The X-Men Movie Franchise - X-Men Days of Future Past (Part 4)

As I said last post, I saw both Days of Future Past and The Wolverine, so now it's time to talk about Days of Future Past.

Going into the film, I was pretty excited. The trailers I had seen hyped me up for the film, and between First Class, the returning cast and appreciation I gained for The Wolverine, I was totally excited for this new installment. I also remember the X-Men 90's cartoon I loved dearly taking on the Days of Future Past storyline as well, so I was hoping that at the very least this movie could hold up as well to me as that cartoon did.

First things first, this movie is the most comic book movie I have ever seen, aside from The Avengers. As much as I love and enjoy a multitude of other comic book movies, a lot of them try really hard to take everything seriously and ground them in reality. While the X-Men franchise has always tried to tell stories as allegories for racial discrimination and the gay rights movement, they still try to have fun with it. This film heartily embraces the nature of comic books and sacrifices a lot of deeper meaning for a story that attempts to cover a lot of ground and embraces new concepts. So the story isn't trying to cover as many deep topics as say X-2, but it trades it in for a story that can go further and do more in it's run time than a lot of the other films in the franchise.

The basic plot of the movie is fairly simple. In the present X-Men universe, from The Last Stand and The Wolverine, these robots named Sentinels have taken over policing Mutants, and the world has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with them having murdered tons of Mutants as well as any humans sympathetic to the Mutant cause. They have a skin that looks like Mystique's and can adapt to anything being thrown at them to fight back. We find Kitty Pryde, Bobby and some new faces to the film franchise (hello Blink and Bishop) hiding out in some weird mountain bunker when Professor X, Magneto, Wolverine and Rogue find them and engage in the plan of the film.

Kitty Pryde can essentially put someone to sleep and send their consciousness to the past. She uses this when they get caught by sentinels to send Bishop's consciousness back to his body a couple days to a week before, so he knows what to do so they never actually get found. Kitty sends their thoughts back in time and when the person wakes up, the new future takes hold. The sentinels are made by Trask industries, the founder (played by Peter Dinklage) was shopping around initial designs in 1973, but no one would fund the sentinel program. However, Mystique murders him, and she gets taken hostage and experimented on. It's through this process that they decide to not only fund the sentinel program, but they give the robots her adaptive DNA, which makes them so deadly. So Professor X wants Kitty to send his conciousness back in time, so his current mind in his 1973 body can stop Mystique from murdering Trask and therefore the Mystique DNA'd sentinels will never exist. Kitty however insists that she only sends people back up to a week to a month and couldn't possibly do 50 years without destroying the person's brain. So Wolverine steps up as the one man whose healing abilities would not only allow him to travel back that far, but also look exactly the same age. And that's the beginning of our film. Logan is transported back to 1973, and it's roughly a decade since the events of First Class. He has to convince Professor X and Magneto to join up with him to stop Mystique from murdering Trask, among other things.

Post apocalptic world, time travel, stopping assassination plots and giant robots? It's a comic book movie alright. In what other medium would such a harebrained collection of ideas gel together so nicely. I had an absolute blast with this film. Even though it's not the deepest story out there, it's one of the very few comic book based movies that actually feels like the material it came from. The music and cinematography is great, the acting is great from all of the main cast and it's a lot of fun. What the story does right in my opinion is that even though it's focusing on this grand plot that encompasses all of the world, it still only focuses on a handful of characters to tell that story. Unlike The Last Stand, where they tried to do a story that impacted the entire world and tried to focus on every major character they had introduced thus far, Days of Future Past lets us spend a lot of time with our handful of characters without trying to develop a million characters. In fact, one of my favorite parts of the film is our time with Quicksilver. The advertising with him before the movie was absolutely terrible, but his use in the film is fun, filled with laughs and just big enough that he feels like a nice addition to the universe without having to devote time out of the movie to develop him and his story, that can come later.

I'm trying to not give much away here, so I'm just going to say that I did not expect how the end played out, for better or worse and it threw me for a loop. Overall, I had a great time with this movie and it's a great entry into the X-Men franchise. Jennifer Lawrence puts in a great performance as Mystique, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender do great as young Professor X and Magneto, especially when the legends themselves Patrick Steward and Ian McKellen are also in the film. Hugh Jackman of course is Wolverine, and he knows exactly how he wants to play that character after 14 years and it works great. So check this movie out, have fun and hopefully Guardians of the Galaxy will fulfill my hope of being another comic book-like movie this summer.


                                                                   Spoilers

One thing I wanted to talk about was the impact that the end of the film has on the franchise itself and the reveal at the end. It's confusing, and very comic book-y, but it puts into question everything we know about the franchise, which potentially adds more questions than it does answers.

