The Mummy Spoiler Free Review

Well, we’re back again with another movie review. Today we’re going to look at an interesting one: the first (second? third?) revival of the Universal Monsters and the beginning of their own, new cinematic universe. I’m talking of course about, The Mummy. Now there’s been a lot of really bad buzz about this one, so we decided to see what all the fuss was about. As usual, no spoilers ahead.

I’ll be totally honest, I kind of expected this to be a hate-watch. In fact, we came prepared, just in case. I even tried something new for the occasion.

Not bad, but really sweet. Also, why do I always get pink wine for these kind of movies?

I was willing to give this movie the shot, the benefit of the doubt, even. That is despite how dumb the trailers looked. Because trailers can be deceiving. It was kind of a ‘hope for the best but prepare for the worst’ kind of scenario. And well, I’m kind of glad I did. I’m going to come right out and say it: this movie is dumb. Not the dumb fun way that I actually tend to really enjoy, but the flopping over like a disgruntled teenager while whining ‘this is duuuuumb’ kind of way.

Laaaaame....

Let’s examine this further by breaking down the exact issues with this movie. 

-Tom Cruise is horribly miscast and phoning it in. Watching this movie, you can tell that this role was written for a younger actor (Russell Crowe even says ‘you are a younger man’. Cruise is 2 years older than Crowe). So much of it just doesn’t add up with Cruise as the lead. That’s not the only reason he’s miscast, though. His character is clearly supposed to be a ‘dashing rogue’, Han Solo-ish type and Tom Cruise cannot sell that, nor can he deliver a one-liner or quip that lands. He’s an annoying asshole with none of the charm this character needs, especially with his buddy Vale, played by a grating Jake Johnson who’s worse than he was in Jurassic World. They obviously cast Cruise for the star power, but he is completely wrong for this role. 

-Annabelle Wallis’ character, Jenny. First off, her and Tom Cruise have exactly zero chemistry on screen. Their ‘romance’ arc is totally forced, unearned, and basically out of nowhere. She’s also the worst character, and that isn’t the fault of the actress. She has nothing to do but spout exposition, be a damsel in distress, and have cringe-worthy conversations about how she thinks Cruise’s character ‘is a good man’. I don’t know who she’s trying to convince more, her or us. It was a conversation that was so trite, forced, and cheesy that I rolled my eyes so hard I’m pretty sure I saw my own brain. If I wanted to watch a movie about lost ancient treasures with a loveable rogue and a useless blonde, I’ll go watch Temple of Doom, because that one’s actually enjoyable. 

damn rights

-Ahmanet’s timeline. This one really gets under my skin, and that’s putting it mildly. We have three different dates for Ahmanet, each corresponding to very different periods in history. In trailer 2, Jenny says that the tomb has been buried for 2,000 years. That would put Ahmanet in the Roman period and long after the end of the native Egyptian pharaohs. Okay, so maybe that was a flub on the trailers’ part, right? Both the UniversalMonsters Wiki and Wikipedia itself say that Ahmanet is from the New Kingdom era, or around 3,000 years ago. That date actually makes sense given what we see of her in the flashbacks. This would have been peak Pharaonic Egypt and that would have worked great. In the movie itself, Jenny says twice that Ahmanet (and her sarcophagus) are 5,000 years old. That would put her way back in the First Dynasty (New Kingdom was 18-20^th Dynasties), not long after the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt. That would also mean that those lovely, recognizable pyramids in the background of the flashbacks wouldn’t be there, as they wouldn’t be built until the Fourth Dynasty. So… get your dates right, guys. Seriously.

-Stupid archaeology. This kind of goes along with my last point about the timeline, but as someone trained in the field, I can’t let this go. Jenny is a terrible archaeologist. They pull out the sarcophagus, seemingly taking nary a provenance, or you know, contacting the government of the country they’re in before they just haul it away. And what about all the rest of the stuff down there? Are they just going to leave it there? They pull up the sarcophagus with two little straps tied around it and then the helicopter flies away, swinging it through the air like it’s a carnival ride. Two straps and not even a blanket or a tarp to protect it as its sails through the air and the blowing sand.

Ahmanet's gonna need some Gravol

 This is beside the fact that while the stuff in the tomb looks relatively Egyptian, Ahmanet’s sarcophagus doesn’t look Egyptian at all. I suppose they wanted a ‘horror’ or ‘monster’ theme with that, but it looks dumb and out of place. Oh, and you can’t ‘mummify someone alive’. That’s not how it works guys. You can bury someone alive, and I suppose you can start mummifying someone alive, but they aren’t going to stay that way for very long. Again, just a dumb line that stuck out to me.  

