Rebel Moon: Stop Giving Zack Snyder Creative Control

Summary

Netflix doubles down on the 21^st century’s most over-hyped director, Zack Snyder.

Zack Snyder can’t seem to string a story together to save his life, maybe he is one of the few directors that works better under tight studio control, as such here we see some sort of rip-off of Star Wars and the Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai that has no soul or personality. It is Bayian, a term I am coining to refer to the works of Michael Bay, in that it is all style and flash but underneath it is just nothing.

The decision to split this into two parts reeks of Netflix and Zack thinking this was going to be bigger than it was, as it stands it is just a film without an ending, reflecting my earlier point that Snyder can’t put a story together and is an awful writer.

Worse yet Sofia Boutella, who actually is a good actor she just chooses to star in flop after flop as she has the most unlucky agent in Hollywood, clearly has taken inspiration from the Alaqua Cox school of acting and plays her central role with the same look of I am a badass and I’m pissed off for the whole film. There is no attempt to give her character anything more than that, but that can be said also for the other characters who are so thin that you struggle to even call them caricatures.

Then you have the distinct lack of gore, what were they thinking there. Was this supposed to be child friendly, if so who thought that was a good idea considering most of Snyder’s fanbase are angry men, who whilst they may act like children are in fact not.

Overall, a woeful dud for Netflix

1/5

Pros.

It has some good visuals

Cons.

It’s boring

Sofia Boutella is awful

It is far too long

Snyder cannot write

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Star Wars: The Quest To Lose Half The Audience To Get A Quarter

Written by Luke Barnes

This piece will talk about Star Wars and the continued mismanagement of the once beloved franchise. As a lot of you will know I have written a cinema issues piece before about Star Wars and Kathleen Kennedy, but here I want to talk more about the upcoming Acolyte show and how the metrics show that what certain sections of Lucasfilm are trying to do won’t work.

So before we get into it a few disclaimers, firstly I think the shows and soon to be movies under John and Dave’s watchful eye have been mostly good bar Book of Bobba Fett¸ secondly the Acolyte may well be good I could be wrong about it. With that said let’s get into it.

Men and women alike for many decades have both liked Star Wars, however, in terms of traditional gender norms it was always seen as more of a boy brand, rightly or wrongly, than a girl brand. Personally, I think people can like what they like regardless of gender, but this was how the franchise was perceived. Anyway in recent years Disney has tried to make the brand into a girl brand with the idea that the male audience would stick around and they could grow the audience even more, and maybe in a sense they could have done this. However, rather than create new stories that had male and female strong characters in it that could encourage both sides of the audience to stick around new projects like the Acolyte don’t value or want the male audience around, so only focus on creating female characters with the idea that male fans have had it too good for too long. No doubt they will cry that this isn’t for male fans or call them ists and phobes as they often do, again because Lucasfilm wants to keep the male audience around, sarcasm.

Moreover, look at something like Madame Web that thought it could take its male audience for granted and went full force into the idea of tokenistic cynical female empowerment and then got closer to having women being fifty percent of the audience but at the same time lost a massive chunk of their male audience and bombed. If I ran Star Wars that would bother me, and I would know as the research suggests that most of my audience was male so I would question will this show work for them.

I am not saying that men can’t relate to female characters of course they can look at the popularity of Buffy but when you create a show that seems to be from the off, with how the creatives have spoken about it, being fairly antagonistic to a large part of your viewing audience, you can’t really be surprised when this does flop or underperform or just doesn’t get picked up for a second season.

What I want is for common sense to return, for the pendulum to swing back to the middle. You can make a show that is for everyone, that doesn’t have creatives that hate their audience and tells them this show isn’t for them, you can have a show that appeals to men and women, you don’t need to prioritise the female audience over the male audience you can do both. Why does it have to be one way or the other at the moment. You know why something like Dune did really well because it appealed to men and women, the director didn’t do an Instagram post in a car looking like he hasn’t shaved in a few too many years and tell fans that the film isn’t for them it is just for a small section of vocal activists on X who probably don’t even care about the IP.

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Stan Culture: Lonely Souls, Cult Like Fanatics Or Dumb People Who Can’t Think For Themselves

Written by Luke Barnes

This piece will talk about stan culture and how it is ruining film discourse. So for those of you unfamiliar, a stan or fan account on social media is a person who devotes themselves entirely to another person or a franchise and spends hours a day constantly tweeting out about them or using fan cams, repetitive streams of pictures or video clips, to prove their devotion.

I have read some pieces about these people saying they are lonely and look to these parasocial relationships with stars as a means of finding community. However, where that becomes challenging is with the dogmatic way in which they act, these people act like they are in a cult, if the object of their eye does something bad they will still defend them blindly and attack any naysayers, which is fairly typical cult like behaviour.

