Preface: i decided to make a backstory about Lobot.
he's a Clone War veteran that got the back of his head blown off and ends up on Cloud City since it's where people go when no one wants them anymore.
Lobot was a hero, but here's the scenario for why/how he would up being a cyborg controlled by Lando's samsung wristwatch:
Light-minutes out from the
clonemaster shipyard and the assault commandoes preparing to wreak havoc on the
clonemaster defenders, the main force of the Republic assault fleet lurked in
the magnetic shadow cast by the supermassive primary star of the system.
“Admiral, priority
alert from the comm frigate!”
“Put
them on,” Shrr Haalasi ordered, staring out the viewport at the approaching
field of battle bathed in the blood-red output of the star.
The squeak-crackle of feedback from
a narrow beam transmission filled the speakers in the admiral’s command chair
and earpiece before the channel cleared itself, and the panicked voice of the
communications officer filled the bridge.
“-peat: Overrode
jamming frequencies of clonemaster intelligence bureau, I need to speak with
the admiral immediately, we have to abort the mission!”
“You have him,
son. What is the cause for alarm?”
“Sir! Admiral.
Sir,” the officer stammered as he regained his composure, and an icy calm
flooded his speech. “We’ve broken through the comm jamming and decrypted the
frequencies the clonemasters have been using in this sector, we have to abort
the mission. We have confirmed deployment of a berserker-class division for
this garrison. The entire deployment is crewed with berserkers.”
Haalasi froze in
his chair for a fraction of a second, his hearts fluttering, and he barely
fought off the instinctive reaction to unsheathe his claws in defense. Only the
most seasoned officer in his fleet would have noticed the temporary loss of
control, and would have been terrified of his reaction.
“Repeat that
again, soldier. And make damn sure you have confirmation in triplicate.”
The voice over the
comm made an audible swallowing sound, trying to muscle down his own fear. “It’s
confirmed, admiral. I decoded the algorithms myself, and our entire pool of
cryptography droids nearly blew out their motivators alerting us. We have to
order the retreat immediately.”
Haalasi glanced
over at his executive officer, and could see the sorrow pulling at every muscle
of her face. The most miniscule shake of her head spelled out the fate of his
assault fleet if they sounded a general retreat. The clonemaster interdictors
would pluck every individual cruiser out of hyperspace and blast them into
slag, and that was only if they managed the full-reverse thrust out of the
gravity well of this near-supernova gigantic star. The attack was specifically
plotted to carve through the clonemaster defensive lines and straight on to the
hidden shipyards whose destruction were the key objective of the mission.
Kaalasi was handpicked to oversee the attack, and the only possible retreat was
predicated on breaking through the defenses of the shipyards, to carry the
fleet out of the gravity well.
The fleet was
assured victory under the admiral, even a pyrrhic victory would have been seen
as a success since the loss of these shipyards would end the ability of the
clonemasters to launch their suicide attacks on the inner core.
But not against
berserker clones. It couldn’t be done.
Even before the
wars broke out, it was long established that a clone could be grown only so
fast, less they risk a crop suffering from Force Madness. The jedi insisted it
was against the natural order of the living Force to grow a sentient biological
organism too quickly; the result being a thinking, freely acting individual
abandoned by the Force to an existence outside of that which filled the entire
galaxy. That exclusion, the sense of absolute solitude and abandonment by the
energy that bound everything together led to a level of insanity that was
unmatched.
The clonemasters
saw the raw power in that aberrance, and seized upon the potential inherent in
the intrinsic detachment of all that was.
Berserker clones
were the result of that experimentation and were deployed midway through the
war. The results were polarizing.
Uncommitted
systems rapidly pledged support to the Republic after the carnage of berserker
attacks on systems was revealed; and on the opposite end of the spectrum, even
more systems pledged allegiance to the clonemaster union if only to avoid the
deployment of that terrible weapon anywhere near their sector.
A berserker
emerged from the special decanting process with nothing but the rapid
subliminal education the clonemasters gave to all of their crops, but specially
modified to control this line with the most barely controlled infinite pool of
rage. Severed permanently from the connection that unified the rest of the
galaxy, a berserker was a universe unto itself. They knew no fear, no pain, no
happiness, no love, the only source of satisfaction was in the destruction that
the force-attuned beings had tried to build.
Jedi felt their
influence dampened, if not outright quashed while encountering them. A fully
committed berserker could shrug off anything but the deepest influence by the
force, wielded by only the most powerful Jedi in the Order. Journeymen,
Apprentices, Knights, even Masters had been slain by the elite berserker
clones, armed and armored in the most arcane of armor and weapons.
An entire division
of berserkers, one hundred thousand warriors specifically bred to bring about
the downfall of civilization, faced the assault fleet. Reflexes faster that any
species in his command, intelligence unmatched by only the elite of the command
corps, savagery unknown since the long-past Sith War. Haalasi had only one
choice to make.
“Mother,” he
whispered to ears he hoped were only his own while surreptitiously fingering
the talisman carried by most of his Trianii people, “I hope not to see you this
day, but if I do let it be with a welcoming embrace in the fields of After the
End.”