-Sexist crap. Okay, just a quick point on this. There are some gross shots of the female characters in this film. There’s one part where Jenny reaches up to get something while in the foreground and you’re basically looking down her exposed stomach and pretty much down her pants. Yuck. She also ends up in the water in a white t-shirt. Also yuck. This is added on top of how Jenny is basically just a useless, damsel character. This movie even has a butt-focused shot of the Mummy herself! And it would have been so much cooler if Ahmanet herself wasn’t so interested in bringing Set into our world, but rather was consolidating her power for herself and her own rule. Wasn’t that her whole plan in the first place? I’m not even going to go into something said at the end after Cruise has rescued Jenny that was said (and done) so much better in a movie that came out earlier in the summer. I actually had to pause the movie because I was so angry about it and how it cheapened that line. I don’t want to say what it was, because spoilers, but it was the same thing a male character said to a female one in a much better movie and with much more emotional impact. (If you really want to know, I can post it in the comments lol)

-Exposition, aka, let me tell you a story. Honestly, there are so many scenes where everything just stops and one character begins telling another what’s going on or what we need to know at that given moment. The film literally begins and ends with an exposition dump. It is ‘tell, not show’ to the nth degree, and it gets pretty tiresome. In fact, one exposition scene is telling us about things that we just had seen a few minutes ago on screen. It just grinds everything to a halt to try and flesh out this universe that they’re building, but it really affects the overall pacing. And yet with all this exposition, there are things that don’t get explained! The double iris thing, the Templars and the dagger, why she’s buried in Mesopotamia (Iraq) instead of Egypt, and so on. 

-Bad CG. It’s not very good, need I say more? Much like Tom Cruise’s performance, it felt like they weren’t even trying.

Alright, I’m not going to end this off on such a negative note. There were a couple of positives. Let’s lighten things up and have a look at them.

-Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. You can tell he’s having fun with this, and truthfully he’s one of the best parts of the movie. Think of him as the Dark Universe’s Nick Fury. 

I'm here to speak to you about the Monster Initiative....

 The differences in his character between the two personalities was pretty cool, even if most of what he does is exposition. 

-The plane crash/ zero grav stunt. I’ll give credit where credit is due, that stunt was pretty cool. The fact that they did so much of it practically is really impressive. Tom Cruise may not have fit well with this movie, but at least you get here what he does in his other films: him doing something completely nuts and doing it for real.

-At one point when the Mummy is bearing down on our main characters, my other half busts into Hall and Oates’ ‘Maneater’. It was hilarious, out of left field, and sorely needed at that point. 

So there it is, guys. This really was not a good movie. I’d say just stick with the Brendan Fraser ones, or the original Universal Monsters films. It’s really not worth your time, and will in several places remind you of other, better films that you could be watching instead. Skip it. 

3/10  

Assassin's Creed Spoiler Free Review

Hey everyone, back again with another review. Now you all remember how I talked about this film back before it opened in December and that I really wanted to see it? Well, we weren’t able to make it to the theater for this one, but it’s recently come out on Blu-Ray/DVD (am I the only one who still says ‘out on video’ when talking about new releases?) so we gave it a rent. So let’s talk about how it went. As usual, no spoilers here.

So in the lead-up to this film’s release, it really looked like we were finally going to get that video-game adaptation film that would elevate the genre out of the muck it seems to mired in. It was going to be that truly great film that would give us what we wanted from the game itself, but also be a good film as well. Warcraft hadn’t been able to win over audiences (in North America, at least), but we had hope that Assassin’s Creed was the The One.

insert obligatory Matrix joke here

For that, it aggrieves me to say that the result was more in the vein of this:

Let me elaborate. I’m not jumping on a hate-bandwagon here and trashing this movie just because other reviewers and critics have done the same. I wanted to like it, hell, I wanted to love this movie. I was excited for it and the only reason I didn’t see it on the big screen was we couldn’t fit it in around the Christmas holiday. It also wasn’t in our local theater for very long. Suffice to say, this isn’t the review I wanted to be writing right now. But here we are.

