Snowpiercer

 Snowpiercer greatest asset is it simplicity. Yet under its straightforward plot is a political statement about class structure. In the near future climate change has turned our Earth into a super happy ice world. Humanities remaining survivor are now stuck circling the Earth in Thomas the Tank engine. Each carriage section has be broken into poor, middle class and rich. Our hero Captain America (Chris Evan)  must lead the huddled masses at the back to the front and overthrow the upper class.

The movie is broken into video game-esque levels. Before each level Curtis (Captain America) receives a cryptic messages about what's ahead.

Before the poor can begin there revolt they must free former head of security, Namgoong (Song Kang-ho).They need  his ability to unlock the gates ahead to progress.  

Each section is a wonderment of production and thought from a brainwashed children's classroom to a fully-fledged aquarium, one of the true joys of the film is seeing what awaits our revellers behind each unlocked door. Along the way they encounter Minister Mason, Tilda Swinton doing her best Margaret Thatcher impression. Her only job is to be puppet that moves the chessboard around for her mysterious boss Wilford. The rest of the cast brings this small-scale depiction of society to life with an array of different human conditions.

Snowpiercer was a brutal,crazy ride that left you thinking. Go in with an open mind and have a really long think about how you can compare it to the world today.

3.5 upper class train waffles out of 5

Movie Review- Welcome to the Jungle (2013)

 Welcome to The Jungle (2013) is a comedy movie that surprised me with how good it was. It definitely had no right to be as good as it ended up being. With an aging Jean Claude Van Dam playing what is essentially a caricature of himself, I went in expecting the worst. However, I was pleasantly entertained for 100-odd minutes, even if there is nothing too memorable about it.

 The movie begins set in a sales company. Chris (Adam Brody) is presented as a bit of a weakling who has his ideas stolen and can't muster the courage up to ask a cute girl at the office out. But then a team-building activity has them camping with Jean Claude on a remote island happens, and no-one in the company is ever going to be the same again (da-da-dum).

 Of course, things don't go as planned on this company getaway. Van Dam gets mauled and incapacitated by a tiger, they can't get off the island, and the office bully takes over the workplace as a god-king while everyone is sort-of high on some native plants. Chris, his best friend, his crush and his best friends wife (all of whom I promptly forgot the names of) have to take back control so that they can be rescued. What follows is Chris going through a pretty standard "heroic" journey. He learns to overcome his fear, stand up for himself and (of course) finds out the girl likes him.

 There was nothing too memorable about this movie, but it did make me chuckle. Van Dam has some of the best lines as he hams up his part in the movie, and Chris played a believable dweeb. The storyline may be predictable and I roll my eyes in the girl being treated as a prize after Chris overcomes his fear, but it does make up for it for not taking itself too seriously. Especially when Van Dam finally performs his round kick.

 3 out of 5 wilderness-hunting waffles

Board Game Review- Terra Mystica

  Terra Mystica is a territory control-style board game for 2 to 5 players. In it, you play as a race of magical beings who are attempting to terraform the planet through mystical means to suit there own habitats (i.e. Mermaids into water, Elves into forest). Hence the name Terra Mystica. In order to achieve this, the players have to manage the resources of money, divine priests, energy and buildings.

  Terra-Mystica is played out on a hexagonal board, each split into one of six different terrain types. Each race can then use various amounts of resources to terraform the landscape, build houses and then try to upgrade the buildings into churches, fortresses and the like.

 What actions you can do during your turn governed by how many of all the different types of resources you have at your disposal. There is never enough resources to do everything that you want to do. It makes it imperative to plan out what you want to try to do and then work towards getting the resources you need to complete this strategy. This is both the greatest strength and biggest weakness of the game. There are so many different resources to manage and keep track of that the game can often slow down just so each player can fully assess their options.

 There is also no direct way to interact with other players. The most you can do is try to spoil their plans by getting resources before them. There is no trading of resources between players or a way to directly attack them. This gives the player interactions a very negative feeling as opposed to any feeling of positive satisfaction or gain between the players.

Another problem is the downtime between turns. With no direct ways to interact between players and some turns taking a long time due to the amount that you need to keep track of, it is very easy to lose interest when it isn't your turn. This is worsened when you can't do many actions compared to other players (due to lack of resources) so you are often left just waiting.

 Overall, Terra-Mystica is a game with allot of potential. I do have to mention that the board and all the components look stunning and the theme is nicely woven into the game. However, for too many games I was struggling to stay interested except for the brief time that it was my turn. It may work better with only 2 or 3 players, which I haven't tried yet, but that may run into the problem of no interaction between players as the territories are too spread out. With all the competition with better territory and resource management games, I would give this a miss.

 1.5 out of 5 mystical waffle landscapes.

Guardians of the Galaxy

Do you remember pop-rocks- the colorful candy rocks that exploded in your mouth? If you didn’t, you have no childhood. But all you really need to know is that they are awesome. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is like eating a bunch of pop-rocks at once while listening to all your dad’s favorite hits. The resulting sugar-high leaves you riding a cotton candy unicorn over a rainbow in a galaxy far, far away. Star Wars 7- You are on notice.

