I'm just a guy who loves stories, whether they be past, present, future, movies, TV Shows, video games, whatever. If you came to get an average guys thoughts on film, you've come to the right place.
So I finished Injustice 2 and I'm trying to write something that is both a review for that game as well as do my spoilers rant for Wonder Woman, but that is turning into a whole thing about the DCEU and there are a lot of thoughts that I unfortunately just don't have a lot of time to map out and make a full rant of yet. I'm hoping those posts will be coming out soon. But for now, I just wanted to finish a movie I hadn't seen before and write a simple review. And that's why I took a little bit of a detour and watched The Secret Life of Pets.
When this trailer dropped, people lost their flipping minds.
And I get it, it's a really cute trailer that asks the question what our pets do during the day when we're not around. I think everybody was thinking something in the realm of Toy Story where the animals are off doing their own thing and then come back and we wonder what they did because we as humans don't know that they're talking in english to one another and going on crazy adventures. It seemed like a cute romp.
So I think the hype for this movie was huge. And the result?
The Secret Life of Pets follows the story of a little dog named Max (voiced by Louis CK). He absolutely adores his owner Katie (voiced by Ellie Kemper) and can't imagine his life without her. One day Katie brings home another dog named Duke (voiced by Eric Stonestreet). And of course, Max has a rough introduction to the large, brown, shaggy, dog.
The next day, after a series of unfortunate circumstances, the two end up out of the house, without identification, and lost. It's basically the plot of both Toy Story and Toy Story 2... except with dogs instead of toys. Max and Duke obviously don't like each other but they have to work together to get home to Katie before she comes home and realizes they are missing.
Along the way they have to avoid the dog catchers, dodge New York traffic, and allude a murderous bunny (voiced by Kevin Hart) and his band of abandoned animals.
And yeah I need to talk about Kevin Hart because this was one of the appeals of the movie besides the trailer. Kevin Hart voicing a cute bunny rabbit who ends up being this savage gang leader.
Sadly its a lot funnier as a concept than in execution.
Kevin Hart is a very funny comedian. Even in his movies that I didn't think were very good like Get Hard I still enjoyed Kevin Hart and had a lot of laughs by his performance. I don't know how much voice acting he's done and if it's him or the script, but this outing for Hart just wasn't his strongest. There were still a couple moments where I thought he was really funny, but a lot of his lines were less funny and more banking on the hope that you've seen Kevin Hart before and his Kevin Hartisms would carry the performance. I don't know if any of these lines were improvised, but if they were I'm a little worried for Kevin Hart's improvisational skills.
But at least Kevin Hart's character had a little bit of just that, character. The other half of this movie when it wasn't Max and Duke running away from being murdered by a rabbit was this entirely pointless group of pets.
So at a certain point in the movie, a neighbor dog of Max's named Gidget (voiced by Jenny Slate) decides that she is suddenly in love with Max and it is her mission to go off and find Max no matter what the obstacle. On her little side mission that she goes on, you've got a whole cast of characters that you really won't remember but they are voiced by a bunch of famous people. There's a cat voiced by Lake Bell, a Weiner dog voiced by Hannibal Burress, a pug voiced by Bobby Moynihan, a hamster voiced by Chris Renaud, a red tailed hawk voiced by Albert Brooks, and a paralyzed dog voiced by Dana Carvey.
All these characters a pretty indistinguishable and while they were all different animals and brought their own gags and little in-jokes about pets you might have, they really don't add anything to the plot at all. This could have been Gidget going on this adventure with red tailed hawk and that would have been a totally serviceable movie, you didn't need all these pointless characters.
Like Albert Brooks wasn't even the best character nor was he really even that funny, but I feel like they could have built a cool little friendship between him and Jenny Slate's character and since both of them are half way decent voice actors, that would have worked better than the fellowship of the ringworm that we had going here.
Are there any good things about the film? I feel like I've been tearing it apart.
Well in case you haven't already picked up on it, I do think the voice cast was pretty good. You had a couple of voice actors where it was very hard to distinguish the character from the voice. Kevin Hart obviously fell into that category as well as Louis CK. But it's a pretty good cast considering.
I will also say that they do knock down the animal behavior gags pretty well. The humor that came from this movie was really the stuff you saw in the trailer, animals acting like animals even though they interact and talk normally.
When they were animating the Lion King, it's famously known that they brought lions into the studios to study how they interact. I imagine that the animators sat and just watched their dogs while doing the animation and it's really well done.
It's the little details that I actually enjoyed more than the blatant gags they pull off for laughs in this film. The little details I'm talking about is when you have moments where Max is afraid or being threatened, his tail goes in between his legs and he has a submissive stance. While the animation is far from realistic on purpose, all the animals are very well animated and that's saying something as animation is definitely not a strong suit of mine and it has to be really good for me to notice something like that.
Overall, The Secret Life of Pets is cute. It's not gonna be the masterpiece movie that you thought it was going to be when you saw that trailer. Which is a shame because I think this really had the subject material and the potential to be a film that would match the quality of a Pixar film and I can't help but think that if Pixar had been behind this movie, it would have been a lot better. As it is, the movie is pretty weak in the story and the humor. It's really just a hodgepodge of gags about your pets accompanied by pretty good animation and a lot of AWWWWW moments. It's a movie about your pets, did you really think that wasn't going to happen in this movie. If you have young kids or are a young kid at heart that doesn't need a lot to be entertained, you'll find a couple of laughs and some AWWWWW moments in The Secret Life of Pets. But as a movie, you're gonna be lacking a little bit by the end.
But those are my thoughts on The Secret Life of Pets. Have you seen it? What did you think about it? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog as well as occasional live tweeting sessions when I'm watching these movies.
I'll leave you with this. C'mon, there's a killer rabbit in this movie, you have to pull out the Monty Python. Enjoy!