I should have known from the beginning. One of the opening shots is a long tracking shot and it looks… well it looks bad. There’s a problem of dodgy-to-outright-subpar CG in several spots throughout the film, even with it’s around $125 million budget. Not all of it was bad, there were some really nice shots, but when it was bad it was pretty noticeable. The ‘prologue’ scene right after that shot is really cool. It was very video game-like and had a great look and tone. I really liked that part, even if I didn’t get as much out of it as a fan of the series probably did. It was kind of like the Joining scene when you play Dragon Age: Origins; a little mysterious and ominous and intriguing all at once. That brings me to one quick point: I know I probably missed a ton of references and nods to the games. A few of the bigger ones I got, but I know a fan would probably be able to tell you a lot more than me about all those fun little easter eggs than I can.

I can tell you the action scenes were pretty good. Kind of. The parkour Assassin stuff was pretty fun to watch but the movie had this really annoying habit of anytime exciting stuff started to happen, so did the cuts. We counted six cuts for the character to jump from a roof to the ground and take out an enemy in the process.

six cuts?!

The number of cuts in the action sequences was egregious, to the point where it actually lessened the excitement of the scene because it was so noticeable and distracting. My kingdom for just one long take during a fight scene!

If this film had anything going for it, it was its cast. On paper, it seemed perfect. Popular, well-loved franchise with an Oscar caliber cast. And it’s not as if the cast was bad, per se. Michael Fassbender is obviously the one giving it his all here, given that this was a passion project for him. Jeremy Irons was doing his slimy, bad-guy thing with odd hints of Scar showing up every now and again but it wasn’t exactly revelatory. Brendan Gleeson does a decent job in a role where his biggest scene is mostly exposition, but it’s Marion Cotillard’s Sofia that I really want to talk about here. First off, I might just have a bad ear for accents, but it felt like hers was inconsistent but again that could just be me. Secondly, I felt like her character could have been done better. Considering her arc and how she was treated by a lot of the other characters, I thought she was going to go in a different direction than she did at the end. I think it would have been a nice twist if she had. Considering how important she was to the story, she just seemed really impotent through most of it and I would have liked to see her take some control. What I thought would be a revelation-type moment for her actually went the opposite of how I thought it would, considering all of this. Of course, that was the second such scene I was wrong about. Fassbender’s Callum Lynch had a scene like that of his own, and while it did go the way I thought it would, the catalyst scene actually came later than the one I'd thought was the turning point.

In terms of the story, the plot wasn’t terribly different from the first game and part of the second (from the synopses I read) just with different characters and a few changed details. It is also very faithful to the games in one way, and it’s the one way that turned me off the series in the first place. I could not care less about any of the plot or any of the characters or anything that happens in the present. I know it’s part of the game mechanic and whatnot, but when I tried the very first game and started off with some numpty in the present, I was a bit disappointed. And to be honest, the characters in the present just aren’t that interesting. This mechanic works less well in a movie, where you are limited by a runtime far, far shorter than most games.

There are exceptions to every rule

 Neither set of characters, neither past nor present, got any ample time for development. That awesome female Assassin you see in the trailers? Minor spoiler, I have no idea what her name is. I don’t think they actually say it in the film. The other assassins in the present? Except for one, maybe two, same deal. You really don’t know much of anything about anyone. There’s enough story and development to keep the plot moving forward, but not enough to invest or make you care about anyone that’s there. Callum’s in the GLaDOS-like Animus (which was pretty cool, to be honest) by the 20 minute mark, so there isn’t even that much setup for him before he’s heading back into the past. There isn’t really anything to make you root for any of these characters or make you care about whether or not they live or die or if their respective missions succeed or fail. Because of this, and the way they filmed the action, it makes set pieces and stunts that are supposed to be awe-inspiring, like the Leap of Faith, lose a lot of their power. This is the biggest sin of the movie, you don’t get invested in any of it and it becomes just kind of dull. If you don’t care about anyone on the screen, there’s no reason to care about anything they’re doing. I just couldn’t get excited by the stuff the movie was trying to push on me as exciting because I didn’t care. The whole thing was also oddly colorless, especially in the present. Not in the DCEU-dark-filter way, I mean everything’s physical color. The building, the clothes, 90% of the stuff in the Abstergo building was a similar grey that all just blended together.

To sum up, this is not the movie that will redeem the genre. It’s not the worst video game movie I’ve ever seen, it’s not even the worst video game movie of 2016. You can tell that there was legitimate effort put into this movie to make it good and make it faithful, but the more I look at it, the more I see there just isn’t enough time in a two-hour movie to make that happen (at least not to the extent they were attempting here). At least in Warcraft, you may not have cared about the humans, but the Orcs were well-done and compelling characters. Warcraft also has the one up on visuals as well, the cinematography and the motion-capture was incredible. I wanted Assassin’s Creed to at least give me that, or if nothing else, just be a good time. I tried guys, I really did, but even Michael Fassbender couldn’t save this one. It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t particularly good either, and that makes me sad. If you’re a fan and you want to check it out, by all means. You might have a better time with it and get all those references I didn’t. If you aren’t a fan, you probably won’t lose out on anything by skipping it.

