The Movie Thread

[SamVS]

Pacific Rim or Iron Man 3?

[Kes]

Iron Man 3. Pacific Rim is really really really shit.

[DaveB]

Neither of them were great movies, but both I found entertaining.

[SamVS]

Iron Man 3 was a great laugh until the last act delivered the dumb, contrived action scene and the cheesy, rushed character arc bullshit. 3/5 for leaving the cinema on a low.

Pacific Rim had cliche characters and a few dumb scenes but these qualities are totally outweighed. It was set in a great, believable world with a culture that reflected the introduction of giant monsters and robots. It had spectacular, even beautiful scenes of monsters and robots and cities being torn apart on a colossal scale, that were incredible eye candy but also engaging and exciting because I cared just enough about the characters and world built in the scenes between the fights. I basically sympathized with all the main characters. Some of the actions and motivations are seriously questionable. If you watched the film with the voiced muted you would lose little of value and much of little value, and be up overall. But it had heart and spectacle and I can't imagine somebody not having fun watching it. 4/5 for America's take on Evangelion.

Okay, Man of Steel or Star Trek Into Darkness.

[Kes]

Why are we advising if you're gonna watch em both anyway?
Not that you'll trust me after you somehow didn't hate PR, but Star Trek into darkness is good. Haven't seen MoS yet but it's had mixed reviews. Do you have a copy of it? It's not out for a bit

[DaveB]

In both cases I thought they were entertaining but flawed. Star Trek Into Darkness was especially irritating once you started thinking about it...

[SamVS]

I've actually seen all the movies before I've posted, Kes, but I want to hear what other people thought of them. I did like Into Darkness a lot, probably the best movie I've seen this year, though as ch1ma3ra implies a lot of plot stuff doesn't really make sense under the surface. Prometheus and Knowing were two other films like that, though I have to give them all some credit for being cool enough for me to ignore the holes at least until the credits rolled. Man of Steel, however, irritated me for plenty of reasons whilst I was watching it: a far worse crime.

[DaveB]

Prometheus? I was so psyched to see that (I am a massive fan of Alien/Aliens) But was horribly disappointed with it - I wasn't convinced after the first 20min or so, but an hour in and I was completely put off. Its *really* pretty but other than that there is very little to recommend it.

[SamVS]

Related: Honest Trailers (spoilers, obvs):

Prometheus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBaKqOMGPWc
Star Trek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTfBH-XFdSc
Avengers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDajL441mZc&list=TLAoQY9ogZMkc

[SamVS]

Ender's Game freaking sucks.

[Kes]

I was afraid of that. I so love the book. What a great shame

[SamVS]

"From the studio that brought you Twilight. From the director that brought you X-Men Origins: Wolverine." What did we expect?

I think I had read some things Orson Scott Card had said about his own attempts at writing screenplays of the book and accidentally associated them with this movie, despite him not being involved whatsoever, and allowed myself to get interested in it. I wonder what Card's thoughts were on this product. Go to his website and, though the film is halfheartedly promoted halfway down the page, the first thing you see, tellingly, is "Ender's Game Alive: The Full Cast Audioplay". I wonder if the original creators attempt is a better dramatization.

The film did remind me of what I liked about the book, so I've just started reading Speaker for the Dead. The Book Thread: Coming Soon.

[SamVS]

Captain America: The Winter Soldier or The Amazing Spiderman 2?

[Kes]

Still waiting to see spidey. Cap America was fantastic though

[SamVS]

I think Days of Future Past is even better than The Winter Soldier, but both are top tier comic book movies along with The Dark Knight, Iron Man and X2. I'm really excited for Age of Ultron and X-Men: Apocalypse. Captain America 3 should be good. Fantastic Four might be good if Fox has learnt some lessons over the past 15 years. I don't hold out much hope for future Spider-Man films. Shame Edgar Wright left Ant-Man, which could have been the film I was most interested in (weird and amazing director with unusual source material), but now I just don't know. Seen some funny comments suggesting Batman v. Superman should be read as Batman V: Superman, and then trying to work out what the previous four canonical Batman films were (eg. perhaps Man of Steel is Batman IV etc). Zack Snyder is certainly a hack, but in the defence of this movie I can say that it will almost certainly star both Batman and Superman, and that might be enough.

[SamVS]

Interstellar or Gone Girl? This time I haven't seen either. But they are totes comparable because they both have feature characters that have gone somewhere, the only difference is in one Ben Affleck's wife has gone into space to in search of a new habitable planet, and in the other Chris Nolan is accused of killing Alfonso Cuarón but the jury is still out.

[Admin]

I keen on seeing Interstellar - still need to convince the wife though.

[Kes]

I think I'm going tonight

[DaveB]

I'd pick Gone Girl, but that's only because I've seen Interstellar and not seen Gone Girl (yet)

[Lizzy]

Was Interstellar good Dave? Looks like my kind of film.

[DaveB]

Was Interstellar good Dave? Looks like my kind of film.

That's a difficult question to answer without spoilers and whatnot

I definitely enjoyed the film and would say its definitely worth watching (particularly in IMAX if at all possible)

One problem with films that are very science-based is that whole "suspension of disbelief" thing becomes a lot harder so there were a few things my inner nerd was rebelling at (and I'm in no way an expert at this stuff)

[Lizzy]

Ah, if the science is shonky then that's not good! Gary hated Sunshine for that reason.

[DaveB]

Don't get me wrong, its not shonky - in fact I've never seen a film that deals with relativistic effects so well (or at least to my limited knowledge of the subject) - in fact that so much of it is done so well means the few niggles I spotted bugged me so much

[Admin]

Can't be as bad a gravity... that set an all time low bar for just pure craziness...
I image a conversation in the writers office... "Lets have Sandra in 3 space ship/station disasters"; "yeah but to add extra tension she should crash land on earth in a tiny lake that she nearly drowns in"...

[DaveB]

That was a good film with some seriously shonky science. Although ironically one of (what I thought to be) the worst examples was actually based in fact

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