Love, Simon Review

Here's a subgenre of film that I have mostly avoided on this blog. The LGBT drama. The conversation surrounding these films is a very sensitive one to most and my feelings towards them are very complex, so it's hard to nail it down as to why I've avoided the conversation on my blog, but it essentially boils down to the simple fact that I'm not the target demographic here. I'm a moderately conservative, religious, heterosexual, white male. I try my best to be open-minded, understanding and progressive, but there's some barriers that I simply can't overcome, the most obvious one being that I don't have the personal experience necessary to properly analyze these films from the perspective of one who has gone through the same things. Simply put, I'm a straight man who is attracted to women. That's not a choice I made. That's just who I am. So when it comes to movies about the LGBT community, I feel like I'm on the outside looking in. Thus when one comes around that is being universally praised by everyone who's seen it, I simply choose to not deal with the potential backlash I'd receive if I admitted that I was unimpressed. Quite frankly, if I'm not the target demographic and I didn't like the movie, then my opinion doesn't really mean anything. So I choose not to fight.

I mean, what if I told you that I hated both "Carol" and "The Danish Girl"? What if I told you that I enjoyed "Moonlight," but didn't think it was the greatest movie ever made? What if I told you that I was mixed on "Call Me by Your Name," with certain aspects being phenomenal while other aspects being atrociously bad? Would you respect my opinion and still be my friend? Or would you sit there in angry silence, never trusting a single word I wrote again? If you stand on the former side of the fence, well then thanks. I appreciate that. But I know there's a lot of people that would be on the latter side, even if they would refuse to admit it. I'd be labeled as the homophobic friend who just didn't get it. And that's just not something that sits well in my mind. So why am I breaking the silence now with "Love, Simon"? Well, quite frankly, this movie is different than most other LGBT dramas. And I plan on driving that home in this review here in a bit. Like most of these movies, I was hesitant about it for a long time, but at some point during the marketing, the light bulb went off in my head, and before I even saw the movie, I knew it would be different. Why? Because this is a Greg Berlanti film. The creator of the Arrowverse. That's my exact cup of tea and I feel completely comfortable discussing it.

Before I discuss all things Arrowverse and the parallels there are to that universe and this movie, I want to drive home why this is different than other LGBT dramas. What it really boils down to is politics. We live in a very progressive era where society as a whole not only has realized that there's a lot of social injustices going on in the world, but they've decided to actually do something about it. Certain cultures, races and sexes have spent their whole history being oppressed and we're trying to undo that. I love that idea. More representation is needed from females, minorities and the LGBT crowd instead of having straight, white males dominate society as a whole. However, when it comes to film, I think there's a right way and a wrong way to go about it and the best example I can think of to illustrate this is to look at the issue of female representation in film. Yes, we need more female-led movies, both in front and behind the camera. But do you do things the "Ghostbusters" way or the "Wonder Woman" way? Both movies had the same general goal of provided female-led movies, but completely opposite ways of going about it. "Ghostbusters" tried to forcefully shove everything down your throat while "Wonder Woman" was much more natural and subtle in their approach.

When I say "Ghostbusters" in this instance, I hope you know I am talking about the new female reboot. The way they decided to go about things was to overcompensate to the extreme. Given that females have been oppressed for many years, they felt it was necessary to make a movie where the women were the only ones who could solve the problems while all the males in the movie were bumbling idiots. So not only was the movie pro-female, but it was also anti-male. I didn't hate the movie because of that. The bigger issue was with the writing and the story. But I do acknowledge that the approach wasn't a great one. Meanwhile, "Wonder Woman" had every opportunity to be an anti-male movie, but even in situations where the door was wide open for that, the movie refused to go down that path. They simply presented the world with a strong female character who was very capable of getting the job done, thus providing women, young and old, with a hero and role model to look up to. At the same time, the movie was also pro-male in that Wonder Woman needed Chris Pine just as much as Chris Pine needed Wonder Woman. Yes, Wonder Woman had the superpowers in the movie, but neither character was dominate over the other.

Now if I apply that to this situation, I'm happy to inform you that "Love, Simon" is the "Wonder Woman" of the LGBT dramas. I won't name specific titles, but a lot of the LGBT dramas that I've seen come with a specific, political agenda and that agenda is to shove the LGBT culture down the throats of the whole world, showing how amazing they are, while at the same time viciously attacking traditional marriage and religion, as if the three elements of society can't coexist, just like "Ghostbusters" was out to prove that, not only are women capable of getting the job done, but they're the only ones that can get the job done while all males are idiots. If we're going to have a balanced world, we need to have the goal of being a balanced world. I know the scales have been tipped a specific way for many years, but to overcompensate and tip the balance the opposite way does not get the job done. Instead it attempts to do things the way President Coin wanted to do things in the end of "Mockingjay," causing Katniss to act in the way she did. "Love, Simon" is not out to shove the LGBT culture down your throat. It does not attack traditional marriage. It does not claim that religion and LGBT rights can't coexist. It's just telling the struggles of a gay, teenage high school kid.

Because of this, I didn't find myself watching in apprehension. I didn't walk out feeling the need to defend my religious views or my support of traditional marriage. I instead became invested in a story about a kid who had this huge secret his whole life that he had no idea how to approach. I became invested in his story and in his character. Even though I have good friends who are gay and I've learned a lot about the types of things they had to deal with growing up, I still don't have that personal experience for myself being that's not who I am. While watching some films that makes me feel ostracized because the way they approach things make me feel like being gay is a prerequisite to understanding the film, "Love, Simon" instead feels like it was politely made for everyone in that I felt like Simon was telling me his story without trying to force his views down my throat or attempt to change my opinion on marriage and religion. That made me feel quite comfortable watching this movie, which in turn caused me to be emotionally invested with this story. I walked out thinking that those who are gay are going to really love and relate to this movie, as many of my gay friends already have, and those who are not gay are going to appreciate this perspective.

This is now where the Greg Berlanti angle comes in. Realizing that he was at the helm of this project put me at ease before I even saw this movie because he had already done this as the creator of the Arrowverse. If the term Arrowverse confuses you, what I am referring to with that is the combined DC TV universe on The CW with "Arrow," "The Flash," "Supergirl" and "Legends of Tomorrow." DC may be struggling on the big screen with their cinematic DCEU as "Wonder Woman" is the only movie in that universe that has been consistently praised, but they're rocking the world on the small screen as "Arrow" just got renewed for season 7, "The Flash" for season 5 and both "Supergirl" and "Legends" for season 4. That will be over 400 combined episodes of television once those announced seasons are complete. And I've faithfully kept up with all four shows. Now I don't know how much of the episode-to-episode decisions Berlanti makes with these shows, but as the creator I don't think it's any coincidence that there are certain running themes across all of the shows that are also very similar to "Love, Simon." Every single show has rather naturally implemented LGBT story arcs and in three of them, LGBT characters are in the lead role. And I've never had a problem with it.

That's why when I made the Greg Berlanti connection, I immediate became comforted because I know how his shows have handled this and I figured he'd do things in a similar way. Specifically in the Arrowverse, I'm thinking of the character of Sara Lance on "Legends" and Alex Danvers on "Supergirl." Season 2 of "Supergirl" focused heavily on Alex Danvers' realization of her sexual identity as a lesbian and slowly started coming out to everyone. Then she began a relationship with a police girl who had come out a long time ago and there was a lot of drama with those two that I rather enjoyed. It was all handled in a very normal, natural way and actually was some of the best romance drama in the Arrowverse. With Sara Lance in "Legends," the proper label for her is bisexual as she started out as Oliver Queen's girlfriend on "Arrow" before the show revealed that she had a serious girlfriend in the League of Shadows. They eventually transitioned Sara from "Arrow" to "Legends" where she is now the leader and captain of their crew. Her journey as a bisexual character isn't a huge focus of the show, but they play around with it occasionally and when they do, it's handled rather well. Sara and Alex even had a bit of a fling on one of the crossover episodes, which amused me.

