First things first, if you think you’re going into this seeing a John Cena movie, you will be sorely disappointed. This movie is similar to
127 Hours, Cast Away, I Am Legend, or
All Is Lost in that it revolves almost entirely around a single character. However, some significant differences exist between this one and those just stated. There are no flashback scenes. This movie is done almost entirely in real time. And it occurs in a single location, though
127 Hours, for the most part, does as well.
The Wall is similar, though, in that each of the mentioned movies experiences extreme periods of hopelessness during a part of or a majority of the movie.
The Wall isn’t nearly as good as these other movies, but it was unique enough to hold your interest. Whereas
127 Hours was based on a true story, where
All Is Lost is easily believable, and where
I Am Legend is more of a science fiction movie for which we must suspend our belief,
The Wall falls somewhere in between. I loved that it was just 81 minutes long. It didn’t need to be any longer, so why drag something out when it doesn’t have to be? And the first 20 minutes were completely engrossing. I knew little about the movie but not enough to know where it was going. But then it took a turn for the weird that took the believability aspect out of it and turned it into a game of cat and mouse that, while entertaining, was not something I’d expect out of my war movies.
Continue reading The Wall (2017) →
Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, 
While a 65% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes suggests a movie should be checked out, sometimes you wonder why the score isn’t higher. Allied, the Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, 
Almost perfect. While it may not even end up in my top five movies of the year, Tom Ford’s (A Single Man) Nocturnal Animals was almost perfect. I liked it so much in this movie, and Ford almost created a masterpiece, but it fell short. An A- for sure. Maybe even an A. But it won’t be the 49th movie I’ve seen that would classify as an A+. Jake Gyllenhaal (
Alien, Fire in the Sky, Independence Day, Men in Black, Starship Troopers, Cloverfield, Signs, Prometheus. These are some of the many movies that have successfully explored contact in some form with extraterrestrial beings in some form. And then you have films like E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Cocoon, Contact, Solaris, District 9,