josechr

Just another cash-grab that exists purely because there's a strong fanbase that will generate views, and no effort put in it, except money poured into great set-pieces and actor-salaries.

The actual story, the script, the lives we're supposed to engage in, the monsters we're supposed to fear, the dialogue we're supposed to be enamoured by, all this seems like a second thought, a notion of a concept written on a napkin.

There are some interesting ideas, but it all seems so incredibly stupidly executed. Likethe scriptwriter locked himself in a cabinwith no internet or any books and furiously wrote fanfiction and then demanded no one else got to proofread it and make suggestions to make it somewhat sensical and logically coherent.

First, we get a re-enactment of the crew on board of Nostromo, complete with cigarette smoking, a ginger cat and banter, but lacking any charm or any sense that these are real people working together, no blue-collar workers vs. Corporate demands of efficiency, just people explaining the plot for us and how the earth is divided amongst a couple of mega evil-corps. There's an aggressive man wanting to destroy the cargo they apparently worked so hard to get previously and sacrificed so much for vs. A cyborg with corporate interests as main directive. The cyborg opts to kill off the entire crew in order to get the "mission" i.e. Different critters and xeno-eggs delivered to earth, by crashing the spaceship into a city or something. No one knows why, they did travel across the vastness of space with that mission in mind, but I guess it's needed for the story. No one remembers the concept of smuggling apparently.

This ginormous hunk of metal isn't detected by anyone on earth or the space station they crashed through, we have been tracking rocks in space for years already, and transponders is pretty ubiquious in different vehicles, in the air, on land and in the sea but not in the future. The first Earth finds out about this is because it suddenly appears 100 meters above the city and crashes into a building. It doesn't crash through, mind you, just damages the facade a bit. It's important for the rest of the "story" that there's a building there.

Then there's the synth, it somehow only works with a human mind. It's not a brain transplant, but "mind transferral" of dying children, whatever that means. Let's just assume it's magic.

Either way, the ship lands conveniently where the brother, of the synth that still cares about her family, her brother is stationed as a medic at that one city and that neighborhood where the ship lands/crashes. She marches in to the meeting of the owner of the city and demands, by the power of confidence, that she and the team of transferred mind-children should go there for some reason, help or provide comical relief or something.

They don't have any training, no education, no advantages except being in synthetic bodies, they get no protocol to follow, they're just children sent into a disaster zone along with a babysitter of sorts. Why?

It doesn't really matter, because the actual professionals who are tasked with helping doesn't seem to follow any protocol or be equpped to deal with a disaster either. They carry giant guns so that they can knock on doors and request that the dwellers evacuate the premises, and tell any wounded they encounter to walk out to the nearest medical facilities.

They encounter various critters, there's a lone xenomorph that's always hiding in the shadows somehow kills everyone no one cares about and when it meets the medic brother, it's just threatening and weirdly flirtatious. There's children in synth-bodies being absolutely useless and getting traumatized for no purpose whatsoever, they have no particular strengths it seems, they can't even protect themselves from tiny eyeballs with arms and this drags on for two and a half episodes.

And that's when I knew I won't watch more episodes of this. It is yet another expensive but completely empty dud.

English chaps travel to exotic Africa, and wants to find the source of the Nile. They shoot wildlife, saves slaves, paints African nudes and drinks tea. Spends weeks or months of walking in the desert and over rock beds. Gets a bug in the ear and determines the solution is to pierce the eardrum and become deaf. Gets oedema, and determines the best solution is to cut off the legs. I'm just glad no one got a headache.

After walking through endless dry land, without seeing any streams of water, they find a lake, and decides this must be the source of the Nile. Instant fame. And now I have to write some bullcrap to make the review long enough to pass the im db word limit.

Extraction was a fun anomaly, a pure action movie with good guys fighting bad guys, and bad guys turning out good and vice versa.

This time, our suicidal hero Tyler gets a second chance by his boss, Nik Khan. A chance to retreat into the wilderness to heal and to find himsell, maybe even forgive himself for his past.

A surprise visit upends his droll days of self-pity and budding realization that he may have been reduced to just an average man after all, when a man named Alcott comes with news that his former Wifes sister and her kids lives are in peril, in a dank, Georgian prison.

So he sets his employers machinery in motion to save them, backed up by a team consisting of some anonymous, disposible mercenaries, his boss, and her brother.

After they locate the little family unit, minus the dad, the prison turns into a war zone. Que a lot of action, and a believable interaction between our killing machine and his siter-in-law. She can't handle a 130 kg beefed up criminal of course, but she dishes out some effective blows with shovels and whatever she finds, and she is badass!

Then, of course, Hollywood politics and American gender fantasy enters the decision making. Men are evil, corrupt or plain stupid (like the son and his uncles), or sad doormats and killing machines. Women are good, smart and powerful, or eternal victims of men's evil. So yet again we are asked to believe a 50 kg woman can toss men twice her size around like it's nothing, that she can run as fast, kill as effectively and be as remorseless as her mercenary employees. Of course she was melanin richer than most, because she was the hero. The pale woman must be the victim in need of saving, as per post-2015 Hollywood convention.

Granted, at this point all realism is gone. The bad guys, petty drug smugglers, has the capacity of a medium sized country, they control the politics, the police, prison system and the army, so they throw everyting against or heroes. Helicopter, motorcycles (How is that effective? Apparently it's pretty much the most effective assault vehicles known to man..) and they have international reach.

And I could no longer invest in this movie. Of course escapism and suspension of belief is a factor in all action movies, but when politics, feminism, forced representation and social indoctrination trumps a decent script with entertaining visuals, most audiences lose interest pretty soon.

We don't pay for a lecture in marginalized, fringe theory, we pay to be entertained. IF you have an original and insightful lesson, the better, but it is not at all a requisite. And let's face it, Hollywood is not the platform for insightful and nuanced politics. The sooner the movie industry remembers that simple fact, the sooner they can make some good money again, and reclaim their relevancy.