The Wild Robot (2024)

The Wild Robot (2024)

 

image from Universal Pictures

9/10

Starring the voices of     

Lupita Nyong'o

Pedro Pascal

Kit Connor

 

Directed by Chris Sanders

 

It is not hard to say that this is going to go down as one of the best animated movies of this decade, because the story is that good. Based off a book by Peter Brown, Chris Sanders wrote this amazing screenplay and directed this masterpiece. He has not dropped the ball since he left Disney for Dreamworks, animations like How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods are part of his resume, so when I saw his name attached to this, I knew I had to see it.

The animation is not trying to compete with Disney when it comes to the graphics, the movie does not have a complete CGI look, you can see a form of hand painting used on the characters, which is why the budget is below $100 million.

The masterful voice acting in the movie and the flow of the movie steals you away from what you are doing, and you become lost in this new world. Sanders did a wonderful thing of not allowing Roz to become a lost puppy on screen, running around looking for something to do. Roz seemed confident and pushed to finding a reason to carry on, and once found, there was no stopping her until she was able to see it through to completion.

Roz is a robot, full name is Rozzum unit 7134. Her container was washed up on the shore of an island not inhabited by humans. She comes on, when an animal mistakenly hit her on button, then from that moment, she was following her basic programming running around the island, looking for someone to claim her as her owner and give her tasks.

The running around was not without its price, since she was not meant to be on this island and does not understand how to relate with the animals or navigate such surroundings. By the time Roz decided to slow down to understand the language and the surrounding she is in, she had sustained some considerable damages.

Nonetheless, the stumbling about led her to crash into a tree, which caused the death of a goose mum and smashed all her eggs except one. She took that egg, then lost it again and had to chase down a fox to be able to get it back. Her curiosity got the best of her, and she kept the egg until it hatched. The gosling was a runt. A runt meaning it was smaller than what a normal goose should be and in the wild, runts do not naturally survive. Roz met a possum mother with her babies, and she told Roz that she is now the gosling’s mother and must care for it. Roz took that as her new directive, modifying her programming and adopted the gosling. But since she did not understand what it means to care for a gosling, the fox, which initially tried to eat the gosling as an egg, decided to work with Roz to raise the child. The selfish process the fox thought will be beneficial to his survival, and the fox felt sorry for the gosling because Roz’s way of trying to care for this child was almost like she was torture.

So, we get to watch this two raise the gosling and prepare it for winter when it must migrate.

The whole process was not easy, and the animation made sure that we get to have enough comedic fun watching, and there are touching moments seeing them fail and some action in the ending with robot fights.

This is a must see.

Brothers (2024)

Brothers (2024)

 

6/10

Starring          

Josh Brolin

Peter Dinklage

Brendan Fraser

Glenn Close

 

Directed by Max Barbakow

 

One thing this movie has is the engaging factor. I must be honest – it is written in a way to leave you wanting to see how things will line up. What I mean by line up is. Instead of the urge to see how things will end, how the brothers will find a way to make amends and get ahead, you are held by the many missing blocks.

What happened to their mum?

The mum’s boyfriend who swallowed the emerald, how did that play out?

What weird thing was the beautiful and forever gorgeous Marisa Tomei cameo appearance into?

And how were the brothers going to deal with the cop chasing them?

Some matters, like the last one was not well tied up, and the movie had some incidents that will make you go, hmm!!! But in the end, it made for a good time, and I enjoyed holding out to the end to see how the things lined up.

The cast in this movie were excellent, and I hardly recognised Glenn Close.

The plot is about two twin brothers, Moke (Josh Brolin) and Jady (Peter Dinklage). You can already see how the difference in height gives you the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny De Vito feel, but the movie is nothing like that. These two brothers grew up as thieves, their mother (Glenn Close) was an armed robber and both brothers were just petty thieves when she left. During one of their heists, Jady got caught. He did not rat out Moke (something the movie does not really touch on), but Moke went on to turn his life around and try to be a better person after the incident. Jady got out early, and this was due to the assistance of a corrupt officer, Farful (Brendan Fraser). They had a deal, Farful will help Jady get out of prison with the aid of Farful’s dad who was a judge and he in return will do a job for them. As you can guess, Jady went to Moke and convinced him to help him out to carry out this last task. It was from there, Moke learned that Jady was in touch with their mother all these times, and they were running their own game and needed him.

How the family was able to iron things out and sort out their differences to get on top of the situation, well you will need to watch this movie on Amazon Prime to find out. Just note, it is not a masterful comedy, just a good enough movie to see when you have little or nothing else to watch.

Alien Romulus (2024)

Alien Romulus (2024)

7/10

Starring          

Cailee Spaeny

David Jonsson

Archie Renaux

Isabela Merced

Directed by Fede Álvarez

 

Alien Romulus is a good film, I tell you. It has been a while since I have seen a good film like this, and it carries its own weight of twist and turns, and it does homage to the franchise. There are ribcage bursting out things. Stabbing with the Alien tail, people running from a monster so huge that you wonder why not just give up. The movie plot is so dark it is amazing, and it is a great job done by director and writer Fede Álvarez.

