The Great Wall Review

     2017 has actually been a pretty good year so far for my movie viewing experiences.  I'd only seen 12 2017 movies before sitting down to view The Great Wall and out of those 12, only 2 were duds.  I seem to recall a bit more of a balance by about this time last year so I watched this one, thinking that it might help pad out the Bad list.  I'll be completely up front with you, seeing the trailers for this movie did not make me excited one bit and Scholar and I figured that The Great Wall would end up being a hate watch, like what she did with last year's abomination Gods Of Egypt or our plans for this year's The Mummy.

      The story behind The Great Wall, conceived by Legendary Pictures CEO Thomas Tull and World War Z author Max Brooks, is that two surviving members of a platoon of European mercenaries have traveled to China to find out the secret of gunpowder.  After a strange encounter with a creature at their camp, William (Matt Damon) and Tovar (Predro Pascal) happen across The Great Wall of China, only to find it heavily guarded and patrolled by an army known as The Nameless Order.  William and Tovar are captured and find themselves caught up in The Nameless Order's ongoing battle with a race of beasts known as the Tao Tei.  Having some emotional baggage, William agrees to help the Nameless Order in their fight in hopes of personal redemption.

     Now that sounds pretty silly, right?  Saying it out loud doesn't really do the movie any favors and the aforementioned trailers didn't help so I sat down with a big glass of Crown and Coke and gave it a watch...

     ...and Goddamn it, I kinda liked it.

Hey, I'm just as surprised as you are, Jing Tian.

      First of all, this is a pretty good looking movie.  There is a lot of sweeping landscape shots and a great sense of scale when getting good looks at both the wall and Bianliang later on, showing just how massive the threat they face is and even when the Tao Tei horde isn't featured onscreen, the cinematography is really nice during these moments.  When our characters reach the Wall, the movie receives a nice injection of color that the first few minutes sorely lacks with somewhat Blizzard-esque armor and weaponry being sported by The Nameless Order gives the aesthetic a more vibrant feel.  Kudos to Weta Workshop in this department because that looked great.

     Another thing that looked good was the action scenes when The Nameless Order engage the Tao Tei in combat.  The shots and editing used during these moments were clear, coherent and not so overdone that you couldn't see what was going on, which was good because this allowed the movie to unleash some brutality during these moments that I thought were pretty intense for a PG-13 movie.  The Great Wall doesn't really shy away from the fact that The Nameless Order are just as likely to get mass casualties just as the Tao Tei.  Naturally, it's not as brutal as something like Hacksaw Ridge but I was surprised by some of the shots showing what became of some of the soldiers during these fights.

     If I had to pick one thing that I enjoyed the most about this movie, it would be the score.  It was actually the first thing I noticed just as the movie was starting up.  Ramin Djawadi's music has the feel of your typical major Hollywood blockbuster but there was also a playful undertone to it which gave me flashbacks to Klaus Badelt's score for the first Pirates Of The Caribbean film.  I'm listening to this soundtrack as I write this review and to be honest, I would buy it.

Just wanted an excuse to show these costumes.

     However, a great movie The Great Wall is not.  One of the biggest problems I had with it, now that I think about it, is that there a couple of side characters in this movie that just do not need to be here.  Pedro Pascal and Willem Dafoe's respective characters don't really add much to the story other than an obligatory human threat to the well being of The Nameless Order and the pacing of the movie suffers whenever they're on.  Their performances are fine (actually, everyone is fine in this movie although it takes Matt Damon a few minutes to really get into it) and I don't have anything against the actors but they just weren't that interesting to follow.  Whenever Tovar and William would get into a spat, I found myself wanting to get back to The Nameless Order stuff, not because of the action and the costume designs but their ranks, hierarchy and way of life was more engaging and even then, I wasn't completely wrapped up with those characters either.  Pascal and Dafoe's characters could've been cut from the movie and I don't think much would've really been lost.

     I am also on the fence about the Tao Tei's designs.  They grew on me a bit more as the film progressed but the first good look you get at them 19 minutes in left me feeling very underwhelmed at the designs and, well, you only get one chance at a first impression.  Other than that, there's your typical blockbuster movie nitpicks: some bad greenscreen near the beginning of the film, it gets very, VERY CGI heavy at the end and it doesn't always look the best and I can imagine there's probably a lot of people who were mad/disappointed at a tease of a big action sequence that we only ever saw the aftermath of.

     

     In the end...yeah.  The Great Wall is not the wreck I was expecting it to be.  It's not a game-changer in the action movie genre, the dialogue isn't Tarantino levels and there's very little humor to be had here but it is an enjoyable, CG creature-feature war film with some pretty intense action sequences and an overall fun feel to it.  I'm not saying I'd run out and buy the Blu-Ray full price but if I found it in the cheap bins, I'd honestly pick it up.  I'm giving The Great Wall the ranking of a Fun Ride.

Wheeee!

      So folks, what did you think of The Great Wall?  As always, thank you so much for reading and if you like what you see on this blog, you be sure to nudge that "Follow" button and stay cynical!

     -The Cynic

Countdown To Godzilla: Cloverfield Review

     Wow, it is really only 16 days until Godzilla?  It still seems so far away but we have come a long way since the Comic Con 2012 Teaser Trailer description was put up online.  Well, let's keep the reviews going to tide us over and today we're looking at the found-footage kaiju film, Cloverfield.

