view_and_review

Valerian was a CGI crap fest infested with terrible acting and a subpar plot. I only made it halfway through before I had to give up. And I really really really tried to stick with it.

It had an interesting beginning with the International Space Station growing in size by adding modules from different nations up until they began adding modules from different beings from different planets, at which point, they renamed it the Alpha Intergalactic Space Station. It got to the point where it was so large it was a danger to Earth if it remained in Earth's gravitational orbit, so they used their thrusters and jettisoned out of there.

The movie then picks up 400 years later and that's when it just became some garbled nonsense with a futuristic military, some avatar like creatures on a peaceful planet, and nefarious plots that had to be uncovered. Unfortunately, we were left with Dane Dahaan and Cara Delevigne to take us through the happenings of this movie and they could not have been worse selections.

HBOMax.

The goal of a movie is to make the viewers suspend their disbelief. I have to be so drawn in that no matter what I see transpiring on screen, I can make myself believe it. If I can't get to the stage where I believe in the feasibility of what's going on on screen, then I can't get into the movie at all.

I could not get into "Peppermint." No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't believe that a Girl Scout mother turned herself into a hardened killer with the ability to hunt down and snuff out the gangbangers who were responsible for the death of her husband and child. She also hunted down the corrupt law officials responsible for the gangbangers going free. And along the way she shoved a gun down a dad's throat for being a terrible father.

To be perfectly honest, I stopped the movie a little less than halfway through. It may be that Riley North (Jennifer Garner) took the time to become a weapons expert, an explosives specialist, a trained fighter, and a ghost--if so, I never made it to the part of the movie where that was shown, AND I wouldn't have believed it anyway.

Obviously, Riley was not your normal person. Normal people who have their family taken at the hands of criminals don't hunt them down. Do they want to? Absolutely.

The mistake of the writer, Chad St. John, and the director, Pierre Morel, is that they believe that a vigilante movie full of righteous revenge is enough of a plot. As long as evildoers are getting their just desserts, then no need for any other kind of substance or credibility. A loving husband and a precious little girl were killed by some L. A. cholos who had enough power to control certain people in the corrupt justice system. St. John and Morel figured that was enough for a set up, now let's just roll out the justice at the hands of the wronged and aggrieved mother.

Just stop.

3.79 on Amazon Prime.

During WW2 the Germans were really sticking it to the Allied Forces. They had superior firepower and gameplanning. One of the things that aided them was an encryption machine called Enigma. They transmitted their top secret communications after encrypting them with Enigma which usually consisted of their next move. If the Allied Forces could crack the Enigma code, they could turn the tide of the war. For that the British employed Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) and a few other brilliant mathematicians.

"The Imitation Game" was a fantastic movie. Along with giving us a glimpse of the pragmatic and robotic Turing, we got a great history lesson.