implaxis

Up until now, I'd thought Ad Astra was the most boring movie ever made. But at least that had some nice space scenes. This had NOTHING. And 3.5 hours long... I knew it was a bad sign when 45 minutes in, the only thing that had happened was, the main character built a bookcase. I gave it another half hour or so. He built a model of a building. At that point I just ff'ed it because i knew it wasn't going to get any better. The gratuitous sex scenes didn't help any, either.

One would think that with a title like The Brutalist he would actually get brutal at some point. I actually thought it was going to be some sort of action or revenge movie. Nope.

Incredible waste of time.

The Magnetic Monster (1952) Now, considering when it was made and with a title like that, and starring Richard Carlson, what would you expect? A cheesy monster movie? I was not familiar with this one and I've seen a lot of old sci-fi movies. Wow, this was unexpected. It turns out to be much more like The Andromeda Strain than Creature From the Black Lagoon. Very serious, scientific, and procedural. I liked it a lot. The title refers to (not really a spoiler because it's more or less revealed early) an element that is exponentially increasing its magnetism, which begins to threaten the existence of Earth itself.

Lots of real old-time computers I really liked seeing (some of which I actually worked with, but they were old even then).

In the first 10 minutes I was reminded how much I hate Director John Woo's trademark scenes. Almost all of them done right up front. The slow-mo. Millions of bullets and the main characters don't get hit. Sliding across the floor or through the air horizontally, firing away, often with two guns. The Galactican Standoff (so-called by me because of how often they did it in the Battlestar Galactica reboot). And this is done a couple times, the last one with five or six people. I was nearly through it and thought "I haven't seen anyone walking through birds yet." Then that showed up.

Cage at his Cagiest. Travolta taking lessons from Cage for his soon-to-be-filmed Battlefield Earth. Easily could have been 20 minutes shorter.

I did like the premise. The timeline of healing was shall we say, a bit unrealistic. I will say there were a couple nice stunts but it had more fake explosions than a Michael Bay movie.