I hope you're fine with me talking about all of this in relation to "Love, Simon" without actually discussing the movie itself. In my mind, this was a better angle to take this review because I have been able to get all my thoughts out without spoiling much of the actual plot. However, I will admit that "Love, Simon" wasn't all rainbows and butterflies for me. Yet you can rest at ease knowing that my issues with this movie had little to do with the approach they took in presenting this LGBT story or Simon's specific journey. Those aspects of the movie stand as a shining example of how I think LGBT stories should be handled and whenever they are handled wrong, I now have a movie to turn to as an example of a movie that did it right. My biggest issue that I had was with a side character named Martin. In a world full of realistic characters, he stuck out as a sore thumb as someone who felt more cartoonish. I think the actor Logan Miller did great with the material he was given. He took it and ran with it. The character himself just felt fake. I would be able to write this off as an annoying side character of which exists in a lot of these high school dramas, but things that his character did were integral to the overarching plot of the movie and I didn't like it.

The other major problem I had is something I need to tread lightly on because it involved the final act of the movie. This is something that the Arrowverse has a major problem with, too. They LOVE playing the whodunit mystery game. It's a huge problem in "The Flash" specifically, but it has existed to some extent in every show. In the Arrowverse it has to do with the villains. They love stringing out the big reveal as to who the major villain of the season is. In season 3 of "The Flash," they waited until one of the final episodes of the season to reveal who this mysterious Savitar character really was. They did the same thing with Zoom in season 2. I got tired of this real quick. As I'm thinking of examples, in "Arrow" season 4, they revealed at the start of the season that a main character was going to die and they made the audience play that guessing game until the last part of the season. Again, I don't know what part of that was Greg Berlanti's decision, but is it a coincidence that the same thing is done in "Love, Simon" with who this mysterious email friend is? Instead of revealing who Simon was emailing partway through the movie and spending the rest of the time developing the relationship, they played the bait and switch game with us until the very end of the movie.

When that big reveal did happen, I enjoyed a big, cheerful laugh for reasons I won't spoil. But it reminded me of those Gorilla Glue commercials where the gorilla jumps out at them, hands them the glue, and they exclaim, "Of course!" Knowing Berlanti, this made so much sense. Message me in private and we'll talk more about what I mean. Overall, though, I did have a very positive outlook towards this movie. Instead of feeling political and in your face, this felt like a natural story. They didn't have an agenda with this film. They just decided to tell a story about a gay student in high school struggling with this big secret he has of being gay. It's quite engaging and done in a very refreshing way. Nick Robinson ("Jurassic World") does a great job as Simon. Josh Duhamel and Jennifer Garner are excellent as his parents. And his group of high school friends, played by Katherine Langford ("13 Reasons Why"), Alexandra Shipp ("X-Men: Apocalypse"), Jorge Lendeborg Jr. ("Spider-Man: Homecoming") and Keiynan Lonsdale ("The Flash") were all great as well. There's just those few major issues I had with the character of Martin and the heavy bait-and-switch reveal strategy, but mostly I came out of this with a positive experience as good high school drama. I'm going to give "Love, Simon" an 8/10.

Ready Player One Review

March has been a slower month than usual when compared to previous Marches, but now we have the most highly anticipated movie of the month for most, myself included, that is sneaking in at the end of the month as we transition into April. In the last few years, 80's nostalgia vomit has been one of the biggest trends in entertainment business, both in Hollywood as well as on the small screen. If we expand this nostalgia trend a few years both ways, touching on the late 70's and the early 90's, it's fascinating that some of the biggest movies released come from the "Jurassic Park," "Star Wars," "Jumanji" and "IT" franchises, with "Ghostbusters" also making a return as well as movies like "Super 8" that, while not being specific 80's franchises, are an ode to 80's film. And of course the best example of this is the crazy phenomenon that is the Netflix show "Stranger Things." Why do we all love "Stranger Things"? Because it's 80's nostalgia vomit at it's greatest. Everything about that show is a throwback and tribute to everything we all love about our favorite decade, done in the absolute perfect way. And now we have the king of the 80's himself, the man who practically invented that decade, Mr. Steven Spielberg, back playing with all of his old toys again.

When I say the term 80's nostalgia vomit, that almost sounds like I'm using it in a negative connotation, but I'm really not. I'm using it more as a statement of fact in describing this phenomenon. We take everything we love about the 80's and dump it all into one movie or one TV show. For me this is more of a positive thing. The 80's are my favorite decade when it comes to entertainment, most of my favorite music, movies and TV shows are either from the 80's or formulated like the 80's. I can even claim that I was born in the 80's, even though it was on the latter end in 1989, meaning most of my childhood took place in the 90's, but I think most 90's kids like myself would agree that they equally love all of the 80's entertainment. It's practically the golden age of entertainment. The music there is by far the greatest of any generation. And thanks to Spielberg with "Jaws" and George Lucas with "Star Wars" kicking things off in the late 70's, the summer blockbuster was invented and by the time the 80's rolled around, the movie industry was completely transformed, taking everyone around on quite the joyride, a ride that we are still looking back on and doing our best to try to replicate or straight-up remake with modern cinema.

Yes, I love a great nostalgia trip, so when I saw the trailers for this movie, I jumped for joy as I was beyond excited. If you, for whatever reason, hate the 80's or aren't a fan of huge nostalgia dumps like "IT" or "Stranger Things," then this recommendation is simple. Don't see "Ready Player One." But if the idea of a movie starting out with "Jump" by Van Halen as it's theme song while our main character is racing around in the DeLorean from "Back to the Future" puts a smile on your face, then you need to run out to your local theater as soon as possible, find the biggest screen you can, grab a big bucket of popcorn, then sit back and enjoy because you're in for a real treat with "Ready Player One." Much like "Back to the Future Part II," "Ready Player One" is a movie that takes place about 30 years into the future from our present day, that of 2045. This seems like it could be a decent representation of the future with Virtual Reality, something that's on the rise on 2018, being the huge thing of this futuristic generation. Everyone has their VR headsets and they love jumping away from reality into the virtual world they call the Oasis, where you can be anyone you want and do anything you want with anyone you want. 

The specific plot of our adventure involves a challenge presented by the creator of the Oasis, who has recently passed away. Upon his passing, it is revealed that he has hidden three keys somewhere in the Oasis and the person who finds the three keys first gets rewarded with the golden Easter egg, giving that person total control of the Oasis moving forward. So the movie follows our main group of players, led by Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke, as they make their way through this challenge. The further they get, the more opposition they receive from our big corporate bad guy, played by Ben Mendelsohn, who is bound and determined to have all the power for himself instead of having the power in the hands of a normal user. Thus him and his crew represent a company like EA, a company that most gamers absolutely hate with the tactics they use, yet they play the games anyways because there's not a lot they can do about it. Or another potential comparison is Disney, who pretty much owns everything in Hollywood at the moment. Or you can even bring politics into this and compare it to the government vs. the average person. Regardless of which way you choose to spin it, this is the big corporation vs. the seemingly insignificant individual.

