<n>Read the explanation of method, madness, and <b>spoilers</b>.<fn></n> <ol> <a href="#Moonfall">Moonfall (2022)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5834426/">5/10</a> <a href="#Island">The Island (2005)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/">6/10</a> <a href="#Lanes">Changing Lanes (2002)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264472/">5/10</a> <a href="#Darkness">Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1408101/">7/10</a> <a href="#Heat">The Heat (2013)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2404463/">7/10</a> <a href="#Wicked">Wicked Little Letters (2023)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt20234774/">7/10</a> <a href="#Three">3 Body Problem S01 (2023)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt13016388/">8/10</a> <a href="#Kaos">Kaos S01 (2024)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt8550732/">8/10</a> <a href="#Hunter">Hunter Killer (2018)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1846589/">7/10</a> <a href="#Transformers">Transformers (2007)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418279/">7/10</a> </ol> <dl dt_class="field"> <span id="Moonfall">Moonfall (2022)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5834426/">5/10</a> <div>I'd seen this movie before, but couldn't find my review of it, so here it is. This is not a good movie. The plot is kind of interesting, as these things go. Like, it's a cool idea: an alien intelligent machine was trapped in the moon eons ago. The moon is a Dyson Sphere around the heart of a dead star. It's pulling out of orbit and threatening to crash into the Earth. The machine detects and extinguishes all forms of modern, electronic technology. That's why we have to use old tech to kill it. Sure, why not? I'm on board. Let's get somebody charismatic to helm this thing. That's the basic outline. Unfortunately, the dialogue and basic plotting is excruciating. It's frustratingly pat and trite and annoying. The actors are all pretty good, but they're given nothing to work with. Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) is the ex-astronaut with the skills the world needs. KC Houseman (John Bradley) is a "mega-structurist," who'd guessed that the moon was like this long before anyone else. Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry) somehow ends up in charge of the whole Earth-rescue mission. Harper's son Sonny (Charlie Plummer) is shockingly bad and stupid. So many things are stupid. They need Houseman on the mission because he's the only one who can calculate the projected orbit with the moon's changing position---but then the computer in the shuttle is also calculating whether they are going to achieve orbit. How is it doing that if no-one else has the formulae? As can be expected, a tremendous amount of time is spent on saving a handful of obviously useless lives. Fowler's son, Harper's son, both of them must be saved, apparently. A main plot point is that KC has a phone with him but it's in <i>airplane mode</i>, so the machine won't notice them. But of course it notices them because the phone is <i>still on</i>. This can't be one of the smartest guys in the world, can it? Look, it's a Roland Emmerich movie, so you can't expect too much. But this is almost too much of a reach. You know you're on shaky ground when you have to make all of your heroes spectacularly stupid in order to move the plot forward. At any rate, with the phone turned off, the AI swarm of mini-robots abandons them immediately, completely forgetting that they were ever there. They proceed into the interior of the moon, diving deep into its hollow interior, emerging into a gigantic hollowed-out cavern where enormous machines swing around each other, forming a planet-sized gyroscope that allows the moon to navigate back and forth in its orbit. Sure, OK. It looks pretty sweet, I'll give you that. They commune with the AI, which fills them with exposition for long minutes about the moon being a seed for life if that that dastardly AI weren't siphoning the power and degrading the moon's orbit. It tells a pretty pat history about humanity's noble past with really the minimum of effort, telling instead of showing. It is utterly unclear how the swarm propels itself and why it can't seem to catch their little ship. There's a bunch of drama on planet Earth as the moon moves closer to the planet---like it <iq>enters the atmosphere.</iq> Nukes are ordered, but orders are refused. A few bit characters die. KC sacrifices himself to take out the swarm but he is quickly resurrected by the AI as an artificial being, tasked with a mission that seems quixotically hopeful, in the same way that the movie seriously thinks that it's going to get a sequel. Although some of the effects were a lot of fun---even if they were so nonsensical and scattershot that it was hard to concentrate---some of the effects were such obvious green-screen trash that it completely threw you out of the illusion (e.g., when Harper showed up at the library on his motorcycle; that was just lazy as hell). They spent so much time trying to explain the logic and science behind a bunch of what was going on---and none of it made any sense. They might as well have just left it alone and done more hand-waving.