2 Weeks of Movies -Cowboys and Aliens

Cowboys and Aliens - 5.5/10

(Warning! One fairly big spoiler and some other smaller ones!)

I chose this one hoping for a bit of really stupid fun. I was hoping, to be honest, for exactly what it said on the box – cowboys, and aliens (translation: lots of cheese). What I got was really stupid, that’s for sure, and admittedly most of the time it was quite fun. Yet, I just didn’t feel that it ever reached the potential that such an epic title suggested. It just wasn’t quite fun enough.

The cowboys element was good. I have no gripes about the cowboys. They were tough, brave, lovable rogues, and they included Harrison Ford. There were guns, horses, bandits and ‘Injuns’. There was a gruff but kind preacher, a mysterious wanted man who takes the law into his own hands, the wet son of a rich rancher who was anxious to prove himself, and various other staples of the Wild West. They reacted to the aliens in exactly the right way: ‘what are they, could they be demons, they’re a damn site more powerful than us that’s for sure, but, what the heck... let’s kill ‘em anyway. Posse time!’

It’s a shame the aliens weren’t done so well. In fact, they felt like a bit of an afterthought, which is strange considering they were the other 50% of the concept. Weird, ugly, scrabbly ape like things with big teeth... well, at least it’s nice to see the apetroll from Super 8 getting more work. Their look wasn’t inspiring or frightening, just a bit lazy and boring. They had the technology to zap the entire world into oblivion, but still prefer to run at their attackers, jump on them and claw them to death. This is when they are being attacked with guns, and in fact possess much better guns themselves. And then you have to wonder why they’re mining gold on a scouting mission, and if it is a scouting mission why they aren’t heading straight back to their planet to tell their mates what wusses we all are on Earth, and if it is in fact a mining mission why they haven’t blasted every town for hundreds of miles? Why take prisoners, burn a few houses and leave the rest? Oh right, experiments. Aliens love to experiment for some reason. To find weaknesses, the justification is. You’d think ‘die like insects when shot with giant laser guns’ would be enough of a weakness to make further testing a little redundant.

So the aliens, as is often the case, are stooopid. But clever enough to build spaceships that can presumably travel FTL. And have the war skills to destroy the homeworld of another alien being who can shapeshift, travel to Earth, work out how to manipulate an alien gun into a bomb, and blow up the whole alien spaceship with ease. So if they can obliterate such an advanced alien race, why are they having such trouble with the cowboys? And why in the name of all that is holy aren’t they just shooting them with their superior alien laser guns?

Yep, this is bang your head against the wall kind of stuff. Add to this some fairly lazy storytelling, the odd plot hole, and a baffling plot twist that needlessly only opened up further plot holes, and you can see why the movie isn’t thought very highly of. However, none of this would have been a problem for me if the film had embraced its silliness a little more and just gone for it with the full-on cheese factor. But it didn’t. The parts that were told with a twinkle in the eye were good, but the bits that were trying to be too serious just failed utterly. And while the concept was a great one, the aliens themselves were just too uninteresting and exasperating to make it work. What a shame!

2 Weeks of Movies - Tintin

Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn - 6/10

(some small spoilers)

I loved Tintin when I was younger, so I was quite excited about this one. Great characters, so many fantastic stories to choose from, and Spielberg directing. The chances of it being something great were pretty high. Unfortunately, while there were parts of it that I thought were done very well, overall this was slightly disappointing.

I found some of the characters spot on. Haddock was brilliant, and Thompson and Thomson were perfect. Villains and side characters had just the right mix of personality and slightly Victorian melodrama. Snowy was snowy. Tintin, however, just... lacked something. And I can’t quite put my finger on what. His animation was good, his look was just right, he had the right sort of ageless feeling about him, Jamie Bell did a truly excellent job with the voice acting... so, what was wrong? There was just something missing, something of the Tintin charm, something that made this Tintin slightly irritate me whereas the real Tintin never would. Something almost sarcastic in his expressions that was perhaps the result of the 3D style animation. Did I simply have impossible expectations? Maybe. But it was slightly off-putting, nevertheless.

The humour in the film was generally good, particularly when Haddock was involved (though burping into the plane’s engine was a little much), and at first the atmosphere managed to find the right mix of exciting and intriguing. Escaping from Haddock’s ship was probably the best part of the film. After this, the film perhaps suffered from one chase scene too many. Yes, Tintin is pretty much adventure personified, but that doesn’t mean the film needs to resemble a Prince of Persia video game. After all, he is a reporter, and this is a Tintin movie. Audiences do expect investigation. In the face of what felt like a slightly desperate attempt to keep action up at all costs, I began to lose a sense of where the plot was going, and I lost interest in the mystery. It even became a bit boring at points. It’s not a good sign that the Thompson and Thomson wallet-stealing sub-plot was probably more compelling than the actual movie’s storyline. The film really began to get tedious with the introduction of the giant crane fight – unnecessary, over-the-top, and eye-rollingly stupid. Thankfully, it wasn’t far from here to the end.

