TITLE & REVIEW
This is set in the far future, when humanity has an interstellar civilisation.
Jaden Smith (
Karate kid (2010)
) is a young rookie cadet.
His emotionally distant father, the General (real-life father Will Smith -
Last Man on Earth
) tries to bond with him by taking him on a trip.
Their starship crash-lands on Earth,
which has been abandoned and returned to a feral state.
The animal life-forms are aggressive (and CGI).
The General is injured, so Jaden must save them both. However, he is haunted by the memories of his sister's death at the hands of an alien monster. His sidearm is a Ranger staff-weapon from Babylon 5 , which can reconfigure itself into any of 21 different types of blade. There are no projectile weapons in the future, it seems.
M Night Shyamalan delivers a competent film. There is no twist ending, it is all quite straightforward. Will Smith is good, as always, but his son carries almost the entire film.
Scientist
Kelly Hu
leads an expedition to discover alien life.
Unfortunately they get trapped on the alien world
while the aliens invade Earth!
Back on Earth, the great cities of America have been invaded. Luckily, even though the military get easily defeated one firefighter leads the fight back. He looks a bit like Dean Cain, but it turns out that he is a different actor. Presumably they could not afford the REAL Dean Cain. Yes, this is the cheaper version of him!
Robert Picardo ( Star Trek: Voyager ) is the US General who leads the human resistance in a counterattack against the alien invaders.
This is set decades after an alien invasion of Earth.
The humans have been driven underground,
while the surface is a wilderness controlled by alien monsters.
The protagonist is codename S.U.M.1. ( Iwan Rheon ), an albino soldier stationed in a one-man security tower. As his hundred days of solitude progress, he starts to go a bit like Sam Rockwell in Moon . His predecessor is unaccounted for, and his superiors seem to be lying to him.
Well, the obvious comparison is with the Tom Cruise effort Oblivion . What that really means is that not only did the Cruise movie get the big budget and the cinematic release, it also got what little originality there was.
The setup itself seems designed to drive the protagonist insane. Each tour of duty lasts a hundred days, with nobody to talk to except a rat that got into the bunker. No books, distractions or entertainment for over three months. How could the people in charge NOT expect him to become mentally unhinged?
The sad fact is that there is only one ending available for the story.
The US military-industrial complex
has built an enormous robotic ape.
They deploy this on a mission,
resulting in the deaths of multiple hostiles.
The survivors plot to hack the robot's systems,
and turn it against its creators.
Abraham the chimpanzee is still giant-sized. He is living in a facility near a small town in the USA, and the locals are protesting about his presence. However, he is the only thing capable of taking down the Mega-Ape.
This is a mockbuster made by The Asylum,
and it is a pretty terrible movie even compared to their other ones.
A space rocket, codenamed Elbe, lands near Roswell in New Mexico, USA. The boss (Eric Roberts - ) orders a small team of scientists to investigate. These investigators are a sloppy team, but luckily the main scientist - a young Black woman ( ) - manages to survive unscathed.
Because the space rocket was originally made in alliance with Russia, a team of Russian scientists are called in to help. The good news is that their leader went college with the Black girl. Are they gal-pals or former lesbian lovers? The Black girl seems a little too distraught when the Russian's inevitable betrayal takes place.
The rocket's sole occupant was Abraham the chimpanzee. He was sent off to make First Contact with aliens, and now he comes back ... contaminated with alien goo. Not only does he grow to a massive size, but a nearby gila monster gets contaminated too and also grows uncontrollably. Yes, this is The Andromeda Strain with a nice helping of Godzilla (1998) . And when Kong - err, Abraham - reaches Washington DC he climbs the Washington monument, a reference to another famous B-movie.
This is the Directorial debut of comedian Joe Cornish,
familiar to British audiences from the Adam and Joe Show.
A woman ( Jodie Whittaker ) on her way home from work is mugged. The crooks then fall foul of some Alien monsters. The survivors hide out in the drugs den of local dealer Nick Frost ( Paul ).
