A.I.C.O. Incarnation
A schoolgirl learns she’s not who she thinks she is, and it involves a quarantine zone that resulted from a berserk experiment to create artificial organisms. What’s with trained special forces soldiers who look like Teen Vogue models? At least some series’ lore would explain it away as cyborgs or trained-at-birth/crisis situation scenarios, or use their youth as a point of character development (like Neon Genesis Evangelion was, but with actual character development)? It crosses the weirdness threshold too easily nowadays. The idea of soldiers on advanced rollerskate tech is a neat idea, though.
7Seeds, Part 1
Different groups of people find themselves on different islands, after a meteor slams into earth and just about everyone is killed. So, basically Lost after the apocalypse. Despite the janky animation, this felt like a good story that will open up into a much wider universe. I’m not sure I have the wherewithal to finish off the series. How did Dora survive? No, really, I thought the animators were really referencing her, which I find a little funny, considering the setting.
Tekken
Basing a movie off a fighting game franchise is never a good idea. The first Mortal Kombat might be the best it will ever get, or this years reboot. At least they got Heihachi’s hair right.
Apocalypto
Not necessarily fantasy, but it practically is, since pre-contact South American natives lived in a completely different world than we moderns do. Then again, civilized nations can be just as savage as the Mayans were near their end—we are just better at obfuscating it.
Death Wish (2018)
A remake of the 1974 film of the same name. I don’t remember that Bronson version, so this felt all new to me. The remake has the protagonist as a surgeon, but Bronson’s portrayed an architect. I might prefer the latter background more, from a storytelling perspective, as it would be more of a fish out of water scenario. A surgeon, and this is demonstrated in the new version, knows a lot about how to kill people; an architect, less likely.
Spaceballs
This wasn’t received well at the time, but I have always liked it since it was satirizing a lot of movies I was into already. The “just plain Yogurt” line always gets me.
Bleach, Season 2 – The Sneak Entry
Season 1 did a good job of setting up the main protagonists and the mechanics of the Hollows in the real world, but this season did away with the Hollows almost completely to do a rescue mission, where there’s a lot of sneaking around and one-on-one battles with human(ish) characters instead of drooling apparitions. The fight between Ichigo and Kenpachi still holds up pretty well after all these years.
Transformers: War for Cybertron – Chapter 1: Siege
This was okay, but it’s a Transformers for the older, more refined (haha) crowd. Even Michael Bay’s cinematic version wasn’t as grim as this incarnation.
Conan the Barbarian (2011)
Another “just okay” remake. I don’t like Jason Momoa’s version, though. Schwarzenegger’s Conan wasn’t just a hack and slash brute, he had tactical guerilla fighting skills. Whether one version over another is closer to Howard’s original depiction, I’m not sure. I haven’t read any of the source material yet. One huge plot oopsie was Tamara’s situation. If she were known to be the last of some sought-after pureblood race, the monks in the monastery, in any world populated with humans, would have been training her and everyone one around her in various combat skills. Nothing doing, here; the plot must move on, but a writer should have figured out how to make it more believable.
Drifting Dragons, Season 1
Whaling, but in the sky, and with dragons. Some great sky and cloud visuals, and believable dragon meat recipes. CGI anime is getting really close to mimicking the hand-drawn aesthetic, but some small/finer character movements give it away here and there, like in this scene. Most major movements look hand-drawn, but subtle ones like the wavy cloth in the wind are too detailed. Rotating around characters, which this series does often, also gives it away. No complaints, just observations. I like the way the artistry is going in this area.
2 Comments
Apocalypto appears interesting, but Mayan history just is not my kind of thing. I’ve seen the old Death Wish, and I’m interested in seeing the remake. Spaceballs was hilarious, particularly if you actually paid attention to Star Wars. I read a lot of Howard’s books, so I could just tolerate Schwarzenegger’s version, but even the preview of Momoa’s version turns me off. The big thing to remember is the difference in the audience. Someone who read the Conan books back in the 1970s interprets the writing quite differently from folks of later generations. There are very substantial differences in how imagination itself works when you’ve already seen a lot of CGI, versus having never seen any of that stuff.
You make a good point about Conan. For good or bad, the “ease” (I put it in quotes because CGI is time-consuming) with which we can make things look fantastical is much more common, so it makes sense that an action-oriented story in a fantasy setting would take advantage of all of that, in a film context.
Death Wish wasn’t wasted time, just not quite my thing. It was nice to see a normal guy go out of his element to protect his family. No woke silliness, either. Sometimes you have to take wins where you see them.