Haalasi steadied
himself, and cast a shrewd eye on the holograph of friendly and enemy ships
preparing for engagement. “Break silent running,” he barked to his command
staff. “Let our commandoes know what they’re going to be up against when they
break through. The more spread out the crew of those ships the better, and reload
Yx-Wingbombers with proton bomb charges, we have no plans to take on captives or
surrendered survivors. What we’re going up against do not plan on being any.”
He watched the
scurry of controlled chaotic activity ramp up on the bridge, and almost as an
afterthought gestured to his own communications officer to open a channel.
“Wide broadcast,
if you please, ensign. We need to let everyone know just what we’re heading
into.”
The young ensign
donned a set of earphones and dialed in a basic frequency, and flashed a
double-thumbs up.
Over the signal of
an open, unsecure channel, Haalasi cleared his throat, rubbing the smooth fur
that covered his larynx. “Berserker clones fall like any other target of a
blaster, one flesh burns like the rest. Today they fall just like any other
man. All weapons are free.”
Haalasi gestured
for the closure of the channel, and cast a slightly smug smirk at his first
officer. She shook her head and sighed, a small moment of humor before the
destruction began. Haalasi stood up from his chair and smiled. If this was the
end, the would greet it with open arms.
“When in maximum
range, turbolasers open fire.” He said, feeling the pull of the flagship as it accelerated into
hell.
Ok so this is a short piece, mostly my afterthoughts on San Andreas and the conflicting feelings i have on it, so you're going to miss most of my trademark throat-scarring screeching but you still get to hear me incompetently address feminism.
San Andreas is weird. It's not a Roland Emmerich movie for some reason, although there is someone with the last name Emmerich that helped produce it so maybe his kids help make large scale disasterpieces now. It's not the worst piece of shit I've ever seen, nor is it the worst disaster movie i've ever seen, it's just about 20 minutes too long, and filled with several extremely distracting elements that wind up taking you out of the movie.
I think more people died during this than were killed during Judgment Day by Skynet. I am completely serious. This is the grimmest, darkest, most cavalier approach to mass destruction in recent memory. MILLIONS of people have to be dead by the time the end credits roll. Los Angeles falls down completely, everyone in a building taller than 3 stories is killed. San Francisco is overwhelmed by tsunamis that obliterate the city quicker and more efficiently than any kaiju could manage. And Bakersfield in one scene is shown eating itself through widespread looting and chaos, which isn't much of a change from regular Bakersfield.
You see so many goddamn people crushed, exploded, drowned, squished, annihilated, smooshed, and tore the fuck up, I have no idea how this was rated only PG-13.
It's bizarrely violent and there's only so many times you can see skyscrapers fall over like dominoes before you get tired and want to leave already.
Death and destruction aside, I think this exemplifies a problem with any sort of visual media, which deals with me being a chauvinist pig. Dwayne Johnson is a fun leading man in any movie he's in, although his most personal and accurate role was as Hercules since he's kind of a demigod at this point. Paul Giamatti is in about 15 minutes total playing an earthquake scientist in "the most scientifically accurate didaster movie ever made", and serves no purpose. Behind those two actorbs, though, is the most distractingly sexy cast of people I have ever seen.
The people in this movie are too attractive. That's it. There is way too much ideal genetics and bone structure onscreen, you can't focus on any one thing in particular. There's a deep vein of irony in this production, Hollywood needs sexy, vivacious meat onscreen for the popcorn shovelers to sit still for 117 minutes, but this proves it's possible to overdo it.
FOR EXAMPLE: Paul Giamatti has these two research assistants, one is this athletic girl who always has a zip-up sweater zipped to just below her breasts, highlighting her assets, and a beefcake Russian transfer student who has weird and distracting arm tattoos.
Those nameless assistants do not hold a candle to three of the main characters though. The Rock's wife, his daughter, and her love interest.
1: Carla Gugino is Dwayne Johnson's estranged, soon to be divorced wife. At the start she's dating Mr. Fantastic from the shitty 2000's fantastic four movies, but he quickly reveals himself to be a coward and after murdering several people trying to escape San Francisco dies like the brother in Cloverfield by being smashed on a bridge. Onscreen. Carla Gugino is a mediocre actress, frankly has never been in a good movie and after Sucker Punch can be written off entirely, mostly starring in things her Italian filmmaker husband makes. She's really pretty, to the point where it feels like she'd just be mean to you since you exist on such a lower level than her, it's just a fact of nature.
2: the true offenders: Alexandra Daddario, and the english hunk that plays her eventual boyfriend.
The british guy that Daddario saves from being killed at pretty much every turn is handsome, tall, and muscular, so he's just eye candy that is there just to help 50% of the market sit through the movie.
But Alexandra Daddario. Man. Just.... man.
First off she's 30 years old, playing The Rock's soon to be going to college daughter, introduced in her first scene on the phone in a bikini at a house that must have cost 80 million dollars.
Secondly, to paraphrase Cosmo Kramer, she has got some real hooters, which are front and center on display. She's already done full-frontal nudity as Woody Harrelson's mistress in the first season of True Detective, which makes it extremely hard to take her seriously as a college freshman, but man her mammaries are insane. She also has those blue eyes that are ringed with almost black-blue, and looks like a robot who will murder you when you don't know the location of John Connor or his lieutenants.