Although the protagonists are a gang of hoodies, there is a moral tone to the film. The leader of the street gang (John Boyega - Star Wars: The Force Awakens ) must learn to take responsibility for his actions.
Alien spacecraft attack Los Angeles,
and a bunch of survivors must fight their way out of the ruins.
Yes, that was the storyline of the recent release
Skyline
. But this time, the protagonists are a US Marine Corps squad led by Aaron Eckhart (
The Core, Dark Knight
). So it should be even better, right?
On a rescue mission in enemy-held territory, they team up with USAF Intel specialist Michelle Rodriguez (last seen a similar role in Avatar ) and veterinarian Bridget Moynahan (playing against type).
The film's defenders claim it is a positive portrayal of the USMC. But the central characters, despite a gratuitous characterisation segment at the start, are merely a bunch of interchangeable red-shirts. Their strategy is based on supposed air superiority by the USAF, but the Marines do not actually call in air support even when ambushed and surrounded. Luckily, the aliens use the central control system that we saw a decade ago in The Phantom Menace . Yes, the USMC stormtroopers are defeated repeatedly by villains who would be hard-pressed to menace Jar-Jar Binks! And some idiots think this is a POSITIVE portrayal of the marines?
This is not even a good action film. The predominant use of shakey-cam in all the action sequences make it very hard to work out what is going on. It is over ten years since Spielberg popularised it in Saving Private Ryan, and it has become a cliche in every battle scene since then.
Yes, this is The Asylum's straight-to-DVD cheapskate version with a similar-sounding name.
Los Angeles is invaded by flying saucers. Luckily, it is defended by the reservists from the California Air National Guard. Also, a Ninja-babe ( Nia Peebles ) from Majestic 12 is in town.
Emile Hirsh (
Speed Racer
) and Max Minghella (
Handmaid's Tale
) hook up with fellow American 20-somethings
Olivia Thirlby
and her BFF while on a trip
- like in any good horror movie these days.
However, this time the trip is to Russia.
Unfortunately, Moscow is the target of an Alien Invasion.
The American teens get chased around by invisible monsters.
The result is suspenseful, to say the least.
It is nice to see something of global significance portrayed somewhere outside of North America. The SPFX are great, but the plot requires some suspension of disbelief. Invisible aliens are one thing, but the idea of a residential apartment being converted into an enormous Faraday cage ...
In the near future, a meteorite has crashed into Germany.
It was carrying an alien species, the Mimics,
strangely named because they are like CGI octopi on crack.
The aliens spread across Europe like the Nazis seeking lebensraum,
until they are stopped by the English Channel in the West
and a Sino-Russian army in the East.
To match the Sino-Russian offensive,
the Allied General (a Churchill/Eisenhower composite played by Brendan Gleeson -
Harry Potter
) must launch an invasion of Normandy!
Tom Cruise is a Military public relations officer. When he disagrees with the General’s plan to send him to the front line, he is branded a deserter and left to the tender mercies of drill sergeant Bill Paxton ( Agents of SHIELD ). Cruise and a squad of expendables (including Jonas Armstrong - Robin Hood 2006 ) are sent into the meat-grinder, ambushed by aliens who knew they were coming and have tactics that negate the humans’ technological advantages.
Cruise gets contaminated by the aliens’ secret weapon - they have the ability to reset time. He also links up with super-soldier Emily Blunt , and discovers that her success was due to time travel too. She becomes a sort of a love-interest to him. This is never developed as a plot thread, and the compulsory sex scene from 1980s action films has been left out so it can get the 12A/PG13 rating that modern action movies are lumbered with.
Earth was invaded by a race of Alien scavengers, like in
Independence Day
. Earth's moon was destroyed (like in
The Time Machine
), and the shifts in gravity caused Earth's tectonic plates to shift.
The Aliens wanted to suck up Earth's oceans,
but now the humans have evacuated the planet and are doing it anyway.
