Sci-fi and Fantasy Movie and Series Reviews, Part 10

My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising
MHA has great animation values in the first place, but this movie added to it with some richer scenery and fight dynamics. You know something’s going to happen when a group of superheroes in training are away from their mentors on a remote island, with a “what could go wrong?” attitude. Plus this premise happened already in the Unforeseen Simulation Joint story arc in season one of the series. Typically, movies that compliment series don’t do much to mess up the continuity, as they can generally be placed anywhere in the series chronology, assuming all the required characters are still alive. Everything usually goes “back normal” at the end of the movie…but not so with this one (this movie, too, has a defined place in the timeline) . There’s a major character change that could have huge implications for him in the actual series’ future.

Ad Astra
This didn’t do so well because I think people were expecting another Interstellar. Instead, it’s more Apocalypse Now, but Colonel Kurtz has cataracts instead of insanity. Also, there was no big reveal at the end: no ancient aliens, no cosmic death ray, no earth-sized colony spaceships. However, it’s a decent psychological study of someone who needs to break a lot of rules in a unique situation.

Doom: Annihilation
Any Doom movie is doomed fated to be terrible. We have no such exception with this one. The story at least gets the Doom canon lore right in depicting the demons as gross, mean aliens instead of mutated humans like the original movie.

Fahrenheit 451 (2018)
By itself, this wasn’t bad, but naming it after Ray Bradbury’s novel, and kinda-sorta basing it on the contents of the novel is a bad move. You can actually pinpoint the plot devices the writers used to make it more palatable to modern audiences, like making Guy Montag single so he could have a sexy fun-time relationship with Clarisse, whose role is much larger than in the book. Doing this, though, removes the conflict Montag has with his wife and her dysfunction, despite her being, paradoxically, a person conforming to the spirit of the times. It also removes the effect Clarisse’s death had on Montag. The most significant deviation, I’m proposing, is thematic: this adaptation was all about book burning, but in the novel, book burning was a result of people’s discomfort with the thinking that comes with reading books as contrasted with the placidity from passively consuming television programming.

Pan’s Labyrinth
Excellent original fairy tale film with a protagonist that isn’t scared of the supernatural, but instead presumes the existence of that realm. It’s sad, in a way, that an adult in that situation would feel off-putting; would be a hard task to write adults in that role and make their behavior believable. Thank goodness Guillermo del Toro forwent his salary to avoid Hollywood’s big budget—it would’ve turned out much different.

Childhood’s End
Four-part movie, based on Arthur C. Clarke’s book. The one major change I noticed was making the Stormgren, protagonist a common farmer, as opposed to the head of the United Nations, like in Clarke’s novel. Despite its length and knowing how everything turns out, I still wan. I think part of that phenomenon in general is seeing how well (or badly) the director sticks to the source material. It felt more unique, too, since it didn’t quote follow the normal narrative beats you’d find in a typical film.

Weathering with You
A runaway teams up with a girl that can control the weather with prayer. There’s probably a basis for this power in Shinto that is lost on me, and most Western audiences that aren’t weeabo-ed. This film wasn’t going to be received as well as it should have been, no matter how good it was, because it’s the film Makoto Shinkai made after Your Name—expectations were pretty high. It requires a second viewing, but it seems like he’s finally excised himself from the montage type of scene sequences that you see in a lot of his earlier work. The maddening boy-girl platonic relationship that teeters on the cusp of being romantic…it’s there. The bright, detailed backgrounds are still there, too, and more vibrant than I’ve seen them. I don’t know how he can get better at backgrounds, but it’s happening. Check out the trailer and check out how realistic those raindrops are.

Event Horizon
Hellraiser on a spaceship. I don’t like horror, but this one was mostly psychologically-based, so there was some “reality” to it. It does employ “hell” as a physical place one can end up in if you’re technology is advanced enough. It doesn’t even fit with a lot of traditional Western (Dantean) views of hell, much less the hell that is described in the Bible.

Minority Report
Great futuristic crime film, with one of the best, “this is what the technology can do” expository prologue scenes I’ve seen. Plus: puke sticks!