wpedmonson
Joined Sep 2008
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Reviews10
wpedmonson's rating
The strong parts of this movie are its dedication to historical accuracy from what I know about the westward expansion of the US. From things like weapons, saddles, uniforms, logistics, language, and music, this movie absolutely cuts no corners, and it's the charming part of this movie along with its range of emotion, much distinct from contemporary movies with lead characters that show a clinically depressed flat affect. For history buffs this will be a great movie to watch.
I'm worried that appeal doesn't extend beyond that audience though. I love what Costner is trying to do here, give not only a both sides take on the American West, it shows the breadth of human experience during that period in US history. The movie is certainly an epic so we see a collection of stories that spans the Southwest all the way to Montana.
What this movie will make you realize is how people were just surviving until the 20th century, life being much much harder than our indoor, luxurious lives relative to theirs. Basic needs aren't always guaranteed. I was pleased with details like the pace and mentality of a wagon train moving west, the leader reiterating to men in his crew that they do 14 hours of moving a day, they stick to that and it's how they survive.
The movie felt like an old western, complete with its optimism about the country's expansion in the 19th century. What was noticeable was the lack of cynicism or brutality that's in vogue when making westerns, Tarantino style affairs that accentuate the bleakness and dark side of that era.
I also appreciate the scale of the movie, particularly including Native American scenes with dialogue in their language, and no white settlers to be seen. You saw a wider range of their lifestyle and concerns, also how they governed themselves distinct from the European settlers.
Overall I felt this was a first installment that just didn't do as well as it could in setting up some excitement for the next chapter. I get the feeling the second chapter will be much stronger, and having to separate these two parts into two movies is a weak part of how this movie will be received.
If your view of 19th century white settlers is unredeemingly negative, you will not like this movie. And I'm worried that in today's political climate, its strengths won't make up for this contemporary faux pas of not making white Americans in the 19th century the perennial antagonists, while Native Americans are given a more sugarcoated treatment.
If you're looking for examples of the darker side of Native Americans at this time in US history, read about what the Commanches did to Cynthia Parker's family in Texas, and that was just one story of many. "Empire of the Summer Moon" is a great longer read to learn about Commanche brutality, and give a window into a fuller narrative about the 19th century in America.
I'm worried that appeal doesn't extend beyond that audience though. I love what Costner is trying to do here, give not only a both sides take on the American West, it shows the breadth of human experience during that period in US history. The movie is certainly an epic so we see a collection of stories that spans the Southwest all the way to Montana.
What this movie will make you realize is how people were just surviving until the 20th century, life being much much harder than our indoor, luxurious lives relative to theirs. Basic needs aren't always guaranteed. I was pleased with details like the pace and mentality of a wagon train moving west, the leader reiterating to men in his crew that they do 14 hours of moving a day, they stick to that and it's how they survive.
The movie felt like an old western, complete with its optimism about the country's expansion in the 19th century. What was noticeable was the lack of cynicism or brutality that's in vogue when making westerns, Tarantino style affairs that accentuate the bleakness and dark side of that era.
I also appreciate the scale of the movie, particularly including Native American scenes with dialogue in their language, and no white settlers to be seen. You saw a wider range of their lifestyle and concerns, also how they governed themselves distinct from the European settlers.
Overall I felt this was a first installment that just didn't do as well as it could in setting up some excitement for the next chapter. I get the feeling the second chapter will be much stronger, and having to separate these two parts into two movies is a weak part of how this movie will be received.
If your view of 19th century white settlers is unredeemingly negative, you will not like this movie. And I'm worried that in today's political climate, its strengths won't make up for this contemporary faux pas of not making white Americans in the 19th century the perennial antagonists, while Native Americans are given a more sugarcoated treatment.
If you're looking for examples of the darker side of Native Americans at this time in US history, read about what the Commanches did to Cynthia Parker's family in Texas, and that was just one story of many. "Empire of the Summer Moon" is a great longer read to learn about Commanche brutality, and give a window into a fuller narrative about the 19th century in America.
As a moderately strong fan of the Terminator franchise who was disappointed by the last two installments, I was skeptical of the latest that came out last week. Two Arnolds? More time traveling cris-crosses? Kyle Reese again? When it's all said and done though, I'd say it worked as a middle of the pack movie amongst the five that make up the franchise.