So I watched Independence Day Resurgence about a week ago
and I’m a little bit disappointed with myself. I wanted to get this review and
the Heavyweights review out before the end of May because my reviews have been
pretty sparring. There are a couple of reasons my reviews have been sparse and
they’re not really new. I’ve been working a new job for about a month and some
change now, I have been working out a lot, I’m in grad school writing papers
that are actually graded, and I’ve been watching a lot of TV instead of movies,
all the same reasons I've had dry spells in the past. I’m hoping I’m in a rhythm now where I can knock out some reviews
of some movies I’ve watched recently and some I’m going to be watching in the
future, but I just want to warn you that that may or may not happen depending on
how busy things get.
But I’m also disappointed because due to the fact that I put
this review off, I have to write this review at the same time that I was writing
my review for Wonder Woman. If you know anything about either of these movies,
you can probably guess that Wonder Woman was a much better film than
Independence Day Resurgence and it pains me that I’m writing this instead of
that. I'm glad the Wonder Woman review came out first, but I do feel I need to write both reviews, but for different reasons.
I am in a small minority of people who don't think Independence Day is a great movie. I don't think anybody is thinking that Independence Day is Shakespeare by any means, but there is a lot of love for a fun stupid blockbuster about aliens coming to Earth and the human resistance we create to fend them off. Personally, I could really care less about this movie. Its definitely not the worst film I've ever seen, but I'm just not on the bandwagon of it being this absolute classic. I think it's hilarious how campy the movie is but at the end of the day it's really just 90's nostalgia speaking and we need to stop glorifying this movie. It's not that great. However, I do understand the following this movie has and that's why I did understand when they decided to make a sequel 20 years later. I didn't think it was a sequel that should have happened, even before it came out, but I also understand this is the world we live in and there are some creative ideas you could do with an Independence Day sequel if you had to make one. Resurgence doesn't really take any of those ideas and the movie suffers because of it.
Independence Day Resurgence, or IDR as I'm gonna call it now, takes place in 2016, 20 years after a bunch of aliens made their way to Earth and tried to destroy us. It's been 20 years since President Thomas Whitmore (played by Bill Pullman) made an epic rallying speech, and flew a plane himself with Will Smith in the battle for Earth. What has happened since then? Well we've taken alien technology and now humans live in a technologically advanced 2016. We have advanced weapons, space travel capabilities, and things are just all around futuristic. And what happened to our band of heroes that banded together to save Earth 20 years ago? Well they're really old...
I don't want to give Pullman, Goldblum, Spiner, and all the other actors they brought in for this movie too much shit, I mean all they did was get old. It happens. There's no reason why wouldn't think this would work, especially since Harrison Ford is being brought back for old films like Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Blade Runner and those movies always have hype around them. However, it's how you use the characters and when these characters were more caricatures rather than real characters, it's kind of hard to make them compelling again, especially if they go from bad ass speeches, to pretty much dying from dementia like in the case of Thomas Whitmore (played by Bill Pullman).
But Whitmore is slowly losing his mind, Brent Spiner's character has been in a coma since the last film, and Jeffie Gold's character Dr. Ian Malcolm (I know that's his character from Jurassic Park, but be honest are they incredibly different from one another and do you even remember his character's name in Independence Day?) is just kind of doing work for the government.
You might be asking what happened to Will Smith's character from the first movie. Well his character died in a training accident...
This pissed me off. I know I'm digressing and going off on a lot of tangents today, but this was quite angering. Will Smith's character was Independence Day. Good or not isn't the question, it's what made the movie successful, and it was Will Smith and Thomas Whitmore's epic speech, neither of which are in this film. Furthermore, you kill off one of the most badass characters off screen in a training accident? He didn't go down in a blaze of glory? He didn't go out in some alien revolution that happened with the remaining aliens on earth after the invasion? Nope, he just died in a training accident.
Will Smith turned this movie down for Suicide Squad and while that movie has issues of it's own, there's at least a chance of a future paycheck with that film as DC is going to utilize Deadshot again. I'll talk about this more later, but IDR hints at a future franchise at the end of this film and I can tell you, that's not going to happen. So Will, even though Suicide Squad was a mediocre to bad film depending on who you talked to, I think you made the right choice here.
Anyways, you've got a new cast of characters including Liam Hemsworth, a guy who is supposed to be Will Smith's character's son, and a couple of female characters. Now before you call me sexist for not introducing the female characters, these two were really boring and almost interchangeable. Nobody thinks about IDR and remembers these two females. Their names of Maika Monroe and Angelababy to give them the credit of being in this film, but honestly, I really kind of forgot they were in it until I looked at the cast list for the writing of this review.
Anyways, the unthinkable happens and aliens come to Earth and we have to fight them off. You may say to yourself, but hey that's the exact same plot of the last film. And you'd be very, very right. There is literally nothing new in this film when it comes to story and the only difference this time is that the aliens coming in a much larger ship.
In the first movie, the sakes were higher because we had insufficient weapons and it was just our fortitude and dumb luck that the humans defeated the aliens. This time around, they've had 20 years to study the aliens, adapt their weapons, and yet I just felt like I was watching the same movie but with a different skin of different weapons and older characters.
Oh... AND NO WILL SMITH!
That's the weird thing about the first Independence Day. Like I said, it succeeded because it was campy, had great one liners from Smith, and it took itself just seriously enough to where it wasn't a comedy but just a fun turn off your brain action flick.
This film takes itself WAY too seriously at times and at other times it feels like it's making a parody of itself.
And you may have felt like I was naming off a lot of characters earlier and not really getting to the point of the movie. Well the reason for that is that the movie does that as well.
There are so many characters in this movie and I couldn't care about a single one of them because not one of them was given any kind of development or care into why they were doing the things they were doing.
Like in the beginning, Jeff Goldblum and Liam Hemsworth get in a ship to go to the moon and retrieve the wreck of a ship that was shot down prior to the alien invasion. Pretty simple right? This could give us some background on how Hemsworth and Goldblum know each other, maybe they could be related, I don't know but it's simple enough.