Some Alien invaders still survive in the shatters remains of Earth. The hydro-rigs are protected by security drones - a flying version of ED-209 from Robocop . Tom Cruise ( Mission Impossible ) is a technician who repairs the drones. He lives with Victoria ( Angela Riseborough ) in a mountaintop penthouse.
Our hero's memory has been wiped (like something out of Philip K Dick ), but he has mysterious dreams about Olga Kurlyenko . Of course, things get a lot more confusing.
Things really kick off when Cruise meets Morgan Freeman ( Shawshank Redemption ), Nicholai Coster-Waldau - Game of Thrones and Zoe Bell (whose lines seem to have been cut from the final version of the film).
This owes a debt to a few other monster movies,
while managing to put its own spin on things.
It starts with Dr Kerry Atkins (
Marley Shelton
) battling a mutated life-form aboard a space ship - like in
Life (2016)
. Then on the ground, Burke (Joe Manganiello -
True Blood
) and his team of mercenaries end up out of their depth - like in
Aliens
.
Zoologist Davis Okoye (Dwayne Johnson - Moana ) discovers that his albino gorilla, George, is starting to mutate. Luckily geneticist Dr Kate Caldwell ( Naomie Harris ) drops by with some exposition. Then MIB Harvey Russell (Jeffrey Dean Morgan - Watchmen ) gets involved.
Meanwhile, corrupt billionaire Claire Wyden ( Malin Akerman ) is under investigation by FBI Agent Park (Will Yun Lee - Die Another Day ). She is the investor behind the serum that accidentally mutated the animals, and needs to get samples of their blood in order to get a return on her investment. Please note, she is a blonde billionaire who operates out of Chicago. Yes, she is basically a more homely version of Ivanka Trump.
The climax of the film is a three-way battle between giant mutated creatures in the centre of the city of Chicago. Gorilla, wolf and alligator. Plus The Rock himself, of course.
This is found footage, like
Cloverfield
. A group of Norwegian college students film a documentary.
They follow a man who they think is a wildlife poacher.
But he is hunting something far more dangerous ...
Trolls, the monsters of scandinavian folklore, are real. Well, convincingly portrayed though CGI. And since the cast has no stars, just talent, there is a convincing amount of tension on-screen.
This is a relatively low-budget disaster movie,
with what was then regarded as a cast of unknowns.
In the ten years after the film was released,
many of them have now become much more recognisable faces.
For example,
at least two of the cast have become regulars in the DC TV universe.
In other words, the casting can be taken as an example of
No stars, just talent.
The premise is that Hud (TJ Thyne - Deadpool ) is videotaping an all-night party in NYC for his friends. When the city is attacked by an unknown monster, he keeps the camera rolling and captures the next few hours of events. The result is a Found Footage version of Godzilla . If one can accept the basic premise, the resulting film is quite enjoyable.
The party's host wants to go rescue his damsel in distress ( Odette Yustmann ). He is accompanied by his brother (Mike Vogel - Under the Dome ) and the brother's girlfriend ( Jessica Lucas ). Hud the cameraman also gets a love interest of sorts - Lizzy Caplan , playing the same kind of feisty girl she is usually associated with.
The unlikely crew trek across Manhattan, and get bumped off one at a time.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead
leaves her boyfriend (Bradley Cooper -
Alias
) and drives off to start a new life.
All a bit reminiscent of
Psycho
, insofar as the story focuses on the female lead rather than the monster.
Meanwhile, news bulletins on the radio tell us a familiar story
about mysterious power-cuts and an on-going disaster.
She wakes up in a prison cell, where she is held by a survivalist (John Goodman - ). He tells her that he will keep her safe, but that the world above them has been scene to an apocalyptic assault. Is the air really toxic due to an NBC attack, or is it all an exercise in gaslighting?
The weakest point of the story is the final Act. While the main body of the film is filled with incredible suspense, the climax is a series of explosions where each one tries to out-do the previous one.
