X-Men: Days of Future Past

The X-Men boldly go forward to the past, or possibly sideways. In this chaotic prequel,sequel hybrid reboot. Days of Future Past opens in a dystopian future where the massive mutant-hunting Sentinels have practically exterminated mutants, incarcerating the surviving ones in concentration camps. Of course the only the most popular X-Men have survived. Luckily they have a plan to send Wolverine back in time telepathically in order to stop the mutant holocaust.

Day of Future Past moves at a delirious pace. Professor Xavier explains situation how the sentinels come to be because Mystique failed to assassinate anti-mutant scientist Dr Trask (Peter Dinklage). Turns out, Mystique’s mutant abilities are the key to giving the Sentinels there metamorphic properties. So wolverine must inception-style his mind  back to 1973 – to persuade Magneto and Xavier's younger selves to join him in this quest. The problem is that he will be a stranger to the younger them.. The further complicating factors are that Xavier is drug addict and Magneto is incarcerated in an ultra-secure unit below the Pentagon. But with the help of Beast and Quicksilver they spring Magneto out 

.From there it becomes a race against time to stop Mystique, restore young Xavier’s hope, and prevent the X-Men of the future from being wiped out.Then the story gets muddled down with a bit of repetition about the whole bleak dystopian future scenario. Major credit to both director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg from  balancing all those elements with very little confusion.

The action scenes are over the top flashy. The visual effects looked great. The post-apocalyptic wasteland was brooding and desolate. Future Sentinels come across as menacing killing machine unlike their 1973 dyson vacuum cleaner counterparts.

If you're a X-Men fanboy like myself you’ll notice lots of little nods to previous movies. X-Men: Days of Future Past is a dizzying ride. That allows for the series to be re-set. Was an surprisingly witty adventure rewarding installment for avid fans. Thanks to the power of time travel we can all forget that Last Stand, Origins and Superman Returns never happened.

4 out of 5 time travel sentinel waffles.

PC GAME REVIEW: SERENA

Serena is a narrative-driven game. It is quite short, but it was also free (on Steam). I thought its brevity was one of its greatest assets as it told the story it wanted to tell without overstaying its welcome. It took me only around thirty minutes to beat this game, but I considered that time well spent.

Serena is a point-and-click style adventure game. You wake up in a cabin in the woods wondering where Serena is. You then click around to move or examine different items. You also happen to be afflicted with that most common of videogame character traits-amnesia. As you explore different areas of the cabin you uncover more of your past with Serena as well as details about the protagonist, whose name I cannot remember.

The game tells its story entirely from the perspective of the protagonist and his memory as you slowly uncover the mystery. The voice acting is superb as it slowly alters its tone to match how you remember events occurring. The graphics also do a good job of getting across the tone that the designers were trying to go for. Neither the sound nor the graphics needed to be flashy but they did a good job of matching the tone of Serena.

The tone of the game continues to change as you discover that things are not as straightforward as they first seem. Without spoiling how the game progresses and ends too much, it seemed to foreshadow its plot twists and then deliberately invert them. This keeps the game feeling fresh as it moves towards the story’s conclusion as you regain your memory of what transpired.

Overall, Serena is a very good game. Although it is short, it is also free and doesn’t overstay its welcome. It has a very deliberate message and tone that it conveys really well. I definitely enjoyed this as a fan of story-driven games that have a satisfying conclusion.

4 out of 5 amnesiac-waffles.

Movie Review: Godzilla (2014)

 Why does Godzilla feel like an afterthought in his own movie? Especially after having a hype campaign that was solely centered around having the mystery of how Godzilla looks? All the latest Godzilla monster flick made me do was remember Pacific Rim. And the comparison is not kind to Godzilla.

 The Godzilla movie starts off at a nuclear reactor in Japan. We are introduced to a family consisting of a father and mother who work at a nuclear reactor and their son. I found this opening very effective to establish the family in a short amount of time before a monster attacks the reactor. This leads to the mother dying, the father becoming a conspiracy theorist to try and find out what really happened and the son joining the military. We are also introduced to a scientist looking at a massive crater somewhere close by. At this point I thought this would take the approach of World War Z (the awesome book) and follow different peoples perspectives during the monster attack, which would have been awesome.

 Unfortunately, this was not the case. Fast-forward to 15 years later and the father is still looking for the truth, the son has grown up and joined the American military  (but as bomb disposal, so there are no grey areas about him killing foreigners and being a bad guy, of course) and has a family in San Francisco and there is a giant monster containment unit over the Japanese nuclear reactor site. And this is where the movie starts to go off the rails. In short, the parts with the family are horrible and bland and often take the focus off where it should be: the monster (or spoiler alert, monsters).

 There are multiple monsters in this movie, being a male and female Muto that are quite bland and a giant Godzilla that is quite uninspired. In effect, the Muto are trying to breed and Godzilla is hunting them, for some reason that is never adequately explained (they don't even feed on eachother, instead feeding on radiation). This would have been fine, except that everytime the monsters go to fight it cuts back to the bland army guy trying to do his stuff. This was particularly evident when they initially face off and instead it just cuts to the next day and the destruction caused. That being said, once the movie settles back and lets you see the monsters fight, it is as impressive as Pacific Rim.

 Compared to Pacific Rim, Godzilla ends up being an extremely boring mess. There are many other things wrong with this movie, but it would have all been okay if it just got Godzilla right. However, like Transformers, it cuts away from the action I wanted to see to some human characters I didn't care about at all. The best parts are the very beginning (the prologue) and some giant monster fight scenes at the end. If it was released earlier, it might have been okay. But in a world post-Pacific Rim, monster movies should be doing better.

1.5 out of 5 monstrous waffles.