The story begins minutes before the battle referenced in the first Terminator movie occurs where John Connor and Kyle Reese along with the human resistance army are defeating the machines in a final skirmish to end the war. Reese is sent back exactly as it happened in the first movie, though there's a glitch where Connor is attacked seconds before he travels back to 1984. This attack changes all of what happens next, similar to what was done in the Star Trek reboot a few years back. Same characters, different plot. This technique has become the weapon of choice when trying to please old and new audiences with a reboot of a popular franchise. Sarah Connor is not the one we know from the first movie, she's waiting with Arnold as the Terminator with her to kill his machine clone and save Kyle Reese. A T-1000 unit is also after them which they're ready for and easily dispense with. Things are different though when Reese recalls a memory from his new childhood past (the past and future are now different that Connor was attacked), and has to convince Sarah to change their travel date.
The main tension of the movie is between Reese and Sarah Connor, which is a welcome change to the previously bleak and macho takes on the story in 3 and 4. Kyle Reese always struck me as one of the better characters along with Sarah Connor, and they work somewhat well together in this movie. Jai Courtney doesn't deliver the performance Michael Biene does, neither great actors for the part (though I liked Courtney in Divergent), and the crucial miss for him is in the youthful sadness of Reese having to grow up in a war ravaged future that Biene did a good job of portraying in the first movie.
The story jumps to three different time settings, which could be confusing for some audiences, and wins the movie the award for most time traveling for a Terminator movie. The tension between soldier Sarah from the 80s, soldier Kyle Reese from the future, and our time is possibly the most interesting part of the movie. The film struggles, though, with what issue it wants to take on from our time and ends up settling for a bland mix of top of mind issues like social media, cellphone ubiquity, and homeland security. On this front, the story offers nothing new for audiences and is one reason why it's receiving poor reviews.
Where it does work though, is in the relationship of Sarah and Kyle now having to live with each other and be pressured to fall in love after knowing they're supposed to give birth to John Connor. At best, the relationship is a love story of two people thrown in together who want to have an attraction and certainly do, but pressures from multiple fronts complicate and threaten that. This is a very relatable aspect of the movie.
The part that doesn't work is the heavy-handedness of the feminism injected in the movie (another common issue movies in our time tackle that has become stale) that seems like a message about both abortion choice and career choice for women. The emergence of this theme in the movie points toward the preponderance of it in the movies of our time, and to further prove the point, just look at the media hype around Mad Max and Jurassic World. For Terminator Genisys, though, this theme comes across as boring and awkward for the couple.
Overall the movie is a welcome addition to the franchise though it's unlikely the movie will regain the greatness of the first two installments. Mad Max will be the critical reboot winner of the summer while Jurassic World will be the popular one. I'm OK with how this ended up.
The story begins minutes before the battle referenced in the first Terminator movie occurs where John Connor and Kyle Reese along with the human resistance army are defeating the machines in a final skirmish to end the war. Reese is sent back exactly as it happened in the first movie, though there's a glitch where Connor is attacked seconds before he travels back to 1984. This attack changes all of what happens next, similar to what was done in the Star Trek reboot a few years back. Same characters, different plot. This technique has become the weapon of choice when trying to please old and new audiences with a reboot of a popular franchise. Sarah Connor is not the one we know from the first movie, she's waiting with Arnold as the Terminator with her to kill his machine clone and save Kyle Reese. A T-1000 unit is also after them which they're ready for and easily dispense with. Things are different though when Reese recalls a memory from his new childhood past (the past and future are now different that Connor was attacked), and has to convince Sarah to change their travel date.
The main tension of the movie is between Reese and Sarah Connor, which is a welcome change to the previously bleak and macho takes on the story in 3 and 4. Kyle Reese always struck me as one of the better characters along with Sarah Connor, and they work somewhat well together in this movie. Jai Courtney doesn't deliver the performance Michael Biene does, neither great actors for the part (though I liked Courtney in Divergent), and the crucial miss for him is in the youthful sadness of Reese having to grow up in a war ravaged future that Biene did a good job of portraying in the first movie.
The story jumps to three different time settings, which could be confusing for some audiences, and wins the movie the award for most time traveling for a Terminator movie. The tension between soldier Sarah from the 80s, soldier Kyle Reese from the future, and our time is possibly the most interesting part of the movie. The film struggles, though, with what issue it wants to take on from our time and ends up settling for a bland mix of top of mind issues like social media, cellphone ubiquity, and homeland security. On this front, the story offers nothing new for audiences and is one reason why it's receiving poor reviews.
