Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 38

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean, Part 2
Jolyne and Co. fight more of the inmates at Green Dolphin Street Prison to gain possession of Dio’s backbone. Not much to say here—it’s part of an entire season, so there’s scant development in terms of moving the overall plot forward. I figured out, after so many episodes of the series in general, a pattern in the protagonist vs antagonist Stand powers. The protagonist Stand powers are mostly just brute force, with a few smaller side powers, like Jolyne’s Stone Free and her ability to turn into long strings and weave itself into tight places some distance away. Antagonist Stand powers are deceptive and tricky, which allow them to construct illusions, mental mazes, and different traps for the protagonists to figure out. There are too many antagonist Stand powers to mention, but one great example from this part is Kenzou’s Dragon Dream, which uses feng shui and cardinal direction points to predict movements and provide the best direction for his attack. The beatdowns between Stands ends up always in favor of the protagonists (obviously), but first they need to figure out who the antagonist Stand users are and how to get around their Stand deceptions. I used to think JJBA was an adventure and superhero type of story—which it is, partially—but at its heart it’s really a mystery/detective series with an emphasis on puzzle-solving.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean, Part 3
Jolyne Cujo and allies follow Father Pucci across Florida to Cape Canaveral as he completes his mission to “attain heaven.” Finally, we got out of the side-quest phase of the story and onto figuring out what’s going on with the main antagonist. The second part of Stone Ocean started to drag for me, even though the Stand encounters were interesting enough. I think part of the reason was that Father Pucci wasn’t in control of his stand powers as they were growing, so you weren’t really sure if this guy was serious or just going to end up being kind of a joke. It’s a switch from previous final bosses like the grandiose Dio, the calculating Kira, the overpowered Kars, etc. And honestly Father Pucci didn’t fully get control of everything, it seemed. Made in Heaven’s power of accelerating time at will is a force he just kind of turns on or off and didn’t require a ton of strategy. It was interesting to see how Jotaro used The World’s time-stopping power to try to out-maneuver him, though. Pucci really ended up being a goof, since accidentally giving Emporio Weather Report’s power is what stopped him in the end.

Drifting Home
A group of schoolkids figure out how to survive, and maybe return home, when they enter an abandoned apartment complex that ends up floating at sea. This one must’ve been a nightmare to write, because you have close to a dozen characters stuck in one place and you want to develop them. This isn’t like Revenge of the Nerds where you have a lot of characters in play but only a few of them experience an arc—no offense intended to Nerds. I suppose that’s why Drifting Home’s has that two-hour runtime…a but long for this kind of movie. I think that development mostly happened, but it felt really stretched out with the two main protagonists. Two hours of all that emotional baggage being exposed takes it’s toll on the viewer. Some funny scenes and dialog exchanges.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
A doll, created by a distraught woodworker, is granted life by a wood spirit. I’ll admit I don’t remember a darn thing about the original Disney version, nor the really unnecessary live-action remake they did recently, but I know the basic plot. If you’ve seen del Toro’s approach before, you’ll know what to expect here, especially in terms of characterization. You’ll know the bad guys instantly, like the fascist mayor giving a certain salute, and the neutral but helpful supernatural actors to spurn events along. Dialog had its wooden (teehee) and predictable moments, too, but the stop-animation and voice acting were top quality. Del Toro still hasn’t topped Pan’s Labyrinth, which is where (to me) the first time he brought his trick bag out and pulled everything from it. With everything after that, it’s the same trick bag.

Warriors of Future
A special forces team attempts to genetically alter a monstrous plant that overtook a futuristic city in China. I can’t help thinking most of these huge sci-fi films coming out of China lately are propaganda pieces, in the most non-cynical sense of the word, to show off a growing filmmaking industry. You might think there would be an issue with western audiences since there’s absolutely no ethnic diversity in the casting (I may have spotted a black woman in the background), but the wokest of the woke have no problem with the unashamed monoculture China has. An entire cast of one non-European ethnicity is diverse enough for some folks, I suppose. Some really well-choreographed shooting and fight scenes, lots of suprising English loanwords and loanphrases mixed into the Mandarin, like “plan B” and “mayday”—and I refuse to listen to an English language audio track for a live-action movie like this. A few human behavior and organizational depictions really took me out of the realm of believability here. One is where the head of the special forces, Tai, openly disagrees and argues with his commanding officer, the colonel woman who showed up, in front of his team. He’d get tossed with extreme prejudice for doing that, but this is a weird crisis scenario in the future, so whatever. Sure, I guess I can allow it. There was also a strained romantic relationship, publicly-known, between one of the special forces guys and an operator at the mission command center. Huge conflict of interest there that wouldn’t be allowed at all in the real world; the comms woman would likely just get reassigned to a different operation. But again, this is a weird situation, so you do your thing, writers!

