragged the premise down for so long.
Tekken: Bloodline (2022)
Could be cool but looks like trash
I've liked the Tekken franchise since I was a kid and thought it might be cool. The characters are all right and it more or less fleshes out the plot of the games, but Netflix once again went all in on the 3D models with cell shading psuedo anime look that has tanked so many of their promising animation properties. It looks like some kid did the animation in his basement. If your going to do a full series, at least make sure the animation is better than the cut scenes from the friggin PS1 games. Hell, render them like the PS1 games even, that would at least he a stylistic choice. Instead, we get more of the same old stuff that made Godzilla, Berserk and half the other anime on Netflix so ugly and cheap looking.
Mad God (2021)
Absolutely gorgeous
It's like a Tool music video but without the soundtrack. Only a little longer than your average Tool video tbh. ;)
Anyways, it's all about visual story telling in a world somewhere between steampunk and Lovecraft.
Blade Runner: Black Lotus (2021)
Major Stinker
Not sure how you secure the license to make a Blade Runner show and botch it this hard. For starters it looks awful, the visually arresting.elements of the original are gone, replaced by PS2 Tomb Raider level cut scenes, obviously they were aware of the visual short comings so they opted to make the whole show way to dark so you can't tell how cheap the CG is, but ya know, you can still tell. The plot is some fluff, but you'll be too focused on how ugly it looks to follow it, standard amnesia plot. Not a hint of film noire influence, and very few elements connecting it to other blade runner properties. A major disappointment.