At the end, the characters save the day and Wolverine gets sunk into the water. He wakes up, it's 50 years later, back in the X Mansion. Storm, Beast, Bobby, Rogue, Scott Summers, Professor X and Jean Grey are all alive and well and Logan is (fittingly) a history teacher at the school. The idea is that the effects of the events in 1973 had a ripple effect, and anyone who died because of the sentinels is alive, but also, because of Wolverine's intervening, 1973 Professor X also knows about Dark Phoenix inside of Jean Grey and can teach her to control her powers instead of trying to suppress it, meaning she never goes evil and doesn't kill Scott  or Professor X and doesn't die.

So at this point, they've retconned the second worst movie in the franchise, The Last Stand, and everyone including Fox was already pretending that Wolverine Origins doesn't exist anyway. So that's great. However, this chain of events puts into question the whole original trilogy, as well as The Wolverine. The only movie that still without a stands true as having happened is First Class. While the events in X-Men and X-2 could still have happened in one form or another, they don't happen the way they do as they exist now. Since 1973 Logan knows Professor X, there is no reason why he couldn't start teaching at the school anytime afterwards, meaning there is no reason for him to be out in Canada bar fighting, in which he meets Rogue, saves her from Magneto's people and both of them get taken to the X Mansion. And yet, there Rogue is in the end cameo sequence, so somehow she still makes it to the Mansion. Magneto is now known to the world to be a bad guy in 1973, so his motivations and actions are possibly very different from what he did in the original films as well. It's possible he still does everything he does, but like I said, it has to happen a somewhat different way than what we saw. We see at the end that Mystique has taken to impersonating Stryker and she takes Wolverine...but unless she's planning to free him once they're alone, it doesn't make sense. The climax of the film comes down to her deciding that there has to be more than one way to change the course of history without killing those people, and that is ultimately what changes the future. So why is she taking Wolverine? If she's going to let him go, then likely the Wolverine of the now current timeline will never have an adamantium skeleton or claws. It makes no sense for him to choose to put the metal into his body himself, and if Mystique does keep him as Stryker and experiment on him or whatever...that completely devalues her story-arc of the film. It's a situation I'll be interested to see how they get out of.

The one thing I think that ultimately disappoints me about this ending is writer Simon Kinberg's disregard for The Wolverine. He wrote the credits stinger from The Wolverine that undercut everything that movie was leading up to, and now with this film the events of The Wolverine never happened. Similar to the original trilogy the events could still happen, but a different way. He saved Yashida in 1945 so that still happened  and Yashida is still in a world where he's dying and wants Logan's healing factor. However, he wouldn't be a hermit in the Canadian wilderness for Yukio to find, with Jean Grey around he has no reason to fall for Mariko, and with him teaching at the school there is no reason he'd get on a plane with Yukio and have adventures. Between the mid-credits scene disreguarding the ending of The Wolverine and the end of this film changing history, The Wolverine just gets thrown out. It had an interesting enough premise and lent itself to sequels, but now they will likely never return to Logan, Yukio, Mariko and that private jet they had. In a universe that is trying so hard to tie everything together after the abomination that was Wolverine Origins, it saddened me to see that they're just throwing previous good storylines out of canon so they can fix bad ones. Next we'll get X-Men: Apocalypse, with everyone in the 80's. I assume this will catch us up on what the hell happened with Mystique and Logan, as well as giving more screen time to characters who should be able to start existing now, like Gambit and hopefully more Quicksilver. Then after that film, 3 years from now, we'll get another Wolverine film, and likely Hugh Jackman's last time playing the character. There is only so long you can stay looking the same for a character that isn't supposed to age, and they've already cheated and used special lighting techniques in The Wolverine and Days of Future Past to lessen the wrinkles off of Jackman. At that point, he will have played the character for 8 movies over 17 years. Nearly 20 years as a character who isn't supposed to age. Hopefully they give him a good send-off, but who knows in what direction they'll take his story next. Guess we just have to wait two years and find out.

The X-Men Movie Franchise - The Wolverine (Part 3)

The first two posts I made on this blog was my in-depth look back and review of the X-Men movie franchise as it stood and my thoughts on the existing properties and the future of the series. I said I'd make a new post when I saw The Wolverine, and eventually one for Days of Future Past. Well, this past Saturday I saw The Wolverine and then several hours later I saw Days of Future Past. I took a couple days to think about what I'd seen and now I think I know what I want to say about both. Without further ado...

                                  The Wolverine (2013)

Before having seen The Wolverine, I was pretty excited about it. I had heard they did a good job with it, and since the franchise had put out First Class I had faith they could do at the very least a competent film again. I was disappointed when it was announced Darren Aronofsky wasn't going to be directly the film anymore, as I had been really excited to see how that kind of movie would be, but when it was announced James Mangold was taking over I was pretty satisfied, as he made one of my favorite movies of the last decade, the remake of 3:10 to Yuma.

