Plus we got a whole lot of rumors around Sony Marvel projects. As well as upcoming Marvel castings, filming starting and more in the MCU. So join us for the news and more Deadpool and Wolverine.

And here’s my Deadpool and Wolverine theory video:

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Comments or Questions: Deadpool and Wolverine Thoughts?

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Cloverfield

So, this has been a movie that I’ve loved for a while. I saw it in theater whens it came out, and the marketing for Cloverfield has not been duplicated and rarely even tried to be duplicated. Let’s go back in our time machine and talk about the build up for Cloverfield.

The Build Up

Cloverfield was a rumored JJ Abrams project for a little while. He was still in the midst of Lost, and everyone wanted to know what his next project was. Even someone like myself who has never really enjoyed Lost and has only watched the first season and a half was curious because of it being JJ Abrams. Then it came out that this was going to be a creature feature and it got closer and closer to the release date. But instead of seeing trailers, seeing shots of the monster on posters and billboards, we got websites. We got conspiracy theory websites, we got news websites for the movie, there were sounds being released of this monster, but you never really got a full clue what it was. As it came time for the movie to come out, we just had bits and pieces of information and people were stoked for it. It was a horror movies/creature feature that had a build done is a completely unique and carefully planned out way.

The Movie

Unfortunately, I didn’t go see it opening night, but there was a group of us friends, and we were interested in seeing it. We had heard a little bit more about it by then, but I’d managed to stay spoiler free. The experience of seeing this movie in a theater is a good spot to start describing it. We were maybe a week or so after opening, and the theater was still mostly full. The movie starts and you quickly get an idea of what is going on. With Cloverfield, I don’t think that there are a ton of actual surprises in the movie, a few, but not a ton. It’s a creature feature done with found footage and done really well. The characters are celebrating a friend leaving for a new job when there’s a disaster that starts. A monster is attacking New York City. You don’t know where it’s come from, you don’t know how it got there, and you don’t know what it really looks like for a while, you just know that there is a monster. We get to tag along with a group of characters from that going away party who are trying to escape New York City and find the people that they have gotten separated from.

Initial Thoughts

I loved this movie from the first time I saw it. I had not been and to this day am still not a fan of found footage movies. I thought that The Blair Witch Project was dumb. This movie almost changed my mind on them and I gave a number of them a chance, I still think that it’s kind of sloppy normally. Cloverfield did a better job at creating a situation where it wasn’t as nauseating to watch, and it mattered that you didn’t know what was happening. There were moments of reprieve for the characters that you don’t often see, and there were moments of real life that were happening as the story unfolds. It wasn’t just a movie meant to scare you, in fact, for a movie that would be classified by some as a horror movie, there really wasn’t a ton of the horror to it. Action, most definitely, suspense, for sure, but the classic jump horror moments that plague so many horror movies, there weren’t a ton of them. It was about the characters and their struggle to survive, it wasn’t a found footage where someone had placed themselves into a bad situation, it’s where they had a bad situation placed around them, and now they had to deal with it and they did a great job in the acting, while not always the greatest, of dealing with it like normal humans. Very scared humans, but normal humans. There wasn’t any sense that these were special characters in the story, sure we got to see their story, but they weren’t a cut above the characters you saw in the background who were panicking and trying to escape, they were doing that as well.

So there we have my non-spoiler review. I think that covers it well enough to jump into more details about what I really enjoyed/found interesting in this movie.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Spoilers Sweetie.

You have been warned.

I’m not going to recap it again, but just to add in some information. Everyone dies in the end, well, not everyone, theoretically one of the main characters escapes, but that is it. It’s something you could guess was going to happen. When the brother of one of the characters (fiance to another) gets killed off early in the movie, you know that no one is safe. The fact that the characters survive as long as they do is more luck than anything else. That makes it even more gripping.

Another piece that I appreciated was that the camera man, played by TJ Miller, for the found footage, was a bit of a goofy character. Once stuff starts going, that isn’t the case so much, but he handles it differently, the disaster/attack going on around him than the other characters do. His panic is unique to other peoples panic, and actually, the main characters, Hud, Lily, Marlena, and Rob, all have their own particular type of panic. They all have different things that they focus on. Rob is worried about Beth whom he loved but had broken up with recently. Hud is able to hold it together fairly well because he likes Marlena and because he can document everything. Lily is focused on the fact that her finance, Jason – who is Rob’s brother, just died as they were trying to escape. And with Marlena is actually what I’d call the most pure panic. She is loosely connected to the group, but is an outsider compared to the rest of them. She gets separated from them at the beginning and she’s clearly seen something horrible when she comes back. As much as Hud, TJ Miller’s character, tries to talk to her, she’s in many ways broken as a character, which is interesting to see.