Guardians follows a human named Peter Quill who is abducted by aliens just after his mother dies of cancer.  Quill, or Starlord  as he wants to be known, spends his time giving alien floozies the Captain Kirk treatment while going all Indiana Jones on ancient alien artifacts. Starlord’s archaeology hunting escapades eventually lead him into some serious trouble after he swipes an unlikely doomsday device. Similar to Thor: The Dark World, it’s a mystical orb of great power that every bad guys wants. Also a bunch of other important things are happening in the universe that just gets glazed over.

Guardians requires no previous knowledge of Marvel-cinematic universe events, so you’ll never feel like you're out of the loop. It knows it is just the bastard child of the long forgotten tongue-in-cheek space opera. It mixes all the best things about Star Wars and Firefly by taking a bunch of misfits and turning them into a surrogate family. It then adds all these conflicting personalities into a tiny spaceship, then sits back with a bag of pop-rocks to watch the fireworks.

The brisk plot wastes no time teaming-up Quill his new rag-tag frenemies. The Guardians include Gamora, the assassin with a heart and adopted daughter of the super villain Thanos. She is played by Zoe Saldana,who making a career of playing rainbow coloured aliens. Next is man mountain of muscle Drax (Dave Bautista), who holds a grudge towards Gamora. Drax’s lack of understanding humor becomes its own source of humor throughout the movie, with him having some of the best lines. Rounding out this B-grade super-team are Rocket, the wise-cracking raccoon, voiced with enthusiasm by Bradley Cooper, and Groot,  a sentient tree, who can only say one sentence (“I am Groot”). Huge props have to go to Vin Diesel and the visual effects wizard that live in the computer as to making it look effortless to bring this fearsome creature with a gentle soul and a gift for slapstick to life.

Together, they have to stop another supervillain,Ronan the Accuser, who is only slightly more one note then that dark elf from Thor. This is mostly due to Lee Pace’s performance as he seemed to have fun hamming it up. The villains really seem there to more properly introduce the audience to Thanos, who actually gets a speaking part this time.

Where Guardians soars is in its world building, which fully trusts the audience to either take notice or ignore it depending on their preference. Guardians has you hyper jumping all around this colourful galaxy, with each new world you visit being populated by seedy alien hustlers and weird, swaggering creatures. There a character that has a deadly flute arrow. Let me repeat- a flute arrow. That sounds totally ridiculous, until you see it in action. Now I want one.

I love how director James Gunn’s overlays the film with some great pieces of music. These are mostly snippets of classic rock and golden oldies. Like a Quentin Tarantino movie, this all adds extra layers of coolness to the movie. Of course, now I am addicted to listening to that darn soundtrack, which makes me want to watch the movie again, which will make me want to listen to the soundtrack some more. It is a perpetual loop.

Guardians of the Galaxy is a movie that is just a fun romp through the galaxy. It is a rag-tag team getting together to combat a threat and learning to be a family. Like pop-rocks, the further you get into the movie the more awesome it becomes.

5 out of 5 intergalactic cotton candy waffles. Pew-pew. Laser beams. Pop-rocks. Go watch it.

P.S. DC take note. We don't want dark and gritty disaster porn masquerading as a superhero movie, we want want fun.

MOVIE REVIEW: AVENGERS CONFIDENTIAL- BLACK WIDOW AND PUNISHER (2014)

With Guardians of the Galaxy just around the corner and Avengers: Age of Ultron hype starting to ramp up, I decided to delve into one of the Avengers animated offerings. Avengers Confidential follows the story of Punisher and Black Widow as they try to take down a team of villains.

It starts with Punisher and Black Widow butting heads over custody of a criminal. This, of course, establishes that they are pretty evenly matched, before Nick Fury shows up. It is quite an effective introduction for showing the spy-style of Black Widow as opposed to Punisher’s brutal style. From here, it quickly gets into the story of Punisher and Black Widow teaming up to take down Leviathan, a bad-guy group who has stolen Shield weapons. Of course, things don’t quite go as planned.

Avengers Confidential keeps trying to artificially increase the tension in the story by making the characters take actions that make no sense. Whether it is a convenient deus-ex brain washing machine or Nick Fury withholding vital information about the mission, it always feels like it is trying to shoe-horn in tension. I envision that this movie could have worked as a buddy-cop type drama, with the contrast between Black Widow’s spy skills and Punisher’s brutal style as they are trying to be heroes even though they are ordinary people in a world of monsters and super-soldiers. Instead, we get an endless string of fights between them which just ends up feeling tiring.

The animation style for the fighting doesn’t help matters. It definitely feels like they overused the big-sound-and-camera-shake for a hit, leaving it feeling mundane instead of only for the big hits. Most of the moves that they depict also end up feeling very unrealistic, which takes away from any impact that the fights might have. What could have been an interesting movie on the non-superpowered heroes of the marvel universe just ends up feeling like a mash-up of styles.

Overall, I feel like Avengers Confidential was a missed opportunity. It could have been good and starts off promising, but too many times it feels the need to shove extra tension and action into the movie instead of letting a story develop. Oh well, at least the proper cinematic marvel franchise is still awesome.

2 out of 5 punishing waffles.