First and foremost I want to give high praise to our cast of up and coming stars. Leading the way is Tye Sheridan, who absolutely owns this role as Wade Watts in the real world and as Parzival, which is his username in the Oasis. This is the kid from "Mud," a movie that hit the festival run in 2012 before being released to the general public in summer 2013. If you're like me and you saw that little indie film and loved it, one of your high praises was that this Tye Sheridan kid is going to be a star. And it's fun seeing him live out his potential as he got his first huge break as the new Scott Summers in "X-Men: Apocalypse" and now Spielberg picked him up for "Ready Player One," which I feel will boost his career even more. In the Oasis, his character of Parzival falls in love with this super hot avatar girl named Art3mis. People in the movie were warning him to be careful because she could be this old, fat guy living with his mom. But the whole time I was like, "Nah, he's good." Because eventually she was going to be revealed as Olivia Cooke, who I've also loved since 2013 as she starred in "Bates Motel," the "Psycho" prequel series that recently finished that I think is phenomenal. She was also in the 2015 film "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl," which I also loved.

I hope this doesn't make me sound conceited. I mean, all y'all are learning of these two just now while I've known them for five years now. So take that! But hey, as I'll get to more here in a second, this movie has something in it for everyone. For me one of the fun things was seeing two young individuals who I've been cheering on for several years get their huge break in a big budget Spielberg film. I talked a lot about Sheridan, but when it comes to his better half, Olivia Cooke, what has impressed me so much about her in the smaller roles she's been in is that she feels so approachable. There's a lot of times where you'll see an actress in a movie or a TV show that you really love, but you think to yourself that even if you did see her in real life, you wouldn't even be worthy of speaking to her because she's so out of your league. That's not the case with Olivia Cooke and I mean that as a high compliment. I feel like if I ever ran into her on the street, I could sit down and have lunch with her and just talk about life. That I respect and thus it makes me happy seeing her get a huge role like this because she deserves. I do want to talk about the other three in this gang, but their human selves don't get revealed until much later, so I'm going to forgo that.

As far as this adventure that they go on, if I had one major problem with the it, it's that I have a hard time believing that this group of kids and young adults would be the first to ever solve this puzzle. I'm not a gamer myself, but I know a lot of gamers and they all seem really good at discovering all the secrets to these games they play. So I feel if the creator of the Oasis really did introduce the challenge after he died, it would be solved by someone within a week or two, if not earlier. But that's whatever. We kind of have to accept the fact that they get super lucky and now have to move forward while fighting the evil corporation. There's so much in this adventure that I want to dive into, but for the most part the advertising did a great job of leaving the specifics of this movie a secret as far as all the Easter eggs hidden in there. I mean, we knew about the Iron Giant and the DeLorean, as well as several other things from the trailer, but there's a lot more that gets thrown out you that are completely surprises and it was a huge delight. I'm sure there was a ton that I missed, but there were a lot of moments where I felt like Captain America in "The Avengers" with his "I understood that reference!" moment. Those instances made me happy and caused me to really enjoy the ensuing scenes.

I think the best thing about this movie is that, unless you've been living under a rock for the last 30 years, there's a moment for everyone. There will be a song that is played, a character that shows up, a reference that is made or a land that they enter where you will recognize it and cry out with much delight. I've been using the phrase 80's nostalgia vomit when it comes to "Ready Player One," because that's the huge spotlight. But in reality I should remove the 80's because Spielberg obviously had a ton of fun playing with all of his old toys from every decade, as well as other peoples' toys as there's stuff from the 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's and the current decade. The only thing that's missing is Disney and Nintendo property, but that's probably because those companies are very stickler with their property. Everything else is here and it's a blast. Given that there's three keys to find, this movie is essentially split up into three sections and without given any spoilers, I'll just say the second section of the movie was the one for me. I also had a ton of fun with the finale where they throw everything at you at once and the first section was fine. I wish I could talk more, but that's all I'm saying for now. As a whole, this movie was an absolute blast and I'm giving it a 9/10.

Paul, Apostle of Christ Review

Yesterday I gave you my review of "I Can Only Imagine," the definite surprise of this Easter season both in terms of box office and quality. Now it's time to dive into the Easter movie I was highly anticipating. I mean, regardless of what sect of Christianity you belong to, Paul is kind of a big deal since his epistles comprise of nearly half of the New Testament. Plus a good portion of the Book of Acts is dedicated to his story and missions. So a movie dedicated to him seems like it would be a winner among the Christian audience around Easter. There's a huge goldmine full of stories involving him that haven't been mined much by Hollywood. The trailers made it seem like high quality cinema and the filmmakers seemed very passionate about the project. Finally, this is the same exact studio that did the 2016 film "Risen," which I really enjoyed, that being LD Entertainment in association with Affirm Films, distributed by Columbia Pictures. Upon release, the poor critic reviews didn't deter me. Most Christian films get panned by critics, including the aforementioned "Risen," which sits at 52 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, only slightly higher than this movie's 36 percent. The 90 percent audience score is what helped me keep my faith in this release.

I don't want to say that this was a disappointing movie for me, but this was definitely a different movie than I was expecting. Thus before I go any further I want to clue everyone in on what this movie is all about it. I didn't think it was too harsh to expect a movie titled "Paul, Apostle of Christ" to be solely about Paul, the apostle of Christ. His story is a very relatable one in the sense that he went about destroying and persecuting the Christians of his day when one day Jesus appeared to him and told him to stop persecuting the saints, to which he responded by completely changing his life around and spent the rest of his days in Christ's ministry. OK, sure, few of us have Christ appear to us, but the idea is that Paul was arguably a very worldly person who was against Christianity, yet was able to completely change his ways and come to Christ. If such a person who had done such awful things can change and come to Christ, perhaps that can give us hope individually that either we can change and become better or our family and friends that we try to reach out to can eventually soften their hearts and come to Christ. Thus if this movie honed in on those themes and drove home this story of Paul and his miraculous change, I think this could've been a powerful film.

But that's not what this movie does. In fact, I would argue that the central themes of this movie don't even surround Paul at all. This is less about Paul's personal journey and more about the persecution of the Saints following the death of Christ, specifically around 60-70 A.D. in Rome. I knew based on trailers that we'd start out at the end of Paul's life when he was imprisoned in Rome by Nero, who was Emperor of Rome from 54 A.D. when he was just 16 years old up to his death in 68 A.D., during which he was potentially responsible for the deaths of both Peter and Paul. For some reason, though, I didn't think we were going to stay in that time period for the whole movie. I thought maybe we were going to do the thing where we start at the end, but then jump back in time and tell the story of Paul in his prime, before then finishing back with old Paul at the very end of the movie. And yes, we do that to a certain extent, but it's a much smaller portion of the movie than you'd think. There's a moment where Luke sneaks into Paul's prison and Paul tells his story and we get flashbacks of him being responsible for the death of Stephen then later telling of his conversion when Christ appeared to him on the road to Damascus, but that's not what the movie focuses on, which surprised me.

Thus while I was watching it, expecting to be entertained or inspired by Paul's conversion story, I had to mentally shift gears a bit as we were instead focusing on the persecution of the saints in Rome, which was one of the darker times in history for Christians. In fact, I would say that Luke is the main character of this movie while Paul is there as the Yoda figure, giving out his wisdom as to what should be done, while not being in a position to lead them since he's in prison. And it's funny that I think of that Yoda comparison, because now I'm thinking about "The Empire Strikes Back," a movie where the Empire deliver crushing blows to the Rebellion. If the Empire is Rome, Palpatine is Nero, Darth Vader is Mauritius, Yoda is Paul and Luke is, well, Luke, then there's a lot more comparisons to "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Paul, Apostle of Christ" than I was initially intending on bringing up when I started this paragraph. I mean, both movies are led by a Luke who gets advice from a wise old figure in the midst of a conflict where the bad guys win. Ha ha! In that case, I suppose it would be a similar situation would be if "The Empire Strikes Back" was titled "Yoda, Ancient Jedi." Both Yoda and Paul are central figures to the story, but the story isn't completely about them.