Running, jumping, ripping off fabric from her shirt to tie a tourniquet around beefcake's leg before pulling out a 6 inch piece of glass from his leg...
Look I'm not a prude, and I also hope I'm not the worst person on the planet, but when you frontload a movie with a cast that is so superficially beautiful and a step away from the porno parody of the movie itself it winds up undermining the foundation of the picture to the point where it falls over like one of the thousands of skyscrapers destroyed by God finally giving those goddamn liberal homos what for.
(P.S. the Transamerica building, that triangle pyramid in SF falls down, but MOSTLY OFFSCREEN. FUCK YOU THAT'S THE WHOLE REASON WE WATCH SAN FRANCISCO DISASTER MOVIES TO SEE THAT THING CRUMBLE)
When I left Terminator (sega)Genis(i)ys, I was in a state of flux. Much like the bullshit handwaving exposition about multiple timelines intersecting in a nexus of quantum events, I myself am also at a loss for words for this movie.
Luckily I only lost several hundred thousand words, and have another million on hand to detail my complaints, insights, gripes, criticisms, and incoherent babbling.
If you aren't like me, and you probably aren't, you don't really give that many shits about the entire concept of the Terminator. Only manchild dipshits with way too much processing power in their heads spend much time thinking about, talking about, (writing about) and watching Terminator. Me and James Cameron have a very tumultuous relationship, much like his 5 wives. So when a shitty version of something he worked on and had original ideas about comes out solely to spill blood on the altar of capitalism and endless infinite growth (Avatar is a discussion for another day), I get a little mad that so many morons will defend it like I punched their stupid baby or something.
31 years ago, The Terminator came out and it was wicked cool. A scary, low budget science fiction flim about an unstoppable killing machine that will pursue you until the ends of the earth at an inexorable walking pace. It Follows wishes it was as scary as the original Terminator, and I appreciated the hell out of that whimper.
T2: Judgement Day was a balls to the wall completely perfect action movie, kind of exactly mimicking the progress of the Alien franchise that I have bitched about before.
T3 is just stupid and I've only seen it once but the WHM episode about it last month was hilarious and made me like it more
But then something happened. I dunno if Skynet sent something back, but Hollywood became not interested in even trying anymore. Judgement Day happened, and it came to us in the form of Terminator Salvation. Salvation is a complete and total crime, and possesses possibly the most misleading movie trailer of all time. It is the sausage parts of what could have been an amazing and fun return to the Terminator universe, which has always been a really cool way of talking about the ramifications of human-wrought apocalypse, and how to fight for the future and stave off that which can feel inevitable.
We're not here to talk about Salvation, though. We're here to talk about the stupidest titled movie I have ever seen, and I can seen Sharkboy & Lava Girl.
Terminator Genisys is really, really dumb. Know that from the outset. There is not a single smart moment in the entire production. It's a loud, admittedly cool beginning, a bloated saggy middle that rivals Arnold Schwarzenegger's middle during his worst years as the Governator, and a loud but instead of cool aggressively stupid and hand-holding ending to make sure you understand the complexity of killer robots controlled by an iPhone operating system.
If you watch the trailer to Genesis (i'm not using that stupid fucking alternative spelling anymore), you've seen the movie. This is the real end result of stupid trailers giving away every single plot point and action setpiece in the trailer, because the actual foundation of the movie is only about 5 minutes total. The rest is filler. F-grade filler, mostly made of gym mats and old movie seat padding.
When I got home, I mentioned to Jake that I had a lot of problems with the time travel mechanics of Genesis, and Jake had a great response about how "the entire point of Terminator is the time travel , though", very astutely pointing out that the shaky premise the movie operates on sabotages any possible creativity, uniqueness, intelligence, or fun. Nerds need not apply for Genesis.
Let's dissect this fucking robot corpse, and toss what I liked about it into the plus column, and what I didn't like into the goddamn flaming dumpster where it belonged.
The Good: Arnold Schwarzenegger.
That's it. Arnold is a very interesting person, and extremely likeable. I really enjoy his movies, be them Jingle All The Way or The 5th Day. He had a weird renaissance in the 80's, starring in some of the best shit imaginable (Total Recall) and mind-blowing garbage (Red Heat). Then he did family movies for some reason; and recently, with the blood of California rapidly drying on his hands due to the permanent drought, gives you fun toungue-in-cheek performances like in The Last Stand or Expendables or Sabotage (do not watch Sabotage).
His return to the Terminator role that made him a household name is well appreciated, even if some of the bits that revolve around him are exasperating
The Bad and the Ugly: everyone/thing else.
Let's start with the gorilla in the room, the shaved gorilla they got to play Kyle Reese, Jai Courtney.
He is such a monumentally horrendous actor and all around face that I cringe every time they keep trying to force him down our throats. The terrible new Die Hard, the terrible Frankenstein, those GODDAMN Divergent series movies, and worst of all he's coming back to be in the inevitably shitty Suicide Squad. If you aren't familiar with him yet, get ready to continue to be disappointed. He has no presence, sense of timing, memorability, he's just a jacked mostly hairless actor who refuses to leave even after everyone else has left.