I enjoyed The Wolverine, for the most part. It has it's problems, but it's a fun and easily watchable movie that remembers who it's main character is. I grew up with the animated 90's X-Men cartoon as my introduction to the franchise, and even though I love  X-Men and X-2 a whole lot, I was still disappointed to a degree of how series they took everything. That's not to say this movie isn't serious, it actually deals with some heavy stuff about the character of Logan, and what it means to be him. What it means to be immortal, to be forced to continue living even when everything you love is dead. What purpose do you give yourself to keep living? If someone offers you the chance to die after all this time, do you say yes?

I think what makes the film work is that they tackle those questions while still bringing us the Logan we've all come to love from Hugh Jackman, but they give him more to do than just be sad and mopey about being immortal. He gets fun one-liners, he tells people to fuck off, he gets to do some fun action sequences. That being said, the story isn't anything to write home about, but the thing is, it doesn't need to be. I could have predicted all but one plot point in the film, but not every movie needs to break new ground, it just needs to be a solid entry. In the X-Men franchise at this point, we had a trilogy of films that had this grandiose scale to them, with stories involving hundreds-to-thousands of people. We then had a very bad attempt at a solo origin movie for Wolverine, where I think one of it's biggest problems was trying to preserve that grandiose scale in a solo movie, between all the mutants in it and the references to others. Then we had First Class, which was a return to form. It operated on about the same level as the first X-Men film did. Two-three main characters, a handful of supporting cast on the good and bad side and that's about it. Then we get The Wolverine, a film that has in it 3 mutants and just a handful of other characters. By focusing on just these few people, we're about to spend more time with them and just go on this ride through Japan with them.

The cinematography is lovely, the fight scenes are fought well. The story of Yashida is bland, at the end of the day, but it's a story that I think works specifically because of our main character, and his previous history. At the opening of this film we see a flashback to Nagasaki in 1945, where Logan (Who was fighting in WWII and taken as a POW and held underground, saves a young soldier named Yashida, who grows up to be the most powerful man in Japan with a very successful corporation. The story is pretty simple; it's present day and Yashida is an old, frail man who is on his deathbed. He summons Logan in order to make a proposition, he has a machine that could drain his life force, so he could continue living and Logan could finally die. Logan, knowing the pain that immortality has caused him denies Yashida the request, and he dies. It turns out that instead of leaving his business to his son, he's left everything to his 20-something incredibly beautiful granddaughter, who is now being hunted by all sorts of evil people because of this fact. Logan decides to help her and off her goes on an adventure to protect this girl and save the day.

Like I said, kinda bland, but it works. Because we have the trilogy before it, we've seen what Logan has had to go through to be at this point. In this film he's constantly dealing with seeing Jean Grey in his dreams and he's living as a hermit in the Alaskan wilderness. Between the cameo he had in First Class and the opening sequence of this film, we know Logan is old, with no signs of slowing down. This movie's underlying subject matter is dealing with the theme that you have to live with the decisions you make, but for Logan, living with a decision means potentially being reminded of what you've done for eternity. His new-found partner mutant Yukio and Yashida's granddaughter Mariko both try to further the point that no matter what has happened in the past, people need Logan's help.

Overall, I really enjoyed this film and I hope the next one they're planning on doing in a couple years will be just as good if not better than this one, and another solid entry into an ever-expanding franchise. If you were holding out on seeing it, just see it, you'll probably have a good time with it, and that mid-credits sequence is the necessary story-tying piece that connects the old trilogy with the new X-Men movie franchise. Below this point I will post what I don't like about the movie, and it will involve spoilers.


What I didn't like about this film is a pretty short list, but pretty significant I thought. First off, the lack of blood. The movie should have been rated R, but they just took out the majority of blood. I'm not someone who demands to see large amounts of blood in my movies, but if you have someone continually stabbing people with metal claws, as well as samurai swinging swords, there should be blood. You'll get some blood on Logan's claws in between moments of him stabbing, but during the act and afterward no one has any blood on them, characters barely bleed. It reeks of a grab at PG-13. I've heard the Director's Cut fixes some of this, but I haven't gotten the chance to see that version yet, but I have hope for it. Second, Logan's lovestory with Mariko seems a little odd. She's someone that, while very beautiful, he's really only known as someone who he has to keep protecting from getting killed, and she knows Logan as this mythical being who saved her grandfather during the second world war. Mariko is somewhere in her early 20's and Logan is somewhere around 120-200 years old. I mean, I guess he can't really abide by an age code when he's immortal, but at least with Jean Grey she was not only incredibly smart and talented but also had a good relationship with Logan for years, and they never got to be together. Mariko and Logan's love storyline feels like a forced love interest plot for added dramatic weight for him to protect her. Finally, and this is a big one...the mid-credits scene setting up Days of Future Past completely devalues the end of the film. At the end of The Wolverine, Mariko becomes the owner of the Yashida corporation and her and Logan have feelings for each other. She gives Logan and Yuriko their own private jet to fly around in and it sets up the two of them having mutant adventures for future sequels. Then the mid-credits scene just timeskips to two years later and Logan is suddenly in a public airport by himself going through security when he is approached by Professor X and Magneto. So the end of the The Wolverine sets up Logan having some sort of relationship with Mariko and him and Yukio flying off to wherever they want in their own plane, and then two years later he's lost Yukio, the private jet and is on his own? What the hell, that completely undercuts the movie you just watched to set up another film in the franchise.

