sexbadong

This film is a nice chronicle of the brief history of the team at Ocean Conservation Namibia. I absolutely love their work, which anyone can see in daily seal rescue videos on YouTube. I highly recommend looking them up, and I follow them religiously myself. They are undeniable heroes.

This documentary is produced by Now Now Media, folks who have a lot of recent experience filmmaking at sea, so the professionally shot footage is immaculate alongside the GoPro footage that the OCN team records.

However, the documentary doesn't cover much else. The OCN team performs the very personal work of rescuing individual seals and other animals from entanglements, and they raise some awareness of ocean pollution on social media. But a documentary focused on them has the potential to discuss much more about the circumstances surrounding their work, and this one really doesn't. It contains interviews with supposed experts, a few commercial fishermen, and a Namibian politician or two, and they talk in broad strokes about the big picture while (likely) stock footage shows us various beaches covered in plastic junk. I got the feeling that these segments of the documentary were "obligatory," and the filmmakers thought it too much trouble to sift through more detailed information that their expert interview subjects may have provided.

Here are some topics that I think this documentary could have explored, but either didn't cover or only gave a brief explanation of:

• Namibian politics, specific politicians and their plans to combat pollution, and the remoteness of Walvis Bay (where OCN is based) from where the Namibian parliament operates in Windhoek
• Specific companies that operate in Namibian waters, or benefit from commercial fishing, and their ties to other countries
• The lifetimes and migrations of various pollutants that cause seal entanglements, including some that are biodegradable but definitely hurt wildlife in the meantime

I'm certain that the above topics are a lot to ask for, but they would be what sets truly great investigative documentary work apart from this film. This film is for the seal rescuers-and they do deserve a nicely produced film like this, for posterity-but it's not much else, in my opinion. At best, I think it's a starting point for concerned viewers to do more of their own research or read dry academic papers.

The first season is worth a watch if you're intrigued by the idea of Alan Tudyk acting like a goofy space alien and swearing at children. The season has pretty good pacing overall, and each episode provides some new interesting twist. Some of the moments intended to balance out the levity feel like they're straight from the Hallmark Channel, but it's not too bad.

*Edit: I wrote the following two paragraphs when I was assuming that the second season was eight episodes long, rather than sixteen with a long hiatus after the first eight. I will finish watching the second season once it is released, but I don't expect my opinion to change much. My impression is that the writing staff had just barely enough interesting ideas for another season of ten episodes, like the first, and had to stretch it very thin once they were ordered to produce sixteen.

The second season has its moments, and those positive moments happen mostly near the beginning. The middle four episodes feel much, much more like something you'd find on the Hallmark Channel. If the town wasn't fictional (and filmed in Canada), I would conclude that the second season was bankrolled by some Colorado tourism fund--especially during the tedious arc wherein the mayor tries to boost his town's reputation. Too much of the season is dedicated to tedious subplots, like that, which relate to the least interesting characters, like him. It's mostly filler, a lot of small town bores just farting around and having very little to do with anything alien.

The final two episodes of the second season (no spoilers) have more to do with the alien side of the show, but they still don't have much exciting going on. The final episode especially feels like a bottle show, because it's just about Alan Tudyk trying to hide a Secret Alien Thing while a bunch of oblivious people are farting around in his house. The episode makes a couple revelations to hook the audience for a third season, but they take up so little of the episode's focus that I have no confidence in the next season being any more interesting. They're the start of brand new plot threads that ideally should've been introduced by the middle of the season, and probably concluded by the time the season was over. Instead, most of the second season was just a meandering waste of time. Any future seasons will probably be the very same.

This entire film is baffling. The best interpretation I could make of it is that its creator is just a rich old dude who loves going to Star Trek and other science fiction conventions, and he wanted to make a spoof movie. Over the course of half a decade or so, he waved money in front of as many Star Trek actors as he could, along with a couple of other celebrities he liked such as Michael Madsen and Snoop Dogg, and got each of them to spend an hour or two filming bit parts.

He had a very vague plot idea about the world being taken over by plants, but still didn't manage to connect most scenes together. I think I laughed twice but spent the rest of the movie just wondering what the hell was going on. The most entertainment you can get out of this movie is looking for all the Star Trek actors and figuring out how desperate each of them must have been to accept this gig.

This movie is interrupted by a commercial for Snoop Dogg's brand of bongs. However, everything about this movie tells me that its creator has never done any drugs in his life and just naturally has no clue.