Double Monster Movie Reviews!

So yesterday I had the privilege of watching two of the most recent monster movie releases one after the other; Pacific Rim and Monsters University. So I thought I would review both of them in one big monster blog post. So please read on and I hope you enjoy my reviews.

Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim only recently caught my interest as film to go see in the cinema. When the first trailer came out I wasn't all too impressed but with the latest trailers and featurettes I decided this was something I really wanted to see, after all who doesn't want to see giant robots fighting giant monsters? Ok so maybe if you're a 12 year old boy this film is going to appeal to you more than the general movie-going audience. But let me just say this, whoever you are, go watch this film on the biggest screen and go watch it in 3D, because it is an experience! This film is director Guillermo Del Toro's tribute to the anime and manga genre, the film follows a war between mankind and species of monsters who make their way through a portal at the bottom of the pacific ocean. Mankind's defences are bunch of giant robots called Jaegers, piloted by two people whose brains are connected through something called the drift. Cue a lot of incredible action, cheesy dialogue and a bunch of fun. Story wise Pacific Rim is very cliche and it's characters are very stereotyped, so much so that film is on the verge of becoming a parody of itself. The story is still a lot of fun but its the action and effects that will blow your mind, making this one of the coolest  movies of 2013. The acting is ok and carries the film enough until the next big action sequence but none of these actors are going to win Oscars for their performances. Idris Elba is the only guy who stands out to me but maybe thats because i'm loving the guy in Luther at the moment, just get ready for a lot of 'Today we will cancel the Apartheid!' jokes when Elba plays Nelson Mandela in A Long Walk to Freedom later this year. Like I said at the start, watch this film in 3D, it's one of those films where the extra dimension really adds to the awesomeness of the film. For all this film's flaws, it is still really cool and as much fun as you can have in the cinema, I for one know this will not be the last time I see Pacific Rim, therefore I am giving it a rating of 3.5/5. This film is very cool and kicks a lot of ass, so please go see it instead of Grown Ups 2 this summer!

Monsters University

I want to start this review by saying Monsters Inc. is one of my favourite Pixar films, when I first saw it i fell in love with the characters of Mike and Sulley, so i was excited to see them return in the prequel, especially as the story was looking at their university lives, a stage of my life that I am in right now. We get to see in Monsters University where and how the friendship between the two characters started, bringing back a lot of nostalgia jokes, back story and more importantly and fun. I did have one problem with Pixar making the prequel, how were they going to make this exciting when we already know the outcome of the film? Well thankfully I was not to worry as Pixar are the masters of storytelling, adding in a lot of twists and turns that make Mike and Sulley's road to the top of Monsters Incorporated a rocky and unknowing one. Like last years Brave, Pixar didn't give away everything in the trailer! Now this wasn't to same standard as Monsters Inc. but it was still a lot of fun. We may still be waiting for Pixar to bring out there next original masterpiece but at least we get to see their most beautiful looking animation yet. Animation films really have gotten a lot better in quality and Pixar still seem to be just ahead of the game, this film looks incredible! There is a lot more depth to the characters compared to previous films and you can't help but feel that the only way is up for the animation studio, pardon the pun. Pixar are the masters of storytelling and seem to be able to grab the audience no matter what the age without the use of throwaway innuendo gags like other animation films. I really enjoyed this film and it was great to see some of my favourite characters back on the big screen, it may not have been Pixar's best film to date but it sure was one of their best looking! I am giving Monsters University a rating of 4/5. The short film beforehand called The Blue Umbrella was also really good, with almost photo like quality animation, it was good to see the animators of Pixar show off their artistic talent rather then just bring out another short Toy Story spin off.

What did you think of the films? Do you agree with me? Please comment below.

Thanks for reading!

Quick Reviews #3

So it's time for another round of quick reviews. This time round I review Wreck it Ralph, Zero Dark Thirty and The Impossible. Read and enjoy!

Wreck it Ralph
(This review was written under a brief from my film course, so it may read slightly different to my usual style. Please let me know what you think of this so that I know whether you guys prefer this style or not.)

After taking it’s time to be imported from the states Wreck it Ralph is finally here in the UK and ready to do business. Does it quite live up to the hype that many critics overseas have been calling ‘the new Toy Story’? Well unfortunately not, but that is not to say that it isn’t a decent animation film.

Wreck it Ralph follows arcade game villain Ralph, voiced by John C Reilly, sick of always being the bad guy, Ralph attempts to become a hero, jumping from game to game around the arcade, Ralph finds that becoming a hero might not be for the best. This is Disney’s best attempt yet to keep up with the big dogs like Pixar and DreamWorks in the animated film race. But unlike its competition it fails to attract the parents in the audience. Pixar does it perfectly; somebody of any age can sit down and really enjoy one of their films (forgetting Cars 2).  Wreck it Ralph on the other hand is not as much a family film but more of a kids film. 