But on top of those two who are really the only people who needed to go, you've got an African Warlord, Goldblum's nerdy sidekick, and some scientist that Goldblum banged one time. Who are these people? I really have no idea.
Then you've got Brent Spiner who comes out of a comma. Spiner's buddy who I think was in the last film (Maybe?) who I think is in love with Brent Spiner? William Fitchner who is a random general they come across. The two random chicks they added on to be love interests for Liam Hemsworth and his random friend. Then you've got Thomas Whitmore and the new President of the United States (played by Sela Ward). Oh and I forgot that Will Smith's character's son is in this movie (played by Jessie Usher). And then out of nowhere, you've got Judd Hirsch from the original film and his band of orphans who eventually go on a road trip to Area 51 to try and find Jeff Goldblum.
Oh and I didn't even mention the random fishermen who are only in the movie to create a countdown till the aliens mine into our world and extract our molten core.
Holy crap! Why did they feel the need to put all these characters in when it really only needed to be Jeff Goldblum, Liam Hemsworth, a more developed female lead, the President (doesn't even need to be Whitmore), a hard nosed general, and a cooky scientist (preferably not Brent Spiner). Notice how I didn't include Judd Hirsch in there? That cast is basically all that was the focus of the original Independence Day, if you're going to just do the same thing do the same thing, don't add fifteen more characters that are just copies of the characters you already have.
The only character I found remotely interesting was Liam Hemsworth's character.
Poor Liam. I don't know if I've done it on this blog a lot but I know I do it in private, I definitely shit on this guy. It must be hard being Chris Hemsworth's brother and while being attractive, being more of the YA attractive than Chris Hemsworth attractive. On top of that, I don't think he's as good of an actor as Chris is and it's evident in the parts he gets.
However, I was slightly entertained by his character in this movie. They tried to do this roguish Han Solo character, kind of in the vein of Will Smith's character from Independence Day. He's definitely not to the caliber that Smith's character was but he was definitely a better replacement than Jessie Usher was. I think Hemsworth saw this as his opportunity to jump into the Independence Day franchise, because this movie definitely is pointing towards sequels and to profit off this idea, and I just don't think it's going to happen for him this time.
The issue that comes up with these characters is not only are there too many, but they don't develop or use any of these characters to a point where we might like them. None of these characters are used correctly and it is really hard to get invested. And that might be enough if the action and the threat was big enough or intriguing enough to get invested in the story, but that's not there either. Again, it's the same movie but with stakes that don't even make sense.
For some reason the aliens can give the old cast headaches now and they're really random and at the convenience of the plot. It's not an intriguing world and I just could not have cared less about any of them.
And as I've alluded to before, the funny part is they think this is going to be a franchise. They though this was going to jumpstart the Independence Day movies and greenlight more sequels to have the humans go and kill the aliens in space.
I didn't even mention the big pokeball that comes out of space and tells them that these aliens just go and kill all life forms around the galaxy. Yeah, these aliens are basically Reapers from Mass Effect.
And yeah, if I saw this in a Mass Effect movie, I'd think this was cool. But when that's such a small part and just tagged onto the end to say, hey we've got sequels coming, it's just not enough.
The hilarious part of all of this is that after watching this, I've noticed that there are possibilities that could have happened and potentially could happen in the future to make a successful Independence Day sequel.
I'm stealing a little bit of this from the Cracked Podcast where the After Hours cast talks about the Independence Day sequel that was actually too awesome to be made. It starts at the 2:40 mark and they talk about how they mention in this movie that between the first movie and this one, there were motherships all around the Earth that remained after the events of the first film and there have been African warlords and tribes fighting aliens for 20 years.
This African Warlord (played by DeObia Oparei) probably has the most interesting backstory of any of the characters in this film, even the ones we knew from the first one, and he's just in the background while we play the same movie we saw 20 years ago with a different skin.
I had a theory that the weird pokeball at the beginning of the film was actually Jeff Golblum from the future because the aliens basically defeat the human race and Jeff Goldblum has to go back in time to stop the aliens. That could have been a wacky element that was different than the original. There are so many things that this movie could have done if it was just focused on one movie at a time and not trying to build up a franchise.
I said it in my Wonder Woman review, when people are just trying to tell good stories and they have the talent to back it up, you can usually get good movies like Wonder Woman. But when we're just trying to make money because we have that 90's nostalgia for movies like Independence Day and we need to reboot everything, we get movies like Independence Day Resurgence.
But what you have right now is a poor attempt to cash in on 90s nostalgia. The story is complete garbage. The pacing is way off. The characters are boring. There were so many opportunities missed. This could potentially be one of the worst movies I saw from 2016, and that is saying a lot... it was 2016.
But what do you think? Are there any redeeming qualities of IDR that I missed? Do you think there should be a sequel, and if so what should that sequel be about? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.
I'll leave you with this. Yeah I don't really like the original movie, but no one can deny that this speech gets you pumped up for anything. Enjoy!
If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know how big of a deal Wonder Woman was the night I went to go see the midnight premiere. I am, or at least bare a resemblance to, an adult man with a job that requires me to get up at 6 in the morning. When I started this blog, I was in college and had the schedule to go off and see movies whenever I wanted to and all I had to do was schedule it on a day that I didn't have class or just skip class all together in order to catch up on sleep from a night like one you have after seeing a midnight show of a movie. I don't have that luxury anymore. But Wonder Woman is the exception to that frame of mind now and there's multiple reasons for that.
So there's this little thing called, The Justice League coming out later this year. This is the display of a pantheon of heroes that are very beloved by not only me but a lot of people. And so far, the reviews for the films that have taken place building up to The Justice League have ranged from mediocre, to just god awful. Of course my reviews differ a little bit as I absolutely love Man of Steel, but it doesn't negate the fact that historically, Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and Suicide Squad have not been critically received well. And yet people keep going to these movies, even when they're not good. It's because we as fans want these movies to be good and we want to get a similar feeling with the Justice League as we did when we saw The Avengers team up all together for the first time. The heroes in The Justice League, I would argue, historically have been more revered heroes and they're the ones that we've wanted to see for such a long time. So when the reviews for the past few DCEU movies have not been great, we get a little bit worried for the future of the Justice League.
