Halo: Unbound

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

One of the worst second episodes to a show I have ever seen. This will be my last time reviewing this show.

Where to begin…. The thing I had the biggest issue with was the fact that this episode let all the air out of the balloon in terms of the momentum the first episode set up and greatly slowed down the pace. I wasn’t expecting all that much from this second episode, especially after the mixed bag that the first episode was, but I was at least expecting it to not be dull, sadly that is too much to hope for.

Moreover, though last week I said I didn’t really care that this show completely ignored the games and the pre-established lore, well things changed here. Midway through the episode I realised that this show has the exact same problem as Netflix’s Witcher series, it takes character names and the franchise name but it makes something unrecognisable out of it. By all intents and purposes, this is just a deeply generic science fiction show with the Halo name slapped over it.

Further in that vein, Master Chief, played by Pablo Schreiber, is taking off his helmet so much here that you forget he even is Chief at times and think you are following a new if entirely forgettable character, but no.

I won’t even start on what they are doing with Cortana, but I will say yikes.

Overall a huge miss for Paramount +.

Pros.

Pablo Schreiber is really trying and deserves far better than this mess.

Cons.

This isn’t Halo

Master Chief constantly taking his helmet off

Cortana

The pacing

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Windfall: Netflix Needs To Stop Giving Lily Collins Work

2/5

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

An ode to Hollywood that really didn’t understand the assignment.

This film did the impossible, it gave us a rare bad Jessie Plemons performance; a thing until recently I thought impossible. However, I will contextualise that point as no one is really good in this film as such how can anyone be bad? More so it is shades of average in terms of performance. Jason Segel is the most palatable, and it is nice to see him giving a straight dramatic performance without making dumb jokes. Lily Colins is just playing herself, it would have been more interesting to have cast Plemons’s real life wife Kristen Dunst in the role and played it that way but hey Colins is married to the director and that has to have some perks right? Plemons just seems tired here, there are a few scenes where it looks like he is going to give it his all but then he seems to run out of steam.

As I mentioned in the summary this film opens like a classic Hollywood picture and has the ego to think that it is the modern incarnation, but the noir esque sensibilities quickly get lost along the way as the film devolves into a very basic crime/ hostage film. Moreover, if the ending was going for shocking then it failed at that too as almost everyone must have seen that twist coming from a million miles away.

Overall, more drab fare for Netflix soon to be forgotten about.

Pros.

Segel is palatable

It is watchable if dull

Cons.

Colins

Plemons

It feels derivative

Umma: Mummy Issues

2/5

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

A mother, played by Sandra Oh, and her daughter, played by Fivel Stewart, must contend with past ghosts that arrive after a death in the family.

So I will give this film props for originality, the Korean flavour to it helped to set it apart from a lot of other mother-daughter horror films out there, moreover, the mythology of the film feels likewise fresh and novel.

However, that is where the praise ends, as though there was some novelty to the film for the most part it was incredibly cliched and predictable. I don’t know if it is just because I watch a lot of films, but I could accurately work out from the opening five minutes where this film was going and how it was going to end and it did just that, not a surprise in store.

Moreover, the mother-daughter relationship between Oh and Stewarts’ characters felt like re-treading well worn ground, the relationship added little new to either the genre as a whole or to mother-daughter relationships in general, much like the wider conflict of the film we have seen it before.

Overall, though certain parts of the horror feel fresh it can’t mask the wider feeling of over familiarity and blandness on display here.

Pros.

The Korean inspiration to the horror

It is watchable

Cons.

The mother-daughter relationship

It is generic

It has been done better before

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Moon Knight: The Goldfish Problem

4/5

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

Moon Knight, played by Oscar Isaac, makes his MCU debut.

I will preface this by saying comics-wise I am a huge Moon Knight fan, the Warren Ellis run on the character from a few years ago was fantastic, as such I have been very excited for this series. The first episode met my expectations for it, but struggled to exceed them as like many others have said this first episode was a lot of fun but it wasn’t perfect.

I enjoyed the fact that this episode felt like it had a different age rating from the rest of the MCU in that it actually allowed things to be gory or frightening and didn’t have to make everything so that it would appeal to audiences of all ages, this gave me some hope for characters like Ghost Rider and Punisher in the MCU.

Moreover, of what we have seen so far I appreciated Isaac’s performance, I know for some this accent is a little fake or grating, personally, though it may be a little confused, I didn’t find it off putting. Furthermore, I thought Isaac was good in his role as Stephen Grant, even though it is not comics accurate.

My one criticism of the episode would be that despite the mature tone of other parts of it the episode still forced in some of the MCU’s brand of ‘humour’ which didn’t land for me and instead often took me out of it. I hope as things get more serious we get less of it, but I know I am probably just wasting my breath.

Overall, a very promising start that looks set to make up for the short comings of other Disney + shows like Hawkeye.

Pros.

The blood and gore

Isaac

A fresh story in the MCU

It feels like how I would imagine Moon Knight from the comics

Cons.

Less humour please

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The Witcher Season Two: The Grey Tide Of Netflix’s Efforts Into Fantasy, How Not To Adapt.

Written by Luke Barnes

In a break from my reviewing tradition I want to take a minute today to talk about season two of the Witcher on Netflix, and why I couldn’t make it to the end of it despite being a fan of the books and the games.

So straight off the bat we have to debate whether this show even is the Witcher, like it is called that and has characters which bare the same names as those who appear in the books and the games but in most other ways it is devoid of the wider franchise and feels far closer to generic fantasy. Whether it is the fact that show choose to cut out so, so much from the books or the fact it changes so much of what it does keep there is just something about this show that just doesn’t feel like the Witcher to me.

Clearly this show is hell bent on appealing to the Twitter brigade, we all know who I am talking about, they have race swapped a number of key characters and are constantly queer baiting a relationship between Geralt, played by Henry Cavil, and Jaskier, played by Joey Batey. I am surprised more people aren’t annoyed about the queer baiting on this show as it is quite obviously leading to nothing and is a poor stand in for any real LGBTQ+ representation on the show. Moreover, the race swaps could have been used well, maybe even played some sort of role in the new story the show wants to tell, but no, they were done for no reason other than for the people behind the show to preach about how diverse their cast is. Yikes.

In addition, the effects are often quite poor, yes every now and again they get one sequence where the effects come together well but more often then not it doesn’t work. This might sound bias against Netflix, which is humorous as many people have called me a Netflix shill in the past, but there is a hue of their trademark cheapness to this show that really shows up more often than it should.

The scene that finally killed this show for me was when Eskel, played by Basil Eidenbenz, was turned into a monster and killed just for the random shock value of it despite only just being introduced and being important in the wider lore. They could have handled this scene in any number of better ways but they did it to prove their independence from the successful books the show is based on and show how there is no element of Sapkowski’s universe that this show won’t ruin.

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