What is even more troubling that they though you could say they do it to have a purpose and have a community, they also devote themselves to people they don’t know. They act like these celebrities are their friends, their family, their lovers and this is unhealthy as it reeks of obsession. A para-social bond between a viewer and an actor or a listener and a singer is normal and often its encouraged, though here it can be seen to be going too far and going into that realm of viewing the singer or actor as a part of them not as a separate person, they view an attack on one as a personal attack on them.

Moreover these people also carry out the silencing activities of a cult, and will come after anyone who speaks ill of their obsession sometimes threatening them with violence or false accusations in order to try and get them to be quiet and to distract from the criticism. This makes honest and valued criticism harder and harder to find as these groups and to an extent both extremes of the political divide cling so hard to their tribalism that they feel that anyone outside of them needs harassing. How are you supposed to say such an actor is stiff and wooden if a few hundred odd balls with too much time on their hands will spam you for days with death threats.

I believe that people need to carry on despite the stans and keep saying what they want to say, but more so I think something needs to be done about the stans from a societal viewpoint this isn’t healthy for them and they are only making cyberbullying online worse as well. In a sense it is a form of extremism not in the bombs and kidnappings sort of way but in a sense of extreme cliques of people where group think rules the roost and that outsiders need to be punished, it highlights the dangers of the internet and how increasingly it is becoming apparent that it needs to be policed better and with a much firmer hand.

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Damsel: Millie Bobby Brown Proves She Is A One Hit Wonder

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

Netflix continues to try and make Millie Bobby Brown a thing, yet she continues to have as much charm as a true British great like Keira Knightly might have in one finger.

So if you needed a better example of what makes a modern Netflix film then look no further than this. Terrible CGI, a ridiculous and insulting girl boss story that makes little to no sense, and a world that feels like Bridgerton with dragons. Oh and it wastes the time of Angela Bassett and Ray Winstone giving them nothing to do and just using them as recognisable faces.

Do we need to go over the definition of a mary sue as it applies to cinematic archetypes? In case we do a mary sue is a character that has no progression and is great at whatever she tries for the fact that she is perfect and infallible. It is reductive girl power nonsense that strips away any humanity, flaws and character that a female lead can have and instead has her be this stoic, inhuman being. What sort of standard does this set for women? Again it is not empowering, they think it is with the idea that it is telling girls that they can be the dragon slayer, but girls already knew that, rather this film says that women have to be tough stoic and not feminine otherwise they are weak and part of the problem. It is incredibly reductive.

So Brown’s character is thrown by the evil male prince into a dragons lair as sacrifice, and even though we are not shown her sword fighting even for a scene in the film she is able to go toe to toe with it whereas a platoon of knights just got destroyed. Again this is cheap, rather than give her character an arc and make her human and fall and have to rise to the occasion the writers can’t be bothered to actually develop the female lead just having her immediately be perfect. It speaks to male writers that want to appear progressive but don’t actually care about their female characters so just use surface level girl boss tropes rather than make Elodie a developed character that you can actually care about.

Moreover, Brown is clearly a graduate of the Alaqua Cox school of acting as rather than try and make Elodie feel more human and real, Brown just plays the character with a constant layer of indignation ready to go on a lecture at any second. Though she is only young as we see her do more and more projects it is becoming clearer that she isn’t a good actor by any means and has clear limitations, maybe she is a one hit wonder, this would make sense why she hasn’t been cast in more Hollywood projects, outside of King Of The Monsters, and is largely now being propped up by Netflix.

Overall, just trash made by an algorithm with no care.

0.5/5

Pros.

It is unintentionally funny at times

Cons.

The CGI

It wastes Angela Bassett and Ray Winstone

The character is poorly written

The girl boss/mary sue qualities

It doesn’t actually update the trope it just recycles it and goes yes we know its bad

The American Society Of Magical: Race Hate The Movie

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

A film meant to stand up an archaic racist trope, becomes just as racist.

If a filmmaker made a film wherein the plot line said there was nothing worse than an upset or threatened man of colour and tried to release it in the contemporary market it would be rightly condemned as hugely racist. However, the idiotic idea that you cannot be racist towards white people is tested to the limit here and proven that you actually can. The way this film generalises about white people and uses blatant caricatures, even for the purpose of comedy, is racist there is no other way to describe it. If as I laid out at the beginning the tables where turned this film would not have been made, yet this film sees the light of day despite an almost pathological hatred of white people seeing them all as villains out to oppress the lead.

Racist humour exists of course one only needs to tune into an episode of Family Guy to see an outdated stereotype of some kind, yet there the difference is that the show doesn’t get up on a soapbox and tell you it is progressive and righteous, it knows it said a racist joke and rolls with it rightly or wrongly. Here however the film thinks it can be as racist as it likes towards white people, making them out to be lazy, stupid, violent and incapable of doing anything other than steal the hard work of those they oppress, and then wants to say it is progressive, when it is actually regressive and divisive.

