Jennifer Lawrence’s movie about spies from Russia completely unwatchable

Posted on March 4, 2018 by reelentropy

I normally go for stills, but this promotional image is much more interesting than anything in the movie. Images courtesy 20th Century Fox.

2/10 Red Sparrow started its existence in the public eye at a disadvantage, known primarily as a reminder of the Black Widow standalone movie that Marvel Studios will never get around to producing. Anyone who actually ventures into a screening will find pretty much the opposite of a Marvel movie, one filled with sex and gore and grimy colors and hefty themes.

That makes it sound like it might be pretty good, but it isn’t. Oh goodness, it is not.

Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence), a ballerina from Russia, suffers a gruesome, career-ending injury as Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), an American spy, gets made. Egorova is forced into servitude for the intelligence agency from Russia as a sparrow, a spy trained specifically to use her body for espionage. Egorova is sent to Budapest to seduce Nash and discover his contact in the heart of the government from Russia.

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Stop what you’re doing and go see ‘Annihilation’

Posted on February 26, 2018 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

10/10 Annihilation is a soaring triumph of science-fiction adventure. It is jaw-clenching, deliriously beautiful and overwhelmingly weird.

Ex-military cellular biology teacher Lena (Natalie Portman) is in mourning for her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac), who has been away for a full year on a classified mission and presumed dead. He suddenly reappears in their home, but something is clearly wrong, and the couple is apprehended by a security force. Lena learns that her husband was inside the Shimmer, an alien field situated in Blackwater National Park in the Florida Panhandle. The field has been expanding for three years and will soon envelop major cities. Kane, now barely clinging to life, is the only thing that has ever entered it and come back. Desperate to save her husband, Lena joins an expedition to find the field’s source.

As the group goes deeper into the Shimmer, they also go deeper into themselves. The all-women expedition, which is the first to be comprised of scientists instead of soldiers, is on a suicide mission, and each of them has a reason they don’t mind dying. The film is framed as Lena’s debriefing after she returns to the Southern Reach.

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‘Black Panther’ is another Marvel movie

Posted on February 16, 2018 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.

5/10 It’s finally time for the first black superhero movie.

Yeah, I know, Blade came first, but this is different! This is Marvel Studios! This is the machine! Blade isn’t really a full-blooded superhero, he’s a vampire hunter — back then, a vampire hunter movie was a much easier sell then a costumed vigilante would have been. Wesley Snipes didn’t even want to play Blade.

He wanted to play Black Panther.

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‘Fifty Shades’ series peters out

Posted on February 9, 2018 by reelentropy

It’s so visually boring! The only striking images associated with this movie are the posters. Images courtesy Universal Pictures.

2/10 So this is where Harry Potter ended up. It’s kind of astonishing to think about it in those terms, but when you take everything else about the past 20 years into account, doesn’t that seem right?

With the series routinely smashing records on opening night, publishers started to focus heavily on a young teenage market that clearly hadn’t been explored to its full extent. The next real landmark in that line was Twilight, which narrowed the audience to teenage girls, and from that came Fifty Shades of Grey.

Almost 21 years after Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone took bookstores by storm, the third movie in its grandchild series, Fifty Shades Freed, hits theaters. Christian Grey (Jamie Dorman) and Ana Steele-Grey (Dakota Johnson) are young newly weds enjoying their vast fortune, but can’t honeymoon for long. Steele-Grey’s old boss Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), whose career was derailed after he tried to rape her in the previous installment, is back for revenge against each of the Greys individually and with a surprising amount of resources at his disposal. The marriage is also threatened from within by an extremely unwanted pregnancy, which causes them to fall back into communication problems they never really moved past.

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‘The Cloverfield Paradox’ is garbage

Posted on February 7, 2018 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Netflix.

1/10 Paramount Pictures decided just a few weeks ago that selling The Cloverfield Project to Netflix would be more profitable than releasing it in theaters, and they were almost certainly right. While Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane rode critical acclaim to $170.8 million and $110.2 million grosses worldwide, Paradox would have been booed out of theaters within two weeks.

Aboard the Cloverfield space station, an international team lead by Schmidt (Daniel Brühl) has spent almost two years in orbit trying to solve the world’s energy crisis with some kind of science experiment while geopolitics unravel below them. They team is met with a sudden success, and then disaster — the infinite energy device works, but it invokes some kind of reality-alteration paradox, and the Earth disappears. Ava Hamilton (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and the rest of the crew must figure out where they are in space and how to get home before the Cloverfield disintegrates or they fall victim to the completely random destruction wrought by this paradox that’s never really explained.

The Cloverfield Paradox is like watching a small child play make-believe — with only slightly better special effects. The horror gimmick is that reality is warping and that there are no rules, so every so often something will go haywire and the characters have to deal with it, but what this creates is a story driven not by by characters’ desires and decisions, but by abject randomness. The only thing you can count on is something vaguely freaky happening every 10 minutes or so to keep viewers invested, but there’s no reason to get invested in the first place.

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