It's been a while but due to the zombie franchise getting new attention I have been forced to watch several zombie movies together with my associates.
I have to say the various british classic crisis & newer ones are good.
Visually not as good as Hollywood but everything else is better here and there (not so cliched and all).
I've got a long movie night behind me so this is a rough critique review of the movies.
----- SPOILER WARNING!! ---------
World War ZTrouble starts up ahead in town and our traffic-jammed hero family decides to follow a truck mowing the way into the heart of it. Duh.
This goes not only against the basic instinc but also common sense, and definitely against the judgement of our famed UN warzone veteran & "super survival" hero Jerry.
Despite the chaos our hero managed to observe and count the time for people's tranformation.
Whoa a ten second invulnerability time in the game for our hero. He doesn't transform himself either after being bitten!
Anyway, suddently out of town (!) they are in town again trying to hammster supplies only to loose it all again in chaos. Duh.
How the heck did they escape town so easily and then why stuck in town again?
Rescued to the Atlantic fleet, the hero is forced to serve in exchanged for his family to stay there. That's great!
Some superdupper young doc speculates the epidemic has to be a virus like the flu from 1918. Duh.
Viruses are not alive by themselves and need incubation time. There's no way a non-active virus can convert people in 10 seconds!
So this smart guy had to be protected to find out the origin source of the epimedic. They set off on a Carribu from a carrier! Fantastic!
But the doc slips and shoots himself dead after setting foot on the ground. The heavens made the better choice in the movie!
Without mission briefing I dunno what's going on next in the game but we meet up with some veteran specops it seems.
OK, so according to a lost memo, yes!, it all started from an unknown soldier brought back to base.
It seems to be a safe bet he's north korean, though. Bingo!
Oh well, our hero had his cellphone on sound when his wife calls out of nowhere during the mission! Was about time she checked if he's doing fine!
Our hero rides his bycicle to safety, and on to the next place of interest, Jerusalem, while observing a n-device going off.
This Carribu is a great plane!
The israelis managed to keep themselves safe, although, everyone else fell due to "human nature not stupidity or weakness."
Oh yeah, nice, our hero surrounded by female soldiers. Hmm, flower power all around which lures the zombies to build up a pile to overcome the walls.
The Z-avalanche buries some of the poor femal detail while they hold them off for our hero.
Our hero observes someone being ignored by the Z!
Dunno what kind of knife he grabbed but he easily cut off the bitten hand of one soldier safing her life.
On to the next site, but the airliner's storage was boarded! Using a grenade to depresurrise and getting rid of the Z.
Despite the crash landing the hero made it to the site in no time.
So our hero figured to use a deadly disease as a camouflage. I doubt there's any disease leaving people alive long enough to outlive the Z.
Instead of going trough the roof our hero decides to use the "only" bottleneck route (disregarding the air-duc route, too) at night when the Z have an advantage.
Oh well, all alone (the rest doesn't matter), armed with a crowbar "Snake Plisken" and unbriefed manages to retrieve all the diseases in the volt.
Choosing a random vile he infects himself and safes the day. Jay! But the fight goes on as our hero returns to his family.
All in all it's a nice action packed movie covering the whole world. For some reason there are no Z-animals, though.
Despite everything the hero, actually, doesn't have a lot of action himself but is well distributed to every party involved.
It lacks a lot of "taking time, talk and think" scenes, there's no planning/briefing just do or die, guts and glory. Everyone seems to be cooperating with the UN hero until he was left behind by the pilot. That was a good one.
Nothing new regarding Z-lore, everything's ages old.
Star Trek into darknessI have been keeping myself unspoiled until now. So here's my unspoiled critique.
Dumbed down for action. Star Trek tech lowered down for dramatic reasons when needed. A spacesuit has no problems but a shuttle has!
Hidding a spaceship in deep water is an outrageous thing for Scotty/hollywood. Finally, caught up with 70 years of scifi literature and 40 years of scifi animes.
Spock uses cold-fusion to cool a vulcan. (Did I heard that corectly or was I dreaming this?)
The ship zips away without burning the atmosphere into a new adventure or rather a rebellion within.
Waking up besides women is the new standard opening scene (Kirk & 2 Catians). Also there are new nice dark imperial uniforms.
Hmm, afters who knows how long Starfleet realized unruly Kirk was not ready for the center chair.
Anyway, instead of leveling Starfleet HQ the bad guy guns down the unshielded & unsecured meeting room of highcommand killing numerous Captains & XOs.