A strange aquatic creature swims up a river in Tokyo.
The Japanese Government do not know what to do about it.
In fact, they are paralysed with bureaucracy -
one of the central themes of this film.
Only one of the younger, more junior bureaucrats seems to know what to do.
Luckily the US Government sends an envoy to help. She is a young ethnic Japanese woman, fluent in the local language and equipped with American information. The creature was codenamed Godzilla by the Americans, but the Japanese pronounce it Gojira. Yes, the old issue of the naming is actually dealt with on-screen.
The USA has traced the creature back to an underwater dump site for nuclear waste. It absorbed radiation, and developed the power to evolve. The first stage was the original creature, and the second stage was the enlarged version that swam up the river. The third stage crawled on land, and wrecked half of Tokyo. But it is the fourth stage that looks like the traditional Godzilla from the 1960s Toho Studios movies.
Godzilla withstands the Korean army's tanks and artillery, not to mention their rockets and air force bombs. But when the US Air Force is called in, they use B-2 Stealth Bombers with special deep penetration bombs. Godzilla switches to his fifth form. Not only can he breathe fire from his mouth, he can emit laser beams from the scales on his spine. Yes, he has evolved the perfect anti-aircraft defence system!
The young Japanese bureaucrats realise what has happened. Godzilla is basically a walking nuclear reactor, and the only way to shut it down is rapid super-cooling. They need to sends teams in to deliver coolants and coagulants. Yes, finally a monster movie with an intelligent solution.
Juliette Binoche
is a nuclear scientist at a power plant in Japan.
In events reminiscent of the Fukushima disaster,
a mysterious tsunami endangers the reactor and kills a lot of people.
Ten years later her husband (Bryan Cranston - Total Recall (2012) ) is a conspiracy theorist who thinks a gigantic Kaiju monster caused the tsunami. He loses his security clearance because he is clearly insane … However, it turns out that the Kaiju (AKA Gojiru, AKA God-Zilla) is real, and the US Military have been monitoring it for decades. Their own paranoid secrecy meant they ignored and blacklisted potentially the greatest scientist they could have recruited onto their team!
There is a far bigger threat to the world. Two other monsters are also on the loose. One looks like Cloverfield , while the other looks like the Alien Queen from Aliens . They are the male and female of a species, and they intend to breed. Unfortunately their species would be a super-predator, dominating the world. Worse, they will meet up in San Francisco, so just nuking them would be a bad idea. Not only would the bay area be rendered uninhabitable, but the San Andreas fault would dump most of the Western seaboard of the USA into the Pacific ocean. Only Gojira can save the world!
In 1973, a scientist (John Goodman -
10 Cloverfield Lane
) gets a US Senator's backing to tag along with a survey of an uncharted island.
He also gets a military escort, in the shape of a US Army Colonel (Samuel L Jackson -
Marvel Avengers
) and his Air cavalry unit.
They arrive straight from Vietnam, where they have seen a lot of combat.
As well as the US military unit they also bring a British mercenary (Tom Hiddleston - Marvel Avengers ). Finally there is a war-protesting journalist - Brie Larson . She may seem like the token woman, and this film certainly fails the Bechdel test, but she actually has an important role in the story. Her role is a combination of the photographer (Jeff Bridges - True Grit (2010) ) and the beauty who bonds with Kong ( Jessica Lange ). All with no nudity but lots more explosions!
As depicted in the movie's trailer, the choppers have an apocalyptic run-in with Kong. However, this is only the setup for the main storyline. The survivors must get across the island to the pickup point.
There is an after-credits sequence that has a link with Godzilla (2014) . Yes, this is all setup for the third story in the series ... the ultimate crossover, next year's Kong versus Godzilla (2018) !
Kyle Chandler (
Early Edition
) reluctantly rejoins the Agency that guards the monsters.
His ex-wife (
Vera Farmiga
) and daughter (
Millie Bobbie Brown
) have been abducted by a rent-a-villain (Charles Dance -
Game of Thrones
).