The mid-credits sequence, while cool in it's own right, feels incredibly forced by the studio to set up Days of Future Past. In Days of Future Past, present day Professor X and Magneto band together to send Wolverine back into the 70's to change history and save mutant (and human) kind. Since the movie is about tying the franchises together and the last movie we saw old man Professor X in he died (though that end credits sequence sets up he's alive in some form) so if they didn't put this sequence into the end of this film, they would have had to spend a good 10 minutes of Days of Future Past setting up not only why Logan was there and working with Professor X and Magneto, but also explain Professor X being alive. It's extra tie-in plot they need for the next film, but since they needed Wolverine by himself, it completely undercuts the movie we just watched. Disappointing in the end on that front, but otherwise well done.

TV Review - Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Season 1)

Yesterday I finished catching up with the last two episodes of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (From now on referred to as AoS) and I thought I'd weigh in on the show and it's current trajectory. When AoS was announced back in May last year I was super excited. Then in September when it came, I liked the first episode a lot. The second episode I liked a little less...then the third one I liked less than that and so on for a few more and I dropped it. After seeing Captain America: The Winter Soldier however, (you can read my review here) I was excited to see how the events in that film would effect the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which includes AoS. Plus, once Cap came out, Clark Gregg started posting about how everyone was missing out by not watching AoS too. So, I picked it back up this month and caught up to the finale, which aired this last week.

I really enjoyed AoS, once it figured out what it wanted to do. One of the big problems with TV culture these days is that nothing gets a chance. If it's not good right off the bat it's dropped like a bad habit. But a first season of a tv show is rarely great, and even if it is, you can almost guarantee the writers and directors don't have a handle on what it should be like until about half a season in. This for me was the problem with AoS. That first episode directed by Joss Whedon set up a good tone for the show, and the dialogue was okay, the next set of episodes were nowhere near that level. The best written character on the show is by far Agent Coulson, and that's because he's been in the MCU since the first Iron Man film, so his character is the most fleshed out, they knew how to write for him. Everyone else in the main cast was brand new and they weren't sure how to handle them and the situations they might be in. Between having to find it's footing and the ridiculous scheduling that ABC put it through (It started in September 2013 and just finished up this week, and 8 month first season) the ratings plummeted rather quickly. While AoS is still doing solid at around 5 1/2 million people per episode, the first episode had over 12 million, they lost over half the original audience of the first episode.

AoS really picked up for me around episode 9, named "Repairs." By episode 9, AoS stopped fiddling around with extraneous one-off stories and started answering the question a lot of people wanted to know, how did Coulson survive his death in Avengers? And then soon after, they unleash the tie-in episodes based around The Winter Soldier, and what happens in that movie directly effects this show. By episode 16, named "End of the Beginning" We are fully immersed in not only the Marvel world and the ripple effects from The Winter Soldier, but AoS starts tying everything we saw in the early half of the season back together with everything else that has happened, and makes for a very compelling and interesting watch.

It had to be hard making the first season of AoS. On one hand, it's supposed to be an enjoyable standalone show to the films. On the other hand, it's also supposed to be an underlying continuity keeper for the MCU. This presents you with two opposite goals, plot-wise. AoS both needs to create it's own interesting storylines that can function without the films of the MCU, yet it also needs to both tie in and reverberate the films of the MCU. While I do think AoS has so far achieved that goal, it took them until about halfway through this 22 episode season to get to that point. Since the show is the first of it's kind to do this kind of task and it's in it's first season, I didn't expect it to get the balance right at first, but a lot of people expected it to just be as instantly good as the movies that surround it. I'm happy to say now that I think AoS has achieved that goal, and will be interesting to see how they tie in to things in the future (especially the Netflix series) but it did half a rough first half.

The biggest problem for me in that first half is that the episodes were all serialized pursuits of items that came around based on the film properties. While an alright idea in itself for an episode or two, they really focus on it for nearly the first whole half, and that becomes tiring. The biggest thing everyone wanted for this series was to tie in to the rest of the universe, and when it seemed the show's answer to that was an alien staff, or an alien energy thing, or an Asguardian item, it felt like a cop-out. I don't blame the show for this problem either, they didn't know how they were going to approach this universe in relation to everything else and it takes awhile to figure that kind of thing out. Once they set in motion the reveal of Tahiti and the effects of The Winter Soldier, the show seemed to find it's voice. The characters while sometimes a little far-fetched, fit better than they did early on, and their dialogue improved as the writer's found the characters voices.

