Month: February 2022

Released: Feb 2022

Director: David Blue Garcia

Rated R

Run Time: 81 Minutes

Distributor: Netflix

Genre: Horror

Cast:
Sarah Yarkin: Melody
Elsie Fisher: Lila
Mark Burnham: Leatherface
Moe Dunford: Richter
Jacob Latimore: Dante
Olwen Fouéré: Sally Hardesty
Alice Krige: Mrs. MC
William Hope: Sheriff

As a movie fan, I have a tendency to be far more forgiving than most fans.  I understand how difficult a movie is to make.  So, I generally tend to give a majority of movies a bit of a pass, even if they are bad.  Anybody who knows me, knows I have a fondness for bad movies.  But there’s a certain joy in watching a bad movie, especially if a movie knows its bad, but rolls with it.  Most movies generally don’t intend to piss their audiences off.  Sometimes it happens, because people didn’t get what they were expecting.  It’s fair.  That’s the subjectivity of movies.  I’ve come across some real stinkers over the course of my life.  That said, I don’t think I’ve had a movie piss me off the way that the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre did.  The original 1974 movie is a bonafide horror classic.  The original sequel was more of a horror comedy, but it worked that way.  The 2003 remake is one of the best horror remakes out there.  In fact, you could say it jumpstarted the horror remake craze.  But we’re not here to talk about the better movies in the franchise.  Oh, no.  We’re talking about the worst Texas Chainsaw Massacre yet.

Set nearly 50 years after the events of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with only Sally Hardesty surviving, the new film follows a group of young people.  This group of yuppies are headed towards an isolated town in Texas to sell of properties at an auction.  While a majority of the town seems abandoned, a local mechanic, Richter, has taken up residence.  But someone else lives here too, and he has a mask…and a chainsaw.  It seems that over the past 5 years, we’ve seen movie franchises get sequels that either ignores every sequel except the original, or they bring back the original characters into a new movie.  Scream did it.  Halloween did it.  And now, Texas Chainsaw Massacre did it.  The original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre worked because nobody had seen anything like it before.  It was gritty and had a very documentary-style feel about a road trip ending in a nightmare.  The sequels and the remakes paid homage to the original film, by at least respecting the source material, even if the films weren’t necessarily that great.  Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022 pisses on the legacy of the original film.  This is literally the third direct sequel to the 1974 film, yet the connections this film has to that one are tenuous at best.  The only real connection this movie has to the original is the inclusion of Sally Hardesty, the survivor of the original film.  The “story” here is only window dressing to move the film from one kill to the next.  I’m not the biggest fan of millenials, but the film’s comment on them and that world is so fucking ridiculous, it’s not even funny.  It has all the subtlety of a chainsaw.

The acting in this film is okay at best, and completely pathetic at worst.  But the characters are some of the worst I’ve ever come across.  Yeah, the kids from the original film weren’t the smartest, but they didn’t deserve what happened to them.  They just got lost and ended up paying for it.  I don’t know if it was the intention of the film-makers to have you cheering for the bad guy, but if it wasn’t their intention, they failed miserably.  Just about every character in this movie deserved getting diced.  The only character that didn’t really deserve it was Richter, the redneck mechanic.  He was actually pretty cool.  That’s it.  What they did to the character of Sally Hardesty is unforgivable.  She’s essentially the low-rent version of Laurie Strode from the recent Halloween movies, only not as compelling.  The late Marilyn Burns would be spinning in her grave to see what David Blue Garcia and company did to Sally.  They literally threw the character into the garbage.  Oh, I’m sorry, SPOILER ALERT!  I don’t really care about spoiling the movie at this point.

Does the movie deliver on the massacre part of its title, at least?  Yes.  Yes, it does.  This new Chainsaw has some pretty gnarly kills in it, even if some of them use a little CGI.  The movie doesn’t shy away from people getting sawed in half or being completely eviscerated.  The bus sequence is absolutely drenched in blood and gore, and is worth checking out, especially if you’re a gore-hound like me.  But that is about the only real positive thing I can say about the movie.  The decisions made by these characters are so incredibly stupid that even a 6 year old child would be shaking their head.  I can’t believe that this movie was produced by Fede Alvarez, the guy who directed the Evil Dead remake and Don’t Breathe.  I don’t understand the mindset of a group of film-makers thinking that they’re respecting the legacy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by shitting on it.  That’s exactly what they did here.  I understand that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was no Citizen Kane, but that movie garnered an audience and became one of the most respected horror movies ever made.  It took it a while, but it made it.  Even the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 ended up becoming a cult classic.  That’s not going to happen with this one, and it shouldn’t.  This movie is fucking idiotic, it’s almost beyond compare.  I’m aghast at the level of incompetence involved here.  Not even Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation or the 2013 movie were this bad.  Just because a movie has some great gore and kills doesn’t make it a good movie.  In fact, the original film had NO gore in it.  It was all implied.  Tobe Hooper managed to trick the audience into seeing something that didn’t actually happen.  Here?  There’s no such pretense.  It’s a cheap fucking cash grab, and I am NOT surprised that Netflix picked it up.