5/10  

Trailers of the Week + Bonus Movie Review!

Hey everybody, how’s it going? We’re doing trailers again this week with a quick movie review at the end to round things out. These are in no particular order but I want to talk about ones I haven’t touched on as much first, with others that don’t need much discussion afterwards. We’ve got lots to talk about today, so let’s get started.


The Mummy

Well, I’m going to be honest, this is hilariously bad looking. Much like the first trailer, it has such a Mission Impossible feel to it that you almost expect that theme to start playing. That’s pretty much the tone of the trailer with paranormal elements thrown in the mix. I’m also going to admit that the song choice is a little weird. The first time watching this trailer I had to stop it and ask aloud ‘Why Paint It Black?’ and never really got an answer to that. The next thing that strikes me is the assertion that whatever they’ve found has been there for two thousand years. Two thousand years ago (from today, and the movie is set in modern times) is after the death of Cleopatra and in the Roman period of Egypt, which is clearly not what they’re going for based on the shots of Ahmanet before she was a mummy.  They should have tacked on another thousand or so and that honestly kind of bugs me. A lot. The rest of the trailer is more of the same and I’m starting to think this might be a hate-watch.


Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

So, Orlando Bloom is back. Really, this one could go either way. It looks very much like a Pirates film and seems to have a lot of the same tone. Some of the CG still looks dodgy but I’ll reserve judgment on that aspect until I see the final product. The trailer itself is fine, I’m personally just having a hard time getting excited about another entry into the franchise. This really doesn’t have anything that really grabbed me and made it a must-see.


It

Ah yes, the Stephen King adaptation. We’re getting two of those this year, between this and The Dark Tower. This movie, however, has actually released a trailer. And it’s actually a pretty good one. It starts off with the familiar scene with the boat in the sewer and Pennywise showing up and builds up quite nicely. It doesn’t really give much away either, even if it’s a familiar story. It definitely looks like they’re going full-on scary and none of the cheesy charm that the last attempt at this property had. There’s going to be some of those horror tropes, you can see that already, but it overall looks pretty solid.


King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

I’d heard about this one, but the first time I actually saw something for it was the trailer that ran before Power Rangers. My reaction to that was basically ‘well, that’s a Guy Ritchie movie right there’ and that was about it. So now this trailer drops and I kinda feel the same way. It looks like it’ll be about as historically accurate as 300, but also that it could be a lot of fun the way that movie was. It’s going to be visually stunning, and Guy Ritchie’s trademark style is all over it. This could be a lot of fun. I’m not sure whether I’ll see it in theatres, but I’d certainly be up for seeing it in some capacity. And unlike The Mummy’s trailer, the inclusion of Led Zeppelin’s Babe, I’m Going to Leave You actually fits the tone and works really well for the trailer.


War for the Planet of the Apes

This is one of those trailers where nothing needs to be said. I’m eagerly awaiting July 14^th.


Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

This trailer didn’t really add anything especially new. As I’ve said before, I didn’t know anything about this or the comics it’s based on beforehand, so it kinda just looks like Mass Effect meets Guardians of the Galaxy to me. I’ll give it a rental because if nothing else, it’ll probably be really cool visually.


Spider-Man: Homecoming

Another trailer with nothing else that needs to be said. Just sit back and enjoy.

Moana Quick Review

Finally, we finally got around to seeing Moana and I just wanted to give my quick thoughts. I didn’t take any notes for this one, this is just off-the-cuff. The short version: this is a great movie and everyone should see it. The music is fantastic, the animation is beautiful, and the characters are super engaging. All the voice work is top-notch, even Dwayne Johnson’s singing is really not as bad as others have said. There were parts that had the four of us howling with laughter, and others that were really heartfelt. It has a certain self-awareness of the tropes of the ‘Disney Princess Movie’ while also kind of following a lot of them. As far as the Disney Princesses go, Moana is a damn good one and I’d say up there with some of my favorites. Go check it out, it’s well, well worth it.

Well, that's it for me. I'll see you next time!

Geostorm Trailer Drops!