Not that they don’t try, in the first act we get a load of cameos from other game characters such as Bowser and Sonic the Hedgehog, that will be enough to wet most gamers appetites, however this stops in the second act where we are left in a game called Sugar Rush which is way too sweet for most to handle.

This is where we meet Penelope an annoying glitch in the games framework irritatingly voiced by Sarah Silverman. This is when the film starts to fall apart because it just becomes very cliche' and boring, nothing new or original is being done to make this film stand out amongst the crowd. If the film had kept up its solid first half then we might have had the next Toy Story on our hands but instead we get bored by staying too long in a world we don’t like and followed around by a really irritating character that again we don’t particularly like and then we finish with an ending which is too predictable. 

The animation may be solid but it still has nothing on the advancements that Pixar make in every film they do. Wreck it Ralph starts off so well but disappoints in the last half, making this film nothing special in the animation genre. Therefore I am giving it a rating of 3/5.

Zero Dark Thirty

There has been a lot of mixed feelings about this film and when I finally came to watch it I didn't have the highest of expectations, however once I had finsihed it I was happily surprised. Zero Dark Thirty is based on first hand accounts of the events that led up to the eventual assassination of terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden. The film starts off with the very difficult to watch torture scenes that have been picked apart by the press since it's release. I can understand some of the criticism but these torture scenes are essential to the film and I believe were most likely essential to the information they gathered in real life. This is not the kind of film you are going to sit down one Saturday evening with your family and have fun watching. No, you have to watch this thoroughly from start to finish so that you can understand  what is going on and how difficult it must have been for the team that were trying to track down Bin Laden. If you are expecting this film to be anything like Kathryn Bigelow's last film The Hurt Locker then you will be disappointed, apart from the last 30 minutes the film is mainly made up of a bunch of people having meetings in offices with occasional real life acts of terrorism thrown in. This film wasn't as 'god bless america' as I thought it was going to be, with a lot of the film putting America in a kind of controversial light. Especially the CIA, the people there don't always seem to be that good at their job. As much as this film tries to give a realistic portrayal there are some points that feel quite fake, mainly with Jessica Chastain's character Maya who starts to shout and scream at her boss at one point and then when questioned by a senior personal she calls her self  'the motherf**cker who found this place', something I doubt would have happened within such a disciplined organisation. At two and half hours long this film still manages to keep you interested even though you already know the ending, the cinematography is incredible and the film really does look amazing. The acting is top notch with Jason Clarke's performance particularly standing out. The last 30 minutes are exhilarating and feel very real as we have since learnt that the director was allowed to see some of the real footage that took place during the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this film and was really interested from start to finish. I am giving Zero Dark Thirty a rating of 4/5.

The Impossible

Based on the real survival of a Spanish family The Impossible does the hard job of putting the tragic events of the 2004 tsunami onto film. A hard topic that the film sometimes pulls off and other times does not. For one, the main family's nationality was changed from Spanish to English, one can only assume this is for the film to attract a more mainstream 'western' audience. The problem with this is that the family are a very stereotypical posh English family that within the first 10 minutes of the film cannot stop referring to each other as 'darling'. This straight away provided a barrier for me as I found the family to be quite irritating so therefore when disaster eventually strikes I did not have an emotional connection with them. Thankfully their irritating nature decreases throughout the film enough for me to feel for the family and want for them to survive the disaster. However it is only this family that you care about, almost like any other survival type film you care for the characters you follow and not for the ones around them, which would be fine if this event was fictitious but it is not, it is real and a lot of people lost their lives and were affected by the tsunami and feeling for so few throughout this movie does not seem right. Maybe it is because director Juan Antonio Bayona has his previous roots in the horror genre that this film sometimes feels like a genre piece rather then a documentation of real life events. That's not to say that some of the horror elements in this film don't work as sometimes they really add to the scariness of the event but then again other times it makes it feel like a disaster movie. The title of this film is quite right, the story that happens does feel impossible and might be the reason that certain moments felt dramatised or too good to be true. As a film it has been shot beautifully with some scenes being absolutely terrifying, just like they should be. By the end of the film you do feel like you have been through an emotional journey, one that you may not want to take again. The 2004 disaster is one that is hard to portray on the big screen and The Impossible doesn't always pull it off however the film still isn't half bad, therefore I am giving it a rating of 3/5.