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Reviews
Another Life (2019)
So badly written it's insulting to your intelligence.
I'm not sure anyone at Netflix even reads the scripts before they green light shows or movies anymore. It seems that for ever decent Netflix original there are 50 terrible ones. "Another Life" throws science and logic out the window almost right away. I'll just recap all of the stupid things from the first few episodes.
I believe in episode 2 the ship needs water and fuel so they land on a planet to mine a mineral containing hydrogen and oxygen. This is where the stupidity begins:
1) Two crew members mining on the planet decide to breathe the air just because there is oxygen in the air ignoring the fact that there could be any number of things in the atmosphere that could kill them or contaminate the ship.
2) In what the writers possibly thought was a clever twist, they bring back an alien virus, but not from breathing in the cave but from a liquid SURFACE sample another crew member took, which somehow infected everyone despite being sealed and going through decontamination. There are so many things wrong with just the premise that it's laughable.
-The virus is "boron based life" yet somehow infects carbon based life "by attaching to iron" and then something about proteins being produced which anyone who knows basic biology knows none of this makes sense.
-Viruses by definition need hosts to replicate and there was no other life present on the planet
-The surface of the planet gets cooked by the moon (that they failed to notice) due to tidal forces causing volcanic eruptions so how is there a puddle of alien virus just sitting there?
-Everyone magically has different symptoms and it just so happens that the guy who brought back the sample is immune.
-Before they're cured, a crew member appears to have gotten better but then somehow her "entire nervous system" detaches from her body and explodes out of a hole in her back and flops around on the floor for a bit. I assume this is some sort of homage to "Alien" but again makes no sense whatsoever.
-The one dimensional, angry xenobiologist man they just woke up cooks up a cure from the immune guy which for some reason kills the virus in the immune guy so he immediately shoots himself up with it. Of course it instantly puts him into nervous system explosion mode so he orders the other guy to shoot him out of the airlock. I guess they were lucky their medbay had an airlock you could engage with one button from outside.
-They cure themselves by exposing themselves to massive amounts of gamma radiation from a white dwarf, which is apparently enough to make them sterile but not enough to give anyone radiation sickness. It was apparently enough to make sure the entire inside of the ship was bathed in radiation though to kill any of the virus...
-The next time they visit another planet, its teeming with life visible from space and they don't even bother with hazmat protection because they "scanned it from space". Meanwhile a minor cut results in an infection that spreads incredibly rapidly in one crew member and the planet is infested with the arachnids from "Starship Troopers".
The awful science is just one bad part of the show. The characters are either idiotic or complete narcissists. The dialogue is bad. The containment of the alien artifact is hilarious in that there is none...The only interesting portions deal with communicating with the artifact and that's been done dozens of times in better media (Arrival, Close Encounters, 2001 etc.) Ideas are just lifted from every decent sci-fi of the last 30 years and haphazardly slapped together into a mess of a show.
Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser (2015)
A Mixed Bag
Possible Spoilers!
I went into this with incredibly low expectations, being a Happy Madison production which couldn't make it to theaters. That being said, the production quality is on par with what I would consider a full theatrical release.
The movie opens with a Dennis Miller rambling monologue that was pretty hilarious and easy to follow. Then for about the first 20 minutes or so the movie and jokes just sort of fall flat. That is a hospital seen that is filled with what I assume to be jokes, none of which really have any payoff.
Its not until about 10 minutes after Joe goes on his bit of a trip that the humor of the original film starts to resurface.
I must have watched the original at least a dozen times, it having aired almost daily on Comedy Central, so I remember the particular flavor of humor in the original. This sequel in some cases falls a level below that, almost reaching the lows of some of Adam Sandler's latest films. Again though, some of the flavor of the first movie seeps through frequently, unsurprisingly when connections are made to the original. I also have to say I prefer Kid Rock as the main antagonist but this one was serviceable. Christopher Walken makes his return and as usual is funny just by delivering his lines.
The new cast members are some well known actors and the returning actors are of course beloved by fans of the original. It would have been great to see what they could have done with some better writing.