On top of all of that, Wonder Woman is significant because this is the first time this character has ever been given her own standalone film.
Wonder Woman is a beloved character and has been around for about 74 to 76 years (I'm not sure which one, she either just had her 75th birthday or is about to have it) and yet we have not had a standalone film about her.
Think about this. We've had 5 standalone Spider-man films (a character that has been rebooted and played by 3 different actors), 6 standalone Superman films (a character that has also been rebooted and played by 3 different actors) and a whopping 7 standalone Batman films (a character that has been rebooted multiple times and played by five different actors.)
Even the Hulk has had two standalone films and had three different actors play him and we just brought Wonder Woman onto the big screen last year with Batman v Superman. Needless to say this was a long time coming.
Now to be fair, the caliber of female led superhero films in the past has not been great or profitable (Catwoman, Elecktra, Barb Wire and Tank Girl are objectively horrible films) and I would say if you're going to do a Wonder Woman movie, you need to do it right. But in a time where one of the highest grossing film franchises, The Hunger Games, was led by a female lead and you have shows like Supergirl on the CW that are doing incredibly well, it's about damn time this movie happened.
So there's your background, how is Wonder Woman?
Wonder Woman follows the story of Diana (played by Gal Gadot), Princess of an island called Themyscara, a mystical island inhabited by the Amazons, a group of warrior women created by Zeus to bring love to the world of man but has been hidden away from the rest of the world for many years after man proved to be weak and prone to the influence of the god of war, Ares.
Right off the bat, I want to mention that the mythology was done really well in the beginning of this film. They basically say, "You know that Greek Mythology, yeah that's all real in this universe". It brings Wonder Woman in the category of not just being a superhero, but a goddess and I'll talk about that more in my spoilers commentary. I do think they kind of glance over that whole, Greek Gods are real thing and I hope it's explored in other movies, but I thought it was a great quick run down of the mythology done in the form of a story Diana hears as a child from her mother Hippolyta (played by Connie Nelson).
Diana is trained by her Aunt Claire Underwood or Antiope (played by Robin Wright who I will say was criminally under utilized in this film) until she becomes a fierce amazon warrior, ambitious in her desire to fight and bring good to the world.
Well she gets her chance when a pilot by the name of Steve Trevor (played by Chris Pine) crash lands on her island straight from the battlefield of World War 1. He tells Diana and the Amazons about the war happening and Diana believes it to be the work of Ares. She is convinced that if Ares is defeated, the war and the suffering will stop. So she goes with Trevor to Europe in the hopes of finding and defeating Ares.
The rest of the movie is pretty much a fish out of water story where Diana traverses the landscape of 1918 during World War 1, eventually displaying the full strength of Wonder Woman, while a villainess named Doctor Poison (played by Elena Anaya) develops a deadly poison that will bring the German armies back to primacy in the war.
So the first question I had to answer with this movie was, is Gal Gadot a strong enough actress and does she play the role well enough to carry this film? While for a lot of people she was one of the highlights of Batman v Superman, I couldn't help but feel like that was just because it was the first time we had seen Wonder Woman on screen and we were excited. She really only had about fifteen minutes of screen time and doesn't do much for the plot of that film besides set up for The Justice League.
The answer to the question is she the right for this part is unequivocally: yes.
And then when you finally see her say F this and take matters into her own hand by walking into no man's land in her costume for the first time in the film, I have to say, even though I had seen that in the trailer, I had goosebumps.
On top of that, she's a very well developed character throughout.
It's very apparent now what they saw in Gal Gadot when they casted her as Wonder Woman, and while DC has had a lot of missteps and missed opportunities, Gal Gadot was not one of them.
Now I do think she has a lot of work to do and I hope she's as compelling of a character when she's fully integrated into the Justice League, but I get the feeling that the momentum of this movie is going to propel Wonder Woman into being a central figure of the Justice League if not the catalyst for the rest of the DCEU.
Then you've got Chris Pine as Steve Trevor and man I liked him in this movie. Steve Trevor has been fighting in this war for a long time as a spy and he also has an understanding of it that is complicated due to him living within a grey area of this war. He creates a perfect dynamic with Diana who is naïve and sees it as a simple conquest to root out evil.
The more I think about these two, the more I really enjoyed them. From the get go, I liked their chemistry and the duality of them. He's there to guide her through our world and the exchanges they have are both hilarious and genuine. Like I said before, Diana is a well developed character and so is Steve, but together they really do make a good arc that works well within the film.
I'm gonna put on my "feminist" hat for a second and analyze how Steve Trevor is a good male supporting character in a female driven story.
There's a point in the movie where he realizes, he's not as badass as Diana is. He knows she can kick ass and she doesn't need saving. But the element of the movie that I really liked was how well these two work together. Just because Diana is basically a god doesn't mean that Steve can't help her. He's okay taking second fiddle to a woman and that's not an issue at all in the film. He doesn't have any kind of small penis syndrome thinking that it's not a woman's place to be behind him, he is totally cool with taking the back seat when it comes to her kicking ass while still managing to do his job.
Now that does create conflict when the things that Steve believes are necessary to win the war conflict with Diana's views and goals to find Ares and end the war in her mind, but that has nothing to do with their sex. These are two smart individuals and they're on the same playing field the entire time. Nobody is above the other, they're just partners.
I'm going really in depth with this film and I'm gonna try and hold some of this back for my Spoilers review, but I think this was exactly the kind of film Wonder Woman needed to be and I think a lot of that is due to the performances of the two leads, and a lot of it is due to the direction of Patty Jenkins.