     The plot of Cloverfield follows the friends of family of Robert Hawkins (Micheal Stahl-David) as they throw a going away party for him as he has accepted a job promotion in Japan.  Filmed entirely from a first person perspective by his brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and his best friend Hud Platt (T.J. Miller), they also capture some tension between Rob and his long-time friend Beth MacIntyre (Odette Yustman).  After they have a bit of a fight and Beth storms off with her date, Rob feels terrible about it and before he can try to fix it a giant creature attacks the city.  Unwilling to find the "off" switch for the camera, Hud captures the carnage of New York under seige and their battle for survival.

OHMAWGAWWWD!  OHMAWGAWWWD!

     Much like most of the world, my first exposure to Cloverfield was the amazing teaser that was attached to the first Transformers film in 2007.  At this point, the title "Cloverfield" was merely a rumor and had not yet been attached to the film but the teaser did it's job.  What caused the explosion?  What tossed the Statue Of Liberty's head like a baseball?  Is it a new Godzilla movie?  Cthulhu?  Jesus?  The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man?  The (now defunct) viral website 1-18-08.com had viral images that I never actually did get to see but from what I've read, it left people scratching their heads more instead of giving them answers (as viral media should be).  Well, we all paced around for a few months and a new trailer was released, confirming the title.  Speculation of the monster's identity was still running rampant but any guesses anyone had weren't even close.  Finally, January 18th, 2008 rolled around so we finally got to see what the hype was about.  It was one of the most intense cinematic experiences of my life (probably in the top 3 or 5 if I had to make a list), but that was 2008.  How is it in 2014 on a 39" LED?

The cast gets rounded up by the military.

     Okay, where to start?  Given that this is a "found footage" movie, you're gonna get a lot of shaky cam.  Does this get nauseating?  When you're watching it on your TV, it's not too bad.  Maybe I'm just saying that because I've seen the movie a couple times but the shaky cam really isn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be and it helps sell the whole premise of the movie (even prompting theatre promoters to warn of potential motion sickness to viewers), much like having relatively unknown actors in the leads.  Don't think that unknowns in the lead tampers the quality of the film because they all feel like real people that you see on the streets and in your social circles and not actors.  Watching this film again, not once did I feel that I was simply watching a movie but rather watching a real event as it unfolded before my eyes.
     Watching the film, I figured that it was simply shot on location in New York with the creature and damaged buildings added on top of existing buildings via CGI.  Nope.  There were a few shots filmed on location in New York with a couple of scenes filmed in Los Angelas and the rest filmed on sound stages with green screen filling the cityscape backdrop.  However, these shots were so well done that it feels like your smackdab in the middle of New York City when "it" arrives.

  

Speaking of "It..."

     Okay, so then of course there's the Cloverfield monster.  Did it turn out to be any of the guesses we had?  Nope.  From what little you do see of it, it has very long forelimbs, shorter back legs, a tail long enough to slice through the Brooklyn Bridge, exterior esophogi dangling from its stomach (that according to the Cloverfield Wiki, it used to eat people and horses) and as you can tell from this shot, is really fucking big.  Given the style that the movie was shot in, you never do get a truly great look at the monster, even when Hud is only a couple of feet in front of it near the end of the film.  Thankfully, Hasbro made a 14 inch figure that shows Clover, as the crew dubbed him, in all of its glory.  This is one of the more bizarre kaiju I've seen and given some of the kaiju that have crawled out of the woodwork, that's saying something but holy crap is it effective.
     You're probably wondering where this creature comes from.  Well, according to the manga tie-in Cloverfield/Kishin, Clover is an undersea life form that was discovered by the fictional drilling company Tagruato.  However, the Kinshin story spirals into stuff that's so out of left field that it is not considered canon to the film.  Producer J.J. Abrams has denied that the creature is an alien, saying the item crashing into the sea at the end of the film is a Chimpanzill satellite, added into the film as a nod to those who followed the viral marketing.
     As if Clover wasn't enough, it also has these parasites that fall off of the creature and attack the people of New York.  They're about the size of a wolf and their bite is extremely fatal, causing the chest cavities of their victims to expand and burst, as Marlena finds out firsthand.  While Clover himself is in the film more than the parasites are, it is his smaller counterparts that provide more of the "BOO" moments in the story and they make them count, despite the fact that the CGI may not hold up as well as Clover's.

My face when Tim Hortons doesn't have my favorite donut...

     Well, I don't think there's really a whole lot else I can say about Cloverfield.  While the movie was met with fairly warm reception upon its release, I find it surprising how many people hate on the movie now.  Did we see the same movie?  Six years later and I still LOVED Cloverfield.  The acting is top notch, the shaky cam helps sell the terror and atmosphere of the film and this movie looks absolutely amazing considering it only had a budget of $25 million.  I've seen movies with quadruple (or more) the budget that this movie had and they don't look as good as this one did.  Does this mean I'd like to see a sequel?  Well, maybe but I don't know how that would work.  Would it be another found footage taken by someone else during that fateful night?  Would it be the monster attacking another city?  If so, you'd have to ignore J.J. Abrams' comment of saying that the creature is dead despite the inclusion of the cryptic "It's Still Alive" soundbite at the end of the credits.  Well, Cloverfield II is still just a rumor at this point so my perspective is this: if a sequel comes out, sure, I'll go see it but if it never happens, Cloverfield works just fine as a standalone film and I will take great pleasure revisiting it again in the future.  If you haven't seen this movie yet, you should really check it out.

     Check back in a little bit as we only have two more entries in the blog to go before the Godzilla review.  Next up will be director Gareth Edwards' Monsters, the project that helped him land the director's chair for Godzilla.

     -The Cynic