KangarooDoug

On the positive side this movie has a sense of humor and I did laugh some while watching it. I'm not a fan of super hero movies that take themselves too seriously, and this one doesn't. But they also need to make you care about what is going on and I didn't really care that much. Your main character is Yelena who is depressed and wants more from life which is fine, but there is this jarring contrast of her casually killing people as part of her job and then showing lots of sympathy and emotional openness in others. Without there really being anything to make the transformation. The idea is to get the group together and bonded and that's fine, but after that, there's not much interesting going on. Julia Luis Dreyfus is not bad as the villain who is not much different from politicians you can see today who don't mind if people get killed if it helps them keep their job. In the end this is just a set up for the next movie.

I felt I needed to add a negative review here to help persuade people to avoid this disaster. Instead of giving you a good Zombie/Post apocalypse story this movie tries to be profound and just comes off as weird and is very boring for long stretches. There's not much of a plot and there are a lot of strange flashes of old movies that I suppose are comparing the England of 28 years later to the Middle Ages. It feels like an experimental student film in places. Why Ralph Fiennes chose to do this movie I couldn't say, but he couldn't save it. The young boy who is the main character does a good job with what he is given and might be the only bright spot here.

So I don't mind subtitles as I find after a while I don't even realize I'm reading them. I think having the characters speak a native language helps because I'm not sure how they'd handle characters going back and forth between languages which they need to do. How do you have character speaking their native language fluently one moment and then accented English the next if in both cases they are speaking English? It also adds an authenticity. The problem is that the rest is uneven in terms of acting and plot. I can understand how they may have needed to cover the women's breasts, but I find it distracting as all the female characters look as they would after the Islands were colonized and the whole point of this series is to show it before that happened. So in a movie that's supposed to be portraying Hawaiian culture you are seeing the effects of European culture before it's supposed to have taken hold. Perhaps in our society, the only way to portray this story with any real authenticity would be in a book where nudity wouldn't be a problem and the language can almost always be in English. But that's more reading and sure to turn off even more people. Aloha.