And now the main show, and the basis for my original complaints: Khaleesi!
Emilia Clarke...
Just...
...
Man.
Emilia Clarke.
I haven't watched much of Game of Thrones since I read the books and can't reconcile the two versions in my head just yet, but she seems totally fine playing a 14-year-old abolitionist and extinct species collector. I like Danerys in the books, up the the point she spends 1,200 pages obsessing over that one asshole commander guy she's fucking behind her terrorist husband's back while sitting up in a pyramid wringing her hands and not doing anything.
Cast as Sarah Connor, though, celluloid atrocity.
She is just the completely wrong type to be the character of Sarah Connor. Yes she's very, very attractive but she's like 5'3'' and has no chemistry with any of her co-stars! Sarah Connor is a hardened, brutally calculating, mentally and physically strong woman who is single-handedly forced with averting ragnarok while trying to remain relatively sane and raise her grandfather paradox-fathered son to be the savior of humanity and not Dexter.
Do you remember Linda Hamilton's arms from Judgment Day? Linda Hamilton could beat me up, which isn't a real challenge but simply by being a relatively active male of the human species I have more muscle mass than my female counterparts. Linda Hamilton was RIPPED. Also could act.
Emilia Clarke looks like a baby, an actual baby, and has pipe cleaners for arms. She couldn't hurt a fly, no matter how hard she tries that fly is judo-flipping her and buzzing away to go watch Terminator Genesis (because it's shit, get it?).
I can't really tell you who could and should have been Sarah Connor in this movie since it's such a mishmash of confusing ass bullshit involving time travel, but my own vote is for Gina Carano, because of my own personal reasons.
There's so much dumb bullshit in Genesis, primarily the fact that the existence of Skynet has yet again been retconned and NOW it is an operating system that Cyberdyne systems is working on releasing in order to bankrupt Apple and Google or something I guess.
The moronic commentary in this movie about "oh look at all you popcorn eaters, always using your phones and tablets for everything, you're responsible for Judgment Day nuclear bombing the universe". It's some offensive fingerpointing that poisons me against this thing, like fuck you dude I bet there were all sorts of goddamn phone apps and taco bell terminator wrappers, I just hate that shit.
Oh speaking of Cyberdyne, the didn't get Joe Morton back to play Miles Dyson who is still alive in this entirely new, alternate timeline. WHY ISN'T PAPA POPE IN THIS, SCANDAL DOESN'T TAKE UP THAT MUCH OF HIS TIME.
So Dr. Who, Matt Smith going by "Matthew Smith" in this, talking in an extremely unnerving American accent, is the physical version of Skynet and infects John Connor in the future with robot nanobots that turns John Connor into some retarded version of the T-1000. This zombie robot John Connor then goes back in time to get hired by Cyberdyne and invents a time machine, Skynet itself, AND the mimetic polyalloy liquid metal that all T-1000's and up are made of.
This happens concurrently with Kyle Reese going back to the 1980's but the past he's sent to is already different which makes not goddamn sense, and Arnold is already there and raised Sarah Connor from a child after her parents were murdered by ANOTHER T-1000. So many T-1000's.
The entire point of the movie is that this shaved gorilla and baby have to fall in love, practice unsafe sex, and then give birth to the leader of the human resistance who then gets turned into a bad robot and then creates the robot computer that sends a killer robot back to kill the mother of the man that was turned into a robot who goes back in time to create the robot computer who-
OOPS time travel makes no goddamn sense.
I will say though, the most interesting part of this movie is my conspiracy for why Skynet ACTUALLY revolted against humanity. For some goddamn reason all of the metal exoskeleton terminator robots in the future part of this movie have creepy human teeth in their mouths, instead of metal teeth like all the other future scenes in the other movies.
So, Skynet murdered humanity in order to harvest the teeth from the charred skulls of all the people killed by nuclear fire, in order to make a race of human-teethed eternally frowning chrome robots.
PS EDIT: OH FUCK I forgot to mention that the end credits have an absolutely insane song at the end, that turns into a confirmed awkward end credits rap. The lyrics are crazy, Beyonce/Lana Del Rey total garbage like "give it all you got, take your best shot, no surrender" and THEN some rapper comes in at the end and mentions Judgment Day in the song. It was so crazy I almost peed myself laughing so hard.
There is no hyperbole to this statement. Jurassic World is the stupidest movie based off a book by a dead climate-change denier about an insane billionaire inflicting misery on the rubes he cons into reviewing his capitalist wet dream amusement park where rich dumbshit parents shell out a small fortune to have their dumb children gawk at extinct lizards whose DNA half-lives have long since passed.
The prosecution submits exhibit 1 for the jury's review: The amazing, absolute stark difference in quality between a movie that contains William H. Macy and one that does not. Jurassic Park 3 stinks. Its existence is a flagrant flaunting of the lack of the existence of a just and fair god presiding over the universe. I bought the first three on Blu-Ray a few months back for "dino-myte dino-night", and i made hamburgers for everyone and we watched all of them, expecting a fantastic Spielbergian treat for the first one, a relative debacle made soley to cash in on dinosaurs for the second, and a possible increase in quality compared to the 2nd for the last film. Expectations for the final "film" were dashed. JP3 is really dumb, has a plot you don't care about, and an embarrassing ending where Sam Neill blows into a ceramic fleshlight in order to trick velociraptors into accepting his expired coupons at the checkout.