Dear Lord... Thank you for this woman.
If you don't know who Patty Jenkins is, she's obviously the director, but prior to this movie she was a pretty sought after name by big studios to direct some of their films after her direction on the movie Monster, and her work as director of the pilot episode of the show, The Killing. Both I have not seen but plan on it after this film.
Back in 2011, she was slotted to direct Thor: The Dark World but exited citing creative differences. Jenkins is one of the many directors who have cited creative differences as a grievance of working with Marvel and Jenkins in particular cited that she would have loved to make a Thor movie but Marvel wanted her to make their Thor movie not hers. (paraphrasing of course, she was very cordial about the exit so who knows, we could see Jenkins direct a Marvel movie in the future).
If I'm the executive at Marvel who stifled Patty Jenkin's creative ideas while working on Thor, I would be eating my heart out after watching Wonder Woman because you can tell this was the movie she wanted to make and I'm glad DC let her do it. I hope this is a wake up call to DC because if they try and control things the way Marvel does with their films, you stifle people like David Ayers and you get movies like Suicide Squad instead of Wonder Woman when you didn't stifle Patty Jenkins.
This review is getting a little bit off track. There is always a spoilers review.
So what are the problems with this movie? Well... um... the beginning I guess is maybe strangely paced? The first half of this movie is just a fish out of water story where Diana is mosing around London with a sword and a shield trying to figure out how we as regular people live. I actually really liked the first half before all the action began because it gave us some time for Diana and Steve to get to know one another, it gave the opportunity for the villains to develop an evil plan that Diana would eventually foil, and it gave us some good build up for the awesome scene when Diana finally reveals herself as Wonder Woman.
I guess the villain of the film is not exactly the strongest, but at the same time I actually think that the villain(s) served a purpose and were pretty good in the context of the film. I'll talk about this a little bit more in the spoilers review as it is a little bit of a spoiler to talk about the villains in length, but DC seemed to be taking a page from the Marvel movies in this one to focus more on the development of the protagonists and the villains take a secondary role. If they're good, the movie only benefits, but as long as the protagonists are strong, we're good to go.
One thing I will mention and this of course will be paired with something of the film that I really enjoyed and that was the action. I thought the action in the film was exciting and pretty well done. I guess a criticism I had with the film is that it really liked their slow motion. There were a couple of scenes where I was watching the action and suddenly it goes into slow motion and it kind of took you out of the action for a quick second. Slow motion can be used in action sequences but it has to be for a purpose and I felt like they were really embellishing that slow motion button in this movie.
Honestly, the criticisms I have to the movie are criticisms I've heard from other critics since watching the movie. There are actually very few things I felt were wrong with this movie and I just had a really enjoyable experience with this film.
So is it a perfect movie? No. Is it a great movie? Honestly, the answer to that question is I don't know.
I think this goes into the reason why this movie is so hard to review. There was so much riding on this film and within the context of the DCEU and the other movies that have come out before it, this is such a breath of fresh air that it is hard to be objective and point out the flaws in this movie.
I will need to rewatch this movie to really gain the full breadth of how good it really is and I'll have to watch it with a clearer mind, setting it apart from it's predecessors. I'm sure there are flaws in the movie, I just think that I was blinded by the hope for a good DCEU and Wonder Woman movie that it's hard to really point out a lot of flaws.
But then there's the fact that you could watch this movie without watching Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and Suicide Squad and be totally fine. I'm sure there are elements of this movie that might play into later films but for the most part it serves as a standalone Wonder Woman film that doesn't even really need to exist within a extended universe. The fact that it does is just a bonus but I honestly don't think this movie is going to have huge if any implications on the Justice League besides giving Diana a backstory.
I find it really interesting that despite a lot of people saying that we're sick of origin stories, out of the 3 superhero films I have really, really enjoyed the most within the last 2-3 years, this film, Logan, and Deadpool, two of those were origin stories.
That's not to say that origin stories should be the only superhero films we make now, if that were the case we wouldn't get films like The Avengers, Logan, and The Dark Knight.
But Wonder Woman is an example of giving momentum to a franchise without throwing everything comic book people love at the wall and hoping it sticks.
We've seen this happen twice with movies like The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Batman v Superman, and Suicide Squad. These movies want to throw as many recognizable characters are the audience, not really explain them at all and say, "I know you liked this character in the comics, well here they are!"
Wonder Woman is an example of a film that takes its time and just gives us a good story. I could count one reference to other films in the DCEU in this film. ONE! There wasn't even an after credits scene! This movie was focused on the here and now and it succeeded.
While I will need to watch the movie again without the initial awe I had blinding me to any real criticism, I will say that Wonder Woman is definitely a movie worth checking out and was able to yell "CLEAR", press the charge button, and bolt some life into the DC extended universe, something it badly, BADLY needed.
But what did you think of Wonder Woman? Was it a fluke? Is the DCEU still in trouble? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.
I'll leave you with this. One thing I forgot to mention is that Wonder Woman continues to have one of the most badass theme songs. And yeah, it's in this movie. Enjoy!
When Heavyweights came onto Netflix, I heard a bunch of people getting really excited. Apparently, which Heavyweights wasn't a commercial or critical success at all when it hit theaters, it has since gained a cult following. This was a very early movie in Ben Stiller's career and it's interesting seeing him back in the 90s and how he's grown and developed since. So many people raved about this movie that I felt it was about time I went and checked it out for myself.
Heavyweights follows the story of a kid by the name of Gerald Garner (played by Aaron Schwartz).
He is a portly young kid and because of that and his lack of athletic skills, he is a social outcast and a pretty unpopular kid. As the school year comes to a close, his parents (his father is actually played by Jeffery Tambor) decide to send him to a fat camp that goes by the name of Camp Hope.