</div> <span id="Island">The Island (2005)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/">6/10</a> <div>This movie predicted a future in 2019 where the rich were harvesting people for organs. The only thing unrealistic about that is that our modern rich either don't know that the poors exist or wouldn't let any of their filthy organs within a mile of them. Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) are two such living organ banks. They live in an underground community that thinks that the outside world is too contaminated to support life. They believe that there is a titular island where they might also someday live. One resident per week is allowed to move to the island. I'm hoping you've guessed that "moving to the island" is about the same thing as your childhood dog "going to a farm upstate." Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean) runs the facility and is concerned about Six Echo's brain activity. Six Echo also meets technician James McCord (Steve Buscemi), who reveals all: Six Echo and all of their friends technically don't exist. He tells them that they are clones and have been grown to provide spare parts to their owners, who live in the real world as wealthy, wealthy elites. Six Echo and Jordan Two escape. Merrick puts mercenary Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou) on their tail, as the two hunt down Ewan's owner, Tom Lincoln. He pretends to try to help them but he's really just trying to kill them. Six Echo knows this, having developed a lot more capability and intuition than was expected. There are a lot of chase sequences and explosions until they end up tussling and the police---and Laurent---catch up to them. I know that this will come as a shock, but the clone ends up convincing Laurent that he's the original, so the mercenary shoots the original. The end? Nope. As the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film)">Wikipedia entry</a> writes, <iq>[r]eturning to Tom's home, Lincoln and Jordan give in to their romantic urges and have sex.</iq> Obviously. The end? Nope. Merrick is now determined to root out the "flaw" that allowed the clones to gain autonomy and wants to wipe several generations of them out in gas chambers. It's pretty harrowing. Six Echo and Jordan Two start a revolution to save the clones and destroy the facility, aided by the mercenary Laurent, who's had a change of heart and is now working against his employer. There's a long fight sequence in which both Six Echo and Dr. Merrick exhibit fighting and weapons skills as well as a ruthlessness that neither of them could possibly have, given their background. There's a harpoon gun fight that looks quite painful until the wound is forgotten in victory. The end? Yup. Six Echo and Jordan Two live happily ever after as really rich people on an island, just like they'd always wanted. The lesson being that, if you are being subjugated and you fight for it hard enough, you can make your way into the elites that are subjugating everyone else. The lesson will never be: you can fight to bring down the system that subjugates. This was the bauble that was dangled before us when the two were fighting to free all of the clones but, once the clones had been freed and were standing around in a desert, we see that the couple coasts into the sunset on a giant boat by themselves, a cut above the rabble who are presumably starving in a desert or barrio somewhere. I gave it an extra star for at least trying to limn a revolution and for having a relatively relevant premise. I watched this one with Keith and Gary. The "motion smoothing/auto-interpolation" was on, so the entire film looked like a student's CGI cartoon.</div> <span id="Lanes">Changing Lanes (2002)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264472/">5/10</a> <div>Gavin Banek (Ben Affleck) is a high-society lawyer. Doyle Gipson (Samuel Jackson) is a recovering alcoholic, divorced father of two boys, trying to put his life back together. Gavin causes a traffic accident with Doyle and they pull over. He writes Doyle a blank check instead of exchanging insurance information. He leaves him in the rain, saying he needs to get to an appointment. Doyle also needs to get to an appointment: a custody hearing. His car's so busted, though, that he can't just get into it and drive away like Gavin does. Gavin drops a bunch of file folders during the interaction, folders which happen to contain documents proving that his law firm has sole control of a $100M estate left by a wealthy benefactor. His firm is being sued for control and he needs those documents at the trial. Doyle has them---and he's just been screwed over by Gavin. Gavin tussles with the daughter of the owner of the estate and her lawyer (Bruce Altman) but is eventually told by the judge that he gets until the end of the day to turn in the documents proving that his firm has power of appointment. Doyle, meanwhile, is late for his custody hearing, so he no longer gets any chance of seeing his children, who are going to move to Oregon. He had just bought a house for them to live in, but his ex-wife wants none of it. The judge doesn't care that he got into a car accident, doesn't care that across the country is just as good as halfway around the world, and tells him that if it had been his (the judge's) marriage, that