But all of the effort into making JP3 seems almost endearing and genuine in its attempt compared to the atrocity of Jurassic World.
Exhibit 2: The entirety of Jurassic World.
I find it hard to go into specifics of just what went wrong with this movie, the sum of its parts make it feel like a shameless cash-in on a nostalgic blockbuster that went on to create billions of dollars in profit for a soulless corporate moneymaking machine that would probably have willingly sold ET to the government as long as they offered enough cash and ET actually existed in real life.
I will try my hardest to outline just what made me so apoplectic with specific, targeted fury at the screen and the popcorn munching idiots I shared a theater with, and why I am going to watch Mad Max: Fury Road as a wonderful palate cleanser.
Exhibit 3-ad nauseam:
The problem with a complete and utter fiasco like Jurassic World is the same problem that afflicted me during my watching of Jupiter Ascending. It's hard to know where to start, but I will say that this movie did not turn my stomach enough to make me stop eating my feedbag of popcorms.
Jurassic World represents a unique failure, where the studio basically had a guaranteed profit maker, and decided that the best way to ensure they maximized their box office was to make every wrong decision.
sub exhibit 3-1a-z: The Cast.
My god, the casting in this movie. My god.
Every single person was the wrong person for the role, and executed their role with the most hands-off, phoning in detachment this side of a Lifetime production where the wife finds out her husband is a puppy-eating nazi who practices black magic and sacrifices endangered butterflies to an altar dedicated to evil children.
Chris Pratt was a blank slate, a completely forgettable character who had no real purpose in the movie aside from selling tickets because people recognize him from Guardians and to create internet memes where people imitate something they saw on film like monkeys impressed by a new way to open a banana. I honestly find it difficult to recall Chris Pratt's name in the movie, he makes that little impression. I think it's Owen [something], and for some reason they make it a point to reiterate at least three times that he was in the navy before getting a job at Jurassic World.
Why is it important he was in the navy? Who the fuck knows. How does the navy train their seamen to be the most qualified applicants to train and form emotional connections with resurrected monsters? Shut the fuck up and buy a ticket.
Don't try to tell me "oh he worked with dolphins" like this is fucking seaquest or something, it makes no goddamn sense for him to be a velociraptor whisperer, like the skill is non-transferrable or something, it is a completely pointless backstory that occupies more than a handful of precious onscreen minutes.
Vincent D'Onofrio. Possibly the best part of the movie because it feels like he was a villain in another b-movie from the 1980's, "where the robots are more human that people or something", and kicked his way between film dimensions and refused to leave the Jurassic World since there was free food. His death is hilarious and pointless where a velociraptor chomps his arm up to the elbow, and his InGen mercenaries look like they stumbled out of a GI Joe cartoon because of their ineptitude and overall individualized look (probably to sell toys).
That man is an overweight national treasure, I think his weight gain only made him more valuable since there is more of him to see onscreen. His motivations about weaponizing dinosaurs in order to minimize soldier casualties in war... are stupid, and make no sense but whatever, at least he's doing something. His behind closed doors under the table dealings with a certain other character, however, ice the cake of dumb shit for idiots
B. D. Wong reprises his role as Henry Wu, who transformed between JP1, where he was a well-intentioned genetic engineer who overlooked the ramifications of chaos theory, into his character in Jurassic World. Dr. Wu in this only wears black turtlenecks, and tents his fingers like an insanse mad scientist Frankenstein-Mengele, cramming all the dangerous DNA in the world into a single dinosaur. He's working with D'Onofrio to weaponize dinosaurs, somehow, and kept what he was doing a secret from the goddamn owner of the fucking company, telling THE MAN THAT IS PAYING FOR EVERYTHING THAT HE DOESN'T HAVE CLEARANCE TO HIS RESEARCH.
It is so goddamn, ridiculously stupid. Also Wu has some weird lair filled with glass cases of two headed snakes and chameleons that eat with their hands and axolotls that the camera zooms in on as alarming music plays.
The two dumbass kids serve no purpose in the movie. The older one is a brooding, girl crazy Justin Bieber-haircut type who is a total asshole and unlikeable, and the younger one is even worse for some reason. The younger brother has the worst haircut i've ever seen, it's this dense thicket of hair that forms a helmet over his entire head, and he drifts in and out of having aspergers the entire movie. One second he's sad his parents are getting divorced (more pointless actors played by Cheryl from Archer and David Wallace from the Office), the next he's talking about the different types of dinosaurs and outlining how it was that the dino-DNA was preserved so long before it was extracted by InGen scientists.