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

 Quirky,charming, oddball and a little bit dark are all ways to describe Wes Anderson new flick The Grand Budapest Hotel. Really it should have be titled the Grand Adventures of Gustave H and his sexy mo. For the most part thats exactly what the movie is, it just didn't live up to the movie my mind created from the trailers.

The story is. Gustave H., a legendary concierge at a famous Grand Budapest hotel is accused of murder of a rich old lady. Who bequeathed him a  priceless Renaissance painting . This lead to a battle with the family over her will - all against the back-drop of a dramatically changing continent. While being the story is being recounted by  Zero Moustafa, the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted friend.

All that sounds pretty much like a wonderful misadventure with Gustave H. But its more convoluted than it needs to be, also the focus is much more on Zero the lobby boy. I found Zero to be like a cardboard cutout with a drawn on mustache. Only really because Ralph Fiennes embodies Gustave H with so much lovable charm that every character around him become a one dimensional  pieces of driftwood.

The plot is merely a mechanism that allows Anderson to transport his vision onto the screen, a vision of a peculiar world seemingly different from our own, but filled with just as much loss and, at the same time, human compassion as ours. There is comedy, but its either very subtle or incredibly over the top.  I would technically describe it as a detective comedy, that's been dipped into nostalgia with a hint of bittersweetness longing for an age long past. Anderson unique film styling helps to bring the world of the Grand Budapest to life. The colours, the camera movement that switches between different parts of the set, the music, the lens angle distortion, absolutely ridiculous CGI is used perfectly to add some surrealism to the movie.

Really I just wanted to spend more time with Gustave H in The Grand Budapest rather then watching him escape a prison or ride several trains. The hotel itself is a character thats never truly explored. Don't think the movie spend really much time at The Grand Budapest. Still it was an enjoyable adventure with the charming concierge Gustave H.
 




2 and half quick witted comeback waffles out of 5.

Retro Movie Review: Dark Shadows (2012)

 Dark Shadows was a bit of a weird film to watch. It seemed like it had a lot of elements that should have made it a good movie. However, the execution leaft allot to be desired as it feels like it jumps between themes and keeps shooting itself in the foot when it comes to a cohesive narrative.
 Directed by Tim Burton, Dark Shadows stars Johnny Depp as an immortal vampire who has been buried for 200 years. He was turned into a vampire and buried by Eva Green, a witch who he had an affair with but did not love. When he awakens, he finds his descendants living in his mansion but living as a very dysfunctional family, the family business (of fishing) in ruins, Eva Green still alive and running a competing fishing business and a girl with a hidden past who he falls in love with again, apparently.
 At the start, it feels like the love story was meant to be the central plot of the movie. However, Dark Shadows tries to keep allot of plates spinning. This includes Depp's rivalry with Green, Depp trying to make sense of the world around him, Depp's love story with the girl (who is his descendant's family's governess), Depp trying to re-establish the family business, and Depp getting to know his family and fitting in with them (it is a wonder anyone managed to do anything without Depp's character for 200 years). Unfortunately, it never really solves this problem. Instead it just sort-of jumps between the plots, each with (at best) a flimsy connection to eachother.
 So while each plot, when viewed individually, works, once they are combined, the whole movie becomes a thematic mess. You immediately jump from  what is meant to be a dramatic, romantic scene (between Depp and the governess) into a comedic scene (such as Depp trying to figure out how a television works). Some plot threads are just dropped or left alone in what feels like a cheat when they realized there wasn't a good way to work them into the story of Depp being the good guy. For example, Depp murders a bunch of innocent teenagers/young adults out in the woods having a camping trip, but when it comes time to the showdown between Depp and Green, the town just kind-of forgets about the murders he has committed and hail him as a hero.
 Overall, this movie feels like a collection of short scenes stitched together after being put through a blender. And overall it doesn't work. The movies theme jumps around too much without any clear direction. Eventually, I got tired of trying to figure out whether a scene is meant to be serious, comedic or would even matter in 10 minutes times and lost interest.
 1 out of 5 Dark Waffles.

NOAH

If you loosely identify yourself as a practitioner of a Western religion, then chances are you know the story of Noah. Just encase you have forgotten, here's the quick run down —God becomes upset with his SIM CITY and decides to flood it. Before doing a big reset on earth, God informs Noah of his plans and tasks him with building a giant boat. Noah and the animal folks then spend 40 days and nights on the worst cruise ever. After surviving all that, Noah and the critters are encouraged to be fruitful and multiply. It’s an easy moral story for kids. It gives a good message about behaving or the world will punish you. It also has a bunch of furry creatures. Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler) ditches the Sunday-school telling for a biblical fantasy epic. This is a stroke of genius as it s way more enjoyable than the last two Hobbit movies. Noah is told as a catastrophic disaster movie, making this old story seem fresh yet newly strange. Here is the lowdown for the gritty biblical reboot. Earth is taken over by Cain’s descendants, who have multiplied across the world. Cain’s descendants have caused major environmental harm by barbecuing animals and digging up precious ore.

These acts of sinfulness make God decide that the World has to be cleansed. Noah, a hippie, dreams of blood and ash, and vast seas washing the world clean. These visions are a message from the Creator – the word ‘God’ is never used – who has a plan in mind for this .This naturally leads onto the whole boat-building task to save the natural creatures, which the descendants of Cain are naturally jealous of.

Add in some glowing minerals that tremble with holy power, quasi-baptismal rites performed with snake skin and a fire sword to give a biblical epic. The most bizarre thing in the movie is the six-armed, rock-skinned fallen angels that look like the love children between the Ents from LOTR and Rockbiter from the Neverending Story. These creatures are, of course, pretty awesome.Noah is provocative, flawed and mostly astonishing: an outsider blockbuster with a mythic texture. 

3 biblical waffles out of 5