“WHEEL OF TIME” BECOMES AN UNFORTUNATE MISFIRE...

 🎥🎞Series Review🎞🎥 - WHEEL OF TIME - Amazon Prime - [PG 13] - This series is based on the book series by Robert Jordan. There was something about the first three episodes of this series that honestly intrigued me to follow it. Maybe it was the visual effects, the details in the production, the hint of mystical mystery, the look of being defiant against the new prequel series out there...maybe it was the addition of Rosamund Pike [from Gone Girl (2014)] that honed my willingness to give this thing a try.

At first glance, the story pitch was a little dry, dropping the viewer into the middle of something big, with magic and other essential mystical and dark elements to a back story that happened a long time ago; falling along the lines of Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. So much of the same type of writing that movies and series before have digressed through over the recent years, that by the time the actual plot is laid out to the viewer, over some mysterious and diabolical reasons that no normal person could possibly understand or accept into their normal lives, you find out that there's a mission involved and that only a few people have been chosen to follow, all mostly against their will. I know, it all sounds like we've heard this same crap before, right?...it certainly isn't the story that sounds too familiar, but with all of the visual effects, the production, and the directing that all looks too familiar to ignore.

The story arc revolves around a group of young twenty year olds, all of whom question just about everything, including their own abilities, and love to argue amongst themselves over self doubt. They are forced to split up and travel for a few months to reach “The White Tower” - a place where all of the known witches reside, preparing themselves for a possible encounter with “The Dark One,” who is seldom seen. There is a prophecy that has been told and they are told that one member of the group is “the chosen one” who will defeat the evil one. Strange plot twist I’m sure, but the series still finds a way to show who is straight, who is gay/lesbian, and who has chosen to be celibate for spiritual reasons.  

The cast is female heavy, most of the magic wielders are female, and in today's Hollywood way of thinking, where ever there's bunch of women living in harmony...well, you guessed it, there's some "alternate lifestyle" lesbianism  going on, which isn't a bad thing, but goes to prove that networks [and streaming services alike] love to use it to piss viewers off and make a selling point to bring in the younger viewers, like its THAT important to show that even in mystical times, being gay exists...whoah boy!

It's also too obvious to point out that, since masculinity is no longer an important element in the mystical world, that there are some over powering and heavily choreographed fight scenes with female heroines which will make this series last another season. If your in to watching a lot of cheese for entertainment, stay the course and enjoy the show. But in reality, this series had something good going for it until the leading character, for all of her mystery and power of being a magical witch, just showed her hand of cards and it was extremely weak.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ [3 of 5 Stars] 

"PREY" SETS A STANDARD FOR SCIFI STREAMING PLATFORMS

🎥 🎞 Movie Review 🎥 🎞  - PREY - Hulu - Rated R - No Soilers! Every once in a while a smaller movie production team releases a gem of a film that could of made for a full feature film to go world wide on the big screen, and this is one of them. PREY stars Amber Midthunder as Naru, a Comanche Native American woman who doesn't just want to be the standard female of a small tribe. She wants to be a hunter, a tracker, and also a healer; these positions in a tribe were mostly held by older, maturer males. Being a Native American myself, made it a little too hard  for me to swallow that the female lead was stronger and more intelligent than the males at first, but I let the movie play and this thing quickly started to burn in the right direction and at the right time. Case in point; if I can accept that in previous Hollywood films, a Caucasian woman killed two big ass aliens in two different films, another Caucasian woman destroyed a cyborg using a compactor, and another Caucasian woman killing a large St. Bernard infected with rabies, then a Native American woman can surely kill a Predator with a tomahawk!

Brilliantly directed by SciFi extraordinaire Dan Trachtenberg who also directed a Cloverfield spinoff and an episode of Black Mirror, he set off to make PREY a little bit more believable and give the Native Americans, who were considerably under armed and extremely vulnerable to an alien predators high tech weapons attacks, a very daring and brave bunch of warriors who faced their enemy without regard to their own safety and lives.

Rumor has surfaced that the Native American cast members of PREY were required to speak Comanche during their screening test, should the director had decided to film the entire production in the Native American tongue. The film presented the Comanche tribe in a pre-horse history, where the first French and anglo-saxon visitors entered their region of territory and introduced the natives to horseback riding, so English was not a native tongue in the region for many years, but I feel that the movie transitioned into the need for English very well.

