dementedoracle Reviews

Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver (2024)

A bit like a Lava cake with toohpaste filling

[4/10 · 21 April 2024]

Note: This review is intended to cover both parts 1 and 2 of Rebel Moon.

Geez, this looked like it would be so good. So good you want to set a special night aside to watch it, switch off your phone, cuddle with your significant other, and enjoy a special treat. But it's such a huge disappointment. I went in absolutely wanting and expecting to love this. The special affects and design are gorgeous, Snyder's distinct action style is fun, if not particularly surprising anymore. But the writing...whew. What a heck of a bottleneck.

Every character is unequivocally flat in the least fun way. The script could have used a massive punch-up, because the dialogue is almost entirely utilitarian. If you like one-liners or just any expression of individualistic personality from a large ensemble cast, look much farther than here. The story feels incredibly reductive. Every character looks good on a marketing poster, but what you see is entirely what you get. The movie offers absolutely nothing from its characters beyond that first impression, and it's not the actors' fault--they're just not given anything to do that provides an opportunity to show any emotional range, hero and villain alike.

The story is equally one-dimensional and predictable. If you're a fan of fantasy/sci fi, there's nothing here you won't feel like you've seen a hundred times before, and what's more, it doesn't even feel like they tried. And I'm not criticizing what I see as a failed attempt at trying something new, or flipping a tired trope--I could respect a good effort. There's no impression at all that the creative team even wanted to break ground with this film. It's like they sat down to plan and said to each other, "Let's go back to basics, guys--let's write like our audience hasn't seen a science fiction film since 1960."

Again, I want to stress that I went into this film biased in its favor. I wanted to find something, anything, to love about it, but just couldn't.

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (2020)

Really wanted to love this one.

[6/10 · 31 October 2020]

I went into this one rooting hard for Nathan Lane and Natalie Dormer, but after several episodes in I realized I just wasn't enjoying anything. The production focused way harder on creating melodrama than entertainment. If the concepts, themes, and characters were deeper, or developed more quickly, then perhaps it still would have pulled me in. As it was, after spending a few hours of my life trying to get into it, all I'd gained was a feeling of tepid depression. Alas, I will always love Nathan and Natalie, just not in this series.

Star Trek: Picard (2020–2023)

Well, I liked it

[9/10 · 1 October 2020]

I can see why some of the old guard would fuss about this one. It's completely undeniable that it doesn't follow the classic Star Trek exploration formula in the least. It's a serial story about a small, independent crew more in the vein of Dark Matter, albeit with way better production values.

But what can I say? I love both of those formulas, so it's a feature, not a bug. And it has Picard, and it's set in the Star Trek Universe. For me, it's all upside.

So, maybe it's not for everyone, but give it a shot just in case.

The Man in the High Castle (2015–2019)

Spoiler Free Review: Three Cheers for Planned Endings!

[10/10 · 18 May 2020]

As of this writing, out of around 800 ratings, I can still count the number of my 10-star fiction television shows on my fingers. This one deserves it, to me, because it gets so, so much right.

It's not everyone's cup of tea, I'm sure, and that's fair enough. There's a glitch between the third and fourth season where a major character is killed off...strangely. It's handled well, but you get the feeling they couldn't sign the actor back on for the new season and had to find a way to work it out. They managed it skillfully, but it stands out as the one point when you get the feeling the writers weren't in complete control. If you simply don't like the genre, well, that can't be helped and again that's perfectly fair. Despite maintaining a good balance of action with drama, the pacing feels glacial at times, and while I personally found the story to be so well told that it turned into more of a feature than a bug, it's easy to see how some could find it hard to digest. So, take this review with the understanding that, like all reviews, I write it through a very subjective lens.

First off, this is one of the few instances, in my opinion, that a novel-to-film adaptation not only faithfully translates the source material, but also significantly improves upon it. I read the novel when I was a teenager, and in my mind filed it away with all those other 60's era dystopian stories, with their bleak, hopeless, cynical messages of warning and nihilistic endings. This series exhausts the novel by the end of season one, however, and I was delighted to find that the writers managed to continue the story in fine fashion, fleshing out and deepening the characters, adding dimensions (hahahah...oh, me...), and maintaining and raising the quality of the storytelling throughout.

There are major twists and turns in the plot, more than enough to keep me yearning to know what would happen next. Main characters aren't safe at all, but you never get that nihilistic feeling that they're all doomed, either, so it's okay to let yourself care about them. The story is driven by promise after promise of a major payoff to come, much like other heavy-hitting, high profile series such as Game of Thrones and LOST. The notable difference that sets MitHC above those titles, however, is the expertly planned ending. I can't emphasize the importance of this enough. While those other shows' creators, in the end, were not up to the challenge of adequately delivering on the promises they made, this show does. The ending resolves all the remaining characters' stories with a level of satisfaction that left me and my wife shouting at the screen, pining for all the shows we wished had ended this well that failed to do so. It left us both looking forward to a complete re-watch to catch everything we missed. For that reason, this deserves its 10 stars, because it's a shining example of an ambitious television series that boldly promises an epic beginning, middle, and end, and then proceeds to actually deliver the complete package with complete authority.