The villains' theory is that the monsters will bring balance to the world. What nobody realises is that Ghidora is an alien who usurps Godzilla's role as the rightful king of the monsters. Instead of using them to protect Earth, he wants to destroy it.
King Kong is still on Skull Island,
but the place was devastated off-screen by a tropical storm
so he is an inmate in a giant dome like in
The Truman Show
. This is to keep him safe from Godzilla,
who is now acting like one of the Kaiju in
Pacific Rim
. The zookeeper is a scientist, Ilene Andrews (
Rebecca Hall
).
Another scientist, Nathan Lind ( True Blood ), realises the best option is to send King Kong to his ancestoral homeland, in the Hollow Earth - accessible through a portal in Antarctica. Maia Simmons ( Eiza Gonzalez ) is sent along to babysit the ape. So, are Erik Northman and Santanico Pandemonium the hottest vampire couple since the Vampire Diaries ?
The head man of Monarch, Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler - Early Edition ), has very little to do. Instead his daughter Madison ( Millie Bobbi Brown ) teams up with her school-friend Josh Valentine (Julian Dennison - Deadpool 2 ) and hunts down corporate whistleblower Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry - Superintelligence ). Together, the whistleblower and the teenagers discover the truth.
The US Navy escorts the ship carrying Kong. For some reason the ships are all bunched together, which may be more photogenic but not smart or realistic. Godzilla attacks, making it obvious why conventional warships (and apparently a reconditioned WW2 battleship) are not used in the Pacific Rim series. Kong and Godzilla are big enough to use an aircraft carrier as a surfboard, and in fact climb aboard one in order to have a fist-fight. There must be an incredible loss of life, but this movie seems to use the trope from Hulk (2003) when the crew of an M1 Abrams tank somehow survived being thrown half a dozen miles by that movie's monster.
The Pacific Rim pastiche takes a step further when it turns out that APEX cybernetics is building its own Jaeger. Yes, the third monster is Mecha-godzilla. This leads up to a massive climactic fight in Hong Kong.
This was
Peter Jackson
's follow-up to
Lord of the Rings
. It is not just a remake of the 1930s film:
While both the original and the 1970s remake had contemporary settings, this is a period piece.
The result of the huge budget is enough CGI to give us the film we would have gotten if
Willis O'Brien
had been given the technology!
Naomi Watts is a hard-up Vaudeville performer in Depression-era NYC. Jack Black ( Be Kind, Rewind ) is a film producer making a film about a shipboard romance between characters played by her and Bruce (Kyle Chandler - Early Edition ). The result is reminiscent of 1930s romance films, or even of Titanic . The actress instead develops a romance with the writer (Adrien Brody - The Village ).
The rest of the bunch include Production Assistant Colin Hanks ( Roswell ) and cabin boy Jamie Bell ( Jumper ), whose favourite book is Heart of Darkness ...
Black claims to be taking everyone to Singapore, though his true destination is a mysterious island somewhere in the Dutch East Indies.
The natives are living in a stone age society, but have developed technologies using wood and rope. Unfortunately they ire every bit as vicious as the Orcs in LOTR.
The original film was inspired by The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, in the same way that Nosferatu was ripped from Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Bearing in mind that everybody who watches this must already know the story (the original is seventy years old and this is the second remake), pretty much every scene counts as foreshadowing of some kind.
Who is the real villain? The actor knows his own limitations and admits he is not like the characters he portrays. The writer is so obsessed with a woman who is probably dead that he will risk everyone else's life. The movie producer tags along in the hope of making his movie (and paying his debt to the others). Getting rich is portrayed as a bad thing, even though the characters all started out seriously in debt in the middle of the Great Depression!
Kong himself is a very angry individual. Perhaps it is a combination of loneliness and sexual frustration, since there are no other gorillas (giant or otherwise) in sight. His only company is the neighbourhood bullies, a gang of T-Rexes. The actress's Vaudeville skills come in useful, keeping him entertained.