It is a good thing to see what modern day graphics can do with these Alien creatures, and it is also amazing to see a familiar face. The moment I saw the late Iam Holm, I was like see what CGI can do. It was a nice work done, since we cannot get Sigourney Weaver’s character Ripley back into the franchise, thanks to the way the franchise has gone with her character.

This movie also takes place in space in 2142, and it follows the events of the first movie Alien (1979) the movie plot takes place between Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986).

After the events of the first movie, the humans took the remains of the Alien to a secret base to go work and see how they can merge the Alien DNA with that of humans and create a better evolved human race. Now how that played out, is something you will have to see, but this was a subplot in the movie that did not take hold until half-way in. So, what led to the Alien mounting another assault on the human race?

While they were doing their experiment in space, the Alien got out and damaged the whole space station. The whole thing was abandoned there in space.

Then comes Rain, an orphan miner who is trying to do enough time mining so she can finally leave the mining planet and go to a planet Yvaga where only humans live with the hope of a better life. Rain lives with her adoptive brother Andy, who is a cyborg with some broken motor functions, reprogrammed to protect Rain by her late father. When Rain was unable to leave the planet, her ex-boyfriend called her for a one-time job in space. The reason she was called is that they need Andy to help them get into the abandoned space station and steal the cryostasis chambers that will allow them to escape to the planet Yvaga. This was supposed to be a get in, get the chambers and get out, but as you know how these things go.

They got in, got the oxygen working, and they mistakenly got the heating on and the frozen cloned facehuggers got lose and well, as you can expect things did not go as planned from then on.

Enjoyed the movie more than I expected to.

Transformers One (2024)

Transformers One (2024)

4/10

Starring          

Chris Hemsworth

Brian Tyree Henry

Scarlett Johansson

Keegan-Michael Key

 

Directed by Josh Cooley

 

I have to say this movie was underwhelming. I had some idea at the back of my mind that I was going to like it, since it was now an animation and there is very little you cannot achieve when you are doing animation, but I was in the end disappointed. The main problem is how the story develops. I am not going to lie and say that I am fully into the Transformer franchise stories and understand many of the origin tales. This is the first time I am seeing this particular origin story of the hate between Optimus Prime and Megatron, when I naturally believe that the hate was not personal it was just you are an Autobot and I am a Decepticon. The change from friends to enemies came about from a betrayal that has nothing to do with both, and I felt the movie could have done better with that plot.

I did not enjoy the graphics at all, and I felt the plot was weak and will not help the franchise win more viewers. That said, the voice acting was good in the movie, but that was it.

The plot is about two friends working in the mines of Cybertron. Cybertron is the home of the transformers, who can transform into vehicles. But these two friends ever since they came online (which signifies birth in their world) were without transformation cogs. In fact, it turns out many come online without these cogs and are made to work in the mines of Cybertron, mining Energon for their planet.

These two friends Orion Pax and D-16 are mine workers, and Pax always sees them being more and does everything he can to be more than just a mine worker, especially obsessed with finding the Matrix of Leadership, but without cogs there is little to no way that can happen. The leader of Cybertron is a Prime called Sentinel, Sentinel is the only surviving Prime left in Cybertron after the others were killed by the alien invaders. Sentinel goes to the surface of their planet to fight off the alien invaders and to look for the Matrix of Leadership, something he has been doing for some time but never achieving.

Pax pulled one of his stunts and got he and D-16 noticed by everyone. This caused a moral boast of other mine transformers that they can be more. This did not go well with their mine leader Darkwing, the reason for this will be best if you watch the animation yourself if you are interested.

Darkwing reassigned them to garbage disposal, wanting them to be there forever, it was there they met B-127. But Pax discovers a message from one of the dead Primes, and he convinced D-16 and B-127 to follow him to the surface to find the message’s origin. There is where they find another Prime, who tells them that they were all supposed to have cogs, and no transformer comes online without one. Now they know there is more going on in Cybertron that is being kept from them. We can see from here that Orion Pax will become Optimus Prime, and D-16 will become Megatron.

As I said, I did not feel this animation as much as I should, and that is why I am not surprised that it did not do well in the box office and has some average ratings.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

4/10

Starring          

Michael Keaton

Winona Ryder

Catherine O'Hara

Jenna Ortega

Justin Theroux

Monica Bellucci

Willem Dafoe

 

Directed by Tim Burton

 

Thirty-six years after the masterpiece Beetlejuice (1988), we now have a sequel. This sequel tries to not forget the characters of the previous movie and maintain the special effect style of the first movie, to give this movie the same kind of feel. The problem is the story itself is not focused enough to gather the same kind of love as in the first movie. This movie had too many characters and too many sub-plots and just felt like it was made as a fan service art, rather than a movie meant to be a continuation of a legacy. Michael Keaton reprises his role as Beetlejuice.

The characters like Delores played by Monica Bellucci or Wolf played by Williem Dafeo, if you delete those characters from the movie, I think the movie will still have the same ending. Because both were added to the movie as forms of distractions, but were never integral to the movie itself. At first, it seemed like Delores was the main villain, but the plot just winds past her. Theirs and the other subplots were placed for laughs, problem is they made the movie feel lost.