What started as a clever, intriguing and enjoyable film worthy of the great Tintin name quickly lost its umph. The film wasn’t bad, but a film about Tintin should have been so much better. It should have been magical, it should have been charming, it should have winked at and grinned at and amazed the audience the entire way through. I would have liked it to have that same certain something that Indian Jones films possess. I should have emerged in a little bubble of nostalgic joy. I didn’t. I wouldn’t say the film was bad, or that it wasn’t worth seeing. But it was disappointing.

2 Weeks of Movies - The Three Musketeers

The Three Musketeers - 6/10

(some spoilers!)

First off, the film isn’t faithful to the book, even though the basic plot elements are there. I don’t see anything wrong with this; The Three Musketeers has been done so many times, it’s nice to see something new in an interpretation of it. So don’t expect it to be the book!

Now, I feel that I liked this one, sort of... against my better judgement. It’s a silly one. Very, very silly. You could play a drinking game of spot the clichés. Almost all the characters manage to be annoying at one point or another. There’s a slightly steampunk element to the giant zeppelin airships, a hint of heist movies, a Mission Impossible style sequence involving Milla Jovovich, as well as a bit of an A-team style special ops feel to it. It’s so many madcap genres rolled into one. And then there’s Orlando Bloom’s hair. Did I mention the silly?

But, come on, doesn’t that sound fun?

It was. Right from the opening sequence, in which the characters are introduced A-Team style, with an action sequence and freeze-frame while their name triumphantly whizzes on screen, I knew I was going to enjoy it. Stupid and corny, yes, but with such a wink at the audience I felt sure this film was going to be fun – and completely nuts. It reminded me a little of the freshness of A Knight’s Tale, reviving a slightly tired genre, and I felt myself being on this film’s side, willing it to win out in the end.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite hold on to the tongue-in-cheek energy it started with. Parts of it were ridiculously entertaining, but the bits in between, winding down to the slightly lacklustre ending, were, I hate to say it, a bit forgettable. The love story was lame, and, in the face of Orlando Bloom’s superior villainy (yes, I was surprised too), I’d lost interest in the ‘diabolic’ nature of Cardinal Richelieu’s plot by the end. At points the film also managed to descend into being too silly, turning it into some kind of farcical parody that was a little baffling.

Still, being the fan of cheese-fests that I am (not to mention my love of shows such as Charmed and Xena), my silliness tolerance meter is probably higher than most. Air ships that have giant cannon fights with each other and still manage to stay in the sky... bring it on! Milla Jovovich sliding down a corridor on her back to avoid the hair-thin wires that trigger a series of traps, Mission Impossible and Indiana Jones stylee? No problem. Exotic weapons in 17^th century France? Great! Orland Bloom’s hair? Teehee, snort. Love it.

Besides, when the camera sweeps out to reveal an entire fleet of airships loaded with cannons heading out to take over France, I think we know we’re safely in the realms of fantasy/alternative history. And why not? It’s actually a fantastic concept... just a shame it wasn’t pulled off as well as it could have been.

The film has its faults. Many faults, if I’m honest. Strangely though, if you can switch off your preconceptions and any feelings of protectiveness for the book, you may just find yourself having a good time.

2 Weeks of Movies - The Losers

The Losers - 7/10

Another of your A Team style special ops movies, less publicised than others and easy to miss. But missing it would be a shame. This was a fun movie! True, the premise, plot and characters are all a bit cliché now. True, you could tell exactly what was going to happen throughout most of the film. But that doesn't really matter when it's this enjoyable.

The action scenes were great, the story was satisfying, the characters were all good (with the possible exception of the obligatory mysterious woman, who got annoying at points), and the film was well paced. The latter is a problem for a lot of modern action films for some reason – everything seems to be based on the ‘first half is all exposition, second half is all action’ rule these days. This one, thankfully, avoided dying the boredom through too much or not enough action death. It also injected a lot of humour, particularly into action scenes, which really helped to lift it above its many competitors in the minefield of ‘special-ops-team-gone-rogue-because-of-corrupt-government’ movies. One scene in particular, involving ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ and some well-timed sniping, is genius.

I have never read the comics – in fact, I didn’t even know that it was based on a comic before seeing it – but watching it, I can see the influence. There is a slight risqué edge to it (killing a helicopter load of children in the first ten minutes for example), a sense of fun familiarity with the characters, a heart and soul to it that something like ‘The Expendables’ couldn’t seem to conjure up, and most importantly, a slightly tongue-in-cheek attitude of playing with the viewer. We all know we’re not taking this one too seriously.

I’ve heard people say this is ‘the poor man’s A Team.’ Personally, I thought it was miles better than ‘The A Team.’ This is what ‘The A Team’ should have been.