Wreck-It Ralph Movie Review
One of the core problems with TRON: Legacy was that it completely disregarded the subsequent advances in video gaming since the first film. In an age where the first person shooter is considered de rigueur, TRON: Legacy was still playing with light cycles (Blockade/Surround) and illuminated Frisbees (Pong). Wreck-It Ralph corrects this oversight by internally chronicling the history of video games from the likes of Q*Bert and Tapper to 2D fighters' Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat to the ...
Guardians of the Galaxy – a second movie review
Where the film hits its stride, though, is in the painting of its characters - which are a marvelous, dysfunctional and irreverent bunch of varying galactic species with individual agendas converging on a common goal of claiming the reward on a valuable artifact, oh, and maybe saving the galaxy.
Bradley Cooper is wonderful as the feral, sentient raccoon, Rocket. Chris Pratt's Peter Quill (AKA Starlord) is a good, funny, charismatic hero. Vin Diesel is mostly MIA as the tree creature, ...
Guardians of the Galaxy Movie Review
And all this for a superhero team that not many people know, and the first Marvel film not to feature one of the Silver Age group of characters created by Stan Lee.
The Guardians are a bunch of undesirables who find themselves fighting together to prevent one of the Infinity Stones from reaching Thanos. If that all sounds a little crazy, then welcome to the Marvel Universe (not just Earth, or Asgard, or wherever it is that Agent Coulson buys his suits) where universe destroying gems and ...
How To Train Your Dragon 2 Movie Review
Hiccup is clearly in a loving relationship with Astrid and Hiccup's dad, Stoick, is talking wedding bells. But there's a darkness that accompanies this maturing of the story elements and it proves to be a double-edged sword.
The unbridled fun of the first film (probably Dreamworks' best animated feature) takes a heavy hit in this one with the story centering around loss, love and loss again. Hiccup's discovery of his long lost mother (voiced by Cate Blanchett impersonating Emma Thompson, ...
Monsters University Movie Review
So it is that Monsters University arrives with much anticipation. The sequel has some mighty shoes to fill and sadly it falls some way short as it is surprisingly bereft of new ideas. What is presented here is simply a ‘further adventures of Mike and Sully’ film that could easily have gone straight to DVD.
The film channels the frat movies of the eighties. While that seems like such a great idea in theory, the potential remains largely unrealised here. Taking most of its cues from ...
Toy Story 1 & 2 (in 3D) Movie Review
I remember feeling a little like this the first time I saw Toy Story: the amazement that somehow a computer had created these textured colourful creatures that emoted and cavorted through such a beautifully detailed world. It's worth remembering that the first film came out nearly 15 years ago, when the top of the line Power Macintosh boasted a head spinning 120Mhz CPU and 16 Mib of RAM! (Of course Pixar used racks of Sun Sparkstations to actually render the movies, but you get my point.)...
Alice In Wonderland Movie Review
This vivid approach isn’t just limited to the visuals either. The landscapes and creatures are integral to a story that also expands the mind. One thinks that the story’s original author Lewis Carroll might have gotten hold of some of the Blue Caterpillar’s best stash before pen was put to paper.
Australian actor Mia Wasikowska as Alice, starts out as a dour young girl sent off to marry a man she doesn’t love and through the magic of the story becomes a luminous woman ready to ...
The Expendables Movie Review
Which is why it is especially perplexing that The Expendables has so many talky bits in it and lengthy ones at that. Do we really care about Jason Statham's endless diatribes on his lucklessness in love? Um… no. Do we care about how Randy Couture got his cauliflower ears? Hmmm… not really. Do we want more shooty bits and explosions? Oh, yes please!
Sly Stallone's new flick is the epitome of WYSIWYG movie making, what you see is definitely what you get. With an all-star gym-jockey ...
Your Highness Movie Review
Your Highness is the kind of ride where they throw so many jokes at you that a few are bound to strike the bullseye and when they do, laughter can be found. It also has one of the highest percentages of groan worthy moments of any film in recent memory. It’s like the writers got really herbalized, wrote a scrip that threw every stupid joke they could think of in that altered state, passed out and then later forgot to go back and edit their altered musings.
Setting the film in a fantasy ...
Star Trek 2009 – Movie Review
It matters nought that the unleashing of a black hole in the midst of our solar system results in little consequence to the neighbouring planets (or galaxies, for that matter); or that Simon Pegg's Scotty bears zero resemblance to James Doohan; or that an unlikely intra-crew love affair will require some significant (and potentially fascinating) narrative acrobatics in order to segue future franchise installments back into Gene Roddenberry's timeline. Star Trek is about the fun, the ...