In case you haven’t figured it out, yet:  I can’t recommend this movie at all.  It’s bullshit.  It’s one of the worst fucking movies I’ve ever seen, and it’s definitely one of the most insulting.  Whoever wrote this movie needs to re-watch the original movie and understand why it worked.  Fuck this movie.

The conventional wisdom when it comes to movies based on video games is that they generally suck.  Why?  Is it because film-makers don’t necessarily understand why people play the games in the first place?  Or are they trying to reach a wider audience that may not necessarily know about a particular franchise?  Whatever the case may be, we have MANY examples of video game-based movies that are awful.  Now, a lot of these you could probably chalk up to former film-maker Uwe Boll not actually caring about the source material of the movies that he’s made.  He’s notorious for some of the worst video game movies of all time: House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, In The Name of the King, Postal.  The list goes on and on.  If you’re trying to reach the gamer audience, you’re automatically going to have an uphill battle.  Gamers, like myself, will pick apart these movies like its nobody’s business.  At the same time, the casual film-going audience isn’t necessarily going to be familiar with the game that you’re basing the movie off of.  On top of that, there are a lot of movie fans who aren’t gamers.  So, you have to try to appeal to THEM as well.  While there have been exceptions, movies based on video games have not fared well against audiences and critics.  I can go all the way back to the FIRST movie based on a video game: Super Mario Bros.  That movie was a complete disaster.  It was so poorly received, that Nintendo would never allow a movie to made on Super Mario Bros.  Now, there is a new animated movie that’s in the process of being made, but that comes nearly 30 years after the live-action film fell flat on its face.  The key to any good movie is the story and characters.  When you’re adapting a video game, you can’t just do a straight adaptation.  You have to figure out what won’t work in a movie and throw it out or alter it to make it fit.  That’s the truth with ANY adaptation.

That brings me to another point: Story-telling.  Telling stories has been a part of human civilization since we first walked on this planet.  It’s one of many ways of passing on knowledge to the next generation.  Story-telling has taken many forms.   From cave paintings to books to movies, story-telling has evolved exponentially over thousands of years.  The key to any good story is writing.  You need to have a beginning, middle, and end.  You also have to have compelling characters and ideas to propel that story forward.  It’s not just that, though:  You need to have conflict and connections between characters.  You know, the things that the audience can identify with.  The best movies have been doing this for almost a century.  With video games, though, they’ve only recently started to become more and more serious about telling stories.  By recently, I mean within the last 10 to 20 years.  Granted, a lot of gamers generally don’t go in for the story, but rather the gameplay, and rightfully so.  It’s an interactive experience that’s supposed to draw an audience into its world.  But what happens when a video game has a really good story to tell that’s well-written?  That’s the cherry on top of the sundae.  To be fair, most stories in video games are little more than window dressing to drive the player from one part of the game to another.

Stories have been in video games since the mid-80s, but as I said earlier, they’ve only been lip-service, essentially.  There have been a few exceptions where the story is compelling like the original Final Fantasy on the original Nintendo Entertainment System.  I would argue that it was around 2003-2004 when video games started getting serious about telling stories.  Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is a perfect example of a role-playing game with decent gameplay mechanics wrapped up in an interesting and exciting story set in the Star Wars universe.  It was well-received by both critics and audiences.  BioWare, the company that made the game, proved that you could have an awesome gameplay experience with a great story.  That’s been their bread-and-butter for decades.  At least up until to the last few years, but that’s a topic for another day.  I would actually point to the original Mass Effect trilogy as being one of the best examples of narrative-driven games.  It was important that the gameplay stood up to scrutiny, but the story was epic and original.  It was also very cinematic.  As technology has advanced, so has cinematic story-telling in video games.  The line between movie story-telling and video game story-telling is becoming increasingly thinner as technology continues to improve.  Now, we’ve got amazing cutscenes and stories that are bolstered by motion-capture, allowing for more realistic-looking characters.  There’s an example of this that I want to bring to your attention: Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.