The visual and special effects for the film were superb and sometimes a little too much for a few scenes. But there was fantastic detail presenting the Native American's, which I felt was pretty impressive and along the lines of the visual beauty not seen since Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves was released. And I'd like to extend a few kudos to the designer of the Predator, as this was a prequel to the first film and they gave a clean restart to the alien hunter from that which was seen in the first and second Predator movies.

Make no mistake, this is a solid and horrifying look at the Predator series. I highly recommend you see this film without any interruption. One look off the movie to grab for your phone or a drink and you'll miss something important!

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️   [4 of 5 Stars]

CONTINUUM [I'll Follow You Down] CRUSHES A FANTASTIC PLOT WITH A WEAK ENDING

🎥🎞MOVIE REVIEW🎞🎥 - CONTINUUM - [PG-13] -Peacock -  This nice little gem from 2013 fell under my scope of reviews shortly after I was doing a copyright search for stories that involved Quantum Time Traveling plots and short stories. The film stars John Paul Rutman, Rufus Sewell, and Gillian Anderson. This film can be found on Peacock under "I'LL FOLLOW YOU DOWN."

The plot is simple but very mysterious, a loving and well respected father is dropped off at an airport by his wife [Anderson] and young son. In previous scenes, the young boy is proven to be pretty intelligent far beyond his years. But the father [Sewell] boards a plane and never returns home. Th son's mother is horribly worried and her love for her husband is without question, but questions arise after his arrival to the city of destination; he's never checked out of his room, his wallet, cell phone, and other items left behind, and the husband has just disappeared. The father has disappeared like a whisper in the wind and his young son has to struggle through life with a damaged mother and a childhood sweetheart who will eventually become his wife.

Years pass and the young boy grows up questioning important decisions in his life, due to the mysterious loss of his father. Rutman - the once little kid also known from the brilliant movie, SIX SENSE - has a love interest that is constantly being put on hold due to his mother [Anderson] still grieving over the disappearance of his father. Eventually the story passes onto the boys grandfather, played by Victor Garber, who tells the young son that his father had stepped through a worm hole and traveled into the past. There are very few details about how the father was able to create the worm hole, but only that he sustained a power source to get him there.

Everything up to this point in the film is pretty believable an understandable. The second half of the story follows a rushed script with no subtle delivery on how the jump in time would be  a mind blowing experience. The film turns to a flashback of the father [Sewell] stepping into a time machine and vanishing in a brilliant flash. From there, the son had also made the trip back in time and confronts his father, eventually forcing to return home and save his wife, plus the spirit of the little boy who was lost without any answers to the big question; "What happened to my daddy?" - But there was no emotion in the delivery of the main story here. The director decided to have Rutman play an angry and determined boy who didn't care about the wonders of time travel, who just wanted his father to come home and put his family back to normal.

In my opinion, the writers lost faith in their script and the screenplay. There was no real character development of any of the characters, save the young boy who was now in love with a childhood sweetheart, both trying to live a life of being parents. The son missed a lot of school, but was too smart for college and apparently progressed though school only by "passing all of the tests." 

The script should have spent more time with the father's ignorance to his families needs and furthermore delivered him showing his son the importance of time travel and how they could witness importance events in history. Instead, the movie delivers a crippling blow to the film by making the son too smart for his own good and taking drastic actions to force his father to go back home and save his family.

What bugged me the most about the time traveling, was there was no real attempt to show details of the 1940s, save a change in clothes, some women walking around, introducing an old restaurant with a guy who wore paper hat and served coffee. There also wasn't a memorable scene in the film that made me want to remember this dud of a production. Rutman tried to be a leader in this film, but the lack of solid character development made him all of the other cast members seem like they were just going through the motions to finish this film.