he would have been on time, rather than late. This is designed to get under your skin. Doyle leaves the courthouse and dumps the documents into the trash, unwittingly throwing out Gavin's papers as well. Gavin calls his secretary Michelle (Toni Collette) and tells him that he is screwed. But then he sees Doyle on the street. Thinking that it's the providence of God, he accosts him, offering him everything in order to get the files back. Doyle is livid. He demands his morning back, not money. He says that he threw away the files. Gavin lies to his partners about having won the case, including his father-in-law Sydney Pollack. He accepts a partnership from his father-in-law, who believes that he's landed the lucrative $100M power of appointment. Meanwhile Doyle digs the documents back out of the trash, realizing that they offer tremendous leverage over this rich-white-guy-douchebag who's already ruined his life. Ben Affleck is really good at playing a douchebag. It's unclear how much acting is involved, but let's just leave it at that. I watched this movie at a relative's house, where the motion-smoothing/frame-rate-upscaling feature was on. I think this ruins pretty much everyone's acting. Affleck looks noticeably worse. Jackson and Collette, who are usually impeccable, also look quite strange in this format. Gavin reveals to Michelle that he had basically conned the old man into giving up the power of appointment. He also reveals to his father-in-law that he'd lost the file. They tell him to forge the power of appointment using a signature from a different document. Instead, he fakes a fire alarm. He ends up sitting outside with Michelle. They kiss. I guess? I couldn't tell whether this was starting a new, continuing an existing, or rekindling an old relationship. A kid rides up to Gavin with a torn-up document. It has a phone number on it. Gavin calls it. It's Doyle at the other end. Doyle tells him to be at a certain place. He goes back to the bank to discover that Gavin has made him bankrupt and gotten his loan rescinded. Computer says no. He doesn't take it well, throwing the computer across the bank before storming out. Since the movie was made in 2002, he isn't tased or tackled or other otherwise grievously incapacitated for his outburst. He just leaves the bank. Gavin meets with his wife Cynthia (Amanda Peet), who tells him that they're going to stay married because she's not going to get off the gravy train of being married to a Wall Street lawyer no matter what he does. She tells him to forge the damned document---she'd been sent by her father to straighten things out. She's more into the crime than he is, at this point. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Gavin calls Doyle, who tells him that everything's ok: he's worked out the bankruptcy and gotten his credit cards working again. He wants to meet up. Gavin calls the guy who'd blocked up Doyle's finances but learns that he wasn't able to clear up the bankruptcy. He learns this on his phone in his car, as Doyle passes him in a cab, showing him the lug-nuts from the wheel of Gavin's car. Gavin crashes but survives, severely shaken but otherwise not really injured. He doesn't seem to suffer from the crash in any way for the rest of the film. He's been in two car crashes that day and is none the worse for wear. Doyle meets up with his ex-wife (or current wife?) and she seems sympathetic. She wants to see the house that he bought her. Although he is at first hopeful, his wife thanks him for letting them go, dashing his hopes of reconciliation. He simmers more. Gavin ends up in a confessional booth, where he feels sorry for himself. He goes to Doyle's son's school to tell them that Doyle is coming to kidnap his kids. After the lady there doesn't believe that Doyle would do anything like that, Gavin escalates by reporting that Doyle's kids have been injured in an accident, making Doyle hurry to the school and almost get himself arrested. He starts to look for his boys, with the school administrator trailing him, calling the police and the safety officers all over him. They cuff him. Doyle's wife is at the jail and yelling at him, being a total bitch, telling him that she couldn't care less about his bad day, about his imaginary drama. She yells that this is what he always does: invents drama because he can't live a real life. Gavin interviews a young woman for a job because she seems so earnest and he wants to see if that naiveté survives a few years at the law firm. He writes a letter that confesses to everything he's done. He sets Doyle's finances in order. His confession doesn't get there because his father-in-law intercepts it, replacing it with the forged document they'd planned to send all along. Doyle's sponsor (William Hurt) bails him out of jail. Then he just yells at him in the street, telling Doyle that he's addicted to chaos. He blames Doyle for everything that's happened to him. His sponsor is just another shitty person, being shitty as hell instead of supportive. Doyle's life is full of those. Doyle and Gavin both realize that they've gone too far and determine to reconcile. Doyle returns the file to Gavin. Gavin clears up Doyle's financial history and sets things right with Doyle's ex-wife, who seems to have forgiven him at the end of the film. Gavin uses the file to blackmail his father-in-law into allowing him to do pro-bono work at the firm. It is utterly unclear what Gavin's true nature is. At the beginning, he just seems like any other shark in the NYC high-powered environment. In the end, he elects to stay at the firm and with his reprehensible wife and father-in-law, benefitting from his elite status, but to do good work for free. It's a bit confused but whatever. I watched this one with Keith and Gary.