While Gerry is hesitant to go to fat camp, he soon figures out that the experience looks more fun than he thought with fun water activities and go carts. When Gerry gets there he meets a couple of nice kids and a small group of scrappy underdogs form (one of them being a very young Kenan Thompson). With fun camp counselors (one of them played by Tom McGowan), and fun activities, Gerry starts to think that maybe his summer won't be so bad after all.
But that soon changes when the kindly owners of the camp (played by Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara) announce that they were forced to sell the camp to a hyper fitness guru and infomercial maker by the name of Tony Perkis (played by Ben Stiller). On a side note, I know it was for dramatic purposes, but why would the counselors like Tom McGowan not know that the owners had sold the camp? I'm really not surprised that they lost the camp.
If you're trying to visualize what kind of character Tony Perkis is, imagine Ben Stiller's character from Dodgeball, White Goldman. I am convinced that Heavyweights is just a prequel to the character of White Goldman. Both of them came from rich families and both of them were fat at one point and overcame a lot of personal growth and challenges to become the fitness guru they are in both films. I really almost expected Tony Perkis to show up during the end credits, be really fat, and end up singing Milkshakes with his man boobs. I'm glad I didn't have to subject myself to that for a second time, but that was the mindset I had for the character of Tony Perkis the entire time.
The rest of the movie is this scrappy group of fat kids trying to survive the horror that is Perkis and work together to bring him down and bring Camp Hope back to the level of fun it used to be.
I do want to talk about the good things of this movie because while there are a lot of things that I need to say about this film that might make you think that I did not like this film or I think that it's bad, that isn't entirely true.
Heavyweights was made by Disney in the 90s. Heavyweights was right on the heals of another live action Disney classic, The Might Ducks. Something about those films were just fun and they all centered around a scrappy group of social outcasts and misfits. Heavyweights creates another group of scrappy misfits and they actually do a really good job at it. These kids weren't the cool kids, they establish that from the beginning. These are your underdogs and everyone likes a good underdog story. There's multiple moments in the film where it's just kids having fun.
The only downside of this being a Disney film is that its a pretty safe PG rated movie. There's a lot of jokes they could have made throughout this movie but they couldn't because this is a family picture. That doesn't mean the writers didn't have fun with veiled humor and going to extremes that most realistic films can't go to. However, the movie as a whole is pretty tame.
Those not as memorable as kids in other movies about scrappy misfits, Heavyweights does have a pretty decent cast and at the very least, creates a cast of kids you want to root for. The emphasis is more on the normalcy of the kids and their desire to just have fun juxtaposed with the batshit insanity of Ben Stiller's character.
Apart of me thinks that Kenan Thompson wasn't originally in the script but they wrote him in as a token black kid. I say that not because I don't think he should have been in the movie, I only say it because all of Roy (Thompson's) lines and actions in the movie really could have been replaced with Josh (Shaun Weiss's character). And then I realized that any of these characters could be interchangeable. With the exception of the British kid and the big dumb kid who doesn't say anything, these kids could be pretty interchangeable. It's not a matter of having a token black friend, it's the matter of having a token fat friend, and that's kind of difficult when EVERYONE is the token fat friend.
Funny side note, Aaron Schwartz is now incredibly fit and not a bad looking individual. Good for him.
Now inevitably I would have to talk about the issues this movie has and there are a good amount of them.
The first is that the movie is in all senses of the word, pretty predictable.
Heavyweights is in reality just a by the numbers kids film and there isn't a lot that can't be predicted
or to be expected for an eventual outcome. The only exception to this rule isn't even done in a way that I really want to give them credit for.
Eventually in the film, they finally get tired of Tony Perkis's evil ways and decide to take matters into their own hands and take Tony down.
Now since, there have been multiple movies that have had kids taking down authority figures. Usually these movies have a G or PG rating holding them back but if done correctly, that can make for some really funny circumstances in which the kids get back at the adult. In Heavyweights though, they kidnap Tony, make him fall into a hole and hold him prisoner in a barn on the camp. Not only do they hold him captive, they hold him captive in a fenced in area that is protected by electricity. They basically Guantanamo Bay the shit out of this guy and it is definitely torture. I don't really think this movie could be made today with all the questionable things these kids do to this guy who has been shown to be a little bit mentally unstable. And the worst part is, the adults totally go along with it.
I mean I get it, the adults are affected just as much by Tony as the kids are, but there's a difference between hating your boss and not letting him out of an electric fence that he's being tortured in.
And then there's a part in the movie where the kids are basically in charge. Now I knew that this was
a Disney film and that it wouldn't get too out of hand. At the end of it Tom McGowan says I think we've all learned a valuable lesson about self control and implores the kids to start thinking about their weight seriously.
I think in reality, this scene would have gone a little bit differently. In reality, I think the kids would have seen Tom McGowan as trying to tell them what to do and before you know it, he's right next to Ben Stiller in an electrical cage as Gerald and the rest of the kids devolve into a Lord of the Flies scenario where all the adults are murdered and then there's a game of politics to decide who really runs Camp Hope. I mean they already put Tony in an electrical cage and tortured him, I wouldn't put it past these kids to drop all conventions and just let loose after that.
But of course, that's not how a Disney movie is going to end. The plunky kids learn a lesson, Stiller gets his cumuppins and even the good guy adult Tom McGowan even gets the girl... even though he really shouldn't be a role model for these kids. I mean I don't wanna knock someone for being overweight but the guy had been at the camp for 12 years and never really lost weight. I mean his lanky buddy should have run the camp but Noooooooo he wasn't as cool as Tom McGowan.
Obviously I would have done things a little bit different with a story about some lovable misfits torturing Ben Stiller but as it is, Heavyweights is a fine movie. It's cute, it's short, and simple. It's not something you really need to look too hard at because if you do you're probably not gonna like what you find. Is it a great movie? I don't think so. I guess I understand if it has a cult following but I think it's a small cult following. The humor is childish and not really as funny as it could be and the story, while unique, is really predictable. Check it out if you want, it's on Netflix, but you don't really NEED to see it.
