mesaxi

I watched this because I was curious what Kevin Costner could do with a bad guy role in an over-the-top action movie. He was alright, still a bit wooden. I think he could have done more with better writing, but ultimately Kurt Russell carried the movie. He just can't help but do. And Courtney Cox did fine as well, always a pleasure to look at.

The movie itself is a very bombastic, fast paced, and poorly developed. Things just sort of happen, and rock songs from the period are played loud and often so they could sell a soundtrack. Nothing feels well explained.

5 may be a little generous but what the hell, it made me nostalgic for the period I grew up in. Not a great way but hey.

Boyle has made a single objectively good movie in his long career, and it's Trainspotting. Ever since then people have kissed his feet even though he's made bad movie after bad movie after bad movie.

I'll start with the iPhone gimmick, which resulted in a few very poorly done 180 degree shots and maybe some of the nightvision sequences that never actually fit what was happening in the movie. All of the stock footage and random edits were like something a college art student would do, unaware of just how pretentious they're coming off. Boyle has been around long enough to know better. I'm also sick to death of these filmmakers who keep coming up with "creepy masks" to put in their movie, or in the case pretty much just the trailer, because were just there and unexplained and randomly cut to at totally inappropriate times. There was a comically bad moment where he ADR'd a line of dialogue over a guy who was center frame and VERY CLEARLY not saying anything. There's also no real context or explanation for anything. The island is quarantined, if you go to the island you're abandoned....so WHY are there soldiers on the island at all? Ralph Fiennes is living off on his own....why? How? Where's his backstory? Why does he not just kill the big "alpha" zombie instead of repeatedly tranquilizing it and walking away?

Beyond Boyle, the writing is also just god awful. The entire premise of the movie is asinine, like the rest of the world is just going to write off the UK as an exclusion zone filled with diseased rage zombies for decades instead of simply clearing the island out entirely. The pregnant zombie scene was comically stupid.

The ending, with "Jimmy" or whatever, was the absolute kicker. Just when you think the movie can't get stupider a bunch of albinos in track suits jump out of the woods and start doing obnoxious kung-fu wirework to fight the zombies. It was like it suddenly morphed into a really bad John Woo movie or something.

I'm not just suggesting that you don't watch this movie, I'm suggesting you don't watch ANY Danny Boyle movies going forward. The dude sucks, that's all there is to it.

My hopes were high, but my overall verdict is a thumbs down. There were many issues that I could point at, but major one for me is how they failed to adapt the book correctly and what that will mean for the future of the show.

The books are told from the perspective of a security android that disables the program that regulates it's behavior, and how it views humans and chooses to use it's free will. This first season was about a security android that disabled it's governor module and...what the HUMANS thought about the android. That's where the show tripped on it's own feet and doomed itself. Aside from the added characterization being somewhat cringey, it changed the focus of the plot. And the next two books.....they don't have any of those characters. If I remember correctly they come back into the story in the 4th book. So now that they've contracted all of these actors that are supposed to what, wait 3 years to come back? Either that or Apple can invent their own material about what these characters were doing during those books and sideline the main story by constantly jumping back to them. They've painted themselves into a corner, which is a shame because books 2 and 3 were my favorites in the series. Really, the first book should have been done as a movie to introduce that character. Then move on to the show, where they could reintroduce those characters when you reach book four. It's only 160 pages afterall, that's an afternoon read. Instead they stretched it into Ten 20 minute episodes, which were extremely unfulfilling.

Beyond that, they made Murderbot a bit of a dick. I always saw the books as being an allegory for how autistics view other people, he doesn't hate them he just doesn't understand them on a social level. In the show they tried to keep you questioning whether or not he would snap and just kill everybody, which made him less likeable on the whole. They also threw away a lot of the great sci-fi bits to the character, removing the great lengths he had to go to disguise himself as a human to the point where he could just throw on a T-Shirt and nobody knew the difference.

Basically, all of the things I enjoyed about the books have been removed so they can make the show about this cringey caricature of a liberal commune, and how this group of space hippies are just so righteous that they defeat evil corporations and win over cold hearted robots. It had it's moments, but it was ultimately a major disappointment. And the humor failed about 80% of the time.