</div> <span id="Darkness">Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1408101/">7/10</a> <div>I watched and <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=2881">reviewed this in 2013</a>. The rating stands. The film picks up where director J.J. Abrams left off, by adding tons and tons of lens flares to the Star Trek Aesthetic and by making it look a lot more like a video game than it used to. The pieces of canon are still in place, with much talk of the Prime Directive in the first 1/3. The crew of the Enterprise---Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), Scottie (Simon Pegg), Bones (Karl Urban), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Sulu (John Cho), and Chekhov (Anton Yelchin)---is trying to rescue a primitive planet from its volcano. They manage it but not without breaking the Prime Directive in order to save Spock. For this, Kirk is demoted to first officer for Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who is nearly immediately killed by Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch), who's some sort of centuries-old super-soldier bent on getting his crew back out of cryo-storage. He wants to continue his goal of eradicating all beings who don't live up to his exacting and high standards. Kirk shoots him down but he teleports away to Kronos, homeworld of the Klingons. They of course go there to find and capture Khan, where he somehow ends up with the upper hand from his prison cell. Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) is in cahoots with Khan, having resurrected him from cryosleep for his own purposes. He uses his ship <i>Vengeance</i> to block the <i>Enterprise</i> from getting to <i>Earth</i> to expose his plans. Somehow the radio isn't working. Now hold on here, because it gets wacky: Khan and Kirk are working together. They space-jump together to <i>Vengeance</i>, where Scotty has already infiltrated, while Spock calls his future self to learn more about Khan. I beg your pardon? Khan and Spock and Kirk negotiate and trick, cajole and deceive and they end up with both ships plummeting to Earth's surface. Kirk sacrifices himself to save <i>Enterprise</i>, while Khan rides <i>Vengeance</i> right down to a fiery crash on the surface. Spock transports down to fight Khan and to bring him back to use his body's regenerative powers to heal Kirk. Khan and Kirk are both cryo-frozen, with Kirk being resurrected soon after he'd healed. They are shown beginning the five-year voyage that would lead to the first season of the very first Star Trek. The end.</div> <span id="Heat">The Heat (2013)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2404463/">7/10</a> <div>Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) is a top-notch FBI agent but she's arrogant and a show-off and no-one likes to work with her. People should appreciate her but she's hard to appreciate. Hale (Demián Bichir) sends Ashburn to Boston. Mullins (Melissa McCarthy) is a local cop in Boston. She drives a beat-up Dodge Rambler. As she's busting a local john (Tony Hale), she runs down a drug dealer, Rojas (Spoken Reasons). Ashburn meets Levy (Marlon Wayans), who's the local liaison with the FBI. Captain Woods (Tom Wilson) is Mullins's boss. Ashburn shows up with her attitude on full display. Mullins and Ashburn tangle, with Mullins getting the better of Ashburn, at least at first. She steals a file from Ashburn that details the crime network in Boston. Mullins visits her brother (Michael Rapaport) in prison to find out more about crime boss Simon Larkin. Ashburn is ordered to work with Mullins. They start off "interviewing" Tatiana (Kaitlin Olson) with predictable results. They team up reasonably well, with Mullins distracting Tatiana and her mother and grabbing a book of matches, while Ashburn grabs a cigarette butt as evidence. They stop in at Mullins's apartment, which is just below Tatiana's. She shows off her refrigerator full of weapons. They team up at the club to bug another suspect's phone. They manage it by making Ashburn look sluttier, which is a pretty obvious move. They get trailed by the DEA, in the form of Craig (Dan Bakkedahl) and Adam (Taran Killam). Craig is an albino. They squabble. They keep getting to know each other and they end up at Mullins's house, where we meet her two brothers Mark (Bill Burr) and Peter (Joey McIntyre), her dad (Michael Tucci), and her mother (Jane Curtin). They're all pissed at Mullins for having arrested her brother. He's back at home though. At this point, I realized that I <i>had</i> seen this movie before, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=2907">in 2014</a>. The rest of the plot is basically them becoming not only acquainted, not only friendly, but becoming best and only friends. There is a long montage of a drunken night out, which ends with