Passengers is one of those movies that interest you, and it would be better served if you looked at the audience score rather than the critics’ scores. A 30% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes would suggest skipping this one. However, a 70% audience score suggests something more. This was one of my most anticipated movies of the year. Plus, I try to see everything. But even I was skeptical when I saw how it was getting panned by so many different critics. Even my most respected site (Roger Ebert) only gave the movie 1.5 stars. But I talked to a couple of other people who go to the movies a lot, and they said, despite some holes, that they recommended it. The only thing I knew about Passengers going in (I never saw a trailer) was that it starred Chris Pratt (Jurassic World, Guardians of the Galaxy) and Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook, Joy) and that they were lost in space. And while I suppose there were holes in this movie, they didn’t deter my enjoyment of it. The parts that I found more troublesome than anything else were the personal emotions and the relationship between the two leads, and I didn’t even have a problem with that.
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Category Archives: Science Fiction
Arrival (2016)
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, Gravity, Interstellar, and The Martian, which are also movies about either extraterrestrial encounters or innovative space exploration that deal more with human component or relationship building than they do action, adventure, and a post-apocalyptic future. Add Denis Villeneuve’s (Sicario, Prisoners) Arrival as the latest movie to try to get itself on this impressive list. The critics (93% on Rotten Tomatoes) and audiences (82%) have enjoyed this movie.
Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Captain America: Civil War is perhaps the greatest superhero movie that Christopher Nolan has not directed. My two favorite superhero movies (The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises) belong to him. As of this post, my third favorite would probably be a toss-up between Batman Begins, Iron Man, and Captain America: Civil War. There are others (such as The Amazing Spider-Man, Iron Man 2, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, etc.) that are up there, but there is clearly a distinction between the top 3 or 4 and all of the others. I hope that superhero movies continue to get better, but unfortunately, it feels like we get 3-4 bad ones for every good one we get. So when we get a movie like Captain America: Civil War, it’s important to take pause, see it, praise it, and encourage more movies like it because we know that poor movies will continue to be made because all of them seem to gross over $100 million easily. And the reason they do is our fault. We continue to see these terrible movies. But that is a different story for a different day.
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Midnight Special (2016)
Midnight Special…First, the good. The tone was incredible. It was seductive. It was menacing. It was creepy. It was engaging. It kept you on the edge of your seat. Finally, it had the right director. Jeff Nichols (Mud, Shotgun Stories) is still pretty new to the game. This is just his fourth directorial effort, and, once again, Nichols teams up with Michael Shannon as his leading man (99 Homes, Revolutionary Road) for the first time since the absolutely incredible Take Shelter, a movie that was nothing short of a thing of genius. In addition to the amazing Take Shelter, Mud and Shotgun Stories were both fantastic movies. Midnight Special was supposed to be the next great chapter in the Nichols/Shannon book of greatness. Unfortunately, this was the furthest thing from the truth.
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Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
What do you need to know about Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice that you haven’t already been told? This has easily been the most hyped movie of 2016 so far. In fact, there may not be another movie all year that receives this kind of publicity. And rightfully saw. This film pits arguably the most recognizable superheroes in the world against one another for the first time. If you saw a movie in the theater at any point between, say, November 2015 and March 2016, you likely saw a preview for this film. The preview does such a great job of not really letting us know who is the good guy and the bad guy. When we think we figure it out, we see a trailer portrayed in a completely different light. Marvel is doing the same thing with Iron Man and Captain America for the trailers of Captain America: Civil War (maybe even more effectively than the movie being reviewed today). It is interesting. It is even more interesting that these two rival companies are releasing these movies so close to one another. You could make the argument that Marvel could have waited until Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice was released and then learned from any mistakes made while also capitalizing on what the Warner Brothers movie did well. But, as we know, that we have delayed production and would have probably pushed this movie to a release date to the beginning of 2018 at the earliest.
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