OK, now time to get back on track after incidentally stumbling on a Star Wars comparison. Once we have the right idea about what this movie is about, I think this movie can be appropriately enjoyed. Or, rather, appreciated. Because this is a rather somber movie. We start by seeing the good Christian saints being used as torches to light the streets at night. While the specific imagery we see isn't extremely graphic, not when compared to something like Martin Scorsese's "Silence," anyways, the implications of what's happening make you rather sick to the stomach. These are good people who did nothing but choose to believe in Christ, yet they are being brutally tortured by the Romans because of it. There's a group of saints out in hiding who are simply trying to figure out what to do, especially since their leader that they look up to, that being Paul, is essentially on death row and they are going to be up next if they don't figure something out. There's a portion of them that decide they want to start an uprising. All things considered, you can't really blame them for desiring that. In addition to the debate as to whether to fight or remain peaceful, there is a discussion on whether they should stay in their home country of Rome or escape to a more livable area.

All of this is done in a rather subtle manner. By that I mean this is a more character driven story loaded with exposition about what's happening around them rather than showing us the action. They could've gone with the up-tempo, high-paced action film with this, but rather they chose to make a slow film that remains very low key. That's why I like the word subtle. I can see a lot of people being bored with this movie or thinking that it lacks focus. And I would agree to a certain extent, but by the end of it, the gravity of the situation weighed heavily on me. I decided that I didn't need to see all of the persecution on camera. I didn't need a lot of war and bloodshed, but the mood of it all felt almost uncomfortable as I experienced the story from the perspective of the people who were still safe for the moment, but were feeling a lot of agony and pain as they hid from the world around them in this enclosed area. Then we'd follow Luke as he would sneak out to visit Paul and the brief images on the street around him or the brutal lack of mercy from the Romans was rather depressing. Through all that, these moments were hit home as we listened to Luke talking to Paul while Paul gave the council of what Christ would do in situations like this and that is essentially to suffer through.

There's one specific scene that stood out to me as a powerful moment of dialogue in this movie. I won't give the specific storyline to what's happening to these people as it's closer to the end of the movie, but Luke is telling them that they are going to experience a lot of pain. But that pain is going to be brief and if they are able to endure it, then will come the moment of glory where their patience and endurance will pay off as they will get to celebrate in the presence of God. I think that's the message that this movie tries to drive home and if you're patient with the movie, I think it's something that has the ability to be impactful. Everyone has to make choices in life based on what they feel is right and, even though it's hard to endure, you have to stick to your guns and continue to do what is right regardless of what the worldly consequences are. If you believe in God or believe in Christ, do you have enough faith to still believe and follow the teaches even if you are thrown into prison, condemned to die, or see your friends and family get tortured and killed. Can you say with Paul as he says in 2 Timothy 4:7 that "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith" even as you are about to be offered up and killed by your persecutors? 

I will admit that this is a bit of a difficult watch at times on a few different levels. First off, yes, there is some imagery that is hard to stomach and, even though a lot of it isn't seen on screen, the movie does a good job of letting the audience know how brutal the Roman Empire was to these Christians. But second, this is a slow-moving drama that requires a lot of patience to get through without drifting off. And never once does it really pick up, thus it requires one to think and ponder on the themes of the movie in order to feel satisfied, because I can see people walking out of the theaters feeling bored and I wouldn't blame them. As pertaining to the lack of focus, yeah there's some story arcs that I felt were included because the filmmakers were trying to figure out how to fill the run time, with one example being Mauritius, one of Nero's little pawns, having a sick daughter who was about to die. I'm not sure what the overall point of that was in the big picture of the movie. But overall as I look back on the movie, this was a satisfactory viewing experience for me. If you can only afford to see one Easter movie, I'd still recommend "I Can Only Imagine" over this one. But if you're willing to be patient and implement a bit of brain power, this movie can work just fine. I'll give it a 7/10.

I Can Only Imagine Review

At the beginning of the month in my March movie preview, I had to make a judgment call as to which Christian movie, if any, would become this year's big Easter hit. It's always a tough prediction with Christian movies, but all signs pointed away from "I Can Only Imagine." Not only did the Erwin Brothers' previous two wide releases, "Moms' Night Out" and "Woodlawn" both opened around $4 million, but the highest opening weekend ever for distributor Roadside Attractions was January's "Forever My Girl" with $4.2 million. Thus can you blame me for predicting that this movie was going to open closer to the $1.3 million of the September 2016 film "Hillsong - Let Hope Rise," a fellow musically-themed Christian movie? You can imagine my surprise when it pulled that number on Thursday night previews alone and wound up with $17.1 million opening weekend. I would've thought "Paul, Apostle of Christ" would be the one to do those numbers, yet that one did the more traditional $5.2 million opening. With Easter coming this Sunday, I have now seen both of these films so that I could give a proper recommendation as to which one is worth seeing. While it's not always the best idea to simply follow the box office numbers, in this case it would be a wise choice.

I've always loved the song "I Can Only Imagine" by the band MercyMe. They played it all over the radio here in Utah for quite a long time. I thought for a while that it was just a Utah thing to play the song on normal pop radio stations because it seems kinda strange for a Christian rock song to get normal radio play. While I suppose Utah radio stations might have been a bit extra partial to the song, when I look up the chart numbers for it, this was definitely not just a Utah thing. "I Can Only Imagine" was obviously No. 1 on the Christian charts as it's the highest-selling Christian song ever, having been certified 3x platinum by the RIAA with 2.5 million copies sold and counting, adding 25,000 sales this week, thanks to this movie, according to kworb.net. In addition to being No. 1 on the Christian charts, it peaked at No. 5 on the U.S. Adult Contemporary chart, No. 27 on the U.S. Adult Top 40, No. 33 on U.S. Mainstream and No. 71 on the U.S. Hot 100. So yeah, this song has been quite the phenomenon, impacting millions of people worldwide for nearly 20 years since its initial release in 1999 and huge push as a single in the early 2000's. Again, thanks to the movie's success, the song has returned to No. 1 on the Christian charts this week, which I find impressive.

The lyrics to the song are quite simple when it comes to Christian doctrine. Bart Millard, lead singer of MercyMe, says in the song, "I can only imagine what it will be like when I walk by your side. I can only imagine what my eyes will see when your face is before me. Surrounded by your glory, what will my heart feel? Will I dance for you, Jesus, or in awe of you be still? Will I stand in your presence or to my knees will I fall? Will I sing hallelujah? Will I be able to speak at all? I can only imagine when that day comes and I find myself standing int he sun. I can only imagine when all I will do is forever worship you. I can only imagine." So yeah, nothing super unique when it comes to Christian music in general, but what really sells the song is how much passion there is behind the song. Just by listening to the song, you can tell that Bart was really impacted by Christianity in his life. What he's saying in the song is nothing superficial or nothing he's been trained to say his whole life. You can tell that he's speaking from soul when he is imagining what it will be like to leave this life and enter the presence of God. I personally imagine that a desire to be seen as true and faithful in the eyes of God when that moment comes motives him to live good in this life.