⭐️⭐️💫 [2.5 of 5 Stars]

EPIC INDIE SURGE FAILS WITH “UNDER THE SKIN”

🎥 🎞 Movie Review 🎞 🎥 - UNDER THE SKIN - [R] - Amazon Prime [2014] - Independent films come and go every year. You would have thought that the term "independent film" would have actually meant; "Made by complete nobodies with a micro-budget that fails in comparison with big Hollywood, but hey, this one has some class in it." But Skin is the proverbial "slap in the face" that proves that some Independent films, even ones written so badly, can somewhat aspire if you throw in a big Hollywood name, especially one who has an upcoming summer action film, and present her naked for all to see in a cheesy, classless pile-of-shit.

 

Now, not all piles-of-shit have a half life of zero seconds, and please keep in mind that Scarlett Johansson truly didn't do anything in this film that made me think, "Hey, this is where her real career started!" - nope, it was way far from that. Directed by Jonathan Glazer, who also wrote the script with Walter Campbell, this pile-of-shit won some big Indie film awards for it's musical score, the direction, and of Johansson's performance[???]...Uhhmnn, did I miss something here? I think that most of this films success comes from the fact that Brad Pitt was somewhat involved in it's development and casting.

 

Well, lets break down the story little and you tell me what big success this pile really has to offer it's viewers...most of whom will be males after I reveal the big surprise in the film. Okay, so without any real description, an alien arrives on earth and becomes a woman. She is helped by a biker-alien who loves to zoom around the countryside looking for her. She wonders from town to town, trapping men into entering an abandoned house, luring them in with sexy temptations to walk into a black muck of liquid that traps them - like the Venus fly trap plant. She discovers that she's more woman than alien and it becomes her weakness; I think Johansson delivers maybe twelve [12] full lines of dialog throughout the movies run...Oh, did I mention that Johansson reveals her naked body seven [7] times in the film, even revealing her bird in a closeup?  If you ever wanted to know what you might expect if you had a chance with her in bed, this is your chance to see her in the nude...yep, that's it.

 

The director claims that there was this really heavy CGI sequence in the film that he really wanted to keep in, but that it was taken out from the film to leave more questions about the alien motif and their technology, which was not explained at all. There are two parts of the films special effects that really took me into SciFi/fantasy excitement, but it came at the end of the movie and there was nothing more question as the en credits popped up after starring into several snowflakes landing on the camera lens; like a quasi Forrest Gump ending. The visual effects were sharp and produced well, but the aimless walking, scenes without dialog, and the doll-like performance by Johansson did not move me at all to keep focused on the film; it definitely did show a glimpse of why she might have been picked to play the lead role in Ghost in the Shell.

 

The cinematography was okay. Most of the film was shot in a guerilla-style filming format which the director felt at the time that he wanted to "catch real peoples reaction" to whatever the alien was doing when walking through town. In my opinion this whole award winning film was a waste of time and just another reason to build up the "what does Johansson's body really look like under all of that plastic and leather" curiosity with her male friends. I'm sure if your male, you won't pass on this movie...I certainly didn't. ⭐️ ⭐️ 💫   [2.5 of 5 Stars]

SPACE 1999: A HIDDEN GEM ON VUDU

🎞 🎥 Series Review 🎥 🎞 - SPACE 1999 - Season's 1 & 2 on VUDU - 

In 1975, British TV unleashed the most expensive SciFi show of the time with SPACE 1999, starring Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, and Barry Morse, who were all veteran superstar actors at the time. The premise is that in the future,  nuclear waste from earth which was dumped on the moon for storage, ignites in nuclear explosions that force the moon to break earths orbit and heads out into deep space away from the solar system. The moon crosses paths with other planets and systems filled with alien life and out of world technologies.

Initially, there are references to magnetic exposure which causes "brain deterioration" and is misdiagnosed as a virus [which I thought was ingenious] but is no longer brought up after the first episode. The rest of the episodes are well written and performed by the veteran actors of the time and the use of simple special effects that might make it easy for a network to consider revising the old effects with better CGI[?]. The history of the show indicates that initial production began in 1973, when it was ready to launch, but was held back for reasons concerning copyright issues and the production of Arthur C. Clarkes, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY under Stanley Kubric's direction.