I just had to share this will all of you. After a number of teasers popped up Tuesday, we were told that a full trailer for what will probably be one of the most anticipated movies of 2017 would be debuting Wednesday. I speak of course, about Geostorm. Yes, that weather-disaster thriller brought to us by Dean Devlin and starring Gerard Butler (why do you keep doing this to me, man?). Also, Jerry Bruckheimer and another director, Danny Cannon is involved too. It’s kind of complicated. But on to the trailer.

Now I just want to give some quick thoughts here. Firstly, the last disaster movie I actively watched was The Day After Tomorrow, so I’m a bit out of the game as far as these go. But this trailer was hilarious. It had everything: big, over-the-top set pieces just bleeding CGI all over, ridiculous premise that could probably be a lot more interesting if done more intelligently, a classic song done in an overly slow and melodramatic way… I could go on! I mean, it seems like they hire the same woman for every one of these trailer songs nowadays, so I guess she’s got a good thing going at least. To be honest, I thought the teasers (which I conveniently watched in one video) were a lot more intriguing and interesting than the full trailer. The viral/found/secret-government- footage quality of the teasers gave the clips a little extra something, a Cloverfield-esque feel that is probably better than it deserves. The trailer, in contrast, was just every trope of the genre and what you’d expect of a Devlin, Emmerich, or Bay film mashed into one big pile. Let’s be real, this movie is probably going to be terrible. Amazingly terrible, even. What we see of the effects are the same glossy, over-the-top kind we see in all of these kinds of films and which after a while just sort of runs together.

I miss the days of blowing up tiny White Houses

We’re pairing that with what looks like some dramatic family issues crammed in the corners to pad it out. There’s the usual ex-wife, a kid, a brother, all that good stuff which I’m sure will be integral to the story. And, as bad as this is probably going to be, some perverse part of my mind wants to see it in all its terrible glory, Gods of Egypt style. Or maybe I’m just a little loopy from digging ourselves out of the massive blizzard that just blew through our part of the world.

This was my car this morning. There was also a second drift on the other side.

Either way, we’ll see what happens come October. Our next film is Kong: Skull Island, hopefully this weekend as long as the weather cooperates. So I’ll see everyone then!

A Winner Is Not Us: Adapting Video Games Into Film

Hey, everyone. Today I wanted to talk about something a little different. I know there was both a new Power Rangers and a new Logan trailer last week that I probably should be discussing, but thinking about those and other, upcoming movies has made me think a lot about movie adaptations. Now I’m not here to say that there is some sort of epidemic of movies adapted from other material, because this has quite literally been happening since the beginning of film. And adaptations run a long gamut in quality as well, it’s not all either good or bad. But there is one particular genre of film adaptation that just never seems to quite… get there. I refer, of course, to the much-maligned video game movie. So, in honor of the release of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter this past weekend, let’s see what if we can make some sense of this.

I have formulated a few theories as where the problem may lie. Feel free to add your own in the comments!

1. Aspects of gaming don’t translate well onto screen:

Characters- Characters that look really good and as though they fit into their gaming universe may look completely ridiculous when put into live action. This goes for both human and non-human characters. For human characters, it is often the costume that is the problem, and there becomes the issue of making it work in the film without losing too much of the distinctiveness of the characters’ look. This is especially true of female characters, as they often have to make their costumes more practical in the sense that they can actually be worn in real life (see all female characters- Mortal Kombat, Cammy- Street Fighter). Except Lara Croft, at least in the first movie.





For non-human characters this is even more difficult in that they need to be realistic-looking enough that you can actually buy that they are even there. Mortal Kombat, Doom, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, and Silent Hill achieved this through practical effects and actors in suits for their larger monsters.



Warcraft used motion capture to great effect to bring its non-human races to the big screen.


However, even within these franchises, and films themselves, there is examples of the opposite. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation’s Sheeva and Baraka, Mortal Kombat’s Reptile, and Super Mario Bros.’ King Koopa and Goombas.

The less said about these guys, the better. Although Yoshi was pretty darn cute

Game Mechanics- I’ll be touching on this one in my next point as well, but how a video game works play-wise is difficult to bring to screen as well. A movie-goer isn’t interested in the minutia of looting and upgrades, base building, fetch quests, resource gathering, etc. These are best left as glossed over at best. There some mechanics and game play styles that have been incorporated into movies, and the results aren’t great. DOOM and Hardcore Henry both featured game style ‘first-person’ perspective. While DOOM utilizes this as a gimmick near the end of the film to pay homage to the games that inspired it, Hardcore Henry plays through its entire runtime this way. It uses parkour and straight-up platforming at times as well, despite not actually being a video game movie (just looking like one). As gimmicks go, the first person perspective, while an interesting concept, doesn’t maintain that interest for the whole movie and gets tired, especially with the shakiness of the camera.

