mossikukulas-21314

I watched this last night out of morbid curiosity. Thankfully I dozed off during some parts of the film so I was spared the indignity.

The end result was a film for 5-year olds with a PG-13 rating out of an R-rated franchise. I don't know what they thought they were doing or what their target audience was but this was a spectacular fail.

The casting.. as I knew I heard Cate Blanchett was Lilith and Kevin Hart was Roland I knew this was doomed.

Lilith is in her early twenties.

Roland is a towering mercenary dude with gadgets that make him a one-man army.

Where's Mordecai? A great character that was left out.

Where's Brick? Why did get Krieg? Were they trying to squish in characters from the rest of the games? Stick to basics people.

What's the point of auto-tuned Jack Black? Should have kept the original claptrap voice actor. Just utter nonsense.

The only cool thing in the film is how they tied into it Marcus' bus. That was pretty cleverly done I was amazed for a few minutes and I returned to the grim reality of the film.

A spectacular fail, a spectacularly wasted opportunity to do what Fallout and Last of US did for their franchises. Maybe it should have been a TV show? Maybe focus on the actual aspects of the game itself? What about all dem guns? Billions of randomly generated weapons.

Or maybe Hollywood people, hire some actual writers to write something decent!!!!

I'll stop here because I could write a book. This is the example of how NOT to make a film out of a game franchise.

AVOID!

The opening of the film and pretty much the first half are excellent in terms of direction, acting, tension, atmosphere, world building everything. It's designed to be that way to lure you in.

Yes it is designed that way as confessed by the director to make you think this is a serial killer movie.

It's meant to be good to hook you and lure you in so you sit and watch the whole thing thinking to yourself, is this it? Is this what they're going with? Really?

It's such a massive letdown and disappointment the stupid plot they have come up with for this film. I love the element of supernatural but this was just stupid. The writing is really really sloppy towards the end and they have squandered an excellent performance from Nicholas Cage and Maika Monroe.

The mum looked 'cheaply done', the makeup is so bad it's not even funny.

It's like the run out of inspiration halfway through and said oh well some idiot is going to watch this so if they're still watching it halfway we still got them.

I'm giving it 5 because of the excellent first half and what could have been.

AVOID!

I saw it last night and I was quite captivated by it. It reminds me very much the films of Wes Anderson without any of the narrative in the background but it also has its own unique delivery style. Especially the choice of colour and how it is blends with the filming locations or CGI is quite remarkable.

Emma Stone was captivating for the most part and she played out the character's development within the plot frame very convincingly.

This is not a film for everyone that is for sure. If you don't like the above directors then you are probably going to hate this film. Lanthimos is building his own unique profile in Hollywood and that's great to see even if comparisons are inevitable.