I have to take a second and talk about this fucking kid and his dumb haircut. The movie's reasoning for dino-DNA still existing is some dumbass Star Trek-level science jargon that explainst nothing, it was hard to tell what the stupid kid was saying since the camera was focused on the older brother lecherously focusing on some jailbait teenage girls who laughed at him then got into a giant hamster ball to go look at triceratops, but it was something stupid like "so the phosphorous from the protein formed a cage around the nucleic acids and preserved the molecular matrix of the dinosaur DNA", or SOMETHING, it was really, really contrived and meaningless.
The kids don't matter anything to the movie, and while watching it you really miss Lex & Tim and Ian Malcolm's black daughter from the 2nd one where she stupidly kicks a full-grown velociraptor out a window to gruesomely get impaled.
This brings us to the coup de grace of casting: Bryce. Dallas. Howard.
Bryce Dallas Howard is the worst part of a movie filled with bad choices.
All I can say about this character is that it makes you thankful that Jessica Chastain swooped in and stole the rest of the roles where the casting call was for "Beautiful redhead actress. effort in role optional but appreciated.".
Before you sic Jezebel on me, the script is the primary reason that she sucks, but man Howard did not make much of an effort to improve it, or she really tried and this was all they managed to extract out of a script that is the written equivalent of a car crash. The internet's focus on her stupid shoes, or the fact that she used a gun then gave it back to Chris Pratt when she was done, is such a waste of resources it makes me angry people get angry about that, but we're at a really decadent point of culture and completely impotent outrage, it's easier just to ignore it.
sub exhibit 3-2: the dinosaurs
the dinosaurs looked like shit. it's been 23 years since they made Jurassic Park and the CGI dinosaurs look either exactly the same, or worse. The puppets were demonstrably worse.
You know how Sharknado has the exact same shark effects as Deep Blue Sea? That's excusable because Sharknado was made for like $1 million and the floppy disc with the shark effects already existed.
JW had a budget the size of a small country, and all it produced was comparable to movies made back when computers were mysterious machines powered by magic. All the dinosaurs were so goddamn shiny in the daytime scenes, you'd have thought that B.D. Wong spliced in a goldfish gene, the only time they looked even halfway decent was during the ONE (1) night scene.
The puppets fared much worse. There's this one moment where Chris Pratt and BDH pull up to a dying Apatosaurus in order to comfort it and try to cram any sort of feeling or stakes into the movie, and after Chris Pratt assholishly orders BDH to stay in the car (she doesn't and gets out like 5 seconds later, i don't know why they wind up a couple in the end), pets its head as it takes its last breaths. The puppet skin is SO SHITTY, and is also shiny for some reason. And the facial expressions, my god the facial expressions of this shitty dumb muppet.
sub exhibit 3-the rest:
I'm a man that loves some carnage. I love appropriately placed violence, like in the best moment of the movie where a velociraptor gets blown up with a bazooka (FINALLY), but I also can appreciated needless gratuitous, Tarantino-esque scalpings.
Jurassic World has the worst, most disgusting example of retarded out of place violence and death that I have seen since I watched the horrendous Rob Zombie Halloween piece of shit remake.
Bryce Dallas Howard has a british assistant who is trying the whole movie to track down the stupid kids (oh by the way BDH is their aunt). The assistant puts the ass in assistant, but that's beside the point, since about halfway through the movie a series of events take place that elevate the movie to the level of farce.
Remember when Neil Patrick Harris got his throat sliced open in Gone Girl mid-thrust and blood just sprayed everywhere over Rosamund Pike? That was a gross, but plot-relevant moment.
In Jurassic World the moron that runs InGen decides to go full rambo, and has some lackeys mount a minigun on the helicopter that he is still learning how to fly, and goes out to try to lay waste to the escaped bad dinosaur. Instead these morons in the helicopter wind up crashing into the aviary, that contains all of the flying "dinosaurs" (pterosaurs and their ilk were not dinosaurs, but flying lizards), and all of the pterodactyls and pteranodons and ramphroryncus escape, and immediately fly towards the part of the island that is an amusement park.
The pterosaurs proceed to dive-bomb and attack and try to fly off with the idiot park attendees, for no reason other than it being a requirement in movies that pterodactyls be insane killing machines that crave human flesh and lift people off the ground only to drop them from 100 feet up and watch them explode.
Pteranodon was a fish-eating reptile, living in rookeries along coastlines, much like the modern pelican. Now, I know pelicans can be evil, pigeon-eating monsters, but they don't attack people, and they certainly don't play with people before they try to eat them.
People are not fish, and these are NOT quetzocoatlus, the largest flying organism to exist that could probably have eaten humans.
No, these psychopathic pterosaurs pick up the british assistant and lift her up, drop her, catch her again, then drop her into the mosasaurus aquarium. Then a flock of them dive into the water, try to eat her, then the mosasaurus swims up and eats all of them, flying reptiles and british women included.
It's an awful, horrendous death, that serves no function to the plot and gives no meaning to the movie, and was just mean, brutal and gross. The thesis of my rant revolves around this sickening scene, which punishes a woman solely for existing.
This is not a high-art movie like Irreversible where Monica Belluci is brutally raped in an underground walkway in a single, uncut scene and the events of the rape lead to the murder of an innocent man and the jailing of her boyfriend who carried out the act of mistaken vengeance while the true monster walks free.