What I really liked as the season went on was the improvement in the other character's. We're introduced to the series through Agent Ward, a cold, barely emotive character. For the first good handful of episodes they kept trying to put him into character moments where he is supposed to warm up, and for the most part...he doesn't. I'm not slighting the actor who plays him at all either, because as the plot develops towards the end of the season you can totally see why Ward stays cold and barely tries normal reactions to things. The problem however was trying to make your lead character the guy who doesn't emote. Throughout the series we get immense developments in Skye, or real protagonist through the show, as well as in Agent May and even Fitz & Simmons. By the second half of the season, I knew who they were, and I cared way more about them and Coulson than I ever did about Ward.

So basically this was a long-winded review in which I say to check out the show. If you haven't seen it yet or dumped it in the first 6-8 episodes, give it a chance. Forgive the show the first half of the season, but don't skip it. A lot of the plot points early on are still relevant later in the season, so it's still valuable to watch for the overall arc of the show, but it's handled much clumsier than it would be later on. I for one am super excited about the future of AoS and how they'll incorporate the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Movie Review - Godzilla (2014)

Yesterday was my birthday. It was also the day that the new Godzilla came out. As a big fan of the big G, it was a no-brainer that I'd celebrate my birthday with the reintroduction of Godzilla to America, and what better way to see him than in IMAX 3D. I was not disappointed in the slightest.

I absolutely loved the new Godzilla, and I'm speaking as a real, true fan. I was indoctrinated into love for the big G from a young age. When I was in elementary and middle school I was all about Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. My favorite character? Tommy, aka The Green Ranger, and his Mech unit, the Dragonzord. In adolescence, I had a tv with satellite cable in my room and I'd stay up late watching the old Toho films on obscure cable channels. I watched a good amount of the Godzilla films themselves, as well as the Rodan and King Ghidorah films. My favorite monster of course came to be MechaGodzilla, especially once I realized the Dragonzord was a play on him. While not all Godzilla movies from Toho are created the same, they were a joy to watch. Besides my love of just watching big creatures beat each other up, I was also enthralled with how real they tried to make them, despite it being actors in suits stomping on model towns.

Yesterday morning I re-watched the original Gojira in preparing myself for the new film, as that is the movie it is trying to be like the most. While in some places it's heavy handed in it's acting and the message of the film is just shoved down your throat, it exceeds in capturing the mystery, wonder and devastation that comes from having a giant monster attack your town. Long shots of the city on fire and decimated fill the third act, and it's horrifying. More than anything however, Gojira (and I imagine Godzilla: King of the Monsters but I haven't seen that version) enforces the notion that Godzilla is a force of nature. In Gojira, Godzilla is an ancient creature from dinosaur times that was just hanging out at the bottom of the ocean when nuclear radiation affected him and made him into the force of destruction we see in the film. His creation as a monster is the fault of man, and when Dr. Serizawa uses his device to kill both him and Godzilla, it is not seen as a victory for mankind, but rather as the payment Japan had to pay for having used nuclear weapons.

In the new Godzilla, Bryan Cranston plays a supervisor of a nuclear plant who is seeing readings of activity that could endanger their plant, but no one will believe him. Eventually the plant explodes and is quarantined. We skip to 15 years later and Cranston is convinced whatever created the last explosion is back, he goes to explore and comes across the "villian" of the movie, the MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) has a cocoon harvesting radiation from the plant, and when it hatches, it unleashes the monster on the world, hungry for radiation. Without spoiling the rest of the film, I'll just say that Godzilla is out there in the world, and he notices what the MUTO is doing and starts hunting him. The rest of the movie is Godzilla hunting the MUTO while the MUTO swims through the ocean going from one radiation source to another, while the government does their best to find their own solution to two giant monsters destroying the world.

I think saying anything more about the plot would take some of the fun out of it, but I really liked how they did the origins of the creatures. It fits in themeatically with Gojira while still being different in it's own right. The re-awakening of the creatures are still the fault of man. Our desire for ultimate power brought forth a being that could cause ultimate destruction, and whats more, feeds on our most devastating weapon, nuclear energy.

I really, really enjoyed this film as it wanted itself to play out, as a slow burn. Director Gareth Edwards took cues from Jaws in how he introduced and showed the monsters. It's at least over an hour before we actually see more than just a fin from Godzilla, and it's terrifying. For the majority of the film, we follow Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a Navy Lieutenant and his exploits trying to get back from Japan to San Francisco where his wife and child are amidst the monster attacks. This I think is the essential part of the movie that captures the true horrific atmosphere of the film. In the Toho franchise, while we see human stories intersecting with the monsters, it's often thrown aside to show large aerial shots of the fights between creatures. What this new Godzilla does best however is showing these monster fights from the human point of view. In the Toho films, often the buildings and landscape are just obstacles for the monsters to fall into or be thrown onto. In this film that is still very, very true, but from the monsters perspective. From the human perspective, every skyscraper destroyed is hundreds of lives lost. A foot crushing through a skytrain rail is hundreds of innocent people suddenly thrown to their doom. Godzilla merely moving through the water around ships means the possible destruction of whole naval ships or bridges because of his size.Their destruction has weight, and the destruction is absolutely horrific.

