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Here's my review of Bandersnatch. That's right "my" review of Bandersnatch cause there's a high chance you clicked on end credits without seeing all the endings. This movie's been on my watchlist since Friday or " To do" list to be more accurate. The story is about a game developer who has an existential crisis on controlling his actions and accepting destiny over free will. I'm not new to the whole "choose your adventure thing" and I've played enough mass effect and telltale games to know how it works , but what surprised me really is how the video game being developed in this movie is of the same genre of this movie, I thought that was a nice nod to the fourth wall. The bad guy in this movie is just really cool , he's the best villain Netflix shows have to offer and it's you. cause you're the one playing god in this game but you don't know it till the halfway mark. I also liked how they let you replay crucial decisions and their outcomes , but give you a time jump to that part so you don't exit to credits . In the end Bandersnatch is an event of it's time , a virtual acid trip with fast phased editing , that 80s tone Netflix's been digging since Stranger things and sci fi which doesn't depend on paradoxes and time travel . In short it's the Truman show meets Donnie Darko with a touch of choose your own adventure. It's one of the smartest works of sci fi in recent years right beside Arrival.

Here's my review of Wonder woman 1984 . So WW84 as it's stylized title says and what internet hashtags call it is the sequel to the Patty Jenkins directed blockbuster solo outing 'Wonder Woman' from 2015. The movie stars Gal Gadot as Wonder woman and she kicks some serious ass in this movie and at this point knows how to play the part really well , like all actors doing franchise themed roles , it takes them a few movies to know how to play the character just right . Tom cruise I think discovered how to play Ethan hunt only after the 4th movie and Johnny Depp completely forgot how to play Jack Sparrow after the 3rd movie , but not Gal Gadot , she's flying as high as a Phoenix without burning any of her wings.

The movie takes place in 1984 which personally is my favorite era of movies , cause that's when pop culture really started from what I believe ( Die hard , karate kid ...and the list goes on ) and the movie uses the aesthetic of the 80s really well , it's very vibrant and has everything from newly emerging malls to spin class , it even helps wonder woman look great in her armor and helped her shed her skin off the brooding Snyder armor we were introduced to her in. But the movie only uses the 80s as a backdrop and not as anything else , and by that I mean , there's 80s stuff going on , but no side character or just anyone has a personality , they're like NPCs in a video game just there to drive the plot . And despite being set in the 80s , the movie doesn't have a single song from that era as a part of its soundtrack despite Blue Monday being heavily used in all the promotions and trailers.

And speaking of trailers , the majority of this movie was heavily ruined for me by trailers . You see three action setpieces in the trailer . A mall heist , a convoy chase / fight sequence in some middle East country and the golden armor battle with cheetah , all of whose best sequences got spoiled in the trailer. A lot of other great one liners too were spoiled in the trailer and so was the entire plot !

From the trailer , what I could tell about the plot was : " there's wonder woman in the 80s waay before Batman and Superman were even born , so no plotholes that way , Chris Pine's back and that has something to do with a mcguffin that Pedro Pascals character owns and then there's Kirsten wiig's cheetah " my only questions for the movie were how does that mcguffin work ? And that they solved with lazy writing of course .

So the story is exactly that , Diana prince is working as an archaeologist in 1984 and doing hero work in her meantime and spends the rest of the time brooding about Steve Trevor . Kristen wiig is her insecure co-worker Barbara and Pedro Pascal ( Maxwell Lord ) is this guy on tv. Chris Pine's back from the dead somehow and insecure Barbara gets superpowers , and it all ties to Max Lord somehow.