The most stupid thing about this film is that it doesn’t understand the trope it is trying to comment on. Within films about said trope, it is in the title, the character has no agency other than to serve and help the white characters yet the characters here have no agency and only exist to serve, they don’t want to change the status quo. As such what is this film challenging? What is it updating? It is just repeating the trope again but saying ‘oh look guys we can see its wrong’, but do they do anything new with it? Nope, they just have a character point out how messed up the trope is something that everyone with a brain already knew.

Finally the lecture at the end of the film where the main character finally stands up for himself just feels like hate speech, it boils down to white people are bad, again sub out that for any other race and this film wouldn’t be made, but this film seems to have a bee in its bonnet.

Overall, there is a reason that this film has underperformed and been ravaged by critics it is race baiting plain and simple, the creatives clearly have some prejudice towards white people, in my opinion, and wants to inject that into the film seemingly unaware that it will alienate a large part of the audience. A well deserved flop that hopefully kills the careers of those involved with it.

0/5

Pros.

None

Cons.

It is disgustingly racist

It hates its audience

It preaches and lectures rather than try to be entertaining

It is tonally all over the show

It doesn’t actually update the trope it just recycles it and goes yes we know its bad

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Gran Turismo: Worse Than A Cut Break Line

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

Sony continues to Sony and in doing so makes one of the worst videogame movies of all time.

Many games have great storylines and would lend themselves well to the idea of being made into films, a great deal of these already have. However, no one at any point thought that Gran Turismo a game without a story was desperately in need of adapting. Yes, I am aware that this wasn’t based on the game but rather a real life story involving it and does this change anything does this film suddenly have a valid reason to exist? Nope.

This film is so depressing, the main reason for this is because this isn’t what Neil Blomkamp should be doing with his talents, he should be making his Alien film. Blomkamp as a filmmaker is interested in both weighty themes and also grand science fiction vistas and worlds, he should be doing that and not wasting his talents on this generic film about a normal person who became a racer through playing a video game.

The plot of the film is exactly what you would expect and it feels so ten a penny that once you finish the film you find it hard to remember anything tangible about it. It is like waking from an uneventful dream, you can’t remember anything and you don’t feel bad about that, though sadly rather than finish it feeling rested and ready to go, to drag out the dream metaphor, you instead feel drained and like you have lost a few hours of your life you are not getting back.

Overall, Sony continues to be the most out of touch studio in Hollywood.

0.5/5

Pros.

A few funny jokes

Cons.

It is painfully generic

The story doesn’t justify the need for this film

It is predictable

It has no soul or substance

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Orion And The Dark: One For The Anxious Kids

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

A young boy realises that the dark is nothing to be afraid of.

I really liked this film for the most part. I thought that Orion was super relatable, and that anyone who was ever an anxious kid will immediately remember feeling his anxieties, it is like a shared collective trauma. I thought it was a bit weird when we stepped away from Orion and it was about his kid and then her kid, I thought this seemed a little confused and messed with the flow of the film it would have worked better narratively if it had just stuck with him.

I thought Orion’s interactions with and friendships with Dark and the other night entities was all quite sweet. You really believed the friendship between Orion and Dark and when they save each other from death throughout the course of the film at different points you can see they care about each other. It is very wholesome. Plus it was nice seeing Natasia Demetriou get some work she is always great. My one complaint on the character side of things would be that the film had too many and as such some of the side characters came off as wanting and lacking in the personality department, we could see them on-screen but knew very little about them.

Overall, a solid Netflix animated film.

4/5

Pros.

The lead is super relatable

The friendship between Dark and Orion is nice

It is very wholesome

The animation is nice

Cons.

The side characters are underdeveloped

Swapping to Orion’s kid and then his kid’s kid is a bit jarring

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How The Girl Boss Is Ruining The Advancement Of Female Leads In Movies

Written by Luke Barnes

This piece will talk about the modern Hollywood archetype of the girl boss, and why by its very existence it reduces women in cinema and makes them inherently stunted.

So to give you a quick summary the girl boss is a girl that takes charge, is in control, is usually fairly emotionless and needs no man. The idea of this character type comes with the idea of giving women more agency allowing them to have power and to be a dominating figure in a films narrative, in this sense the girl boss was supposed to be empowering. However, the fundamental issue with the girl boss is that it stops women being human, they may be powerful and in control but they are no longer allowed to have flaws or be well rounded characters, the character simply becomes they are great and in charge and that is where the exploration ends.