While I think the human plot and dialogue to be equally predictable, that didn't make it bad. What is being said and what is being done are not revolutionary things or ideas, but they are executed well and fit right at home in this kind of film. The score by Alexandre Desplat was absolutely gorgeous in how well it conveyed not only the feeling of terror, but also anxiousness and intensity. The recreation of the Godzilla roar and his sounds are both iconic and sound real. IMAX opened the film by playing the new Godzilla roar and it was both terrifying and exhilarating, my theater yelled and cheered. The cinematography was also delightful, and the fights are a joy to watch.

Overall, this film succeeded for me mostly because of what it decided to show me, when it decided it wanted to show that to me, and knowing what would and wouldn't make the film better. One of the "problems" with the Toho films is that the longer Godzilla and the monsters are on screen, the more you notice about how fake it is, how the men in the suits move, the suits being suits, the environment being scale models. I said "problems" because to me that is part of the charm of those films, but Gareth Edwards was not going for that, he was going for the most realistic take on the creature since Gojira, and the less of Godzilla you see, the more you can believe he's a real, breathing entity. For me, Godzilla felt totally real in this film, and part of that is because I didn't have ages to notice how fake it actually all is. Between the motion capture of Godzilla, his design, and how he was shown, I could believe for those two hours that Godzilla was real, and it was everything I ever wanted since seeing The Dragonzord rise from the sea to take down the baddies in Power Rangers.

If you're interested in seeing the new Godzilla film at all, by god go see it in theater, IMAX 3D if you can. I have full confidence that the home release will still be a wonderful film, but the feeling of seeing the big G on a 40 ft. tall screen was everything I had ever wanted for him.

Music Review - The Black Keys - Turn Blue

I've been a fan of The Black Keys since 2003's Thickfreakness, and it's been fun watching them grow and evolve. While they've gotten further away from that Blues-influenced Garage Rock sound they started with, they've continually found ways to incorporate new and interesting elements into that style and make a fun experience out of it.

With Turn Blue, The Black Keys do just that. Teaming up with Danger Mouse again, (He produced Attack & Release and co-produced Brothers and El Camino) The Black Keys put out an album that, while steeped in a Bluesy, Garage Rock tinged atmosphere, explores the Psychedelic range for the majority of the album, and it's a welcome turn. If Brothers and El Camino are two sides of the same coin, Turn Blue is a slightly misshapen but similar coin. Okay, I'm bad at making analogies, let's just accept that right now.

I listened to the album twice through the free iTunes radio stream and immediately dug it. Today, on the day it came out, I went out and bought the vinyl and it sounds absolutely delightful, with wonderful packaging to fit the mood and theme of this album. From what the band has said, this album is less about radio singles and more about being a "headphone record" meaning it has been mixed specifically to have a unique experience in headphones over a stereo system, but I have yet to try it out. I bet it makes the experience even that more personal.

While Brothers and El Camino felt like a collection of tightly constructed numbers, Turn Blue feels looser, more air-y. Songs like title track Turn Blue have breathing room. They float along, letting the melody just wash over you. It's not always a slow pace however, as the lead single Fever is a floor-stomping disco-y number, with one of the best basslines and most memorable synth lines on the whole album. It's infectious, which is probably no coincidence due to the nature of the song lyrics. The lyrics throughout most of the album are about love and loss, which was to be expected as the divorce singer Dan Auerbach was going through happened during these sessions. It's often forlorn and depressing, but sometimes the lyrics pull up into this wistful-hopefulness and it's just the little glimmers of hope the album needed to keep from being a complete downer.

The biggest things you'll notice about the album is that it has a lot of soul to it, vocals and guitars. It really grooves along too, with some heavy basslines and real fuzzy guitars. Between the amount of reverb used on the lead vocals at times (like Bullet in the Brain) and the female vocal harmonies hanging around in the back (like on Year in Review) the album has this hazy, dream-like quality to it, but it never stays that way for long. It's just there long enough to give you an idea of what that could be like, but they never let it go too long without punctuating the song with a wonderfully catchy bass riff or reverb-upped guitar.

Turn Blue feels like a floating journey through the mind of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, with hints from Danger Mouse floating in and out. After having produced the last 3 albums and taking co-writing credits on El Camino, Danger Mouse's influence is undeniable at this point. He's a producer who loves to let the music breath, and that I think is the best asset here on Turn Blue. It never feels like the music is being forced, it just feels like this is how these songs were supposed to sound, even when we've never heard The Black Keys quite like this.

I cannot recommend Turn Blue enough. I understand that some old fans like myself who might not like the more poppy sound The Black Keys have been turning to, but if you understand all that made them what they were is still there in some way or another I think you can appreciate this album. While it's a long ways away from the raw, pure energy of Thickfreakness and Rubber Factory, this is just an outreach into a different sub-set of influences that makes for just as enjoyable album in it's own right.