For those of you that don’t know, Uncharted is an Indiana Jones-inspired adventure game centered around a character called Nathan Drake.  He searches the world for lost cities and treasures, but ends up running afoul of nefarious groups and organizations that are intent on finding the treasure before he does.  Uncharted is one of the first games that really felt cinematic in scope, but it’s the fourth game that takes it another level, at least visually.  I’m going to show you a clip from the game and I want you to pay attention not just to the graphics, but also the writing and chemistry between the characters.  The scene in question takes place after Nathan Drake and his long-lost brother Sam have been chased out of the fictional city of King’s Bay in Madagascar.  We see Nathan and Sam regroup with Nathan’s best friend, Sully.  When they enter their hotel room, Nathan is confronted by his wife, Elena, who he had been lying to for the previous several weeks about a job that never actually happened.

This particular scene is one of many throughout the entire game, but it shows something very important: Chemistry.  Look at the way Elena and Nathan react to each other.  These are two characters that love each other and Nathan’s deception has caused some…problems with that, and you can see that on Drake’s face: He screwed up, and he takes it out on Sully.  It’s an emotionally charged scene that I feel rivals a lot of movies that deal with this kind of relationship.  It’s that good.  You can see the emotions and the disappointment on Elena’s face when she’s confronted with…everything.  It’s tense and it’s heartbreaking.  It helps that the graphics and the technology on display in this game can deliver those performances, but it’s also the voice-acting that makes it work.  This…is film-making, but for a different medium.  We’re seeing more and more games take this approach to telling a story.  The Resident Evil 2 remake from a couple of years ago is another great example, but for a horror game instead.

Story-telling in video games has come a long way in a surprisingly short amount of time.  The Uncharted video games are probably my favorite example of cinematic and narrative driven adventure games.  Movies and video games will always be separate in terms of story-telling, but the quality of story-telling is quickly catching up to and may actually exceed what movie are capable of.  With video games, the story can draw you into a really amazing interactive experience unlike anything else.  Movies are more passive experience where you just sit and watch things unfold, and that’s just fine.  Obviously, I love movies and good stories.  Maybe that’s why it’s so hard for film-makers to adapt video games into movies.  They’re two vastly different kinds of experiences.  At the same time, film-makers are trying to lure gamers in by appealing directly to what film-makers THINK gamers want.  The recent Mortal Kombat movie threw in buckets of blood and gore saying, “Hey, we’re R-rated now!”  “Look at us!”  The recent Resident Evil movie visually got the original games right in terms of character and location design, but both film suffer from the same problem:  Bad. Writing.  It’s not enough to try and placate gamers by showing us what we want to see.  You have to get us to actually care about it, and that’s the crux of the issue.  There is a new Uncharted movie that was just released to theaters starring Tom Holland as Nathan Drake and Mark Wahlberg as Sully. Judging from the reactions of both the audiences and critics, film-makers got it wrong…again.  I’m going to go see it tomorrow and I will let you know what I thought of it.  I just thought it would be interesting to talk about how much video games have evolved in terms of story-telling, and how they continue to evolve.  It’s really interesting, in my opinion.

Released: November 2021

Director: Johannes Roberts

Rated R

Run Time: 107 Minutes

Distributor: Sony/Screen Gems

Genre: Horror

Cast:
Kaya Scodelario: Claire Redfield
Robbie Amell: Chris Redfield
Hannah John-Kamen: Jill Valentine
Tom Hopper: Albert Wesker
Avan Jogia: Leon S. Kennedy
Donal Logue: Chief Irons
Neal McDonough: William Birkin