For the sake of this piece I want to look at two girl bosses side by side to show how the archetype has lost its way to the point of being parody at this point. Firstly lets look at the character of Sarah Connor from the Terminator franchise, Connor is a girl boss as she is in control she tells people what to do she fights Skynet and despite her fling with Kyle Reese at the start of the series she doesn’t need no man, she is a strong independent woman and mother. She is not immediately perfect at fighting terminators as she would be if the film was made today she has to train and work to get there, she is a flawed person but does everything she can to protect her son, she is human. Then you have Elodie, Millie Bobby Brown’s character in Damsel, in this film Elodie repeatedly says how she doesn’t need a man or want to get married as though having human wants and desires made you weaker, Sarah Connor had romance didn’t make her any weaker. Elodie preaches about the patriarchy and how she needs to be a figure head for all women, implying all women need to be activists and take to the streets otherwise they are enabling oppression, Sarah Connor fought the patriarchy and won she didn’t spend her time preaching. Finally and most damning of all where before I said Sarah Connor had to work to be a badass, Elodie just picks up a sword and bang she’s better than any soldier, why because she is a woman that’s why. It is reductive.

The modern girl boss archetype as a whole makes the idea of a female action hero or even a powerful woman generally inherently less human and takes it to such an extreme caricature like place that then makes the characters incredibly one dimensional and allows them no room to grow. The reason why Rey was a bad character in the new Star Wars films was because she was not a character you could root for as she didn’t have an arc she was just great and then saved the day that’s it there was no progression, no journey as there was with a Sarah Connor, Laurie Strode or Ripley.

The girl boss as an archetype reeks of work by committee or perhaps in Netflix’s case work by algorithm they go what do young women care about? Social justice, activism, breaking down gender norms. Can they be floored or need to grow as a person? No that would imply they weren’t inherently perfect that’s sexist. Can they want to be equal to men rather than better than them and needing to degrade them in order to make themselves look even better? No, once again that’s sexist wanting men and women to be equal that’s sexism if the female lead of your superhero franchise isn’t inherently better than all the male characters there that is problematic now- see She Hulk.

One would argue that the progressive idea of strong interesting and well developed female characters is being ruined by the girl boss archetype and that in many ways the view of women it presents is limiting and regressive

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Demon Slayer To The Hashira Training Event Film

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

Tanjiro and co begin their training to become Hashiras

As I have already reviewed the Swordsmith Village Arc I won’t be talking about the first half of this event film. It was fine but I had already seen it and talked about it so why waste words.

The opening episode of the new arc however was intriguing. The Wind and Serpent Hashira chopping down a legion of demons and unwittingly discovering the Infinity Castle that has been used to organise demon meetings before is interesting as now the Corps will seek it out. I also liked that Tamayo is now going to be more directly involved in the series if she goes to help the demon slayers.

My main complaint of the film was that it didn’t show what the remaining high ranking demons were up to, the implication is that they will now all come for Nezuko but it would have been nice to have got a moment seeing them discuss this.

It would also have made more sense for this to be a combination of the first two episodes of the new season rather than the last episode of the last season and then the first new one as most of the people in the audience, myself included had already seen the first half of this compilation film.

Overall, a promising start to the new season but it would have been better if it didn’t rehash the end of the last season again.

3/5

Pros.

A promising new start

The opening is strong and heavy on the action

It is nice to see the characters react to Nezuko talking

Cons.

It would have been nice to have had a better insight into what the demons were planning

It shouldn’t have re-shown the last episode of the last season it just seems like filler

Wicked Letters: Naughty Words To Make Your Elder Relatives Blush

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

A series of profanity laden letters cause havoc in a small town.

Comedy can be so subjective, in many cases you can think a film is brilliant if it matches your sensibilities but if it doesn’t it can come off as unfunny, boring or even depressing, and I find that in this case I am leaning towards the latter. Though there were funny moment in this film is was far more of a dramedy then the trailers suggested it to be and at times I found it to be very depressing indeed.

Jessie Buckley is the saving grace of the film and her character is likeable and easy to root for, over the course of the film you want to see her free and you want to see everyone that keeps punishing her for being a little different be put in their place. Luckily it is that sort of film and the ending does give you the resolution you were looking for. Without Buckley this would be a much worse film.

Olivia Coleman on the other hand, and I say this as a fan, needs to find a new schtick, she has played a mentally ill posh woman so many times now in almost every role that she has been type cast. Again I won’t spoil it for you but I will say it is super obvious very early on in the film who is writing the letters to Coleman’s characters and if it was a different actor in the role I don’t think it would be so obvious.

Overall, it is nice to see British cinema still has some life blood but this just wasn’t to my tastes.

2.5/5

Pros.

It has a few funny moments

Buckley

Spall

Cons.

Coleman

It is depressing

The tone is all over the show

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