2. Interactive Engagement vs. Passive Engagement :

This builds off of my above point about game mechanics. The first person perspective in Hardcore Henry wears out its welcome not just due to the shaky, first person view, but because it is hard to invest in the story, especially when it uses another video game mechanic: the silent protagonist. If the movie had been a game in which you could interact with it and feel invested in progressing the story, then the lack of dialogue from Henry wouldn’t matter. It would be one of a thousand first person shooters out there and probably would have been pretty fun. But the way you engage with a game and a movie are very different, a movie is about watching, but a game is about doing. If you attempt to make a movie feel less cinematic and more game-like, then you can lose the audience because they won’t be invested in your story.

3. Picking a story and characters to use.

This is where things can be very tricky. Some games, especially those in the fighting genre are often quite thin on plot and abundant on characters. This seems like a pretty perfect opportunity for a movie: lots of pre-existing characters and freedom to build a lot of plot around fairly basic premise. The first Mortal Kombat movie did quite a good job of balancing the characters but the sequel completely goes off the rails. The same problem arises with Street Fighter, as it tried to jam in absolutely every character on the roster into the film no matter what.

Pictured: not even the full main cast

There needs to be a balance, just the same as non-game movies. That's one complaint about Suicide Squad, that there were too many characters with not enough time spent establishing them for you to care about them. An RPG-type game would be even harder, as they are often in densely lore-packed worlds that even in-game are supplemented with codices for the player. In addition to this, characters are often player-made in terms of look, race, etc. Warcraft found itself with this problem, too much story to tell and not enough time to tell it (pre-editing, the film was 2 hours 40 minutes). Side-stories are usually the way to go on this, such as Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker and the Resident Evil series. However, that is a risk in itself, as many audiences for these don’t want the side characters and stories, they want the big story and characters. As it was, Dawn of the Seeker only had a limited theatrical run in Japan, not worldwide, and a lot of complaining is made in Resident Evil that Jill, Chris, Claire, Leon, et al., are cameo characters rather than the mains. People, especially game fans, just aren’t that interested in Alice.

Alice! Who the... you know what, never mind.

4. Faithfulness to the story vs. Creativity

Ah, the bane of adaptations everywhere. How closely do you adhere to the source material? How much creative liberty do you take? How much of each demographic do you alienate by changing/adhering? This is not solely a game-movie problem, don’t get me wrong, but it is as important for this genre as for any other adaptation. Warcraft was, to a tee, faithful in its story and look to its source, but was hard to follow for those not familiar with the dense lore it brought to the table. DOOM took the opposite approach, taking only the ‘fighting creatures on Mars with big guns’ part and changing most of the rest. Most of the rest of fall somewhere in between in terms of what they keep and what they change. Again, this is a balancing act that is walked by many different kinds of media, not just game-based films.

5. Casting

Again, this is not merely a problem in video game movies, but one for many other kinds of films as well. Who do you cast in these roles? This also follows from what story and characters to go with. If you do a movie based on the Mass Effect franchise, for example, who do you cast as Shepard? Do you go with male or female Shepard? We’ve all seen the casting announcements for movies, and the vitriol that can follow if some character doesn’t ‘seem’ like they were cast properly, and it being a character that you have played as or alongside can lead to some pretty strong feelings. Imagine, will you, if they ever really did make a Legend of Zelda movie, or something of that prestige. Can you imagine the level of scrutiny that would follow the casting of that? And a movie can suffer for its casting, there’s no question. I thought Max Payne was a pretty decent adaptation, but Mark Wahlberg was not the best choice for Max (that’s not even mentioning the fact it should've been R rated, even if there is an unrated DVD version).

Bless his heart, he tried, but he just doesn't have that noir vibe.

On the other side to that, despite the fact that it isn’t a great, or probably even good movie (but I love it), the casting of Raul Julia as M. Bison vastly improved Street Fighter and helped alleviate some of the miscasts in that film.
There is also the point that games have become so cinematic as technology has improved to the point where a lot of times, they are more like movies anyway. Between cut scenes and cinematics,

Diablo III cinematic

improved graphics,

Dragon Age: Inquisition. This is an in-game screenshot I took on the XBox One version

.

