Antagonisten

I had nothing to watch and decided to try this out. The first season is really good. The story is run of the mill terror fighting, but it was well made with good pacing, some action and managed to engage. So I was happy after season one seeing that there were three more seasons available.

Unfortunately the show quickly goes downhill from season one. Acting is still good, it still has high production values, but the story and writing is both lacklustre and weak. It requires a serious suspension of disbelief as the plot-lines become more and mor ridiculous and the shortcuts more frequent. It really is a shame since the characters are fairly well built and the setting works. But there is just no real way around weak writing.

Watch all four seasons if you really dig the style, but lower your expectations after excellent first season.

I didn't really fancy the first Pacific Rim movie that much, but it did have a certain level of artistic flair. Benicio del Toro has the ability to add that to all of his movies. It is very noticeable that he has stepped back in this case and left most of the work to others, only retaining a production credit.

On the surface this movie is not that different from the original. It's still giant robots boxing with japanese-style monsters. But the narrative from the first movie, the voiceover that at least gave you the feeling of a deeper story, the philosophical tidbits... All of that is missing completely. This is something more resembling one of the crappier Transformers-sequels, "here, this is the premise, now everybody fight and destroy things!". There is nothing really wrong with the special effects or the action sequences, but it's just not satisfying. The effects look slightly worse than in the first movie, but overall they are fairly well made. Much of the fighting is set inside a major city, that feels very much like a model. It's not a believable city, and in general the feeling of huge robots and giant scale is somewhat missing. It's more like one of those old Godzilla-movies where a model set with cardboard houses is destroyed, eveything just topples a little too easily. This was something that I felt was very successful in the first movie, there was a real sense of epic fighting going on. It was enforced by really well-made music and sound effects. All of that is much weaker here, even though it feels big-budget it still looks a bit cheap. Making effective action scenes is not easy, and even though they spent the money, they didn't get bang for their buck.

Honestly, I would probably recommend people to pass on this movie. If you liked the first one, this is most likely not going to do it for you. The lacking weight, the lacking flair and storytelling. It's basically more of the same, just that much less well-made.

I have sort of enjoyed all the previous installments in the Transformers saga. I'll admit it's part nostalgia for me, but it has also been a nice set of Blockbuster-movies with great special effects, big robots and good action scenes.

I would say the movies have been getting progressively worse throughout the series, I'll also admit that the addition of Mark Wahlberg didn't really help my opinion. But there has been a certain floor as to how crappy the comic relief has been, how jumbled the story was allowed to become, how much suspension of disbelief they allowed when it came to physics and worldly constraints (still allowing of course for the fact that it's a SF-movie).

In this movie though, screen-writing and continuity has been thrown out the window. The story is completely disjointed with no proper time- line and no real coherence. There are some decent concepts and a few funny characters, it's not a boring movie as such although it's at least 30 minutes too long. Without giving any spoilers, all these movies have felt a bit like they are repeating themselves, and this is no exception. I hope that this is the final installment to be honest, this movie series has survived itself.