hendricks-jon

It's several kinds of stories layered on top of each other including love story, spy story, critique of consumer culture, mystery, schizophrenic story, with an ending that is a bit magical realist. Keeps you wondering and guessing throughout. Great characters and story-telling draw you in and you care about them. Definitely worth seeing. I went into this film with no preconceptions other than a sci-fi take on consumer culture. Found the film very enjoyable and well told. Setting the film in post-Soviet Russia with an onslaught of American consumer capitalism was a nice angle to the "genre" of consumerism critique films. Frankly, I don't think the director quite knew what genre of the film it was but that's okay. Was a very fun ride.

I cannot believe The Avengers has received such stellar reviews. By 1/3 the way into the film, none of the characters draw one in, the story is uncompelling and I find myself only waiting in boredom for the next fight scenes which turn out to be formulaic and insufficient to warrant further viewing. The designs for various scenes and characters also fail. They look plastic and cheap and distracting from the story rather than immersive. Save your time and money and skip this title. Evidently these reviews have a minimum line count which is equivalent to paying by the word. So let me be verbose. This film was not even fun to watch the villains tearing apart the world because they look so silly in their costumes, their character building moments are horribly predictable and shallow, and what is up with the designs for Loki? He looks more samurai than Scandinavian god, which I am sure is a tip of the hat to the samurai influence in comic books, but let's get real for a moment. He's a bloody Norse god. He should look Norse. If he's going to look so radically different from Norse mythology -- all cybernetic-anime -- then there needs to be some kind of story and character building to explain it.