For the longest time, most people thought that video games were for kids.  For a while, they kind of were.  But over the last 25 years, we’ve seen video games become another legitimate medium for story-telling.  Even more impressive is that a lot of games these days have become more cinematic in their approach to telling stories.  Uncharted, for example, is a very cinematic experience that happens to be a great video game, especially Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.  So, with video games becoming more movie-like in their presentation, it’s bizarre to see them continue to try to bring these interactive experiences to the big screen.  The problem?  Most gamers prefer the interactive experience as opposed to the passive experience of a movie.  They have more control over what a character does, whereas a movie, you just sit back and watch it.  Another issue is that movie producers and directors fail to understand that idea and try to market these movies towards an audience that is obviously going to be extremely skeptical, and rightfully so.  Most movies based on video games suck.  There’s not a critic out there that’ll deny that.  There’s a few here and there that manage to be somewhat decent: Mortal Kombat(1995), Tomb Raider(2017), Sonic The Hedgehog, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.  In 2002, there was another movie that almost broke the curse of the video game film: Resident Evil.  20 years and 5 sequels later, we have a new entry: A reboot called Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City.  It’s a ridiculously long-winded name, so I’ll just refer to it as RE: 2021.

In the long-forgotten year of 1998, a ruthless organization known as the Umbrella Corporation has been conducting illegal bio-weapon experiments in the suburbs of Raccoon City.  Claire Redfield, a former resident of the city returns to inform her brother, Chris that Umbrella isn’t the benevolent business that he thought they were and that there’s something seriously wrong with the city.  At the same time, a group of elite police officers disappeared will investigating a dead body at a nearby mansion.  The Resident Evil video games owe their existence to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.  Those are are two of the most iconic zombie movies ever made.  As a casual fan of the games, I could see the influence that Romero had on the original 3 games.  These games wear their influence on their sleeves and rightfully so, because the stories in these games are very b-level horror movie kind of stories, and they work in the confines of a video game.  The original movie that was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and starred Milla Jovovich, took a lot of elements from the original game, but it managed to do things in a very different way that worked for movies.  Say what you will about the sequels, they still managed to feel like Resident Evil without actually referencing the games, outside of the zombies and characters.  The movies went their own way.  This new Resident Evil takes the first two games and mashes them together into an incoherent mess, when they really didn’t need to.  All they had to do was focus on one game or the other.  Splicing the two together created a whole lot of narrative problems.  There’s way too much going on, and as a result, it takes a while for the film to really get going, but by the time it does, it’s almost over.  It’s really bad writing.

In all fairness, it’s really obvious that the film-makers have a great deal of love for the source material.  That much is clear, and you can definitely see it in the details.  From a visual standpoint, RE:2021 LOOKS like a Resident Evil movie.  The locations, the sets, and the costumes are all ripped from the game.  They also look really, really good.  Some of the creature designs for the Licker and Birkin are all really good.  Kaya Scodelario LOOKS like Claire Redfield and Robbie Amell LOOKS like Chris Redfield.  I can’t emphasize it enough: The movie LOOKS like Resident Evil.  The problem is that it doesn’t FEEL like Resident Evil.  There’s a lot of reasons for that.  First of all, the writing is awful.  There’s not a character in the film that the audience could identify with.  They’re all incredibly unlikable and one-note.  The worst offense here is what they did to Leon Kennedy, one of the protagonists from the second game.  In the game, Kennedy was a rookie, yes, but he was not stupid.  The Leon Kennedy in this movie is a complete and utter MORON.  He can’t seem to do anything without approval from the chief, who doesn’t like him at all, and he ends up losing his gun to a non-violent conspiracy theorist locked in a cell.  This is the kind of idiot that you would stab in the leg and leave him for the zombies so your group can get away.  He’s supposed to be a competent police officer, but Kennedy’s like the low-rent version of a Keystone Cop.  Claire is really the only competent character in the movie.  She knows how to pick locks, handle guns, and takes charge.  Albert Wesker, who would eventually become the franchise’s main and iconic villain, is also the only one that seems to feel like a human being…at times.

About a week ago, I did a post on The Best and Worst Casting in movies.  There’s something to be said for a strong casting that can elevate even a bad movie.  But when you get every aspect of a casting wrong, it boggles the mind.  There’s not a single actor in this movie that has been properly cast.  Now, I want to say that I don’t blame the actors for how their characters turned.  It’s not entirely their fault.  But somebody was drinking on the day that these folks were cast as who they were supposed to be.  Robbie Amell actually looks like his video-game counterpart and he does fairly well and Kaya Scodelario is passable as Claire, but everybody feels out of place.  Avan Jogia is the most out of place as Leon Kennedy.  He doesn’t even LOOK like the character.  I’m not going to say that actors have to look exactly like their video game counterparts, but an effort needs to be made to make sure that there are similarities and some sort of resemblance and there wasn’t.