The climax, back home in NYC, is a lot more emotion-packed. The Authorities send in the Biplanes in the insane hope that small-arms fire (even if it is belt-fed) will actually be any use against a fifty-ton ape!
The resulting movie is about twice as long as the original. There is much more character development, and some very touching relationships.
This was
John Guillermin
's follow-up to
King Kong (1976)
. It is a well-made film, and the director was familiar
with both the story and the technologies involved in telling it.
So what went wrong?
Well, a sequel should be released two years after the original - not ten.
The story starts with the climax of the original film. We see stock footage of Kong falling to his apparent demise. Then we fast forward half a dozen years. Kong is in a coma, but otherwise almost entirely unharmed by his fall. However, he is in desperate need of a heart transplant. Since there are no compatible donors, lady scientist ( Linda Hamilton ) has constructed a massive artificial heart. Now she just needs to install it.
A white hunter (Brian Kerwin - ) stumbles across another giant ape somewhere in South America. He sells the ape to the University that owns Kong, and somehow the blood is an exact match. This is in spite of the creatures coming from different continents. The lady scientist is the only one who thinks it is risky, because the new ape is a female.
Kong makes a full recovery. However, the female ape must be in heat because he can sense her when she is literally a mile away. Naturally, he busts out of confinement and pays her a visit. He carries her off in his arms, like a groom carrying a bride over the threshold, and takes her to a place called honeymooners' ridge.
The lady scientist and the great white hunter follow the apes, and since romance is in the air the humans hook up too. This is actually the most unrealistic part of the whole movie; the automatic hook-up between the male and female leads who really do not have much in common.
The US Military sends in Colonel Nevin (John Ashton - Beverly Hills Cop). Naturally, he goes full Ahab and becomes obsessed with killing Kong. What would the sympathetic monster's story be without a villainous human antagonist? As a side note, Linda Hamilton's career peaked with The Terminator (1984) and this failed as her follow-up movie. In a strange coincidence, the film's biggest break-out star is the villain who went on to be a comedy sidekick in an Eddie Murphy series.
Kong disappears into the wilderness. This film was shot on location in Tennessee and North Carolina, so that must be where he is supposed to have hidden out. Luckily the uninhabited swamps of Dixie-land contain many alligators, so an enormous ape can eat all the protein he needs. Eventually he gets spotted, and hunted by rednecks led by Leon Rippy ( Alcatraz ).
Kong's female is held in a disused nuclear missile silo. He comes looking to save her, but he has to get past the US Army first. This leads up to an impressive climax.
This is a low-budget effort,
shot with a handheld camera (though not Found Footage like
Blair Witch Project
). The actors are unknowns,
possibly selected because they look like big-budget stars Skeet Ulrich (
Chill Factor
) and
Cameron Diaz
.
Our protagonists are Americans, trapped in Mexico and trying to get across the American border. Unfortunately the border area is now a no-man's land full of aliens that look like Giant Squids.
Thanks to imaginative SPFX the aliens, when they emerge, look more like jellyfish that glow in the dark.
Thankfully, there is no pretence of a phony romantic subplot. That kind of thing pervades action movies, which shoe-horn the token female character in as the hero's love interest. In this story, the girl is the boss's daughter and the man's job is to get her home or he will become unemployed.
This is a follow-up to the first film,
but although it is set in the same universe it does not feature the same characters.
The protagonists are a group of US soldiers serving in the Middle East.
It turns out that the Mexican border is not the only Infected Zone.
The USA's military invasion of Iraq now has aliens to worry about as well as locals.
Unfortunately the American tendency to create collateral damage among the local civilians
has only encouraged the insurgents to fight even harder.
The film introduces our heroes while they are at home for rest and recreation. Their home-town is Detroit, and they act like a street-gang out of Eight Mile. Then they get deployed in the desert. Helicopter travel, encounters with irate locals - this is like a Vietnam war movie. It seems evocative of Apocalypse Now ...