But those are my thoughts on Heavyweights. What did you think? Are you part of the cult following? Tell me what you think of this film. Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.
I'll leave you with this. If you haven't noticed, I've been falling behind a little bit, I actually watched Heavyweights a while ago. But I'm back now and I'm going to be doing a review for Wonder Woman tonight because I saw it last night! Enjoy!
So I am of the mindset that everything Bryan Cranston does is gold. I don't know how he does it but ever since Breaking Bad opened up a lot of serious opportunities for him as an actor, he's taken that opportunity and run far with it.
I didn't see a lot of trailers for The Infiltrator, but when I heard Bryan Cranston, I assumed it was at the very least going to be pretty entertaining, but I wondered if this was just an opportunity for Cranston to get involved with an action movie like actors of his age like to do from time to time like Liam Neeson in Taken, Pierce Brosnan in November Man, etc. While I don't hate that idea, some might consider a route like that to be selling out and it seemed like The Infiltrator could possibly be an entertaining movie but nothing special.
How foolish was I to ever doubt the talent and choices of Bryan Cranston.
The Infiltrator follows the true story of Robert Mazur, a US Customs agent who has had a long career going undercover to bust drug dealers and is coming towards a time in his career where he's thinking about retiring with his wife (Juliet Aubrey) and two kids.
However, he gets wind of a new opportunity to go undercover with the Colombian Cartel and instead of following the drugs to the criminals, he has the idea to follow the money to the criminals.
He creates the cover of Bob Musella, a corrupt businessman, in order to infiltrate the money laundering operations of Pablo Escobar and his Colombian Cartel and he finds himself in the midst of an intense and complex undercover mission to take down one of the largest criminal enterprises in the 80s.
The Infiltrator is following a slight trend that I'm seeing where it's a historical crime story set int he 80s following the police work to bring down the Colombian Cartel. You're seeing it more in shows like Narcos and other mediums and it's a niche of crime films that I am actually starting to really dig. You don't really realize it these days, but the 80s were almost 40 years ago and they're getting the same treatment I think the 60s got with movies like Catch Me If You Can, Forrest Gump, and JFK. I don't know if more things are getting unclassified or maybe when you reach a forty year mark things become historically interesting but it's also a sign I'm getting really old.
But The Infiltrator, like I said, is actually a deceptively intense movie. I mean some of the movie is stuff that you've seen before and stuff that you come to expect when watching a movie about a guy going undercover, however, The Infiltrator is written and Bryan Cranston performs in such a way that it feels new and it is incredibly intense.
This is also very surprising because Bob isn't going undercover with the drug dealers or the people who go and kill people, he's going undercover with the highest rungs of the Colombian criminal enterprise.
A big part of the movie is him schmoozing with Benjamin Bratt's character who is one of Pablo Escobar's inner circle. Still a dangerous guy and Bratt plays him in a way that you feel that intensity still, but honestly a lot of the movie is Bob and the female customs agent playing his wife (played by Diane Kruger) just getting to know and making friends with Bratt's character and his character's wife. And I know you're thinking that sounds incredibly boring, however, it manages to keep the intensity up, especially when you overlay it with reminders of what could happen to Bob if he or his partner say one wrong word.
John Leguizamo is in this movie and he plays a fellow Customs agent by the name of Emir. Emir sets up a cover that is a more traditional one. He goes undercover with the guys selling the drugs and doing a lot of the day to day operations, kind of what you would expect and undercover mission to go down as.
I've seen Leguizamo in a lot of films. Some of them he's been good, some of them he hasn't been so good. But I'm pretty sure this is the performance of his that I love the most because he represents a side of the job that Bob is teetering on. Emir loves his job and the danger that comes with it. He almost gets off on it and he both serves as a warning to Bob and how he could get sucked up in this job, as well as a safeguard. There are moments where even Emir has to stand back and say that Bob is cutting it close and risking things with this job and it's a really interesting relationship these two have.
And then there's Diane Kruger.
So believe it or not, I actually like Diane Kruger. She was very good in movies like National Treasure and Inglorious Basterds. I think in a role where she is playing someone where they can explain why she has that German accent, I think she does a very good job.
However, I've noticed in movies where she is playing an America, she can't help but sneak that accent out and it's kind of noticeable while she's playing American customs agent, Kathy Ertz.
Which is a shame because she actually does a good job in this film. I think that her character was kind of thrown into the movie very quickly with very little introduction, especially with how important her character becomes to Bob. She and Bob develop a very close relationship and it's because they are pulling the cover as though they are married. There is an element that makes it a little bit weird, especially since Bryan Cranston is about 21 years older than Kruger, however, I think that these two work together very, very well and especially in the moments where they delve into Bob's relationship with his wife, Diane Kruger has an opportunity to really shine.
And speaking of Cranston's age. I don't want to knock the guy for being 61. I think as long as he's able to perform as great as he does all the time, it doesn't matter what his age is. However, something that I picked up on in the beginning was I think Bob Mazur was supposed to be in his forties during the events of this film. You can add all the black dye to Bryan Cranston's hair all you want, he still looks like he's in his fifties and even maybe his sixties at times.
Is this a big deal for the film? Not really. Bryan Crantson has proven time and time again that he is one of the best actors out there today and he gives such a dynamite performance that I really forgot how old he is once the story started rolling.
I think there's a possibility that this could be one of the last opportunities for Cranston to play a character like this because of his age so it's a good thing that it happened. But even that I'm skeptical of due to how great of an actor he is.
What are my problems with the movie? Not a lot honestly, I think that this was one of the hidden gems of 2016 that really went under the radar for a lot of people.
Maybe one of the criticisms I could have is that it does pull a lot of conventional undercover cliches that remind me to always take the words "Based on a True Story" with a grain of salt. But at the same
time I think they also manage to pull out some interesting relationships and twists and turns with that undercover story that make it really interesting.