Is there anything that I actually LIKED about this movie?  Sure.  As I mentioned, the attention to detail is spot-on at times.  The locations are identical to the video game counterparts, especially Raccoon City’s Police Department interior.  Some of the events are lifted right out of the games as well.  There is clearly an attempt at adapting the games into a live-action medium, and I’ll be honest:  I kind of enjoyed it.  It has a very 90s, b-movie feel to it, which is appropriate because the movie takes place in 1998.  Also, I like the fact that I can see what’s going on.  The last of the Paul W.S. Anderson movies was a shaky-cam mess.  There’s very little of that here.  So, the cinematography is pretty good.  Sound design is also pretty decent.  Some of the CGI creatures are not half-bad.  The Licker and the Birkin monster are actually impressive, even if they kind of look like they were ripped from one of the animated Resident Evil movies.  The CGI dog, though, was awful.  Zombie dogs are fairly integral to the original series of games, but this one was ghastly, in all the wrong ways.  Also, the helicopter crash at the mansion was hilariously bad.

Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City was a movie clearly made for the fans, at least that’s what the film-makers hoped.  Unfortunately, the die-hard fans of the original games are going to hate this movie.  Yeah, the got aspects about it right, but there’s no real tension and no real stakes.  You have a problem when the movie you make is centered around fan-service.  Fan-service can be a good thing, as it was in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, but it wasn’t in your face like this movie.  It’s the same kind of problem that plagues EVERY movie that’s all about fan-service.  Do I hate this movie?  Honestly, no.  Disappointed, yeah.  But the truth is, is that I enjoyed this movie more often than I didn’t.  The problems that this movie has can be laid at the feet of Johannes Roberts, the director and screen-writer.  He obviously has passion for the source material, as did everyone that worked on it, but Roberts’ ability to write a coherent script is painfully lacking.  Characters are either not interesting enough or they are completely unlikable.  The gore is pretty good and some of the creature and zombie designs are pretty decent, but the movie doesn’t get to actually being a Resident Evil movie until the third act, which is completely rushed.  Yeah, it’s not a good movie.  It’s not the worst I’ve seen, but it feels like it should’ve gone direct-to-video.  The fact that it managed a wide theatrical release is beyond me.

I say this as a casual fan of Resident Evil:  If you’re a huge fan of the games, stick with those or go back to the original movie.  For casual fans like me: Set your expectations low.  Real low.  You might find yourself entertained a little bit.  For the rest of the movie-going audience: Don’t bother.  I will say that I would rather watch this than Moonfall again, so there is that.

Released: February 2022

Director: Roland Emmerich

Rated PG-13

Run Time: 130 Minutes

Distributor: Lionsgate

Genre: Action/Science Fiction

Cast:
Halle Berry: Jocinda ‘Jo’ Fowler
Patrick Wilson: Brian Harper
John Bradley: KC Houseman
Michael Pena: Tom Lopez

I swear, the planet Earth has a rough time of it, these days.  Especially in movies.  Alien invasions, nuclear explosions, the sun, people, asteroids, global warming.  It seems this planet has taken more punishment than Catherine The Great.  Granted, the earth always bounces back, but the movies show it no mercy.  I love disaster movies.  Whether you’re tackling smaller disasters like volcanoes, tornadoes, or earthquakes, natural disasters make for some visually spectacular moments.  To me, Dante’s Peak is one of the best disaster movies ever made.  You can even go all the way back to Earthquake from 1974, which was a pretty spectacular film.  Even movies about man-made disasters like The Towering Inferno provide some really awesome visuals.  When it comes to destroying the planet, nobody can do it better than German director Roland Emmerich.  This guy has quite the resumé for planetary annihilation.  The only other director that could destroy the planet as well as Emmerich can is Michael Bay.  God help us if those two ever team up on a project.  That said, Emmerich can come up with some crazy ideas for destroying the world when he’s not sticking his foot in his mouth, but I’ll get to that in a bit.  For now, the movie I bring to you is Moonfall.