The movie also introduces us to Astrid (Jenna Ortega) Lydia’s daughter. Now Lydia has embraced her ability to see ghosts, and milks it for money. She is the host of a show called Ghost House with Lydia Deetz, and she is dating the producer. She and Astrid are estranged and so is Lydia and her parents, but the death of her father, causes both Lydia (Winona Ryder) and Delia (Catherine O’Hara) to unite and start planning the burial.

There is a missing link in the movie, which is never fully explored. Astrid and Lydia’s estranged situation is not fully felt on screen. Astrid explains why they are estranged, which for many movies is enough, but add to it that her father is also dead, there seem to be more which can best be explained from Lydia’s view than just Astrid, which was not done.

We are shown that she does not like her family, as you will see from the movie, that they are weird and neglecting, but still it felt in the movie that they could have done more to make that feeling of distance more meaningful.

Unlike the first movie, Beetlejuice is shown a lot more, and we see him trying his best to get Lydia’s attention from the land of the dead. Astrid gets herself into some trouble, and she is in the underworld and Lydia needs help to save her, so she calls out Beetlejuice, and he agreed to help her based on his own conditions.

In the end, as I said, the movie is just a fan service making and lacks the fun of the first movie.

Trap (2024)

Trap (2024)

4/10

 

Starring          

Josh Hartnett

Ariel Donoghue

Saleka Night Shyamalan

Hayley Mills

Alison Pill

 

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

 

The first 50 minutes of the movie is amazing, 50% into the movie’s runtime, and you can feel the wonderful writing of M. Night Shyamalan and the directing for the first half of the movie is just superb. If the movie ended there, when he gets to have a one-on-one talk with Lady Raven (the make-believe famous singer in the movie, played by Shyamalan daughter) it would have been great. But even at that point, being able to get that close to someone famous seemed so impossible and out of place, but I was going to let it slide, but the Second Act of this movie was all about being out of place and just not adding up. Yes, the confrontation with the killer is before us and his next actions are important, but it was like Shyamalan ran out of ideas. How he was able to get that close to a famous singer and get that singer to co-operate with him to the point shown in this movie is outrageous and damn lazy writing. The final act of this movie was awful. If I was told this movie was written by someone who was having his first break, I would not have felt bad, but this is M. Night Shyamalan – how can he write such a horrible third act? It was just too obvious he did not want to kill the character off. No way, anyone will attack an officer and not get shot.

The movie is about a man, a serial killer who takes his daughter to a concert of the famous musician Lady Raven, and he notices that there are a lot of police officers about and FBI agents. He is suspicious, and he starts to get familiar with the people working there, asking innocent questions, to gain their trust and finds out that they are there looking for him, even though they do not know what he looks like.

He has no idea how they know he will be there, or how they plan to find him, all he knows is that he needs to get out of this concert and not let his daughter know that something is up.

We get to watch how he cons his way to people’s trust and use all these to get around the police. We see how he tries to keep his family together while trying to escape from the police and keep his identity a secret.

It will be hard for me to say, go and watch this movie when I know that halfway through, it goes from thrilling fun watch, to downright disappointment.

 

Rebel Ridge (2024)

Rebel Ridge (2024)

 

6/10

Starring          

Aaron Pierre

Don Johnson

AnnaSophia Robb

 

Directed by Jeremy Saulnier

 

Rebel Ridge is a fun watch, you are engaged in a cat and mouse kind of situation, where the lead Terry and the police chief Sandy seem to keep running at each other. They never seem to find a way to de-escalate the situation between them, making it almost impossible for the movie to have a happy ending, which is what the movie wanted.

When my friend suggested that I see this movie, he said it had a Rambo, First Blood feel. I think it is more Jack Reacher than it is First Blood.

First Blood was gritty, rough and Rambo you can tell had lost his mind and was never going to stop until he was dead. This had a more reasonable motive, and the Summer character gave Terry the grounding he needed not to go overboard.

Now, that all said, you can easily see in this movie how things were taking to a point where make believe was overdone, and the movie failed to make a lot of sense in many cases, but in the time of useless films like The Union or The Killer, this is a welcome development to watch a film from start to finish and not feel like smashing the screen.

The movie starts with Terry on a bike and getting run over by the cops in the town he just rode in. He was searched, and he had on him $36,000 which he got from selling his truck and his partnership in a business. He needed the money to bail his cousin out. The police seized the money from him, and there is where Terry had a problem.

His brother was a state witness, who helped put a criminal in jail, so he cannot be sent to prison because if he does, he will not last a day. He was busted on drug charges and needed to be bailed out before he gets sent to prison, which is what Terry was trying to do.

The problem is, the town which his cousin got busted in was running a scheme, to which Terry happened to fall into. They were stealing money off people and running a game to fund the community and buy off the judge. So, Terry needed to get the money back, which was not going to be possible, and time is running out for his cousin.

As you can guess, for this to be a movie, things did not play out the way Terry wanted, and he decided to take the whole police department down with him, if he is unable to get this de-escalated the way he thinks it should go.

You can catch this movie on Netflix.