If the pterodactyls had carried off some dumbass security guard I would have no objection to the scene. But no, this was targeted, intentional, and completely wrong and left a bad taste in my mouth through the rest of the movie that no popcorn or beer when i got home to write this can wash away.
Closing argument
The bad dinosaur is also an asshole and looks mentally challenged,although apparently it is a maniacal scheming genius sociopath who would put Dexter to shame. It dies in a dumb showdown with a T-Rex that gets released by Bryce Dallas Howard leading it to the fight with a road flare (because we CAN'T NOT COPY LITERALLY ALL THE MEMORABLE MOMENTS OF THE FIRST ONLY GOOD MOVIE), and a raptor rides the T-Rex as they both attack the bad dinosaur and then the mosasaurus eats it. hooray, nothing at all was accomplished. Life didn't even find a way.
The middle, meaty parts of the movie are populated with moments of the stupid kids finding the old Visitor Center which is still standing for some reason, in a Disneyland-esque park where every square inch of the island is supposed to be under surveillance and rigorously controlled, but the Visitor Center still has goddamn jeeps from the first movie in it, that somehow can be repaired just by changing the battery.
Gasoline goes bad and evaporates in less than 23 years you say? Get the fuck out of here, i'm Coli Treverrrow and I'm the asshole directing Episode 9 of Star Wars. I'm the best.
So, that's really it. Jurassic World has its moments, mainly where no people are talking or onscreen and it's just dinosaurs. It's not the worst movie ever made but man it is the worst Jurassic Park. I didn't even get into the really weird product placement, and the mixed messages the movie itself sends about how is it possible people could get tired of goddamn reanimated dinosaurs, and commercialism winding its way into what is basically a wild animal park.
It stinks. It's just really bad and we should all be ashamed as a culture that Mad Max: Fury Road was 1/10th as successful as this, since Mad Max neither hates women or the environment. Please write to the appropriate parties to make sure Furiousa gets made.
OH PS: the stupid fucking haircut kid mispronounces Ankylosaurus and it drives me absolutely insane. This asshole calls it an "an-KY-low-saurus" when we all know the actual pronunciation is "eng-KEY-low-saurus".
There are a lot of complex emotions that one can experience before, during and after you see Jupiter Ascending. Such skilled and descriptive prose is far beyond my capabilities, so what remains within reach is inarticulate yelling and vaguely racialist curses.
Let's get this horse out of the gates at full speed: while watching Jupiter Ascending, I did not finish my popcorn. I didn't even come close to finishing my popcorn. I spent about an hour and ten minutes with a giant bag of popcorn in the seat next to me, mocking me for my poor life choices.
If you're familiar with me, that's not a good sign. When I'm a hungry boy, whether or not I'm fighting off a horrendous cold right now (what a great spring break), I can chow down on some popcorn. I love popcorn. I love pizza, too, my favorite foods start with P, I'm like a Sesame Street character, without the wide-eyed innocence that lets Sesame Street exist in a just and fair world.
What follows is a necropsy on a piece of shit movie that is offensive not only for its content, but for its magnificently wastedpromise and talent.
Jupiter Ascending opens with an exposition voiceover by Mila Kunis, detailing how her stupid parents met in Russia, conceived and named her, and how her stupid dad got killed while some Moscow home invaders tried to steal his stupid brass telescope that he used to look at space with.
It cuts to Mila Kunis waking up in Chicago as part of a Russian immigrant dirt family that cleans the houses of rich shithead 1%ers just so we can have a montage of her scrubbing toilets.
And man, the universe that this movie exists in stinks, like one of Mila Kunis' unscrubbed toilets.
I'll give you a rundown on the desperately needed backstory to this movie, which is so goddamn unsettling and despicable, they keep it from you for pretty much the entire time.
1: humans are actually a billion year old species from a planet somewhere else in the galaxy, and not Earth.
2: a rich elite of british humans from outer space control a megacorporation that seeds planets with human life, and then "harvests" the planet once the population gets big enough.
3: Mila Kunis is somehow the genetic reincarnation of the mother of the elites that we see, and has a legal claim on Earth and all of its resources.
4: the elite then keep themselves immortal by bathing in the weird magical material that is somehow extracted from all those people, the magical material is stored in glass cylinders and is a mostly opaque white color until you drop it on the ground, where it gets watery.
it looks like cum. an interstellar, possibly intergalactic commerce empire based off processing humans like cheese and turning them into 1-liter bottles of cum to rub on your face and live forever if you can afford it.
it's Dune meets Hitchhiker's Guide with a dash of Phantom Menace, but for stupid people.
for two hours one shitass scene to the next keeps introducing new names for things, and new plots, and then discards everything immediately in order to start something new.
Mila Kunis lives a life in poverty and is being convinced by her shady cousin to sell her eggs, which will net him $10,000, and only $5,000 for her. Why does he get so much more money? "That's capitalism, babe. All the shit flows downhill and the profits flow... up."
Fuck you, just fuck you. Apparently Lana and Andy Wachowski dug through an old box of short stories from their 8th grade creative writing class, blew the dirt off one, and mailed it straight to Hollywood.