Ashburn having giving away her car to another bar patron Wayne, with whom she'd been deep-kissing all night (when she wasn't stealing cigarettes right out of people's mouths. The romance with dumpy Wayne doesn't last long, as Ashburn's car had been rigged to explode and he goes up in flames with it. Now, they know they've hit a nerve, so things get serious. There's a montage of them getting serious. They are forced to move the Mullins family, which is a complete shitshow of Bostonisms. At the end, the montage shifts to them loading out with lots of weapons and armor and gear. They get the temporary drop on their quarries, but then a whole bunch more adverseries show up and capture them. There are hijinks and they show how well they work together and they prevail. It's entertaining enough, even if there are no surprises. They each excel and get promoted and become best friends and they live happily ever after. I watched this one with Gary because he loves it.</div> <span id="Wicked">Wicked Little Letters (2023)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt20234774/">7/10</a> <div>The movie is about a young Irish woman named Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley) who'd moved into an apartment in LIttlehampton with her boyfriend Bill (Malachi Kirby) and daughter Nancy (Alisha Weir). Next door lived Edith Swan (Olivia Colman), with her mother Victoria (Gemma Jones) and father Edward (Timothy Spall). Edith and Rose were friends at first, despite their strong differences in opinion on the primacy of God in their lives. Edith had been receiving letters filled with florid invective. Her father <i>knew</i> that it was Rose sending them. They managed to get the police involved and had Rose arrested. At her Grand Jury hearing, she was remanded into custody and sent to a prison until trial. She was utterly unable to pay the bail of £3. Edith was regaled in the newspapers as a heroine of sorts. Rose languished in prison, writing to "Woman police officer" Gladys (Anjana Vasan), who refused to help her, despite her own suspicions that Rose was not behind the letters. Eventually, the ladies of Edith's own whist club pooled together the money to post Rose's bail so that she could rejoin her daughter and Bill at home. At this point, the letters multiply, being sent to literally hundreds of people in town, always with a unique way of cursing that was at once vicious and awkward. We watch as Edith's father dresses her down again and again, one time assigning her to write a passage from <i>Proverbs</i> 200 times. Edith breaks down and starts writing another of the titular wicked little letters. It turns out that she had been writing them all along---including the ones to herself. Together with Edith's whist club, Gladys goes from strongly suspecting Edith herself to sleuthing about to build up enough evidence to convict her---if only to free Rose. The trial goes a bit back and forth, with Rose's barrister attempting a handwriting defense, to no avail. It was very convincing but the judge determined that handwriting evidence was inadmissible. The prosecutor brought up the murky facts behind Rose's past: was she actually a widow? Was Nancy actually a child of wedlock? And all sorts of other delicious questions that mattered very, very much to early 20th-century England. It probably still does, or soon will again. Despite the rocky trial, the court adjourns until the following Monday, giving the whist investigative team a final weekend to catch Edith in the act. They manage it, with the help of some invisible ink and, quite frankly, Edith's irresistible urge to write filthy letters to anyone and everyone. Her final letter was addressed to the magistrate judge himself. She was, of course, trying to nail Rose for good. Edith's feelings about Rose were deeply conflicted. She never really had a chance with the monster of a father that she had. I thought I'd like this movie more, based on reviews and the trailer but it didn't quite spark like I thought it would. It was good but not great.</div> <span id="Three">3 Body Problem S01 (2023)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt13016388/">8/10</a> <div>I'd just finished reading the books, which is my context for watching this show. It was quite faithful to the source material, moving a bunch of things around from the three books to form a slightly more linear approach that is more appropriate to a television show. Like the first book, the show starts during the Cultural Revolution, where Ye Wenjie's (Rosalind Chao) father is killed for refusing to renounce his profession. She also refuses to bend. Instead of killing her, though, they banish her to a very remote military base with a huge radio-telescope dish that can be used for interstellar messages. At the time, she meets a young Mike Evans (played later by Jonathan Pryce). Wenjie eventually uses the dish to bounce a message off of the sun, magnifying it immensely, and responding to the Trisolarans, who'd made contact with a warning not to continue communicating. Why did she do this? After seeing how humanity was constantly warring with itself and with the planet, she'd give up hope on it. In the modern day, her daughter Vera (Vedette Lim), who'd become a formidable physicist in her own right, kills herself. Her former