After fifty minutes of character development our heroes get sent on their big mission. These are not a bunch of stereotypical grunts that we expect to get killed off one at a time. They are well fleshed-out characters, and they are heavily armed. A fusilade of their 20mm shotguns and 40mm grenade-launchers can take down one of the massive alien creatures!
The unit runs into trouble inside the Infected Zone. First there is an ambush by insurgents. Then the survivors have to hike out, avoiding both the aliens and other humans. Luckily they meet Sofia Boutella .
The Apocalypse Now comparison gets even more apt. As the soldiers continue their journey, the mental stress mounts up to an almost unbearable level.
In the near future, Earth is invaded by giant monsters.
The Military call them Kaiju, a reference to the Japanese origins of
Godzilla
, and build giant robots (Jaegers) at the rate of one per Mega-city.
The next step is to build a giant wall along every inhabited coast.
Seriously?
The smart thing to do would be to abandon all coastal cities,
and relocate the population inland.
After all, expanding existing cities like Denver would be easier
than building a massive wall of the scale shown.
Each Jaeger needs two pilots, whose actions are linked with a mind-meld. The mind-meld machine is necessary for plot reasons - it allows amped-up character interaction between the PTSD twins, and it allows a comedy-relief scientist to meld with a Kaiju brain.
Do these things not have ejection pods? Well, it turns out they do - but only when the plot demands it.
To put in some phony jeopardy and excessive character development, as well as unnecessary personal motivation, it turns out that BOTH the pilots have PTSD from previous encounters with Kaiju. Seriously? This is so much worse than in The Great Escape, where the tunnel-digger was claustrophobic and the forger was blind!
This is set ten years after the events of the original film.
Jake Pentecost (John Boyega -
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
) gives a brief expository voice-over,
when he explains that he is the son of the Idris Elba character in the original.
Now he has become a drop-out, living in the ruins of a coastal city
and scavenging mechanical parts for a black-market Jaeger industry.
Jake and his friend get conscripted into the military. He gets paired up with his old buddy Nathan Lambert (Scott Eastwood - Suicide Squad ), the token white guy who has a barely-touched-on romantic subplot with cow-orker Jules Reyes ( Adria Arjona ).
There is a major sub-plot concerning the two nerds. Hermann Gottleib (Burn Gorman - Torchwood ) is now running the military's science program. Dr Newton Geisler (Charlie Day - ) has been recruited by a military industrial contractor, a Chinese mega-corp that wants to privatise global defence. Just like Stark Industries in the MCU, this is not a good idea.
This movie actually has a decent story behind it. However, the third act basically boils down to what the first movie was - lots of action scenes involving giant robots smashing things.
This was produced by Guillermo Del Torro but directed by Stephen S. DeKnight , best known as the creative force behind Spartacus: Blood And Sand . There are a few familiar faces: Dustin Clare ( Wolf Creek: Season One ), Nick E. Tarabay ( Arrow ) and Dan Feuerriegel all get a screen credit.
If anyone has seen
Pacific Rim
they will know it is a B-Movie with a mega-dollar budget.
In contrast, this is a B-Movie with a B-Movie budget - and it shows.
The CGI SPFX are surprisingly good when one considers how woeful the acting is
- perhaps it is just the direction that lets it all down.
An oil rig in the North Atlantic is attacked by a giant monster. US Navy Admiral Graham Greene ( Wolf Lake ) orders a diverse trio of pilots (like in Stealth ) to search and destroy. David Cochaki from Baywatch is the lead man, who has a problem with authority figures and all the other clichés of the archetype. The token babe and token black guy are there to back him up.
After a couple of small fights, the monsters come back for a climactic battle. Meanwhile, the Admiral has an underling who wants to nuke the combat zone. Unfortunately, our heroes are in the middle of it ... on Manhatten island!
For all its problems, this low-budget knock-off is actually better than the original! Yes, dollar for dollar this effort gives better value for money than the Guillermo Del Toro movie.
