With the hordes headed to the movie theaters today to watch the poorly-reviewed Alice Through the Looking Glass and X-Men: Apocalypse, I decided to put that disappointment off and clear through some of my early 2016 backlog. Films I can count on to disappoint without having to stand in line for them. This is largely my rationale for having watched The 5th Wave. Continue reading Movie Review: The 5th Wave (2016) “Does The Sixth Wave Have the Ending?”
The official start to Comic Con 2013 isn’t until tomorrow night, but the promotional posters continue to flow on to the Interwebs. Today we have new offerings from: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Amazing Spider-Man 2, Carrie, Edge of Tomorrow (formerly All You Need is Kill), Oblivion (for the film’s Blu Ray release on August 8th), The Seventh Son and the third already from 300: Rise of an Empire.
Today’s been a bit of a pre-summer theme week here on Killing Time. As we look ahead to the summer behemoths, some are absolute slam dunks. I would be utterly shocked if Iron Man 3, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Man of Steel or Elysium failed to deliver. There are this year, an unusual number of films that stride the fence between “I’m looking forward to it” and “Oh please, God, don’t let it suck.” Here are the top 5 on my worry list:
1. Monsters University – This may purely be post-Cars 2 traumatic stress syndrome and-to be fair-this one has a plot that doesn’t sound absolutely meatheaded the way Cars 2 did. Pixar also has an odd history of producing crap trailers for amazing films so they always make me nervous, but nothing I’ve seen has me thinking this is going to be a classic.
2. World War Z – First it was going to be a trilogy and a franchise for Brad Pitt. Then it was just one movie. Then test audiences saw the one movie and hated its guts so much that they grabbed everyone, went back out and filmed over a third of the movie over again. I love this book. I think the ant pyramid of zombies is freaking awesome. Want it to be good. Nervous.
3. The Lone Ranger – Let’s deal with the problem on the left in the picture below. It’s not Tonto and the Lone Ranger. Depp looks like he’s going full multiple Sparrows in Pirates 3 and I hate the make-up. Plus, how in the name of all that is holy can you spend nearly $300 million making a western? I love this character. I have since I was a kid. I really wanted a great treatment and THIS one I’m nearly certain won’t deliver. In fact, I’ll be as surprised if it’s good as I will be if Star Trek is bad.
4. Kick Ass 2- Kick Ass left itself open for a sequel so we knew it was going to happen, but everything I’ve seen so far has been painfully bad. The story is also not as strong as the first film and Jim Carrey has a tendency to ….overwhelm any film he’s in. Don’t make Hit Girl suck.
5. 300: Rise of an Empire – OK! Quick history review: how many of the 300 survived the battle of Thermopylae? NOOOOOONE. First the sequel was going to be about Xerxes. Then it was changed to 300: Battle of Artemsia, which is a famous naval battle in which the Greeks held off Xerxes’ navy. Now it’s 300: Rise of an Empire. These are Greeks not Spartans. You don’t have Zack Snyder who, love him or hate him, defined the look of the film. You don’t have source material like Snyder had Frank Miller’s graphic novel. What do you have? The picture below was released a few days ago an it is the only evidence of any kind we have that this isn’t the result of a studio executives mad libs bet gone horribly awry.
Killing Time 