Now aside from Gal Gadot as Wonder woman , I really liked Pedro Pascal as Maxwell Lord , and talk about range . This guy was stoic af and was still conveying emotions in last week's season finale of the Mandalorian through a helmet and now he's this eccentric less annoying Donald Trump esque tv person with shades of Saul Goodman in a movie set in the 80s . Now that's range . Kiirsten Wig as Cheetah though ... I was a bit skeptical at first ( I mean , come on .. the voice of Lola Bunny from Looney Tunes ?? ) But I guess she was alright , wasn't annoying or anything , just that it wasn't iconic in any way. But what they did with her character though , taking this crazy insecure person . obsessing / idolizing the superhero and then somehow getting powers of their own and going rogue is something which has failed twice with Jim Carrey's Riddler in Batman Forever and Jamie Foxx's Electro in the amazing Spider-Man 2 , and Kiirsten Wiigs cheetah was no different . It would've been fine if max Lord was the only bad guy though , cause I felt cheetah was there only to put up a physical fight with Wonder woman cause Max Lord is only human.

What I know about the character of Cheetah is mostly from the Justice league doom movie and the legion of Doom episodes from the JL : animated series and what I could make out was that she's this human - cheetah hybrid and is wonder woman's arch nemesis . Also , Chris Pine's back in this movie as Steve Trevor himself and he was great , what I really liked about that was how they did a reverse fish out of water with him and by that I mean , Diana was the fish out of water in man's world in the first movie and Steve Trevor showed her the ropes here , and now Diana's doing the same for him now and that made for some nice little one liners and jokes , most of them , if not all got spoiled by the trailers.

Another thing I really liked about the movie was some of the lore and abilities of Wonder woman that were introduced . There's the invisible jet , her newly found flying ability , her golden armor ( which I would totally buy a hot toy collectible of ) and much more. Then again I felt those scenes were set up just to introduce them and had nothing to do with the plot.

Now all these writing problems I've been mentioning mostly comes from Geoff Johns who co wrote this movie , DC and Warner bros have changed their plan for their DC slate of movies to be family friendly entertainers which are less brooding and that worked for Shazam and Aquaman .Both of those movies were origin stories that required a Geoff Johns treatment , and for those of you who don't know , John's is one of the Giants at DC comics and has written some iconic stories like Flashpoint and Shazam. But not everything comic book exactly translates well into a movie and part of that has to do with how comic book lore is larger and spans hundreds of issues while movies have to compress them into 3 hours or less. John's writing is something I've noticed a pattern with and that includes him involving time travel spells , wizards , ancient amulets , ancient stones , prophecyy and whatnot as per his convenience to drive the plot and that sort of fantasy / tomb raider element works really well for Wonder woman , but the problem is how this movie is a sequel to the Zack Snyder written wonder woman ( 2015 ) so Geoff Johns' writing feels out of place . And writing has to stay consistent in movies no matter who's directing , the avengers movies had the same writers for all four of them despite having different directors and that's why the story and the character motivations add up. This movie had all the Geoff Johns' cliches from magic mcguffin stone to getting a legacy armor ( pretty much like the Aquaman movie ) and much more. But the story does have a lot of heart to it , call it cheesey but it really does , it just doesn't get time to shine as the plot moves fast is all.

And speaking of cheesey . Like I said earlier about how DCs going for a whole family entertainer than character driven darker stories , it's fine to do that , but there's a line to taking it really old school . You know that scene in Batman & Robin where commissioner Gordon shows up on the little tv monitor in the batmobile and never does anything and let's Batman do everything , that's what this movie does , there's no cops , just nothing . It's like the whole movies world was built for wonder woman to play in , there's just no consequences . It comes off as something along the lines of an Adam West Batman show with some heavier storytelling . The stakes are really high and to quote Mysterio himself " an avengers level threat " but the tone of the movie and the events prior make you too optimistic that everythings gonna be alright , there is no " will she or won't she save the day " and I tried putting up with that as the movie progressed , but there was this one scene ....two kids are playing football on the road in Egypt when military convoys are battling it out mad Max style with wonder woman , they don't even bother to stop playing and they just wait for wonder woman to save em or something. It's like that kid from that carnival scene in Spiderman 1 where he just stands as the stage is about to fall on him and Spider-Man yells " move it kid " and finally goes there to save him . There were also massive cgi errors , you could tell it was cgj . And some of them were really standing out for a movie this huge . The ending fight with cheetah was shot in the dark to get away with bad cgi reveals and I thought that was lazy on the studios part . The production too took the cheese of the 80s for granted at times and made the oval office look like a sitcom set ffs. But the overall production wasn't like that , the opening scene in themyscira was truly breathtaking but never really tied into the rest of the movie in any way other than calling back a line and mostly was there for spectacle purposes.