The movie begins as astronaughts Brian Harper and Jocinda Fowler are working on a satellite when they’re attacked by a mysterious force.  While Fowler is praised for saving the shuttle, Brian is laughed out of NASA for his explanation of what happened.  10 years later, a nerdy conspiracy theorist, KC discovers that the moon has changed its orbit and is on a collision course with earth.  Trying to get the attention of Brian Harper and NASA, KC is met with skepticism until NASA discovers the exact same thing is happening.  Realizing that Earth has about 3 weeks before the moon crashes into it, a plan is set in motion to head to the moon to figure out what’s going on, only to find out that there’s more happening with the moon than they realized.  Of all the doomsday scenarios that have played out in movies over the past decade, the moon crashing into Earth is probably the most interesting.  From a story-telling standpoint, you’ve seen this kind of movie before.  Multiple times actually, and it always plays out the exact same way.  Moonfall, aside from some pretty outstanding visuals, doesn’t do anything to distinguish itself from any other disaster flick in existence.  Especially from a narrative standpoint.  It’s the same as 2012, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and Armageddon.  The only difference is the mechanism of destruction.  If you’ve seen ANY of those other movies, you’ve seen Moonfall.

It’s really funny when you think that Roland Emmerich, the master of disaster, decided to pull his punches with Moonfall.  Seriously.  You look at all the stuff he did before when it comes to destroying the world, he went all out.  2012 was EPIC in that regard.  But for Moonfall, Emmerich decided to restrain himself.  Of all the movies to show restraint on, why did it have to be this one.  The idea is ripe for apocalyptic levels of destruction, and while we do see some of that, there really isn’t enough.  Instead, the film focuses on the adventures of a handful of people that I couldn’t care less about and their attempts at preventing Earth’s destruction.  Now, to be fair, some of the ideas involved with the moon and what it represents are incredibly interesting.  There’s SOME high-level science fiction in those ideas, but as is usually the case, Roland Emmerich isn’t smart enough to implement those ideas in a meaningful way.  You could tell from the trailers that the moon in the film is a version of the Dyson’s Sphere, a real-life scientific theory of a megastructure that was designed to harness the power of a star.  There’s a lot of creative things you could do with that idea, especially in a disaster movie, but it’s essentially window dressing here where Emmerich would rather focus his efforts on bad family drama.  I have to give credit to the actors.  Patrick Wilson, Halle Berry, John Bradley, and everybody act the hell out of this movie considering the god-awful script that they’ve been given.

To give Moonfall SOME credit, the disaster sequences are pretty spectacular when they do happen.  I have to be honest:  Seeing the moon roll over in the sky is a pretty epic and terrifying image.  They don’t really skimp on some of the major destruction and explosions.  But as I’ve said before, there’s not enough of it.  It doesn’t go off the rails enough to wow the audience.  Again, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before and done better.  On the plus side, it’s not boring.  It moves pretty quickly.  Honestly, I would rather watch this than the new Scream movie any day of the week.  I don’t think it’s completely awful.  It’s definitely got some spectacular moments, and if you set your expectations properly, you might have a good time.  I did have a good time, but not always in the way that the movie intended.  This is the kind of movie where you get your friends, a pizza and some cheap beer to enjoy.

In my introduction, I said that Roland Emmerich had stuck his foot in his mouth.  Let me explain:  According to Deadline, Roland Emmerich slammed Star Wars and the Marvel movies for “ruining our industry a little bit.”  I find it hilarious that he’s complaining about blockbuster movies, when he himself has made several including Independence Day, one of the biggest blockbusters of the 1990s.  It would be one thing if the success of those movies actually had an effect on his ability to make a movie, but here’s the problem: Moonfall cost 150 million dollars to make and it didn’t even bring in 10 million on its opening weekend.  That makes it one of the biggest box-office bombs of the year so far.  You could say the film left a moon-sized crater in Lionsgate’s wallet.  This isn’t the first time a director has tried to slam successful movies.  We’ve seen this song-and-dance from a number of high-profile directors including Martin Scorsese.  It’s one thing to say that Star Wars and Marvel movies aren’t for you.  That would have been just fine.  But they had to take it one step further and actually accuse THESE movies which are successful, of not being “true” cinema.  Any movie that can bring in a large audience, especially during a pandemic, is a win in my books.  People need a reason to go back to theaters.  Spider-Man: No Way Home provided that, and it’s one of the biggest box-office successes of all time.  Normally, I wouldn’t bring this up in a review, but Roland Emmerich started blasting movies before Moonfall was even released.  Do you even think that people will go see that movie after he made those comments?  It’s just a thought.

Anyway, do I recommend Moonfall?  If you’re a disaster movie buff like me, it might be worth checking out, but you’re not really missing anything if you don’t.