Where it does work though, is in the relationship of Sarah and Kyle now having to live with each other and be pressured to fall in love after knowing they're supposed to give birth to John Connor. At best, the relationship is a love story of two people thrown in together who want to have an attraction and certainly do, but pressures from multiple fronts complicate and threaten that. This is a very relatable aspect of the movie.
The part that doesn't work is the heavy-handedness of the feminism injected in the movie (another common issue movies in our time tackle that has become stale) that seems like a message about both abortion choice and career choice for women. The emergence of this theme in the movie points toward the preponderance of it in the movies of our time, and to further prove the point, just look at the media hype around Mad Max and Jurassic World. For Terminator Genisys, though, this theme comes across as boring and awkward for the couple.
Overall the movie is a welcome addition to the franchise though it's unlikely the movie will regain the greatness of the first two installments. Mad Max will be the critical reboot winner of the summer while Jurassic World will be the popular one. I'm OK with how this ended up.
Global warming! Political unrest! Corruption! Despair! Sadness!
These are the ailments of the story of Tomorrowland, and the proposed solutions to them are as heavy-handed as they appear above.
The story is about a teenage girl, Casey (Britt Robertson), who holds herself to be fearless, ambitious, and incredibly bright. She is one of the few optimists left in a world (much like ours today) that is wallowing in despair over dystopian nightmares being realized and where the melting of the ice caps is both figurative and literal. And what's worse, she's the only one to think that there is a solution to all the world's ailments. She is "recruited" by a young girl from Tomorrowland, who shows her a glimpse of an alternate dimension where the best and brightest of the world gather and build a utopian society, or so they think. The problem is that they stopped recruiting when they saw that the world will end using technology they created that could predict the future, or at least see one version of it. In other words, they've given up hope in fixing our world. Frank (George Clooney) was one of their citizens that spoke out against this policy and was banished. He is put together with Casey and they travel to Tomorrowland to stop the world from ending in a matter of months, told by Frank's homemade doomsday clock.
Tomorrowland is a movie that runs on nostalgia and underlying it is a bankrupt moral philosophy on solving the world's problems. Imagine the philosophy underlying TED talks (technology, engineering, and design will solve the world's problems) making a movie for children to watch and be inspired to adopt their meta solution to the world's ailments. The solution is that we don't have enough "dreamers" working together building innovative and well-designed inventions. People don't believe they're special enough, and they give in to their sadness and don't believe in themselves.
What's painfully missing from Tomorrowland is any conscience. Even tonight before I saw the movie I had a conversation with a friend over "Jurassic World" coming out this summer and my fears on what they might do to the story. In the worst case, they make the movie about dinosaurs. In the best case, they carry the theme of the relationship of science and morality that upheld the first movie so well and showed the terror that innovation without a conscience (that word even means "with science" though I know it wasn't coined with that in mind per se) brings.
The only vices in our world, according to Tomorrowland, is being uninventive and a pessimist. Ironically, the movie revels in cliché after cliché, hoping we'll be wowed by the mediocre spectacles that are references to older future-chic tropes.
The theme that runs throughout the movie and eventually shows its own superficiality and impotence is the value of raw optimism. I'll contrast this to the virtue of grit which is the far more superior trait to hold. Optimism is simply being positive where grit is more akin to courage. One is a formation of outlook, the other is drive. Certainly Casey is optimistic, but where the movie gets it wrong is saying that's all we need.
Also there's the assumption that raw talent is what we have as the resource to tap for solving the world's problem. And with this view it shows that there are the gifted dreamers, then there's everyone else. Where the movie is misleading is in how it tells young viewers that believing in yourself and being special is all you need to solve these age-old problems the world is fraught with. Our time is terrible and we need optimists. What Casey never does in the movie, and what any inventor or great thinker will tell you about genius is that it takes a lot of work. They fail. They fail a lot, and they get up and they edit their work. They learn from their mistakes and they build a better invention next time. They learn when to scrap a project, and when to stick with it. Learning that virtue will serve our young people better than mere optimism. Certainly optimism is a part of it, though it's only one facet to a complex set of character traits.