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Movie Review - The Amazing Spider-Man 2

    A handful of days ago I saw The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in IMAX 3D and I wanted to take a few days to think about the film critically before I put out a review. The film is getting such a bad rap (55% on Rotten Tomatoes) I wanted to think about what I said and if I could address the problems brought up in those reviews before I wrote my own. So here we go.

   I really, really enjoyed The Amazing Spider-Man 2. I thought it was not only a superior superhero movie, but also the best representation of Spider-Man we have gotten on film so far. That is not something I say lightly. Sam Raimi's Spider-Man was my introduction to superhero movies and it's sequel Spider-Man 2 is at the top of my list for favorite superhero movies of all time. The third film I enjoy on a base level but I acknowledge and readily see that it is not a good film. While Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films had their problems throughout, you could tell the guy loved the characters, and that love was something I could latch onto as a kid. When I saw The Amazing Spider-Man two years ago on it's midnight premiere, I liked it, but I could see a million things wrong with it and those things really bugged me. I loved 500 Days of Summer, but didn't know if that director could go from personal indie Rom-Com to big budget Superhero franchise. Sure enough, when the movie hit I could tell Marc Webb had directed the movie. The dialogue sequences anyway. Any time two characters were by themselves interacting it was shot beautifully and the chemistry was great, especially between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, but the action sequences were competent at best. The first Amazing Spider-Man feels like the hands of Sony executives are all over it, trying to do their best to distance themselves from the last franchise while still trying to cash in on the burgeoning popularity of superheros.

   The first Amazing Spider-Man has clunky dialogue, plot lines that go nowhere or feel forced and competent but lacking action sequences. The dialogue sequences between characters however was spectacular and was what made me enjoy the movie despite it's obvious flaws.

   So here we are at the sequel, which was preceded by the news that there are already 2 more direct sequels planned, with Marc Webb attached for the first one but not the second, as well as plans for a spin-off movie with Venom and Carnage. Amazing Spider-Man 2 therefore had a lot to live up to. Before it even opened it had to guarantee it would be good enough to warrant a whole franchise around it, which is saying something considering the first film was only rated as decent and not good or great.

   I think that for the most part, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 succeeds. It is by and large better than the first film by miles. It is certainly not without fault, but it is on a wholly other level of film than the first Amazing Spider-Man is. The action is better, the dialogue (while still at times ham-fisted) is better, the characters are more fleshed out, the score is amazing and the plot, while a bit messy, is more solid than the first.

   The main story of the film is a combination of exploring Gwen and Peter's relationship past highschool and into the future and Peter dealing with the return of an old friend who suddenly is the most powerful man arguably in the world and dealing with Electro, a villain whose powers challenge Peter's ability to take him down.

   I'll start with what I like most, and it should come as no surprise as to what it is; the relationship between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy. After seeing and falling in love with Marc Webb's 500 Days of Summer, I had full confidence he could make me believe in the love story between Peter and Gwen, and he fully succeeds. It's also helped along by the fact that in real life Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone fell in love during the filming of the previous movie and have been dating ever since. Their relationship is the best part of that first film, and it certainly is exceptional here. Their real life chemistry gives the characters the necessary believability we need for these characters, especially when trying to separate themselves from the previous trilogy. As much as I like Sam Raimi's Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, Peter and Maryjane in those films don't really have that much chemistry. Maryjane seems Peter as nothing more than a friend until she finds out he's been going out of his way to save both her and New York, and until he pulls off these feats of bravery he can't talk to her. She is put on this pedestal of being the perfect girl for him when she's not really that spectacular. Maryjane is Peter's dream girl who he only gets into a relationship with once he becomes more than what he normally was.

   On the other hand, in The Amazing Spider-Man, Gwen is naturally drawn to Peter before she knows his secret. In that first film, my friends and I noticed that she's putting it out there that she wants Peter real bad before she knows of his dual life. While Peter is still shown as shy and isn't great at talking to her at first, she knows and is interested in him and his interests and they have conversations as equals and not as someone who is afraid of talking to the girl he worships like in the Raimi films. Besides this change in their interpersonal relationship, Gwen is also seen as someone of similar or superior intellect to Peter. She is just as smart and able as he is, which allows her to while still being in danger, have an effect on the plot line of the film instead of just being a damsel in distress. In The Amazing Spider-Man it is Gwen who saves New York. It was Spider-Man who saved the town from The Lizard, but it's Gwen who retrieves the antidote for the gas The Lizard released that will turn the people of New York into lizard people. That is one thing I really like and respect about this series, Gwen Stacy is integral to Spider-Man saving the day, in both the first film and this one.