Yeah, sure, finding the equal amount of passion in the music itself certainly helps as the balance between the piano, strings and drums brings a lot of energy and feeling to the song. But I'm not necessarily here to review the song itself, but I feel it's important for you to get my personal take on this song because that's important to my view of this movie. I will admit that when I watched the trailers, I was definitely intrigued, but just because a song is good, doesn't mean the movie behind the making of the song will be good. As it turns out, though, there's definitely a reason why this song has so much power and soul behind it and that's because Bart's story is an incredible one. I could tell just by listening to the song that he had a story worth telling that led him to write the song and I'm glad a team of filmmakers found his story and decided to tell it because, just like this song has inspired millions, I honestly think this movie can inspire millions. There's a strong message here about love and forgiveness stemming from the complex relationship Bart had with his father. As Bart says, his father was a monster. He had a bad temper and when something upset him, he took it out on Bart and his mother, causing his mother to leave them, leaving Bart alone with his abusive dad.

When it comes to Christian movies, I actually get quite picky with them. Granted, I'm not as picky as some mainstream critics, but I prefer there to be a balance between a good spiritual message and a good cinematic experience. Bad acting, bad story and poorly written characters can ruin a Christian movie even if the movie's heart is in the right place. Then we have movies like the "God's Not Dead" franchise that are straight-up off-putting by painting Christians and non-Christians in a bad light. Or we have the curious case of the Kendrick Brothers' films such as "Fireproof," "Facing the Giants," "Flywheel" and "War Room" that are so black and white with their preaching and unrealistic with their storytelling that I think they do more bad than good because you simply can't relate to their unbelievability. If life is going poorly, it's because you're not following God and the second you start following God, everything is going to perfectly fall into place. Your football team will start winning, your car business will be successful and your cheating husband will immediately get nauseous. NO! That's not realistic to life. It's damaging to say that because if a non-believer tests that theory and life still sucks, he or she might conclude that it's all fake.

That's why I really love it when I find a movie like "I Can Only Imagine" that hits all the right notes. This is not a superficial movie about life going awful for father and son only to magically get better when they find God and have life perfectly turn out for them. This is a story about a father who has been abusive to this kid his whole life, so when Bart is old enough, he high-tails it out of there to live his dream, something his father constantly told him not to do because it's not going to pay the bills. Thus when Bart is out living his dream, thinking everything is going to work out nicely, he gets a rude awakening when professional people from record labels tell him that he's not going to make it, thus giving him the thought that maybe his mean dad was right the whole time. But his manager that has been going along with him sees something in him, but sees that he's scared of bringing it out and that stems from this broken relationship between father and son. So Bart makes the decision that he needs to go figure this out. Face his father. Yet the second you think the movie is going to turn out like every other Christian movie with both of them seeing God and magically living happily ever after, it doesn't. There's some genuine, intense drama.

Obviously we know that things eventually work out because, spoiler alert, Bart Millard broke out in a huge way with this song he wrote. But the power here is not in some crazy, twist ending. It's in the journey that leads to this ending. The drama in this movie is real. This father/son relationship is something that I think a lot of people can relate to and learn from. Instead of having this miraculous turnaround, what if you've been living this horrible life, find God, and think that your son is going to accept you and you can move forward like nothing happened, only to witness your son walk in and bluntly tell you that he can't forgive you because of the stuff that you did to him? Or what if you are in Bart's shoes? Is it easy to walk home and instantly forgive someone who has treated you so badly for so many years, just because it appears that they have changed? No, it's not. It would be unrealistic to expect anyone to instantly forgive an abuser because there's years of built up pain that's sometimes impossible to just let go. While some Christian movies like "War Room" or "God's Not Dead" left realism on the chopping block in favor of their superficial message, I loved "I Can Only Imagine" because it had the courage to be real and thus is the far more inspiring film.

Listen, I'm not going to spoil the specifics of how this all turns out, but there's a powerful message in this movie that really hit me hard. If I'm being a bit critical, it did take a while for the movie to get there. Sometimes life doesn't fit perfectly into a three-act movie structure and it's a tricky balance to know how exactly to turn someone's life into a movie. This movie doesn't always find that balance as it's overly long in certain places. But if you're patient with it, everything ties together quite beautifully and it's that third act of this movie that hits this home. I might forget in due time that the first two acts were sometimes overly long, but I don't think I'll ever forget how inspiring the final act of this movie was. I have to give a lot of credit to Bart's story being an inspiring one, but without the performances of J. Michael Finley as Bart and Dennis Quaid as Bart's dad, this wouldn't have worked. Those two sold this movie and made Bart's story work out perfectly on the big screen. And now when I listen to the song "I Can Only Imagine," I'm going to think of the story behind it and how Bart dedicated the song to his father and that's going to make the song mean even more. Thus if you're looking for an inspirational film this Easter, this movie is the one to check out. I'm going to award it a 9/10.

Pacific Rim Uprising Review

"Pacific Rim" is a dumb movie. I want to make that abundantly clear. It is a really dumb movie. But it's the type of really dumb movie that was mostly self-aware enough to be as equally entertaining as it is dumb. I mean, there's not much in terms of story. Idris Elba was a freaking awesome character that delivers one of the best movie speeches, but outside him, the human characters are either extremely wooden or mostly forgettable. There were monsters that climbed through rifts in the Pacific Ocean to terrorize the world and to fight them the government decided to build giant robots with overly complex established rules like drift compatibility that I think the filmmakers involved kinda forgot about halfway through. It's a movie that's really easy to pick apart due to the extreme lack of intelligence involved in much of the writing. But do you know what? The now Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro didn't care. He just wanted to live out his childhood fantasies by making a big, dumb movie about giant monsters fighting giant robots. If you turn off your brain and just enjoy the ride, it is extremely entertaining as your inner 9-year-old will have a huge grin on your face the entire time. Enough so that you will most likely be able to overlook all the glaring issues.

A sequel with a repeat performance of that is all I wanted with "Pacific Rim Uprising." It's a sequel we almost didn't get due to "Pacific Rim" flopping pretty hard in the United States. But thanks to strong overseas totals, especially from China, it's a sequel that was financially justified. And I was really happy about that. I was excited to get back to this alternate universe where giant monsters are roaming the earth and we have giant robots to fight them. Yeah, sure, the critics score on Rotten Tomatoes was uncomfortably low at 45 percent, but just like a 9-year-old might not even know or care about what Rotten Tomatoes is, I didn't care about the score. Slightly over half of the critics are hating on this movie? Big deal. As I've explained, the first movie is a really dumb movie that probably doesn't even deserve its 71 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. A 45 percent score for that movie would probably seem more fitting. So why should I care that this sequel is really low? I mean, the trailers look awesome enough and they promise me that this movie is going bigger and better with the monsters and the robots, seemingly being extremely self-aware. Yeah, sure, Guillermo isn't back in the directing chair this time around, but I was still super excited walking into the theater.

Turns out I have to begrudgingly concede that the critics were right this time around. I really wanted to love this movie. I was willing to set nitpicks aside for an entertaining romp with monsters and robots. But holy freaking cow did this movie not give me ANYTHING to love. It's 10 years later and the government has done an absolutely atrocious job at preparing for the chance that the Kaiju might return. Like, seriously, there's very few grown adults that know how to successfully pilot a Jaeger and the team in charge of the Jaeger all seem very uneducated and juvenile. Our only two real adult pilots are John Boyega, the son of the late Idris Elba in this universe, who, spoiler alert for the first movie, sacrificed himself at the end of the film, and Scott Eastwood. The two of them are barely drift compatible as it is and John Boyega starts the film out living a rebellious life because, as he narrates in the beginning, he is nothing like his father and only wants to steal old Jaeger parts to trade for his... Cap'n Crunch and Oreos? Some rebel. So we seemingly have a story arc like that of Michael B. Jordan in "Creed." That lasts five minutes until he is back as a Jaeger pilot because this crew has no one else to turn to. Go figure.

