Category Archives: Barkhad Abdi

Eye in the Sky (2016)

Eye in the Sky was a movie I literally knew nothing about going in. I never saw a trailer, and based on what I knew on nothing more than the title. I thought this would be a science fiction movie. It was by no means a science fiction movie. The best way to describe it is a war on terror movie that really focuses on how mission objectives and moral decisions are sometimes. In terms of movie comparisons, I would say it is American Sniper meets Lone Survivor meets Platoon meets Lions for Lambs meets 2015’s little known Good Kill (as a quick aside, I would suggest seeing this movie before seeing Eye in the Sky. You’ll learn more about drone missions. Eye in the Sky sort of expects you to know a little about these without really explaining them). That is certainly a lot to compare. Ironically, American Sniper meets Lone Survivor were my favorite movies of the year (2014 and 2013, respectively), while Platoon was my third favorite movie of 1986. I mention this because I was not the biggest fan of Eye in the Sky. I know that the movie has done really well with the critics (92% on Rotten Tomatoes), but I felt it was a little loose and not drawn to the story as well as I could of. This and the combination of a really clunky beginning while also being a movie shot mostly in real-time, and you have a movie that felt like it failed in more avenues than it succeeded in. With that said, this wasn’t a bad movie, and it got much better the further you got into it.
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Captain Phillips (2013)

captain phillipsThe movie of 2013 that I think I found to be most disappointing was Captain Phillips. This was by no means a bad movie, but I approached this movie with the belief that this was going to be THE movie of the year. It was anything but the movie of the year. It wasn’t even a top 10 movie of the year. After all, is said and done, it most likely won’t even be a top 20 movie of the year for me. I’m not entirely certain what the main reasons were that I didn’t like it. I will rattle off a couple during this review, but I think that, ultimately, it came down to not meeting my extraordinarily high initial expectations.
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