The Movie Critic Next Door

Once, long ago, someone spoiled the twist ending of The Sixth Sense for me, and ever since then I've tried hard not to be That Person. So this review will be very carefully worded, and I refuse to confirm or deny any theories you and your friends may have formulated based on the previews. But the whole crew is back, which was nice to see, and I'll just take this opportunity to link to the first movie in the new series so I don't have to worry about it later.

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I did my best to avoid the 3-D version of this. Ideally, I would have liked to pretend that it didn't exist... because, seriously. Why in the world would anyone want to see The Great Gatsby, a book that is about the opposite of an action thriller, adapted into 3-D? Was this an attempt to make it seem less like a film to which some women might have to drag unwilling husbands and boyfriends? If so, I'm pretty sure it didn't work.

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Back when I was reviewing Iron Man 2, I talked about sequels and their outrageous expensiveness. Well, this time around, having seen how popular the last Iron Man flick was, the studio raised the budget and, apparently, told the scriptwriters and the director to go wild with the effects, and gave them full permission to break anything they liked as long as it was dramatic.

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By 2077, the Earth has seen better days. The moon is even worse off, though, since it's mostly gone, destroyed by mysterious aliens called Scavengers, or Scavs. According to my research, this lack of moon means that the Earth is now prone to wobbling wildly on its axis, the weather would be even more insanely unpredictable, and the tides would be about half what they are now. That last part doesn't matter as much as you might think, since at the moment the only thing anybody wants from the oceans is to drain them dry.

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This year's film festival featured a lot of ants. Yes, ants. Not giant ants, which I must admit was my first thought, but a bunch of regular-sized ants of different species all working together for some mysterious purpose. They did look like giants, though, as there were many extreme close-ups of said ants projected up onto a large screen, and I felt rather small myself at times.

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I could never be a character in a horror movie, at least not a main character. Not so much because I scare too easily -- that's probably an asset in a character in a horror movie -- but because I'd be trying so hard to be cautious that the scary stuff would take forever to get going. In this case, for example, everything starts when someone cuts open a lot of wire and tears into a thick plastic bag in order to read the scary old book bound in human skin. I know, right? He seemed sensible otherwise, but wow.

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This movie makes it look depressingly easy to take over the White House. Well, "easy" presuming that you have access to a fair amount of high-tech weaponry, a master tactician, detailed blueprints of the building, and a large group of heavily armed fanatics. But as main bad guy Kang (Rick Yune, The Man with the Iron Fists) points out, it took them just thirteen minutes, so they still make it look easy, at least.

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The other day, I mentioned to someone that this movie was coming out, explaining that it was a prequel to The Wizard of Oz. The reply I got: "Isn't that Wicked?" Research shows that Wicked is in fact a prequel of sorts, so I guess now there are two, because there's certainly no continuity between movie and musical / novel, not even in the names of the characters. Someone needs to take charge of this mess and decide what's canon and what isn't.

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The opening credits helpfully inform us that the movie is inspired by true events. This means about what it usually means in a Hollywood movie, which is to say that they took five or six basic facts, shook them around a little, and put them into a general outline that probably actually does have a little something to do with the actual circumstances. What really happened is that a Soviet submarine on maneuvers in the Pacific sank under doubtful circumstances in 1968.

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I was wondering why the trailers for this film were so vague, and now I know that it's because it starts out as one kind of movie and slowly morphs into another kind. Mind you, it does so much more successfully than that movie whose title I can never remember, but I'm sure it still makes previews a little difficult to put together.

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