On top of that we have a 15-year-old girl, who is actually pretty cool in the movie. Our one character worth caring about. She actually build her own mini Jaeger. Say what? How did she do that? Is she the next Anakin Skywalker? But whatever. Because she's super cool, she is recruited into the small school of young Jaeger pilot cadets. Who we eventually turn to pilot all the Jaegers to fight the Kaiju. Because, again, we have no one else to turn to. Then we have other characters that do things. I really couldn't tell you much about anyone else because all of them make the boring cast in the first movie seem like top-notch, Oscar-worthy characters. The only thing that I can even think of pulling out and talking about is that someone gave Charlie Day one of the worst scripts in recent memory with a hilariously awful character arc and reveal. Poor guy had to do something with that atrocity and it never really works out. More stuff happens and we go quite a while without even having any action sequences at all. Just a whole ton of setup with these dull characters. Eventually we get a rogue Jaeger showing up to cause trouble and our team has to figure out what in the heck is going on as they battle this thing along with a handful of Kaiju-infected Jaeger minions.

Now I don't want to be one to complain at the fact that our Kaiju don't even show up for the longest time because the best monster movies in history force the audience to wait for the big reveal and "Pacific Rim" is something that did that all wrong by revealing all the monsters in the first five minutes of that first movie. In fact, I think that spoiled people into hating the 2014 "Godzilla" movie because Godzilla didn't show up for quite some time and people who had just watched "Pacific Rim" the year before had decided that they didn't care about world-building and plot setup as they just wanted a mindless Godzilla movie where Godzilla is fighting the other bad monsters for the entire run time like the Kaiju vs. Jaeger battles in "Pacific Rim." But for crying out loud, if you're going to go away from that formula that the first movie set up in favor of a more classic monster movie feel, give me a build up worth caring about. I was bored to tears for most of the movie. I didn't care about any of the plot. Most of the characters were complete garbage, including John Boyega. The 15-year-old girl was the only one worth caring about and she didn't do enough to make the movie worth watching. I just wanted some dumb fun from a "Pacific Rim" sequel and I didn't get that.

So check this out. Because I was so bored and there weren't very many people with me in the theater on a Monday afternoon, I pulled out my tablet and decided to calculate some of the timing from this movie. My showtime was 4:00. I didn't take note of exactly when my movie started, but there's usually 15 minutes of trailers and given that the credits finished at about 6:07 and the movie is only 1 hour 51 minutes long, the movie starting at around 4:15, give or take a few minutes, makes sense to me. The first time a Kaiju in its full glory shows up in this movie? Not counting the Kaiju-infested Jaegers or the Kaiju shown in flashbacks? 5:35. We have to wait 1 hour 20 minutes for a Kaiju to show up and start destroying Tokyo, I think it was. They were somewhere in Japan. And remember, this movie is only 1 hour 51 minutes long. I also decided to time the battle between the Kaiju and the Jaeger. It clocked in at 19 minutes long from when they first started fighting to when the battle was finally over. And there's about a 5-10 minute break in there where our depleted team of Jaegers, comprised solely of our young kids fighting alongside John Boyega and Scott Eastwood, have to regroup as the mega Kaiju is running towards Mt. Fuji.

Then there's this curious case of this battle. After being bored for the first 80 minutes of the movie where little happened, I was finally excited to see the fun action sequences that I paid to see. And sadly it was rather disappointing. It felt like the sparse leftovers of something much better. There were only three Kaiju that they had to wrangle up and in the first movie, it would've been a piece of cake. But no one from this team was very good at being a Jaeger pilot. I mean, this was mainly a group of kids with no prior experience of fighting in actual Jaegers. So the Kaiju mopped the floor with them for most of the battle. When the Jaeger team was winning, the battle became more like that awful final battle in "Man of Steel" with Superman and Zodd where Superman didn't seem to care about the lives of the millions of people he was ending while trying to stop Zodd. Neither do these kids in these Jaegers care about the humans around them as they grab entire buildings that are probably full of people and throw them at the Kaiju or grab cars on the ground and throw them at the Kaiju. There were zero consequences in this movie. They were determined that this was their opportunity to save the world. But what about the millions of people they were killing in the process?

If you watched the trailers for this movie and became intrigued because it looked like an extremely self-aware movie full of giant Kaiju fighting giant Jaegers, know that nearly all of the action sequences from the trailers, as well as John Boyega's speech, are from this final battle during the last 20 minutes of this movie. You can say they spoiled the movie in the trailers. But they had to because they chose to do jack squat in the first 80 minutes of the movie. I've heard some saying this is like "Independence Day Resurgence" to "Independence Day." And I kinda agree with that, although "Pacific Rim Uprising" isn't as bad as "Independence Day Resurgence" and "Pacific Rim" isn't as good as "Independence Day," which I think is slightly overrated anyways. But the principles apply. This is a half-hearted, boring, lazy sequel to a highly entertaining yet dumb original. I found "Uprising" about as entertaining as last year's "Transformers: The Last Knight," which, granted, isn't the worst Transformers movie, but is still a mostly worthless pile of empty nonsense that barely snuck onto my worst movies of the year list. I think I gave the original "Pacific Rim" a 7/10 back in 2013, which seems about right. For "Pacific Rim Uprising," I'm giving it a 5/10 and even that feels a bit nice.

Tomb Raider Review

March has recently become known as early summer in Hollywood as recent years have seen "The Hunger Games," "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice" and "Beauty and the Beast" celebrate $150+ million opening weekends in March. Hollywood has definitely taken note of this phenomenon as major studios have felt comfortable releasing their big tentpole releases in March. This March hasn't been quite so lucky, though, as "A Wrinkle in Time," "Tomb Raider" and "Pacific Rim Uprising" have all failed to even hit $50 million. There's one final chance with "Ready Player One" opening on Thursday of this week, but that probably won't get too much higher than the three aforementioned films. But the fact that Hollywood tried with all four of these films does support the fact that studios are comfortable opening movies in March, still, as these movies seem like the type of movies that fit the bill for a big summer blockbuster. That said, I've already covered the highly disappointing outing for Disney in "A Wrinkle in Time," so it's time to move onto "Tomb Raider" and hopefully I'll get to "Pacific Rim Uprising" and "Ready Player One" before the week is finished. I'm not expecting much out of these titles. I just want some simple, fun entertainment out of them.

In regards to "Tomb Raider," I'll admit that I was never fully on board with this movie. Instead of being like, "Oh my gosh, we're finally getting another 'Tomb Raider' movie," I was like, "Why are we getting another 'Tomb Raider' movie? Is that something that anyone really asked for?" When the trailer was released, it did nothing for me and thus my question remained the same. Why was this happening? In fact, I was so uninterested in this idea that I put this on the bad section of my 2018 movie preview. The movie looked really bad and the recent history of video game movies suggested that this wasn't going to work out. I mean, if both "Warcraft" and "Assassin's Creed" were disasters, why should a reboot of "Tomb Raider" be the movie to reinvigorate the genre? Can't we just give up and let movies be movies and video games be video games? Transferring video games to the big screen is clearly not a transition that works out well. So yeah, my expectations for "Tomb Raider" were in the basement. And quite honestly I think those extremely low expectations actually helped me enjoy this movie. This is by far no masterpiece and I'll have many complaints to get to, but I walked out feeling decently entertained. Certainly one of the better video game adaptations.