   I thought the action sequences of the film were waaaaay better than the first one. Spider-Man flows naturally, and what's more, has spider-like movements and actions. In the Raimi films he primarily uses his powers to shoot web, crawl up walls and jump really far, but in the last film and especially this one, they make it a point to show that the spider-bite affected his mind. When he fights, he fights with every limb being another tool, in the opening sequence he has to catch a bunch of little bottles of plutonium and does so using both his arms and his feet, and then uses his web in various ways to store them. They've made it a point in both films too that since being bitten he likes hanging out either upside down or from various heights or angles that a regular person could not do. All of this was taken into consideration when doing his action and stunt choreography, it not only feels like the same person in and out of suit, but it also feels like this is someone who has traits of a spider inside of him.

   The cinematography and score were absolutely fantastic. The first film had no real memorable score or theme and real questionable song placement choices. While we still have one incredibly odd song placement choice, the original score done by Hans Zimmer and the Magnificent Six (which include Pharrell Williams and The Smith's Johnny Marr) is superb. Each of the main characters has a definable theme and the music has the necessary weight to it to make scenes have the most impact.

   If you made it this far into my review, I want you to know I really enjoyed this film and think it deserves your attention if you like Spider-Man as a character. Even if you didn't really like the 2012 film, check this one out. Below I will talk about what I didn't like about the film, but since I can't do that without spoiling the film, you've been warned. If you haven't seen the film read no further and go see it before reading the rest. As a Spider-Man fan for the majority of my life, I heavily enjoyed it and think it's worth seeing.

Spoilers Below

   Okay, so for what I didn't like about the film. The storyline with Peter's parents feels haphazard and messy at best, and a time waster at worst. In the first film we got over half of this storyline about Peter's parents and what they were working on, which was in fact essentially, Spider-Man. However, about halfway through the film that storyline just disappears and is forgotten about. Cut to this film and it's not only what we open the movie with, but the whole storyline is told over again and then elaborated on. When Aunt May talks about how government officials said Peter's parents had betrayed the government and Peter just believes her and thinks his parents were traitors is my low point for the story-arc. We spent a portion of the last movie learning not only that Richard Parker was working on some secret, revolutionary work from someone who worked with him, but we also learn that Oscorp is up to some crazy things. In this film before this sequence, we are both shown and told that Oscorp is running a cover-up on Max Dillon. So why does Peter automatically believe his parents were government traitors and bad people? The hidden train station lab Roosevelt is really cool and I like the scene and what it reveals about the Spider deny. Not only is the Spider DNA that Richard Parker was working on include his own DNA so only someone with his blood could enjoy it's effects, explaining why Peter got his powers, but it also answers Peter's question of whether or not he could give his blood to Harry Osborn and have it work. However, it felt like a ten minutes too long in an already long movie segment that didn't need all that build up to get to.

   I also did not fully enjoy Harry Osborn's character arc. It's a story of extremes. Harry comes in hating his dad, finding out he has a genetic disease that will kill him and hating everything Oscorp stood for. He meets up with Peter and their friendship is nice and covers a lot of ground in a short amount of time and feels like a real friendship between two estranged people who used to be close. Once Harry finds out however that the Spider DNA has everything he thinks he needs to be cured, he has a one track mind that drops all character sense out of the way for plot progression. You know Harry is desperate for a cure, but we hadn't seen him as a killer. When Spider-Man denies him his blood, it made more sense to me that the next step would be for Harry to set up a trap for Spidey and then forcibly take his blood. Harry shows no ill-will towards Spidey earlier, mostly just curiosity and bewilderment. Instead, when Spidey says "No you can't have my blood." Harry automatically switches to "Well, guess we have to kill Spider-Man now since he wouldn't help me." That doesn't make sense. That's a matter of plot fast-forwarding Harry's desperation to find a cure so that he would inject the spider venom himself and turn crazy, inspiring our third act results of both the death of Gwen Stacy and the incarceration of Harry into Ravencroft so he can be approached by Gustav Fiers and start assembling the Sinister Six for the next movie.

   Harry's character arc was sacrificed for the necessity of the franchise. Harry needed to be sent to Ravencroft so he could encounter Fiers, and set in place the Sinister Six for the next set of films. He needed to be desperate enough to inject the spider venom himself instead of Peter's blood. When Norman is dying he is seen to be at least in his 50's, and Harry is 20. It is assumed that that will be what becomes of Harry if he doesn't find a cure for the disease, but Norman's parting gift to Harry is all of his research and intelligence of what lies within Oscorp so that he can find the cure for himself. As Norman is seen doing pretty well in archival footage with Richard Parker, you can assume Harry would have at least 20 years before his conditions from the disease got really bad. Norman's message is to use everything he had done in his lifetime to find himself a cure. Harry starts with this option, then very quickly goes from "Well, Spider-Man has everything I need, guess I need his blood" to "Kill Spider-Man, I'll steal the pure spider venom instead." It's a rushed arc in order to get Harry to do things for the plot to set up the rest of the franchise.

   All this being said, the film still works for me, but I can also recognize where the film falls short and what it could have done better.