Exception
A spaceship crew, capable of cloning themselves with the ship’s technology, travel to find humanity a new home. Interesting take on the monster-on-a-ship premise, where the creature in question turns out to be rather intelligent and humane. Like Warriors of Future, this one had bad human behavior problems that I couldn’t logic my way around. There was no captain on the ship, and there didn’t seem to be a chain of command other than when they communicated back to their home council or whatever it was. Most of the time the crew had to decide things for themselves or put it to a vote, the process by which was too ad hoc for the type of mission they were on. Related to the “no captain” scenario was that there was no contingency plan in place if something went wrong with the Womb that creates the clones, which caused a lot of problems when that actually happened. Even if there would be no plan in place (did all humans become severely stupid in the future?), a captain could have simply decided the solution where there were gaps in protocol and procedure. Third, related to the “no contingency plan” premise, but not so much the “no captain” premise, is that the ship’s Replicator couldn’t print weapons, so the crew had to create makeshift weapons when needed from objects on the ship. I guess finding a new planet for humans to live on isn’t really a top priority among this universe’s settings? I actually wouldn’t mind some of these premises if the message of the story was to show how democracy doesn’t work in space, how the hubris of scientists and their overabundant faith their own creations can cause problems for other people, or pacifism is a bad idea. Such wasn’t the case, so I can only assume the writers needed to rewrite how humans behave without a cause or explanation so that the story could happen.

Out of Shadows
A decent roundup of a lot of what’s been labeled as “conspiracy theories” in the modern political landscape. Watch it for free here. It seems like it’s not much of anything new if you pay attention to that stuff. Obviously, even just broaching the topic in polite company, whether it’s accurate or not, bugs a lot of people. Oh, well. As I always say, I dislike documentaries because the video format is inherently misleading, even without the intent to deceive. Agreeing with what is being proposed in a documentary is incidental, since our minds are made up before we even watch it, for a host of different reasons.

The Talos Principle
An android must solve puzzles and learn the nature of the realm in which he inhabits and its apparent ruler, Elohim. Here comes a “get off my lawn” rant. Starting with writers in my generation, Gen X, and going forward, I’ve noticed the really terrible awful no good very bad tendency to be unskilled at portraying characters with different viewpoint accurately. Or, as it seems with the young(er) Millennial/Gen Z punks involved in writing, there’s an even narrower range of viewpoints represented, and opinions that fall out of that range of acceptability make the holders of such views Turbo-Hitler non grata. Boomer writers had at least the sense to know there are people out there with strange and spooky beliefs that don’t want to nuclear genocide everyone that isn’t like them—whether or not they actually wrote those characters is a different story. This phenomenon isn’t something I necessarily want to pin on the devs of this game but it made me think of it as I watched the playthrough and read all the in-game computer terminals that gave the backstory.

The Shape of Water
A mute cleaning woman in a secret research facility develops a relationship with a humanoid amphibian being held captive. The stylization and design language are great, as every del Toro film does, but I don’t know man…his characters are getting to be lousy, ill-conceived tropes. You know the black deuteragonist is going to be sassy, strong, but helpful; military personnel are unreasonable warhawks; the gay artist neighbor is going to dispense lonely wisdom; the captured ugly monster is misunderstood; the religious, patriotic white male is…take a wild guess on that one. Story was fine, probably, but I don’t remember much because I was too focused on trying to find something redeemable among the dull and annoying characterizations.

War of the Worlds 2005
A divorced crane operator flees Brooklyn with his two children as powerful alien spaceships attack the city. This was a retelling of the practical side of what happened in Wells’ original story, but set in the modern day. There was a lot of allegorical stuff Wells intended (or what critics say he intended) for readers that aren’t present in this movie. I don’t know if any of that meta-textual poop made it in the original 1953 movie. Probably not. Spielberg could’ve kept this in the original fin de siècle setting with some adjustments, mostly minor, with perhaps the biggest hurdle is figuring out how to get them all the way to Boston in a pre-auto era. Lots of solutions to that, the first coming to mind is not needing Farrier and the kids to travel so far. The family name could be put to more literal use there, too. Good characterizations: the blue collar dad is streetwise and not quite completely estranged from his kids, the pre-teen daughter freaks out easily but loves her brother and is patient with her dad, the teenage son is kind of a reckless punk but has a fledgling warrior-protector’s heart. Speaking of War of the Worlds, I had a huge crush on the 1988 TV series when it came out (watch it all here). It’s dated as those things tend to be, but the story still holds together. Looking through the other depictions of the WotW story, that series is the only one that takes place in the original cinematic universe, which was contemporary to the time it was released in the 50s, not in Wells’ turn of the century setting. Everything else using the WotW story is a retelling or a remake, and most of those depictions came out after that 1988 series. What in the world (haha) happened to writers and studio heads that they are so unwilling or unable to add onto an original story and make it work? Is that really so hard to do?