As far as the plot goes, this is where I admit that it's already slightly fuzzy in my head. I saw this movie about a week ago in 2D IMAX for $5 Tuesday, a pretty sweet deal if you ask me. Normally I don't admit in my reviews exactly when I saw the movie in relation to the review. I just stay with the philosophy that I'll get my review out when I get it out and my readers can be patient with my schedule. In this case, though, I feel the information is pertinent because the movie is admittedly very forgettable. It's been only six days, yet I'm already having a hard time recalling the plot. Compare that to something like "Annihilation" where a month has gone past and I haven't been able to get that movie off my mind at all. But in jogging my memory, this version of Lara Croft has been abandoned by her father, who disappeared seven years prior and everyone assumes he is dead. He was a very rich businessman, so the people in charge of the company have been waiting for Lara to sign the deeds and take over her rightful inheritance, but she doesn't really want to as she would rather live on her own, making her own way in life. However, she's about to give in and sign the papers when she is given a clue to her father's whereabouts, resulting in an adventure to a mysterious island.

The first thing that immediately jumped out to me while watching this movie is how committed Alicia Vikander was to this role of Lara Croft and that commitment level alone was enough to keep me interested in her character and the journey she's on. As far as my history with the "Tomb Raider" franchise as a whole, I'll admit that I've never really played the games as I'm not much of a gamer anyways. And I can't even remember if I've seen the two Angelina Jolie movies all the way through. But as the original movie came out when I was 12, I was very well aware of its existence and how my fellow male teenage friends reacted to the movie and to Angelina Jolie. She was a popular celebrity crush, to say the least. That's because she was very sexualized in the movies. I mean, video games targeted at teenage boys often sexualize the female characters, giving them tight clothing or little clothing while having disproportionate body sizes. That's how Lara Croft was in the early games and that's how the early movies were with Angelina Jolie, causing teenage boys around the world to drool all over themselves while watching this hot girl in tight clothing kick butt in some extremely cheesy action flicks that definitely weren't meant to take seriously at all.

I mean, if someone comes up to you claiming they absolutely love the 2001 "Tomb Raider" movie, take note of their gender and do the math in your head to figure out how old they were when it was released. Chances are they were a teenage boy at the time. Thus proving my point. I mean, that movie carries a 5.8 on IMDb and a 20 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, two figures that are significantly lower than the 6.8 and 50 percent that this updated version has at this moment. So it's not like it was praised as a masterpiece. In fact, the general consensus is quite the opposite, that it's a piece of trash. Unless you were a teenage boy when it was released. Thus when it comes to this new one, I was really nervous that they were going to give Alicia Vikander the same treatment and that idea disappointed me because my girl Alicia deserves a lot better. Turns out I was pleasantly surprised as Alicia's Lara Croft is NOT sexualized. She's a normal girl living a normal life, at least initially, and she has a normal female body type with normal female clothes that aren't super tight the whole time. Thus she fits in well to 2018 as a strong female character who can appeal to both genders and a variety of ages, rather than being treated as eye candy for teenage boys.

Given that I've loved Alicia Vikander since 2015 (and I'm happy that I finally learned the correct pronunciation of her first name that she herself revealed in a recent Wired Google autocomplete interview -- uh-liss-ee-uh), as she was great in her triple feature of "Ex Machina," "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." and "The Danish Girl" that year, winning an Oscar for "The Danish Girl," I'm glad that she was given good treatment in this movie. And, as I said, she completely owns this role, proving to be a bonafide action star deserving of even more major roles. If we truly learned our lesson from last year's "Wonder Woman" that female-led superhero movies can make a lot of money, Marvel and DC should give Alicia a good, long look for their next big female-led superhero movies as she'd be great. Being that this movie as a whole has received very mixed reviews, yet I've not heard one complaint about Alicia as everyone loves her in this movie, even if they hate the movie itself, I think that shows that this is more than just me being biased towards an attractive female my age who I've loved in every role I've seen her in. It's impressive to me that she can take a fairly generic movie with generic action sequences and do so well that I actually enjoy the movie as a whole because of it.

But yeah, you'll notice with this review that I've spent the whole time talking about Alicia Vikander and how amazing she is while not really talking much about the movie itself. I didn't know much about the plot going in, even though it apparently closely follows the recent games of which I've never played, but it was really easy to figure out exactly what was going to happen. Her dad was missing and he sent her a letter to burn his research on a particular subject so that it doesn't get into the wrong hands. Of course that means she was going to be disobedient and find where he was and said information was going to get into the wrong hands when she got to the island where he was at. And yeah, that's exactly what happened. Evil dude played by Walter Goggins is evil just for the sake of being evil and he does dumb things that cause conflict and eventually they go tomb raiding on this island, searching for this supernatural mummy thing that was supposed to release a dangerous power that would destroy the world if it got out and of course evil dude didn't believe that, which is going to set up action sequences him, Lara and the rest of the evil stuff in the tomb. If this sounds like a combination of, like, 10 different movies, that's because it is, thus leaving me disappointed.

However, the visual effects in the movie were still pretty good. And seeing it in IMAX made the sound design quite impressive and engaging. Even though I was two steps ahead of the plot the entire time and was not treated to any twists and surprises, I was mildly entertained by the action sequences in the movie. The tomb sequences felt like a poor man's "Indiana Jones," especially reminding me of the finale of "The Last Crusade" when they're in the one tomb-like place searching for the Holy Grail. I laughed at how easy it was for Lara Croft to solve all of the fancy puzzles and riddles that were impossible for everyone else. None of the other actors in this movie struck me as bad, but outside Alicia Vikander, they all felt like they were just there for the paycheck while Alicia was the only one that took her role seriously. There were a lot of sequences where I just wanted to kick back and enjoy myself with a silly, cheesy action flick, but given that the movie took itself super seriously, I had to take it super seriously as well and it doesn't hold up that well. Yet Alicia Vikander does so good that she made me want more as she does one heck of a good job in this. So let's put a good cast and crew around her for the sequel so they can get this right. My grade for this movie is a 7/10.

A Wrinkle in Time Review

If you haven't heard the news recently, Disney is on a mission to take over the world. Pretty soon we might have to rename Earth to Disney World. They already owned Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm. Now they're in the process of purchasing Fox. On top of that, they're on fire with their own live action releases, with the biggest highlights being "Beauty and the Beast" making $1.26 billion worldwide last year and "The Jungle Book" making $966.5 million worldwide the year before. Next year looks to be a huge year for their live action movies with "Dumbo," "Aladdin" and "The Lion King" all on the slate. Then they have "Toy Story 4," "Frozen 2," "Star Wars: Episode IX" and two more Marvel movies with their other branches. Topping things off, they already have dates scheduled for 11-12 movies each year from 2020 to 2022, even though they're not revealing all of the titles yet. But before we get to all of that, we have to make our way through 2018, which has a lot of question marks in pretty much every category for Disney except for on the Marvel front. And they've unfortunately started off on the wrong foot here with the perplexing disaster that is "A Wrinkle in Time." Perplexing because there was a lot of talent that combined together for this pile of dog crap.