Let’s talk about the monster. The monster doesn’t matter. Sounds weird, but I’d say it’s very much the case, the monster just needs to look good enough and monstrous enough that it’s scary. It could have been any sort of monster and worked. Now, that isn’t to say that it doesn’t look cool, it really does. And having the babies fall off of it, or maybe smaller monsters was a nice twist and set up some of the better horror aspects to the movie. But the suspense of not knowing about the monster is how the monster is used most effectively. At the end of the movie, we don’t know for sure where the monster has come from, we don’t know if it was doing this specifically or because monsters just attack cities in creature feature movies, we don’t know even how powerful it truly is, and that’s okay, because Cloverfield is a creature feature that isn’t mainly about the monster. It’s about the group of four characters and Rob’s need to save Beth. And that’s good, if it was about the monster, you wouldn’t have been about to do found footage like they did.

Finally, as time has gone by, and I just watched it three weeks ago, maybe four now, how has it held up? I personally think that Cloverfield has held up really well. The CGI for the monster is good, and the whole found footage style works extremely well. Just to touch on that again, what I love about this found footage style is that movies like Welcome to the Jungle (so horrible) and The Blair Witch Project are made a horror movies first and foremost. They are about people going out of their way to put themselves into a horrible situation and then reacting poorly to that situation. As characters, they almost always had the ability to go back and leave well enough alone, but they never did. They always kept on poking the bear, going further and further into danger, but in Cloverfield, that wasn’t an option for these characters. They were actively trying to run away from the danger instead of filming themselves being stupid, they were filming it because, as Hud puts it, people have to know what happened here. There’s no trying to be cool, trying to get famous, and trying to prove a legend like there was in the other two, it’s purely characters in a bad situation trying to do what they think they have to do. At the core of that, that’s what I really like about Cloverfield, it’s a monster movie, but the monster is just a piece in the background, it’s really a story about Rob, Lily, Hud, Marlena, and Beth, and how they fight to survive something horrible and what matters to them as as characters. Is it a cinematic masterpiece, no, but it’s a really well done movie that takes you on a pretty crazy ride and tells an interesting story,  and when I watch a movie, that’s what I want, and Cloverfield does that well.

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Kristen and I got a chance to see this on Tuesday, and it’s officially releasing on July 21st, 2017. So as you’re making your plans for the weekend, I get to help you answer the question: is Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets worth seeing?

The story is based on a French comic called Valerian and Laureline, which was first published in 1967 and wrapped up in 2010. Needless to say, they didn’t try and fit the whole story into the movie. The story revolves around the two main characters, Valerian and Laureline, as they try and determine what is going on in Alpha City, the City of a Thousand Planets, and why an attack is happening that is making parts of the city and station uninhabitable. This city was sent away from its decaying Earth orbit after it got too large, but that was 400 years ago. Since then, this city, which had a good number of alien inhabitants while around Earth, has picked up many, many more aliens, and everyone lives together peacefully for the most part. However, there is a zone of radiation that is growing, making parts of the station uninhabitable. So Valerian and Laureline are tasked with helping Commander Filitt, played by Clive Owen, find out who is behind it all.

Some initial thoughts about this movie — first of all, it was better than I expected. I thought it was very likely that we would see nearly all of the thousand alien races, but we probably only saw several dozen It was still a lot, but the trailers made this movie look like it was going to be shiny alien races galore and not much plot. Now, that’s not to say that there is a great plot — there are multiple plot threads and one that runs throughout the whole thing, but it isn’t a tightly constructed plot. In fact, we meet a character pretty early on in the film who seems to be a Chekhov’s gun; however, the film then forgets about him, and we’re left wondering whether there was something left on the editing room floor, or if the writers just forgot to come back to him. The best compliment that I can pay to this film is that it is very reminiscent of The Fifth Element, another Luc Besson film (albeit shinier — which wasn’t always in its favor).