We get to see a nice line of "Enterprise" display models. The last one looking strangely different than should be.
Anyway, Section 31 is revealed. Duh, the movie can't go without gathering all fancyness.
Well, at least we got our racy female agent (Dr. Markus).
Working in an armed organization Scotty didn't realized he's a military officer and complains about mission ordnance orders.
He complains about shielded photon torpedoes and firing them with an unknown payload could make the warpcore go off.
Oh well, Scotty gets relieved and since there's no other engineer Chekov replaces him.
With an urgent unethical & lawless mission the Enterprise warps away just after leaving port and while in orbit.
The warpcore sabotaged the ship falls out just above the bad guy's hideout (Kronos).
Sulu gives a long detailed speech to the enemy that would have gotten him courtmartialed for giving away classified information.
At least we got a nice lovers' quarrel between Spock and Uhura.
Fearing the Uhura's wrath the crew let her negotiate with the Klingon (who happen to wear Cylon-like armor_.
The Klingons weren't impressed as she comes across as a weak benevolent human. She should just have claimed blood revenge.
So the bad guy had to save her while single handely getting rid of Klingon ships and troops. (best action in the movie)
But facing the Enterprise's torpedoes he surrenders.
Kirks calls home with his personal communicator....sending Scotty to some coordinates corresponding to Jupiter. Duh.
It's an unguarded secret base. Scotty joins right in the middle of a group of blackops shuttles to enter the base unnoticed...
The torpedoes turned out to be converted cryo chambers with 300 years old people.
Guess what, it's Khan & his people! And the strange starship model turns out to be a new battleship designed by Khan and build in secret.
Bones experiments with Khan's blood on a dead Trible. It's all a secret plot to make war with the Klingons.
The ship is hard to makeout but seems to be at least 3-4 times bigger than the Enterprise.
It seems to be based on the Starfleet Battle Battleship design found in the StarTrek Command game crossed with StarTrek Online.
Its phaser easily punch trough shields and ship like butter. It's a wonder the Enterprise was still in one piece and after being thrown out of warp.
Kirk citing "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", a Mayan phrase, but Spock associates it with who knows who.
Anyway, Khan says the ship is a Dreadnough class, 2x size, 3x speed, modified for minimum crew....
Doesn't sound quite right nor sensible...a specifictly designed and built ship is a modification?
The ship battle is just a onesided massacre, nothing worth watching.
And then the ship, without power, falls from moon orbit to Earth...people falling all around ...I wonder why the moon doesn't fall, too?
Kirk goes into the radioactive warp core to safe the ship. Now, Kirk has his shining moment.
Of course all of this happens without anyone knowing in this medialess world.
The captainless ships in orbit are dead so the E has to save Earth from Khan or rather Spock.
Khan's ship levels Alcatraz before diving into the bay, and although it seems to crash into Angel Island it crashes into San Francisco.
Khan succums to Uhura's wrath so Bones could inject Kirk's dead body with Khan's superhuman blood to revive him.
And so the journey begins....
It's an action packed movie but everything else is simply cellphone kid level who don't know how to calculate by hand.
Or rather it's a movie where the story follows the action and fills in as necessary.
It's perfectly made for the cellphone-imlanted & partying generation.
So I wonder why the women don't get leotard uniforms, and men get 300's Spartan armor? Why are there no pole dancing babes and hunks in the bars?
Why don't the Klingons have a hundred piercings instead of some, have punk hair styles, and wear tank-like armor?
Why are there no more babes with cleavage among the useless crew? Where's the saboteur been after doing one job, and why's he not a cook?
Most importantly why didn't Kirk do Dr Markus already?
Gosh, shoot me for hoping the movie would be better than the first one. Despite all the actions and visual there's not much to enjoy.
OblivionI watched it a while ago but was not worth the effort to write.
To put it simply "Total Recall" with an extraterrestrial enemy and Tom Cruise.
It's like any other Tom Cruise movie since Mission Impossible. Nothing too bad, good action, here and there some nice things to see or enjoy.
It's lacking a bit or rather the lone hero parts seem to have no depth (no story telling) making it look boring.
They are for the pondering art viewer than normal movie audience. The "rebels" are well armed but overpowered & inexperienced despite decades of war.
Recommendable, but you won't miss anything if you don't watch it either.
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It seems to me Hollywood movies are all about actions and visuals now. There's not much time reserved for story or background or character shaping.