This is one of those rare shows, like GoT and LOST, that reach higher than they have any right to. It's like they manage to blow open the lid on their respective Pandora's boxes. When all was said and done, however, and all that destructive, dramatic, mysterious, explosive magic had been released, MitHC's showrunners demonstrated the rare gift of knowing how to close the lid back again.

Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)

Superb example of a sequel that delivers on the original

[8/10 · 18 May 2020]

There's something to respect about a production that can perfectly reproduce a winning formula. There's a reason this movie's rating is so close to the "Welcome to the Jungle". It's just as good, in the best way possible.

I mean, sure, you have an occasional success story where a first film is good, and the second is just far and away better (seemingly 99% of which are solely thanks to James Cameron), but mostly what we want from a sequel is a return to the same positive experience we had before, and this movie delivers beautifully. I laughed just as much, loved every character, found just as many new videogame in-jokes to admire. There was just enough of a twist on the plot to keep it fresh, yet still in touch with the first movie, and the same can be said for all the new characters--it all fit right into place.

This could easily have been called Jumanji: Vol. 2. If you liked WttJ you'll like TNL just as much, for all the same reasons.

Lost (2004–2010)

The calculus is pretty simple on this one

[5/10 · 3 May 2020]

One of the greatest first halves of any television series ever, and one of the absolute worst second halves. Best if you quit watching after season 4 or so, and just live out the rest of your life imagining the twist is that the island was Atlantis all along.

The Gentlemen (2019)

Not bad, but not as entertaining as the trailer and high ratings seemed to suggest

[6/10 · 10 February 2020]

There's nothing offensively bad about this movie, but its entertainment value is incredibly subjective. There's just a lot of time spent on either exposition or conversations where nothing actually gets accomplished to move the plot forward. It's then left to the strength of the actors and actresses and the writing of the characters to hold the audience's attention throughout the scenes. Colin Farrell, Hugh Grant, and Michelle Dockery were more than capable of consistently carrying this burden, but the rest of the cast and the writing seemed to get tired at times.

Overall, watching this movie is a little like watching Guy Ritchie. If you really love Guy Ritchie it's quite the special treat, but otherwise not a very rewarding use of your time.

Dark Matter (2015–2017)

Begins as a faint reflection of Firefly, but wait, there's more...

[8/10 · 2 September 2016]

If you read nothing else:

This series has a rough start, so don't go in unless you're prepared to commit to watching through the first season. The accusations of weak special effects and uninspired sets are completely true. The performance value at times perfectly reflects the remarkably low expectations we've come to set for every SyFy original production sans The Expanse. But woah, does it get hella better.

The Writing:

The writing here is strong. Really strong, and not just "for SyFy". In the early episodes the characters are presented as stiff archetypes you would expect from a run-of-the-mill science fiction show. That's not in itself such a bad thing because it's part of what we love about the genre, but it can easily give the early impression the show is canned. Stick with it. The first season does a wonderful job giving lingering attention to each character's backstory, fleshing them out and making each one dynamic. By the end of the series, the writing makes a bold, decisive shakeup to the entire show that solved virtually all the issues I felt with it up to that point, and gave it strong legs going forward. I now anticipate every Friday night, waiting to watch the next episode.

The Characters:

This is where most of the comparisons to Firefly will land. You could easily line the characters up against the crew of Serenity and play a game matching them to their Dark Matter counterparts. To me this wasn't a bad thing. If there's any show I want to see shamelessly copied, is that space pirate masterpiece. At first the show-runners handle the characters and their banter clumsily in comparison to Whedon's veteran guidance, but over time the crew members shed their imitation qualities and develop their own endearing identities. My one complaint is that I would love to see that same attention given to the shows many villains.

With a couple exceptions, the seven-member ensemble cast does a fine job in their roles, with Zoie Palmer (holy crap, she's good), Melissa O'Neil, and Anthony Lemke on the high end. Jodelle Ferland and Roger Cross come in middle of the run. Alex Mallari Jr. and Marc Bendavid's characters made me grind my teeth a lot, but looking back I think their problems are more to do with poor direction and inflexible characterization on the writers' part. They still serve their purpose on the show, and over time the good far makes up for the bad.

The Special Effects and Sets:

Ugh. Avoid this show if this is all you care about. And SyFy as a whole, actually.