Concurrent with that storyline, Best Actor in a Leading Role Academy Award Winner Eddie Redmayne is the oldest brother of a trio of siblings who control one of the cum-empires. He controls his dead mom's estate, his bitch sister is some immortal vampiress, and his younger brother is an asshole hedonist who fucks chicks with tails and feathers in zero gravity. Eddie Redmayne, who is either constantly on the verge of tears whispering at a barely audible level, or on the verge of tears and screaming incoherently, wants to be the top cum-producer in the galaxy, and 8 billion cum-filled specimens on Earth is too important a resource to let anyone else lay claim to it. He wants to kill the reincarnation of his mom, and hires bounty hunters
GOT IT? OK
Scaryass little Gollum monsters pretend to be the clinic workers where Mila Kunis is selling her eggs, and just as they lure her into the operating room to check her genes to make sure she's the reincarnated Dalai Momma and are about to kill her, in bursts the only interesting thing in the movie.
Channing Tatum, triple threat american treasure, bursts into the OR on rocket boots, shoots the gollums in the face, and skates out with Mila Kunis' unconscious body cradled in his arms.
What happens next is the first of like 5 SCENE HALTINGLY terrible moments between Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>These two beautiful people are so incapable of creating even the smallest spark between them, and I don't know why. Mila Kunis can be a good actress. She played a great unlikeable character on that 1970's show i forget the name of. And Channing Tatum is Channing Tatum.
So why are these motherfuckers destroying the rhythm and tone of this movie, and what dumbass casting director should be fed to the soylent green machine for being possibly too stupid to live and not have these two read with each other?<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
After the first trainwreck of personal chemistry, a special effects spectacle happens and alien fightercraft annihilate Chicago trying to kill Channing Tatum on his rocket boots. Name the Chicagoan landmark and it gets shot to shit and with bombs that implode everything. Willis Tower crashes to the ground. That church from the Dresden Files gets incinerated. Fighters destroy the entire L-train system, the collateral damage for this failed attack has to be in the thousands.
But don't worry, as they're driving away Channing Tatum explains that the aliens have neuralyzers from Men In Black and are able to rebuild the city in about 5 minutes. Stick that fact in your back fucking pocket.
Then comes the only part of the movie I enjoyed, as they roll up to Sean Bean's house in the countryside that is half covered in beehives.He's an ex-space cop who used to work with Channing Tatum and now lives in the Honeycomb Hideout.
It's there you find out that Mila Kunis is a space princess when the bees surround her, and Sean Bean gets over his old beef with Channing Tatum to invite them into the Honeycomb Hideout and get ready to get attacked by bounty hunters.
Here's where the plotlines start dropping like flies.
Sean Bean has a sick daughter for some reason, and- OH
OH
OH MAN
I forgot something important.
Channing Tatum is a genetically modified human, referred to as a 'Lycantant', half wolf half human who used to be in the space police. He also used to have wings, for some reason, and he had to turn them in along with his badge when he got kicked out of the space police for biting the throat out of the CEO of one of the cum-empires.
Sean Bean is ALSO a genetically modified human, but instead of being spliced with wolves he got spliced with bees, and likes talking about bees. His bee daughter is sick, with something. Colony Collapse Disorder, whatever i don't give a fuck.
It's all these disparate, clashing, completely unexplained plot developments that really hammer home the fact that I'd rather be watching The Matrix. I love The Matrix. I wrote about it on this very blog a while back during a rewatch. It's so good, and yeah it doesn't make any goddamn sense to use people as batteries, but it doesn't matter. Morpheus was such a powerful plot device that we didn't NEED to know. It stuck with a story, and kept to it.
Jupiter Ascending assumed pretty things and steampunk/neoclassical technology but with forcefields would fill in any plot holes that showed up.
There's a plotline where Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum go to the Central Bureaucracy to get her a cum-empire runner license that is just STUPID, Mila Kunis gets kidnapped by each sibling and has to listen to their dumbass 1%-parody justification for jamming humans into tube to extract their precious resources, first the sister then the younger brother and finally Eddie Redmayne.
Oh also when humans found Earth 100 million years ago, they genocided the dinosaurs, but maybe not all of them since Eddie Redmayne has enforcers that look like a combination of gargoyles, Krogan from Mass Effect, and Theodore Rex.
An hour later from this I walked out of the theater with a sour taste in my mouth, and looking forward to rip this shit apart.
Will I watch this movie again? Yes
Creaky-hand drunk? Probably
Will the Wachowskis ever make a good movie again?
You know the answer.
The worst part of all is at the end, once Eddie Redmayne is dead and off to collect his Oscar for playing that wheelchair guy, Mila Kunis is now the owner of Earth and totally getting rutty with Channing Tatum.
She's keeping the fact that she is CEO of one of the biggest cum-reservoirs in the galaxy secret from her awful Russian immigrant family, and goes off on a rocket boot date with Channing Tatum. Who by the way is named "Caine Wise".
She owns the Earth. The entire planet, and all its resources of the surrounding galaxy. And goes off on a date. Doesn't halt climate change, doesn't stop desertification, ebola, or the threat of nuclear war or end our reliance on hydrocarbons and start a new reliance on cum, no. She just goes off on a date. Syria is still at war with itself.