Scientist James Franco (
Your Highness
) experiments on chimps so he can cure his father (John Lithgow -
3rd Rock from the Sun
) of Alzheimers.
With the help of chimp-wrangler Tyler Labine (
Invasion, Reaper
) he adopts a super-intelligent chimp named Caesar.
He even sets up home with vet
Freida Pinto
, and all seems right in the world.
Eventually, Caesar (Andy Sirkis - King Kong 2005 ) falls foul of asshole neighbour David Hewlett ( Stargate Atlantis ). He winds up getting thrown into a primate detention centre run by American-accented Brits Brian Cox ( Manhunter, Troy ) and Draco Malfoy ( Harry Potter ). This is where the heartwarming family drama turns into a prison movie. Will Caesar outwit his captors, leading an ape revolt? Well, if you've seen the original or the trailer (or even the title!) then you'll know the answer.
This is far superior to Tim Burton 's reboot of the franchise. The CGI is good enough for Sirkis' performance to be mentioned as an award-worthy by critics. The plot works well, predictable as it may be. The cast is great, and tons of subtle references are thrown in.
This is a sequel to
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
. Ten years after the outbreak of the killer flu,
and the high-IQ apes led by Caesar (Andy Sirkis -
King Kong (2005)
) live peacefully in the forest.
They have nothing to worry about, except for the occasional enormous grizzly bear.
Humans start moving back into the city of San Francisco. Gary Oldman ( Dark Knight Rises ) is in charge, reminiscent of John Malkovich’s character in Zombie Apocalypse comedy Warm Bodies . The humans need a power source to create electricity, because they have no supply of fuel for their generators. The wind-farms and solar panels are few and far between, so the only option is the hydro-electric dam in the forest ...
The humans try to make peace with Caesar and his clan. There are two major obstacles to this. Firstly, Oldman sends Kirk Acevedo ( 12 Monkeys ) who is the same gun-toting trigger-happy idiot he is in everything else. Seriously, this character thinks a six-shooter will make a difference when he is outnumbered a dozen to one!
The other problem is Koba, the scar-faced ape who was so memorable in the previous film. He is Caesar’s second in command. And what was the fate of the man Caesar was named after? Killed by people he trusted in a coup attempt ...
This movie picks up a few years after the events of the previous one.
Koba's followers, cast out of the ape tribe, have defected to the human side.
They act as scouts for a human Special Forces unit led by Colonel Woody Harrelson (
Hunger Games
), who is obsessed with wiping out the apes.
Caesar (Andy Sirkis - King Kong 2005 ) and a couple of his close friends set out on a vengeance quest. They ride their horses across a desolate landscape, which makes this film more than a little similar to a western. En route they pick up a couple of stragglers, a mute human girl and an unbalanced chimp named Bad Ape (Steve Zahn - Perfect Getaway ).
In the final act of the story, our protagonists find the secluded base of the crazy Special Forces Colonel. This is visually and thematically reminiscent of Apocalypse Now. In fact, there is an on-screen acknowledgement in the form of a graffetti scrawl that reads Ape-Pocalypse Now.
All in all, this is an excellent film that ties up the trilogy and yet can be enjoyed as a self-contained stand-alone story. It evokes the spirit of classic films, and does not fall short.
Eric Balfour (
Texas Chainsaw Massacre Remake
) and his GF go to LA to see his best buddy, Donald Faison (Scrubs) and his trophy wife,
Brittany Daniel
. But after a night of partying (and basic character development,
so we are meant to care what happens to them) ...
It starts with a huge cloud of superheated water vapour, like in Independence Day . The twenty-somethings watch as something deadly trashes the city centre in the distance, like in Cloverfield . Finally, in the harsh light of day we get to see Giant CGI robots stomping people, like in Transformers
This is the first big Alien Invasion film in a long time (well, since Signs ) but it seems to be cobbled together from so many other films. It is competently done, but not exactly original.
