Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

7/10

Starring

Tom Holland

Samuel L. Jackson

Zendaya

Directed by Jon Watts

It is the sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and the twenty-third film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). This movie also marks the end of phase three of Marvel’s The Infinity Saga.

Here is life after the death of Tony Stark/Iron Man, and with his death comes the heavy weight he carried when he kinda led the Avengers. Stark believed that Peter Parker was the one he could trust to carry the weight of his legacy and this film plays on that thread all through the movie.

The movie is fun, and i felt it was like a delayed gratification being played out here. I had to wait through a long intro and getting to know what is going on for over eighty minutes before the movie in my eyes finally kicked off.

This form of delayed gratification worked, because the moment things started to happen, they happened fast and I was totally engrossed. My comparison to the previous movie is that, I very much enjoyed the characters and the dynamics that followed the story of the individuals in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Here such dynamic and deep rooted acting following character depth was replaced with magnificent visuals.

It was like, you know the guys here already and here is someone new named Mysterio (Quentin Beck). His tale will be summarized, which it was and the movie got going.

The movie takes place after the events of the previous MCU film Avengers: Endgame (2019). Tony Stark is dead and the time where half of the universe was gone for five years is known as the Blip. Peter Parker is feeling the weight of the aftermath. While Aunt May is busy helping people with the aid of her nephew Peter in his Spider-Man costume to get over the events of the Blip.

Peter’s school is planning a trip to Europe and he is going with the hope of getting away from everything for a while. He has been ghosting Nick Fury and just wanted to focus on his trip to Europe to use that opportunity to win MJ.

Things as usual did not go the way he planned as Fury hijacked his trip to suit his own wants and Peter gets to meet another supposed superhero in Beck/Mysterio. Beck claims to be from another earth to battle a bunch of supervillians known in his world as the elements. He says they destroyed his own earth.

There is so much happening in Europe that everyone didn’t see Mysterio coming especially Peter who trusted him so much that he handed over his inheritance from Tony to Beck. This is no spoiler, if you follow the Spider-Man comics you already know that Mysterio is a villain.

In the end, I felt the relationship between MJ and Peter Parker was forced. It just didn’t gel like the way it was done in 2004’s Spider-Man 2 during the time of Toby Maguire and Kristen Dunst. Other than that, I enjoyed Happy’s role in the movie and enjoyed the movie as a whole.

ARQ (2016)

ARQ (2016)

4/10

Starring

Robbie Amell

Rachael Taylor

Shaun Benson

Gray Powell

Directed by Tony Elliot

The movie is half-baked and a very exhausting Groundhog Day kind of scenario. The challenge is the first act, it is dull and very un-eventful and then imagine that happening over and over again.

I for one believe the movie would have mattered as interesting and worth seeing if they got the intro right. The first act did not last long enough to deliver a sizable punch of intrigue and thrill, instead we get a straight forward things happening in a chaos theory kind of way.

Then we witness the repercussions of the little change play out similarly with to the first, with our supposed protagonist trying to get ahead of time.

The movie is set in the future where the human race is suffering from lack of food and good atmosphere. Humans now live isolated and struggle to keep food rations to themselves away from robbers. A man named Renton wakes up besides his former lover Hannah. The next thing we see are three men breaking into his bedroom and capturing them and tie them to a chair.

They demand he tells them where his rations are, but when something led to his death, he finds himself waking up again to experience the same thing over again.

When he gets killed, wakes up again on the same day. He soon figures out why they are caught in a time loop. Where he has to relive a home invasion on repeat go wrong. Now he is working against time to break the loop and escape the consequences of his life actions.

The disappointment in this movie is that it stated its own problem, “you cannot expect a different outcome by repeating the same action(s) over and over again.” The writers seem to forget that seeing a repeated dumbness of an actor can be boring and exhausting. The protagonist, instead of learning he just at certain times repeated the same action(s) over and over again.

You see him tweak some things, but the writers wrote him to be very naïve and extremely dumb to think that such tweaks were going to have a needed effect. How the director thought this was going to be fun to watch goes beyond me.

Imagine you have figured out the intent of the people around you and what they are capable of, like twice over. Then you go ahead and trust them to make the critical choice to change the outcome, when they have already failed on other critical decisions.

By the time the movie gets to the deep part and hidden secrets, you are already exhausted.

Here is a sci-fi movie about the future, that just failed to entertain, you can help yourself by missing this on Netflix.