The series ran for several years and many episodes laid down the foundation for early SciFi television formats for SciFi shows that are being produced today. Many of the sets look familiar to the ones used in Star Trek: The Next Generation (STNG) and with good reason; the set layouts were perfect to use in studio construction for SciFi TV; i.e. STNG, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, etc. You also might be surprised that the plots and alien contacts from several episodes of this series were also used in STNG and two of the Star Trek Original Series [STOS] movies. One episode in particular during the first season is entitled "Voyager's Return" was very similar to Star Treks first feature film concerning "V-Ger" - Something for you to compare when you watch each episode and look for familiar plots coinciding with STNG.

The series revolves around three cast members most of the time and develops characters through a myriad of episodes that have to be watched in sequence. Most of the actors in the series actually work in Hollywood today and I’m shocked to notice that many of the writers and directors worked for many years on network television. Some episodes come off with dry performances, almost like watching today’s soap operas, but was effective for the time. Landau’s performances are stellar and everything you see today in all SciFi shows. The series is a valuable part of ScFi TV and I recommend anyone who likes filmmaking ScFi to watch and learn from the masters of the time.

The low rating of the series is only due to the special effects of the time and some of the delivery of the guest stars; who were essential for the show's growth in the 70s, but the developments of the new species just weren't given time to "tell their tail" to their strongest presentation in screenplay.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ 💫 [3.5 of 5 Stars]

AQUAMAN FAILS TO IMPRESS AND AT TIMES IS BORING WITH TOO MUCH ACTION

Movie Review - AQUAMAN - PG13 - Starring Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, William Dafoe, Dolph Lundgren and Nicole Kidman. 

My initial thoughts on this mess is "Meh"...The movie is filled with tons of CGI, bad dialog, and it's a poor rewrite of a classic comic book hero. The only kudos I could possibly give this film are to Kidman, who performed the role of an action hero with a pristine caliber performance. But all of the help from a star studded cast couldn't save this movie. The cliche writing made it almost unbearable to watch this thing straight through without calling bullshit every once in a while...well, actually throughout the whole film.

There's a lot of cheese in this film; and by cheese, I mean a ton of explosions and large under sea creatures...there's also extreme eye candy for female women to gaze at whenever Momoa was in a scene without his shirt on and that’s all really about it. The director was trying to make a gritty underwater Wolverine movie and his efforts [plus those of the writers] just didn't cut it. Momoa may be ripped, biker-type good looking man, but he couldn't act his way out of a paper bag. 

One of the worst effects in the film is that it also has tons of scenes with fast swimmers, some action and a multitude of underwater neon light. The blue screen effects was just too much for me, and there were times where you could passed the blue screen, giving the actors a pasty look on their faces. The addition of Manta's unusually large helmet made things look a little too silly for such a hyped film.

Of course, at the end of the film, there was plenty of room for a sequel or even another addition for a Super Friends or Justice League sequel; not that I give a crap for something like that.

⭐️ ⭐️ 💫 (2.5 of 5 Stars)

MOVIE REVIEW - STAR WARS: ROGUE ONE

STAR WARS: ROGUE ONE - [PG13] is definitely one of the BEST SciFi movies I've seen in quite a while! I was given a special preview about a week ago and I was COMPLETELY blown away by the original story, visual effects, and take on making a prequel to the original trilogy, parts 4, 5, and 6. 

This was NOT a J.J. Abrams disaster tale, filled full of useless nostalgia and recycled old actors; this film has class, style and best of all, a strong story arc which will lead to a sequel and possibly a better angled trilogy (???). Targeted with brilliant new actors and very little swiping from one scene to another, SWRO surely brings eloquently detailed filmmaking back to the big screen...well, I saw it on the screen I have at home. There is something NOT Star Wars about it though, don't expect to see anything far too familiar with the storytelling, save the ships and technology which have become the staple of the franchise. There are certainly darker plotlines and a hopeless trail of intrigue that damages the certain eventual fate of the characters that are developed in the film.

Darth Vader is as menacing with his words as he is in stature in this film, a poignant delight for older SW fans. There is nothing "empty to see" about him, save the movie reinforces the diabolical side of the empire and what Vader does to seduce a more promising future for the Empire.

On a final note, there was something more "punching in the gut" about this film than "Force Awakens"; with likeable developed characters and a mission I really cared about, seeing them through to the end...kind of. A much-much better film with a convincing story adaptation ELEMENTS that should have been adhered to with SW VII. 

☆☆☆☆ [4 of 5 Stars]