Fallout 4. Another screenshot I took in-game.

more voiced protagonists, etc., it almost begs the question of why we are making movies of games in the first place. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be done, but more like they’re almost becoming redundant. Unless they are expanding on the world and lore, but we’ve already talked about how that goes.

6. Budget doesn’t seem to matter.

Common sense would tell you that the reason that so many video game movies fail because they are niche, low-budget films that lack the production value to attract a wide audience. That, we have discovered, is not true. Just because many game-films are those things (even the most expensive of the blockbuster Resident Evil films only had a budget of $65 million), more money does not equal a better movie, or at least a more well-received movie. Just ask Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed. The latter can’t even seem to catch a break despite an Oscar-caliber cast as well. In fact, one of the best/most faithful video game movies is the first Mortal Kombat film, with a budget of only $20 million dollars. Many times, even if the film is a box office success, such as Mortal Kombat or Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, it fares very badly critically. Is there inherent dismissal of video game movies by critics? I wouldn’t rule it out but I wouldn’t pin it solely on that. As a gamer and a lover of bad movies, I can let a lot slide in terms of goofiness and other flaws in plot and execution (whether intentional or not), but even I can admit that a lot of these films are just bad. Some are fun bad, but some are just outright atrocious.
So what do we do? Do we stop making video game adaptations? I wouldn’t go that far, despite the fact that making a good one seems to be as likely as finding a unicorn in your backyard.

I typed that as 'Unicron' the first time. Point stands either way.

It may be an almost impossible feat, but I still hold out that faint hope that one day someone will hit upon that balance and we will finally get that good, well-received, successful video game movie. Failing that, I’d still love to see the full version of Warcraft, even though that probably won’t happen because it didn’t do well enough for a director’s cut. But, a girl can still dream, and maybe one day I’ll be right.

Me and My Wine: Hate Watching Gods of Egypt

I wanted to do something a little different. I’ve been rounding out my top movie lists for the year and there was one that I’d seen bits and pieces of but hadn’t actually sat through the whole thing. And that movie was Gods of Egypt. I had no illusions that this would be a good movie, so I was going to try something new. I was going to hate-watch it; in that I was going to sit down with snacks and some wine and roast the movie as it played. Since the weather prevented me from seeing Assassin’s Creed last weekend, this seemed to be as good a time as any. Now, I haven’t done something like this in a long time, not since maybe Doom. There’s been several unintentional hate-watches (Troy, Alexander, Batman v. Superman: Extended Cut), but nothing I’ve really set out to watch that I knew would be this bad. Also, instead of a regular style of review, we’re going to go on a journey together. We’re going to explore all the ‘best’ moments as they happened, live-feed style (non-timed entries are general observations). I took my notes specifically with this in mind, so I can bring them to you here pretty much word-for-word. Warning for spoilers as well, I guess. Either way, I hope you enjoy.


Pre-Movie:
-Runtime is 2 hours, 7 minutes. Got my libation for this evening, let’s get this show on the road!

And Thus it Begins:
-2:30- Oh, this CG…..
- These Egyptians are rather… European looking
-5:30- Okay, those women and Horus are definitely not in that shot at the same time. The fact that Horus was on a green screen is painfully obvious.
- The costumes are loud, garish, and ugly, at least for the gods. Not regal.

Everything is shiny/ Everything is fake that you see on the screen/ Everything is shiiiiny/ No this isn't a dream

-7:30- Why am I getting Star Wars prequel flashbacks?
- I’m very disappointed! I wanted Thoth with an ibis head!
- So flashy and over-the-top. Why could we not be a little more historical and less bad RPG armor?
- Osiris rocking the sequin cape!
-12:05- This is like an Xbox 360 cutscene. And that might be generous.
- Father? Who is their dad? Ra is not Osiris, Isis, and Set’s dad! Their parents were Geb and Nut!
- Gerard Butler the Yelly-King strikes again! Only this time he’s leading the scary masked soldiers instead of fighting them.


- 15 mins- Don’t do a fight scene that does the 300 thing. Don’t remind me of a better movie that I’d rather be watching! And stop shaking the camera!
- The graphics for this beast-mode Quick-Time Event really suck.
- So. Many. Cuts.
-Even the cups look plastic.
-25 mins- To be honest, this is kind of… boring.
-25:30- Those scorpions…. They were better in Walking With Monsters
-Where do you get that many scorpions? Good question buddy, now watch out for the THWOMP after this platform.

Movie could've been a LOT shorter....