Hans Zimmer composed the music for this movie and it works were it has to , still.. I felt an 80s soundtrack as a whole would've really worked with the aesthetic of the movie .

There is a tiny message pointed at hope and change towards the end of the movie and it wouldn't have resonated with people more if it had come out on December 2019 as originally planned , just works well after a year of 2020 wholesomeness.

In the end , Wonder woman 1984 is bright , vibrant , fun , optimistic and is pretty much Spiderman 3. It's got good stuff and bad stuff , but it never fails to entertain . In a nutshell , it's a 2 and a half hour CW show with a lot of heart disguised as a blockbuster movie. I never type this much normally , then again I love all things Superhero , so I went all in. So if you read this much , thank you !

Here's my review of Mank. So Mank is the new straight to Netflix movie directed by David Fincher from a script written by his late father Jack Fincher . The movie is a biopic about the late Herman J Mankiewicz who is best known for writing the movie , Citizen Kane , which is considered one of the greatest movies ever made. Herman or " Mank " as he's referred to in the movie is played masterfully by Gary Oldman who's performance is aided to from the cinematography of the movie being all film strip esque and 1930s ish and will no doubt be a serious contender at the Oscars. Amanda Seyfried was also great in this movie. Despite the top notch production and great talent though , I felt this movie was boring and I'm someone who actually enjoys arthouse movies. Now the story is set in 1930s Hollywood where Herman is in isolation writing the script for citizen kane for Orson Welles aided by someone to dictate to and a german nurse . Then there are flashbacks to before his isolation where he meets producers , Gambles , drinks and all Hollywood - ish stuff. But its very hard to keep up with the characters cause you don't know anything about them other than that they are either studio heads , politicians or both . And since you're not familiar with any of them , it just doesn't work . If you've seen the popular HBO show Entourage or even the netflix show Bojack Horseman , you know how great shows set in Hollywood are . There's agents , writers , directors , scandals , crisis management , PR teams and so much more things there to set up drama , and the one other thing common to both shows is how they use current politicians , current actors with cameos , pop culture references and a whole lot of stuff we could relate to . This movie is pretty much Entourage in the 30s without an Entourage for Mank . Mank meets people , has smart stuff to say , brokers deals with production houses and that's just about it. Mostly it has to do with the fact like I said before that we dont know this world , in Entourage someone says " James Cameron's directing Aquaman " and we didn't need the show telling us who he was and in Bojack Horseman when someone says " this movie is going to cannes " we didn't need the show explaining what it was , cause we just know things from pop culture. This movie on the other hand needed to tell us that for us to know the world , what's at stake and who the characters are , instead it just doesn't and I think Jack Fincher didn't feel the need to do that since he wrote this script at a time when 30s pop culture was common knowledge , atleast among film critics. Now David Fincher is one of my favorite directors working today and I'm a huge fan of his movies for the different themes in them and how perfectly crafted the movies look and are acted . Speaking of themes , Fight club was about anti consumerism , Gone girl was about pretending to be someone else and all that . Now this movie doesn't really have a theme , or maybe it does and I didn't notice said theme , which only means its subtle. Now David Fincher has made few masterclass movies in his long career as a director and that's cause he's worked with different writers such as Gyllian Flynn , Steve Zailian , Andrew Kevin Walker and Aaron Sorkin , despite working with different writers , he's made his movies with his own vision in mind and you'd distinctly know each one of them as his own movie , but his father I don't think is someone who Fincher would collaborate with if he was not his father , cause I wouldn't have guessed this movie to be directed by him had I not known about it previously . In the end , Mank definitely doesn't look like something Fincher would've made unless he was paying homage to his late father , nevertheless the movie doesn't dissapoint you completely cause of its great acting and quality of production .