In terms of Disney's live action films, this obviously doesn't fall into the category of a live action remake of their own classic property like "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Jungle Book." Rather this is Disney taking a chance on a popular novel that some have claimed is impossible to successfully translate to the big screen. "Challenge accepted," said Disney. So they gave the keys of the car to Ava DuVernay, an extremely popular up and coming director responsible for "Selma" and the popular Netflix documentary "13th," got an all-star cast to jump in the car along with Ava, and together they put the pedal to the metal for this risky adventure... only to drive it straight into a brick wall and watch the whole thing go up into flames, leaving me baffled while watching this disaster, trying to figure out where this all went wrong. Sure, if this was in fact an impossible task to begin with, maybe we point the finger at Disney executives for even trying to make this work by forcing creative minds to solve an unsolvable problem. But even if that was the case, the final product should've been much better than it was as there were basic filmmaking techniques that outright failed across the board and I'm going to do my best to unpack all of this because there's a ton to get to.

First off I want to start by giving the disclaimer that I know nothing about this novel. It's possible that the core problems could lie in the novel. If that's the case, I can't comment. I can only comment on the film that I saw. The initial setup here, at least on paper, is a solid setup. We have two scientist parents played by Chris Pine and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Chris wants to solve all the mysteries of the universe while Gugu wants to focus on the small things. Solid setup there with potential metaphors that could be used later on. Fast forward four years and Chris has gone missing, causing the life of his daughter, played by Storm Reid, to be rather chaotic. As is often the case with the loss of a loved one, there's a lack of desire on her part to reach her potential. Because of that, her classmates hate and bully her. She struggles with her teachers and her principal. Her relationship with her mom isn't even where it should be. These are solid, real life, emotional problems that could've made for a fascinating first act. And I don't feel it would've taken a whole lot of effort to make that aspect of the film work. A well-written screenplay, great directing and solid acting should've done the trick. With the talent on board, there's no reason to believe that I wouldn't be hooked by this setup.

But that's the problem. I didn't care at all. The whole thing just felt wooden to me. We have a cliche group of bullies who apparently hate Storm Reid. Why? I don't know. They just do. I find the cliche bully character in these grade school dramas to be annoying in the first place, so it's especially bad when these group of girls do a horrible job of selling it. Then as we continue through school, the teachers don't seem to have any apathy for this girl, the principal deserves to earn the award for worst principle and Gugu as the mom gives the most phoned in, lazy performance as Storm's mom. There's no emotion from any characters. The screenplay is lazy and basic. And Storm Reid, bless her heart, is the only actor who seems to care about the movie. She does great. No one else does. Not the teachers. Not the principal. Not the classmates. Not the mom. Not the extremely annoying little brother. Not the boyfriend who's randomly madly in love with her despite like no setup or warning at all. No one. I was rather shocked at this. Storm Reid was the only one that seemed to care about this movie. So then when Reese Witherspoon shows up in their living room one night, I was like, good. Get us out of this boring town. Let's go on a fun adventure through space.

That's when this movie gets weird. I don't know what the plural form of Mrs. is, so I'm just going to use it as is, but we have the three Mrs. that show up. And I'm not even sure what they are. Some sort of masters of the laws of this strange universe. We have Reese Witherspoon as Mrs. Whatsit, Oprah as Mrs. Which and Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Who. Reese is abnormally bubbly in this. I kinda liked her character at certain points and I appreciated the fact that Reese seemed to be having a lot of fun with this role because everyone else seemed bored. Oprah was there to spout out random nuggets of wisdom in a very Oprah-like fashion. She was also a giant hologram for a while and that was strange. Mindy as Mrs. Who is, well, there. I'm not actually sure what her point was. She didn't really do much. I guess the writers of the book and/or screenplay just felt there needed to be a trio of wise ladies, but didn't quite figure out specific roles for all three of them. Why did this trio of ladies show up? Well, to help them find their dad. Chris Pine is out there somewhere and he needs to be rescued. OK. That works for me. Let's go on a crazy space adventure through this bizarre universe and hopefully I can have a bit of fun in the way I have had with previous trippy sci-fi adventures.

Sadly, though, fun is the wrong word to describe this adventure. Boring is probably a better word. And weird. When I watched the trailers for this movie, I had a feeling that this was going to be a trippy film, but I had no idea if it was good trippy or bad trippy. Unfortunately this is bad trippy. I definitely don't mind weird. If we go on random, crazy adventures, I prefer to be fully engaged and have the feeling that I am watching something epic, even if I don't understand what it all means. The most classic example is "2001: A Space Odyssey." That's the strangest movie you'll ever see. But in an epic sort of way. A more recent example is last month's "Annihilation." That's a very strange journey, but it's a layered one with a lot of depth and meaning. With " A Wrinkle in Time," we just did weird for the sake of being weird. There's no rhyme or reason. And there's a bunch of odd rules in place that I highly doubt anyone on this team had any idea what they actually were. It just seemed like they tried to come up with what weird sequence they could come up with next or what random rule to throw out of left field at the audience. And it almost had the feel that they were coming up with everything on the fly as if they started filming before finishing the screenplay.

But at least this was going to be a visually stunning film right? Add in some breathtaking cinematography to make the experience even better where you then have to go find this on the biggest screen possible. And it was like that. Until it wasn't. One moment we'd have a visually stunning film. Then next moment it was painfully obvious that the whole scene was done in a studio with everyone in front of a green screen. Granted, that happens in a lot of films. But in 2018, we have enough technology that even decent filmmakers should easily trick me into thinking the world around them is real. Instead there were moments where it felt about as real as the weather man or traffic man on your local news. The images behind them looked so fake. At these moments, I think I was supposed to be feeling emotion as this story progressed, but I was so distracted by the awful effects that I didn't even care. And I didn't feel bad because Storm Reid was still the only actor in the movie at this point that cared about the project and now it seemed like the visual effects people also didn't care. Did Ava care as she was directing this whole thing? Did the writers care when they attempted to adapt this novel for the big screen? I honestly don't know. It didn't seem like it to me.

And then we have the final problem that just did it in for me. Again, I remind you that I have zero knowledge of this novel. But it felt like there was a lot more to this adventure than was portrayed in this movie. It reminded me of the movie "Eragon" when they took several scenes from the book and combined them into one scene to save time. I don't know how big or small the novel "A Wrinkle in Time" is, but this adventure through the universe felt like it should've been a lot longer because the second act of this movie feels extremely short. We wander around in a field. Take a fly through the sky. Visit a couple of random places. Then we're onto act three. We briefly bump into Zach Galifianakis and Michael Pena along the way, literally for five minutes or less each. Then we're at the finale. It felt like this could've been a 13-episode Netflix series, but what we have instead is the pilot and finale getting the proper time while episodes 2 through 12 get crammed into 20 minutes. The movie clocks in at 11 minutes short of two hours and that's with credits. They gave themselves no time to develop this story. I'd say they should've added 30 more minutes, but with the lack of passion across the board, the 109 minutes as is was excruciatingly painful to get through.

I was going to go really low with my score. But I'm bumping it up a notch for one reason. Chris Pine. We got 90 percent of the way through this movie and up to that point, the only person who cared was Storm Reid and a little bit from Reese Witherspoon, who at least seemed to be having fun. But then when we finally got to Chris Pine, he also showed that he cared about this and there were some genuinely good father/daughter moments that gave me the feels for a few minutes at the end. I still didn't care for the rest of the movie, and there's more atrocities in the form of spoilers that I didn't even get to, but the Chris Pine and Storm Reid moments were solid. But overall, this is still a big no from me. A huge misfire from Disney. I went into this hoping the 42 percent from critics were them just being Grinches to another family film. Instead, I feel that score is too high. And I hate to say it, but I think a good portion of that 42 percent were simply too scared to trash a movie made by a black, female director in 2018. Yes, I want more female and minority directors, too. But they also can make bad movies. It's OK to trash them when it happens. I still love Ava and I hope she recovers from this. But the fact of the matter is she made a really bad movie and I'm giving it a 4/10.