The problem is that Casey never fails in the movie. If anything she waltzes into every situation and seems to know more than everyone else, and she never has to work at anything. You never seen any of her inventions (though she does have a cool security camera disrupting drone she uses), you never see her take a crack at something and it not work. She just bulldozes into situations with overconfidence that smacks of arrogance and somehow the inept adults in the story never thought of incredibly obvious solutions to problems in the story.
In the end, Tomorrowland falls too short to be called anything worth watching. The story has too many uninteresting characters with a plot that doesn't pick up and when it finally does you ask yourself, "Is that it?" You'll feel cheated, much like you would if you thought optimism will solve the world's problems.
These are the ailments of the story of Tomorrowland, and the proposed solutions to them are as heavy-handed as they appear above.
The story is about a teenage girl, Casey (Britt Robertson), who holds herself to be fearless, ambitious, and incredibly bright. She is one of the few optimists left in a world (much like ours today) that is wallowing in despair over dystopian nightmares being realized and where the melting of the ice caps is both figurative and literal. And what's worse, she's the only one to think that there is a solution to all the world's ailments. She is "recruited" by a young girl from Tomorrowland, who shows her a glimpse of an alternate dimension where the best and brightest of the world gather and build a utopian society, or so they think. The problem is that they stopped recruiting when they saw that the world will end using technology they created that could predict the future, or at least see one version of it. In other words, they've given up hope in fixing our world. Frank (George Clooney) was one of their citizens that spoke out against this policy and was banished. He is put together with Casey and they travel to Tomorrowland to stop the world from ending in a matter of months, told by Frank's homemade doomsday clock.
Tomorrowland is a movie that runs on nostalgia and underlying it is a bankrupt moral philosophy on solving the world's problems. Imagine the philosophy underlying TED talks (technology, engineering, and design will solve the world's problems) making a movie for children to watch and be inspired to adopt their meta solution to the world's ailments. The solution is that we don't have enough "dreamers" working together building innovative and well-designed inventions. People don't believe they're special enough, and they give in to their sadness and don't believe in themselves.
What's painfully missing from Tomorrowland is any conscience. Even tonight before I saw the movie I had a conversation with a friend over "Jurassic World" coming out this summer and my fears on what they might do to the story. In the worst case, they make the movie about dinosaurs. In the best case, they carry the theme of the relationship of science and morality that upheld the first movie so well and showed the terror that innovation without a conscience (that word even means "with science" though I know it wasn't coined with that in mind per se) brings.
The only vices in our world, according to Tomorrowland, is being uninventive and a pessimist. Ironically, the movie revels in cliché after cliché, hoping we'll be wowed by the mediocre spectacles that are references to older future-chic tropes.
The theme that runs throughout the movie and eventually shows its own superficiality and impotence is the value of raw optimism. I'll contrast this to the virtue of grit which is the far more superior trait to hold. Optimism is simply being positive where grit is more akin to courage. One is a formation of outlook, the other is drive. Certainly Casey is optimistic, but where the movie gets it wrong is saying that's all we need.
Also there's the assumption that raw talent is what we have as the resource to tap for solving the world's problem. And with this view it shows that there are the gifted dreamers, then there's everyone else. Where the movie is misleading is in how it tells young viewers that believing in yourself and being special is all you need to solve these age-old problems the world is fraught with. Our time is terrible and we need optimists. What Casey never does in the movie, and what any inventor or great thinker will tell you about genius is that it takes a lot of work. They fail. They fail a lot, and they get up and they edit their work. They learn from their mistakes and they build a better invention next time. They learn when to scrap a project, and when to stick with it. Learning that virtue will serve our young people better than mere optimism. Certainly optimism is a part of it, though it's only one facet to a complex set of character traits.
The problem is that Casey never fails in the movie. If anything she waltzes into every situation and seems to know more than everyone else, and she never has to work at anything. You never seen any of her inventions (though she does have a cool security camera disrupting drone she uses), you never see her take a crack at something and it not work. She just bulldozes into situations with overconfidence that smacks of arrogance and somehow the inept adults in the story never thought of incredibly obvious solutions to problems in the story.
In the end, Tomorrowland falls too short to be called anything worth watching. The story has too many uninteresting characters with a plot that doesn't pick up and when it finally does you ask yourself, "Is that it?" You'll feel cheated, much like you would if you thought optimism will solve the world's problems.