-GREEN SCREEN STRIKES AGAIN
-Costumes really are bad.
-29:50- Don’t pull out the arrow ya numpty! You leave that in! In!
-Y’know, at least the green screen and fake-looking background were part of the highly stylized aesthetic of 300. This is just shoddy.
-32:40- Horus, I have come to bargain!
-So they’re like MCU Asgardians?
- Poor Anubis. He looks baaaaaad.




-Why doesn’t anyone’s crown look like and actual Egyptian crown?
-46-47 mins- this battle is ugly looking. Got nothing on Warcraft’s cinematography. That movie looked great.
-51:35- This waterfall could not look more fake if it was a piece of cardboard with the word ‘waterfall’ written on it.
- Kratos is much better at fighting Minotaurs
- Oh look, another Quick Time Event

Snack Break Talk
-54:18 into the movie
-The most offensive thing about this is that’s it’s kind of boring. Although, big action set pieces are yet to come.
-What happened to Isis? They haven’t even mentioned her since the beginning.

The Movie Resumes
-All of the humor falls depressingly flat
-1 hour in- After Osiris was killed and chopped up, Isis DID NOT KILL HERSELF! ARE YOU KIDDING ME? SHE STOOD UP, FOUND ALL THEM PIECES AND BROUGHT HIM BACK! **** THIS STAIN OF A MOVIE FOR SO BLATANTLY TOSSING ASIDE A GODDESS WORSHIPPED WELL INTO THE ROMAN PERIOD, AND CONSIDERED TO HAVE GREAT POWER! ***** YOU AND THE BATTLE BEETLE YOU RODE IN ON! (Note: this is a censored version of a tirade I went on regarding a single line of dialogue).
-To be honest, I’ve been figuring out people’s names because we have the captions on, rarely from the dialogue itself.
-1:01:50- A white snake? (Husband breaks into “Still of the Night”)

In the still of the night/ I hear the wolf howl, honey/ Sniffing around your door....

-ummmm, snakes don’t roar.
-1:02:19- Halfway through the wine, still doesn’t feel like enough for this.
-I don’t care about any of these characters.
-Closed captions save me again! White woman on white snake- Anat, black woman on black snake- Astarte. Their ‘snake saddles’ look like Chitauri cruisers tho.
-Thoth is hiding on a sunnier Dagobah? Ugh, Chadwick Boseman was much better as Black Panther.
-1 hr 16 mins- trying to have character and emotional stuff. The acting is either meh or over the top in this film.
-1 hour 19mins- another Quick Time Event.
-Thoth’s gown is lovely. We should see that on the red carpet sometime.

accessories included!

-1:20:33- That’s the Sphinx? Do these people know what a sphinx looks like?
-1:22:20- Did it just say ‘oh bother’ like it was Winnie the Pooh? Really?
-You know, I don’t care about Horus and Hathor’s relationship. Like, not at all.
-You don’t get into the afterlife if it’s heavier than the feather! I don’t care about that crap Set said like an hour ago.
-Set gets an armor upgrade- increased stats but that cutscene was hideous.

Followed immediately with a one-liner that would make Schwarzenegger cringe

-The one liners never land, either.
-1:36:28- This is bad, imitation, free-to-play-on-Facebook fantasy RPG armor. This shot doesn’t even look like Photoshop, it looks like MS Paint.
-These fight scenes are so badly shot. They’re all so choppy. Are we trying to hide poor choreography? What?
-1:42:00-ish- Why does Set’s armor looks Greek now? It’s gotten Greek-er as time goes on. I guess that is what happened with the Egyptian royalty. Too soon?
-Even the music is bland and uninspired.
-1 hour 50 mins- Horus looks like Solid Snake in this shot.


-Pope Ra. Every time, we laugh about Pope Ra.

This was all I could think of

-Horus is too shiny in that armor. Everyone’s too shiny in the CG armor.


-So everything’s cool now?
-So what about everyone who died while Set was ruling? So they get a do-over with them scales?
-Honestly, Alex Proyas? What did I just watch?
So that was Gods of Egypt. Obviously a terrible movie. I could only possibly recommend it if you watch like I did, with drinks and other people to make fun of it with. It looks awful, the acting is either dull and lifeless or completely over the top, the story is uninteresting, and the music is utterly forgettable. The only reason it isn’t top of my Worst List for 2016 is because I don’t even think I could watch Number One again, even under the circumstances I watched this one (that list will be coming soon).

Hope you enjoyed my little experiment! Happy 2017 everyone, and here’s to better movies in the New Year!