students, Auggie Salazar (Eiza González), Jack Rooney (John Bradley), Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), and Will Downing (Alex Sharp) discuss how scientific measurements have stopped making sense. This ends up being the reason for why Vera killed herself: it's actually Sophons---hyper-dimensional, light-speed, super-folded, and super-intelligent protons sent by the Trisolarans---that are deliberately keeping human technology from advancing. Why? Because the Trisolarans are on the way to colonize Earth because Wenjie told them to come. Why are the Trisolarans fleeing? Because their planet is trapped in a three-sun system that is extremely unstable, which has led to an extremely long, slow, and painful development phase for Trisolaran civilization. We actually learn about this through a convoluted and unusually realistic video game invented by the Trisolarans and distributed by the Sophons through cool headsets. This is just like in the book, though. Although they are considerably more advanced than humanity is right <i>now</i>, they cannot exceed light speed---they cannot get past 10% of light speed---so it will take 400 years to get to Earth. In that time, humans will have leapfrogged the Trisolaran technology and will be more than ready to prevent their own colonization. The Sophons, capable of light-speed travel, arrive much sooner, and are there to confuse and stymie humanity into developing much more slowly. There is also a group of people led by Mike Evans who are preparing to welcome the arrival of the Trisolarans (called the "San-Ti" in the show, because "San" means "three" in Mandarin). They call Sophon (Sea Shimooka) "Lord". They have developed a quasi-religion. Some of their minions are given extra-human powers, like super-strength. One of them is Tatiana (Marlo Kelly), who is terribley annoying but also quite convincing as a cult member. She kills Jack. So much happens in this season. Let's see. Augie gets infected by Sophon and sees a countdown everywhere, until she gives up her nano-fiber technology experiments. She drinks a lot, like <i>way</i> more than her 75-pound body could ever accommodate. I think Saul likes her? No-one knows why though, because she's a mopey, whiny pain-in-the-ass. She's the smartest of them, she's obviously ludicrously wealthy, and she looks like she's about 25 years old even though she must be at least 50 in order to have achieved as much as she has. Unless she's, like, Tony Stark or Reed Richards, or something? Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham) is there from the beginning, working with Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) on the Staircase Project, which aims to send something out of the solar system at 0.1c (1/10 of the speed of light). She works with her naval secret-agent boyfriend Raj (Saamer Usmani) to get Augie to use her nano-fibers to seriously destroy Mike Evans's ship as it navigates through the Panama Canal, killing everyone on board but also getting the records of all of their conversations with "the Lord". I almost forgot my favorite character (also from the books): Da Shi (Benedict Wong), who is just wonderful. No notes. He's just like I pictured him in the books. He's involved in many ways, working for Wade and the U.N. Will has terminal cancer and, long story short, he ends up professing his love to Jin in the form of buying her the rights to a star with a fortune he'd recently acquired but that he wouldn't be able to enjoy because he has terminal cancer. He commits his brain to Jin's Staircase Project. Ye Winjie meets with Saul and tells him a complicated story that's designed to impart her knowledge without allowing the Sophons to understand it. Saul is doing an ok job, but I very much preferred the quirky and enigmatic Luo Ji from the novels. Saul's "weirdness" is that he likes to blaze up all the time. Luo Ji was way, way cooler. Anyway, Saul becomes a Wallfacer by the end of the first season, with his nomination and initial experiences mirroring those of Luo Ji from the second book. Several key Asian people have been replaced with black actors. If you've read the books, it's a bit jarring. Like, Wang Miao is now Augie; Luo Ji is now Saul.</div> <span id="Kaos">Kaos S01 (2024)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt8550732/">8/10</a> <div>The Greek Gods are real, people! This first season follows the story of Prometheus's (Stephen Dillane) subterfuge against his quasi-friend Zeus (Jeff Goldblum), who'd punished Prometheus for eternity for having brought fire to mankind. Hera (Janet McTeer) also schemes against the increasingly erratic Zeus---they say he's acting like his father Chronos---while she continues a long-running dalliance with Poseidon (Cliff Curtis). Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan) is great as Zeus's red-headed stepchild (as it were) who's scheming to get into his father's good graces. He helps Orpheus (Killian Scott) begin his mission to retrieve his lover Riddy (Aurora Perrineau) from Hades, where she'd gone after having died on Earth. There, she meets and falls in love with Caeneus (Misia Butler), who is trying to figure out the mechanics of Hades. He thinks that the souls are being harvested for their life-force rather than being resurrected. He turns out to be very right about that. Hades (David Thewlis) has strong misgivings about what is going on, whereas Zeus tells him to keep his lip zipped and follow orders. Medusa (Debi Mazar) and Perephone (Rakie Ayola) are in on the scheme, but it doesn't sit particularly well with them, either. Poseidon is in charge of president Minos (Stanley Townsend), whose son is the minotaur and whose daughter Ari (Leila Farzad) is also determined to find that out. Prometheus is manipulating all of this as a sort of fate---oh, yeah, the three Fates are in this as well, headed up by Lachy (Eddie Izzard)---and his first step on this plan was to kill his lover Charon (Rakie Ayola), whom he had entrusted with carrying out the plan once he'd posted up in his new job as ferryman. The cast is huge and the references to Greek myth and characters are plentiful. The plot has several strands that come together at the end of season one, but definitely set things up for a second season. If you're interested in the exact details, see <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaos_(TV_series)#Episodes">Wikipedia</a>. Prometheus sits on Zeus's throne, the people have lost faith, and Zeus is bleeding. I gave it an extra star for the inspired choice of casting Jeff Goldblum as a mercurial God, and for giving the majestic McTeer the role of his foil in Hera.</div> <span id="Hunter">Hunter Killer (2018)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1846589/">7/10</a> <div>This movie was not unexpectedly somewhat trashy but Gerard Butler is always entertaining. He can really hold a movie together. He plays submarine captain Joe Glass. The rest of the cast is of surprisingly high quality, with Gary Oldman kind of phoning it in as CJCS Charles Donnegan. There's Linda Cardellini as Jayne Norquist and Common keeps being cast in stuff, too, although I rarely find him entertaining. Michael Nyqvist played Captain Andropov in one of his last roles. I remember him fondly as Viggo Tarasov in the first John Wick. This is a testosterone-filled movie about a Navy crew where Glass has been tasked with tracking down another sub that went missing while tracking a Russian sub. There's a SEAL team in the mix that witnesses a coup d'etat in Russia, where an admiral takes the Russian president captive. He means to start a hot war. As Russians do. There are more dastardly Russians about as Glass's submarine finds the wreckage of not only the missing American sub but also the Russian sub it had been tracking. He manages to rescue Andropov and a few others from that sub. The Russian sub that sank both of the other ones is still lurking and attacks them. There are the classic submarine tropes: holding on to things attached to the wall, bracing for an impact, falling all over the place on impact, turning wrenches to stop leaks, sloshing through knee-deep water, closing bulkheads on other people, Dutch angles everywhere, trying not to make noise, dropping a tool but catching it at the last second, navigating an underwater minefield, navigating tunnels through reefs, trusting Andropov's instructions even when it looks like he's led them astray...but a gap opens up at the last minute and now Glass knows he can trust him. You know the drill. It's not new, but it's reasonably well-done. It ticks the boxes. In the other part of the plot, the SEAL team is pretty definitely following a script written by the Navy as a pretty blatant advertisement for being a SEAL. It's even better than all of the video games that the Pentagon sponsors, I bet. They even got one guy who looks kind of like Christian Bale (but it's not) and another one who kind of looks like John C. McGinley (but it's not) and yet another who looks kind of like Eric Bana (but it's not). There's a lot of shouting and hating on Russians as well as reconciling and being able to work together because we are after all just people who love our brother soldiers and want the best of all possible worlds. HAHAHAHAHA. No. The U.S. magnanimously helps Russia extricate itself from its self-created political crisis---the coup which the CIA most definitely had nothing to do with. It's a feel-good ending as the U.S. captain Glass avoids starting a hot war and his new buddy Andropov protects Glass's sub with covering fire and then takes out the evil admiral Durov. The president of Russia is returned, safe and sound, so that democracy may prevail in Russia, thanks to the Americans, whose overriding interest is to promote democracy, freedom, and free enterprise in a world of harmony and peace. I watched it in German. I gave it a couple of extra points because of the quality of the cast and the fact that this was definitely at <i>least</i> 50% better than either of the GI Joe movies. The action was filmed quite well, with no obvious CGI. Kudos.