Let’s talk about the acting in this film. The simplest way to put it was that it was kind of a hot mess. This film focuses heavily on the characters of Valerian and Laureline played by Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne. It seems Valerian is supposed to be very like Korben Dallas from The Fifth Element; however, in Bruce Willis’s portrayal of Dallas, the character had rough edges but ends up being generally likable. Though it’s clear that DeHaan’s Valerian is supposed to be likable, he isn’t given the same rough edges and depth that Korben Dallas has. Some of that is because the portrayals of Laureline by Cara Delevingne and Bubble by Rihanna, both whom are evidently supposed to help Valerian grow and develop as a character, do not work all that well as foils to him. Rihanna’s performance generally just seemed to take up space in the film, as it ended up adding nothing besides a dance scene and an attempt at boosting Valerian’s character growth. Cara Delevingne’s performance was better; however, her acting range seems limited, so while she was believable, for the most part, as the government agent partnered with Valerian, she wasn’t as believable as a character who was supposed to grow significantly like Valerian and also encourage him to be a better person. While DeHaan did a decent job of trying to show that growth, the fact that Delevingne’s acting style is reminiscent of Nicholas Cage’s (i.e. they seem to basically play themselves in films) meant that there wasn’t much for DeHaan to play off of. Despite these flaws, though, there were a few solid performances. For example, Sam Spruell, who plays a General on the Alpha Base/City was really enjoyable to watch, and it was compelling to see him make tough decisions.

The aliens in the world are generally well done. However, they weren’t without flaws either. There is an alien race that you meet early on, called the Pearls, that felt like a miss to me. They are generally humanoid and almost remind one of the aliens from Avatar. They were presented as a very happy and peaceful race, and this was conveyed through their flowing, almost dance-like way of moving. This didn’t make any sense to me, though, as it would be impossible to maintain without having much more muscular shoulders than these aliens had; they were generally tall and wispy looking. This was a shame, as we meet them early on, and it gives the film a bit of a rocky start. But the CGI and other special effects were generally quite well done.

One last critical note — I do want to talk a little bit about the length of this film, and some issues with the story itself that I saw, without giving away too much. This film is two and a half hours long, which I felt was a good 45 minutes too long for the material in the film. Now, some of this comes from the creators trying to jam more aliens into this film than needed, but a fair amount of it is just odd pacing, or odd additions of comedy at certain points. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets needed one more good pass-through by the editors, director, and studio to trim the fat. It also needed better direction in terms of the protagonists’ relationship — since the movie takes place in under 24 hours, it feels like the studio determined that the film needed to include a complete love story that resolved by the end. That was just a bad plan, as it felt rushed, and there was no real reason to bring it full-circle. I felt it would have been more compelling if, at the end, they’d had the girl kiss the guy and say something like, “We’ll see where this leads down the road,” to leave things more open-ended. There was no real reason to rush it and force it.

So I’ve talked about how this film was better than I expected — so why was that the case? First off, I’m sure it was partly because it exceeded my expectations by a long way. I was pretty sure from seeing the trailer that while it looked like it could be interesting, it was more likely going to be mostly a slog, punctuated by lots of pretty or impressive-looking aliens with no strong plot to pull it together. However, it did have a decent overarching plot (albeit a bit weak and overdone). Second, I liked it because it has a nostalgia factor due to its simliarity to The Fifth Element. These two films very much feel like they’re essentially the same film, and that’s not a bad thing. I still prefer The Fifth Element to Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, but there was something familiar about the film that made it more enjoyable for me. Finally, once you figure out that it isn’t trying to be a serious film and that it’s meant to be a popcorn flick, it allows you to enjoy some of the more well-done characters — for example, the Shingouz, who are information brokers. The three of them go to great, comical lengths to get Laureline to like them, and feel like a cross between Alf and half Howard the Duck.

What is my final takeaway from this movie? In short, it’s a popcorn movie; there isn’t much more to it than that. It touches loosely on some deeper themes, like the pitfalls of colonialism, but that mainly felt a bit borrowed from Avatar and didn’t add a great deal to the story. Is it worth seeing in theaters? It certainly was pretty to see in 3D, and there are lot of shiny aliens and special effects, but I don’t know that I would want to pay full price to go see it. This film is not a great piece of filmmaking, but I and most of the theater found it quite enjoyable nonetheless.

Critical Grade: D

Popcorn Grade: B-

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