REVIEW: Jurassic World Dominion [2022]

This isn’t about us. Why create something new when you can ride the nostalgia train to the bank? That’s ultimately what the Jurassic World trilogy does. Did it correct some things as far as pushing the potential of Michael Crichton‘s original novel? Yes. With Fallen Kingdom, Steven Spielberg‘s heir apparent Colin Trevorrow finally brought the dinosaurs to shore and acknowledged the next step in the evolution of the genetic technology at the back of everything this franchise delivered since Jurassic Park. Fast-forward to Jurassic World Dominion, however, and you couldn’t…

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REVIEW: Battle at Big Rock [2019]

It’s one of them. If Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom had one purpose, it was for clone baby Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) to do what Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) couldn’t: let the dinosaurs go free. While the idea of using Lockwood resources to create an ark and save as many species as possible to exist in their own island sanctuary away from hubristic humans was a ruse to illegally sell them all off to the highest bidder, the mercenaries under Eli Mills’ (Rafe Spall) employ ended up playing Noah anyway.…

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REVIEW: Top Gun: Maverick [2022]

It’s time to let go. Director Joseph Kosinski pays homage to the late Tony Scott by opening his thirty-plus-years-in-the-making sequel Top Gun: Maverick with the exact same music cues, similarly propulsive aircraft carrier b-roll, and text-based intro (adding “and women” to “the handful of men”) as Top Gun. Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” kicks in to whisk us back to the 1980s if only for a couple minutes before entering an aging Navy garage with Captain Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell (Tom Cruise). His dogfighting days over the Indian Ocean are over. After…

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REVIEW: Top Gun [1986]

Your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash. There’s no arguing that Top Gun isn’t a pro-military piece of glossy propaganda. Between Matthew Modine declining the lead role because it would go against his politics to Tom Cruise admitting four years later that a sequel would be in poor taste considering its sanitized view on war to the Navy literally having script approval to change plot points to better suit their recruitment needs, everything about it screams jingoistic idealism. That it would eventually be preserved in the National Film…

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REVIEW: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness [2022]

Go on red. **Potential Spoilers** I admittedly found myself uncertain when deciding which entry of the Marvel Cinematic Universe I should watch in preparation for the franchise’s latest, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Should I go all the way back before Infinity War and refresh myself with the original film considering this one is technically its sequel by name? Or should I revisit the most recent chapter from just a few months ago in Spider-Man: No Way Home considering titular hero Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) played a major…

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REVIEW: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 [2022]

Dot, dot, dot. The first Sonic the Hedgehog movie ended with an apparent happy ending for Sonic (Ben Schwartz) and his new adopted family (James Marsden‘s Tom and Tika Sumpter‘s Maddie Wachowski). Not only had the little “blue devil” found a way to focus his speed force and send unhinged government spook Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey) through a portal to the uninhabited “Mushroom Planet,” his heroism also endeared him to the town of Green Hills enough to invite him in as a covert member of their citizenship. Between a visit…

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REVIEW: Firestarter [1984]

You don’t need your gun. I haven’t read Stephen King‘s Firestarter, but I must believe it has more going for it than Mark L. Lester‘s adaptation. Why make it into a film at all if not? If I were to guess, the problem occurred when the producers hired Stanley Mann to create a new script that leaned more closely to the novel after Christine director John Carpenter had already commissioned two before exiting the project. There’s a difference between making a film version of a book and filming the book—something…

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REVIEW: The Northman [2022]

We thirst for vengeance, but we cannot escape our fates. Like the Brothers Grimm were to Disney with so many fairy tales, it appears Saxo Grammaticus was to William Shakespeare where it comes to Hamlet. The Danish historian’s lead character was Amleth—a young boy who witnesses the murder of his father and forced romance of his mother at the hands of his uncle before having to run away from the latter’s kill order so that he may return (if an ambitiously opportunistic soldier lies about watching him die). The parallels…

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REVIEW: Re Granchio [The Tale of King Crab] [2021]

Princes and poor people. While Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis‘ Re Granchio [The Tale of King Crab] begins with the discovery of a piece of Etruscan gold by a 19th century self-loathing, drunken lover known as Luciano (Gabriele Silli), we don’t meet the character until after being whisked away to the Tuscia, Italy village Vejano and a group of present-day hunters gathering for food, wine, and stories. These are real people as far as I’m aware, men whose words already inspired a prior short and feature length documentary…

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REVIEW: Black Site [2022]

Drift caught, sir. The terrorist bombing of a hospital in Istanbul has left almost two hundred people dead, including CIA Agent Abby Trent’s (Michelle Monaghan) husband and daughter. Since they were on-site because of her job as an analyst whisking them off to far-flung regions of the world, she blames herself for their deaths. It’s therefore no surprise that she fights hard to be reassigned to an off-the-grid location known as the Citadel considering it currently houses the government’s best lead (Simon Elrahi‘s Farhan) to discover the culprit’s identity. Abby’s…

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REVIEW: Everything Everywhere All at Once [2022]

How can we get back? The nihilistic notion that life is meaningless and “nothing matters” doesn’t necessarily need to put you into a depressive malaise. It could also provide you the room to take chances and live without regret. That’s not to say that a cautious life is destined for sorrow, though. The path of least resistance doesn’t always mean that it’s a path to obsolescence. Look at Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) and Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan) as an example. They chose a textbook “boring” life together, one that demands…

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