</div> <span id="Transformers">Transformers (2007)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418279/">7/10</a> <div>Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) gets a new car. It's yellow and looks like a Camaro/Firebird. He managed to scrape together enough cash and enough good grades to get his dad (Kevin Dunn) to help him buy it from Bobby Bolivia (Bernie Mac). He manages to use the car to get Mikaela Banes's (Megan Fox) attention. There's a backstory, of course. Witwicky's grandfather ran into the Transformers in the late 1800s when he was attempting to get to the North Pole. They left some traces of ... something ... on his eyeglasses. These are the eyeglasses that Witwicky is trying to sell on eBay. These are the eyeglasses that the Decepticons discover and use to find Witwicky. His car is Bumblebee, a Transformer that wants to protect him. At the same time, the military discovers a Decepticon in the Qatari desert. He kills a lot of them. Some of them escape and start a march across the desert, including Epps (Tyrese Gibson), Lennox (Josh Duhamel), and a few others. The Decepticons infiltrate the military The only one who's onto them is Maggie Madsen (Rachael Taylor). She reports to Sec. Def. Keller (Jon Voight) and gets hacker Glen Whitmann (Anthony Anderson) to help crack Decepticon codes. He's hilarious. It's wonderfully nonchalant how they are both completely unaware of how hot she is. I mean, Rachel Taylor <i>and</i> Megan Fox in one movie. What's not to like? It's just robots and smoke shows from a time before Instagram ruined everything. I'd forgotten how charming this movie was, especially when compared to all that followed it. It started off as a straight-up Spielberg/Lucas-style movie about a young man to whom amazing, space-like things happen. The mood is set, right down to Witwicky riding his mother's bike to catch up to his car when it takes off by itself. A lot of this charm can be chalked up to the sheer star power of LeBeouf. That and some inspired casting of bit characters like Witwicky's friend Trent (Travis Van Winkle), who's shown climbing a tree and washing his dog like a normal teenager. Sam's Chihuahua Mojo has a broken leg and is adorable. The guys in the desert are fighting some sort of scorpion-like Decepticon. The effects are really, really good. This was back when they still cared to make them feel real instead of taking the cheapest lowest common denominator that people are willing to accept. At the same time, Bumblebee takes on a Decepticon to protect Sam and Mikaela and reveals himself as a robot to them. She wonders why such a highly developed robot would turn itself into such a shitty car, so Bumblebee turns himself into a <i>brand-new</i> Camaro, a product-placement for which I'm sure Chevy paid through the nose. They all watch as several meteors hit the Earth simultaneously. They're actually transformers, all landing at once. They pick up their patterns from various vehicles, then gather around Sam and Mikaela to introduce themselves. They reveal their mission: to find the Allspark. They do a bit of exposition, explaining the history of the Autobots and Decepticons. They end up at Sam's house, looking for his grandfather's eyeglasses. Agent Simmons (John Turturro) and sector 7 show up, looking for aliens. The Autobots rescue them, but Sam, Mikaela, and Bumblebee are captured soon after. Sam, Mikaela, Maggie, and Glen are all taken the Hoover Dam, where they are shown a captured Megatron, who'd been discovered and taken there by Sam's great-grandfather. They also have the Allspark, around which the Hoover Dam was built. Agent Simmons is in his weird element, explaining how all modern technology is based on what they learned studying Megatron. They demonstrate to the field-trip class how the Allspark can animate any piece of technology to be a Transformer. The little Decepticon hacker is inside and sabotaging everything. He turns off the cryogenics and starts heating up Megatron. Simmons's S7 and the surviving Army guys tangle, with S7 having to back down. They make them bring Sam to Bumblebee, who was being tortured. Sam takes Bumblebee to the Allspark, where he starts ... programming it? It reconfigured itself into a much smaller version. Portable. Megatron is awake. He's pissed. Simmons, Maggie, Glen, and the Sec. Def. are trapped in a library with an old computer that Glen is spinning up to be able to get out a message. The little hacker robot is breaking in. Aboveground, there's a lot of bombing and destruction going on. Bumblebee's legs are all messed up. Nobody is wearing a helmet; everyone's fine. Except Bumblebee. He looks <i>no bueno</i>. He gives Sam the Allspark. Sam's crying. Mikaela's more resourceful: she steals a tow truck to get Bumblebee out of there. Sam's on the run with the Allspark. The soldiers hold the line, lining up with the Autobots against Megatron. The Transformers all roll and transform a lot, even though that must take a ton of energy. They're just transforming all over the place. They break a <i>lot</i> of shit, like a <i>lot</i> of buildings. As Sam runs by, the Allspark creates a whole bunch of new Transformers from close-by technology. It's a shit show. Mikaela and Bumblebee are back in the fray, taking out the giant robot that had almost gotten to the soldiers. Blablabla, Sam kills Megatron with the Allspark. Or did he? The first hour was great! And then it dragged a bit, there was less Sam Witwicky and more robot battles, so I docked a point from the final score. I watched it in German.</div> </dl> <hr> <ft>These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the <i>genre</i>, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid <b>spoilers</b>. Links are to <a href="https://www.imdb.com/user/ur1323291/ratings">my IMDb ratings</a></ft>