I really do think that it's a hidden gem of 2016 and something that people should check out. If you're a fan of the show Narcos, you will definitely like The Infiltrator, but even if you're not, you get a bunch of really great performances from a wide range of actors like Cranston, Leguizamo, Bratt, Kruger, and a lot of other really great actors throughout.
Something I didn't mention is the emotional drama of this film. I don't want to give away the ending but like I said earlier, a lot of the movie is Bob and Kathy getting to know Benjamin Bratt's character, Roberto Alcaino and his wife and that does have some emotional strings to it. Nothing you're going to cry over, but it is interesting and does make for a good thriller drama combination all around.
Overall, I really recommend The Infiltrator. I think it was marketed as an action film from what I can gather from the trailer, but it actually is a really intense thriller about the US's investigation and take down of the Colombian Cartel in the 80s.
But what did you think of The Infiltrator? Did you like it? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.
So this review might seem random and out of place but my decision to watch the first season of modern Doctor Who was really random and out of place too. I am on a little bit of a fantasy sci fi kick right now and I had been watching random episodes of Doctor Who here and there, but I wanted to go back to where it started. I wasn't originally planning on doing a review on this season, especially since I've watched this season and random episodes of Doctor Who sporadically over the past few years that I didn't review. I changed my mind after I finished the last episode because there is a lot to say about this season and the impact it had on Doctor Who back in 2005 and today.
After multiple attempts to try and revive Doctor Who with film and I guess an attempt to reboot the series in the states, BBC regained the rights to Doctor Who and aired the new rebooted season in 2005. Now I did not watch the show back in 2005. I actually didn't jump onto the Doctor Who train really until 2012, well into Matt Smith's tenure, but I always wanted to start the show from the beginning, no matter how difficult that was.
Doctor Who begins centered around a young girl named Rose (played by Billie Piper). She has a pretty normal life in London, she lives with her chatty mom Jackie (played by Camilie Coduri) and has a boyfriend named Mickie (played by Noel Clarke).
One day her life is turned upside down when a strange man enters her life, calling himself The Doctor (played by Christopher Eccleston). After a brush with death and the end of the world involving living plastic and killer mannequins, he offers her the opportunity to travel with him on his spaceship called The TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space) which looks like a 1970's British Police Box. Rose joins him and the two go on adventures through time and space, fighting aliens and trying to help people across the universe.
I have no shame in saying this because I know I'm not the only one. When I first started Doctor Who, it took me a while to really get into it. The first season is very different from the rest of the series and the budget was so minimal that visually, it really didn't age well. On top of that, the acting is pretty
hokey and the first three episodes, while I have come to appreciate The Unquiet Dead, are not exactly the most compelling episodes ever. It wasn't really until the episode, Dalek, that the show started to intrigue me and that's the 6th episode. If you're a normal person, you usually don't sit through 5 episodes of television if you don't think it's good. I however am not a normal person and that hasn't really changed (hence why I'm still begrudgingly watching Iron Fist right now).
However, what I have found recently is that Doctor Who does build on itself. The perfect example of this is the episode in Series 4 called Silence in the Library, the first episode to feature the character River Song. I remember watching that for the first time and thinking that it was a really good episode. Watching it now, the episode only gets better and is frankly heart breaking. All these episodes compound on one another and they gain significance after future episodes air and things are revealed.
The same can be said about the first series. While visually it probably hasn't aged well, the stories and the character development definitely has. You can tell that they went back and watched old episodes of Christopher Eccleston and incorporated his performance and story arc into future episodes and it really makes his performance better with future context.
However, when looking at this show objectively (at least as objectively as I can) I do have to think about both the historical context this show finds itself in in regard to the rest of the series, as well as the experience someone might have if they're watching Doctor Who for the first time and have no previous knowledge, like I did.
And in that mindset, I will say, the first series is still a little bit of a handful and it takes some getting used to.
The series starts with the episode Rose, which while it has a great introduction to the character of The Doctor and Billie Piper as Rose, it's a little bit cheesy with the acting. Furthermore, the production value and the visuals really haven't aged well and you're going to feel that the entire season. Now this eventually becomes a subject of nostalgia because Doctor Who prior to the Matt Smith years had this very dirty and almost cheap feeling to it. It wasn't until Season 5 in 2010 when the show's budget was raised and the visuals actually catch up with the science fiction material Doctor Who could create. This is a good thing and a bad thing, especially in Season 1. There's a running joke that the Doctor and Rose are in The TARDIS, a machine that can travel anywhere in time and space and they keep on ending up in Cardiff for half of the episodes. It's obvious the budget was limited when you start seeing the same sets and the same characters reappear, even though there's only 13 episodes. The other episodes would set the standard for what future Doctor Who seasons would look like, a mixture of The Doctor and his companion going to new worlds, meeting strange aliens, and going back in time to either meet historical figures or witness historic events.
Something that I kind of forgot about when watching this season again was the incredibly dark turns this show takes in this first season. A lot of people die in this first season and that's one of the elements that they worked the limited budget into well.
For example, during the Parting of the Ways, did you recall that the Daleks actually attack Earth and we watch the continental shapes change as they bomb Earth. I really forgot how dark those episodes, especially the series finale really was. I think it worked well however, because in probably the best two part episode in the Season, The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances, Eccleston has this great line where he says, just this once, Everybody lives.
Now if you've followed Doctor Who consistently since this season, you know that it's a little more than just this once. There are several episodes actually where Everybody lives and everyone is risen from the dead by the Doctor in some mcguffin method, however back in the day with this first season, this actually meant something. Like I said, there are a lot of dark episodes in this season and this actually meant something to see everyone live at the end of the episode.
And this segways well into my thoughts on Eccleston as The Doctor himself. The Doctor has had many personalities and many experiences that shape who he is as a character. Eccleston's Doctor appears at a time where he has lived through the Time War and has seen the destruction of the Time Lords. The experience is very new to him and he holds that guilt in.
Everything from his performance to his U-Boat captain clothes shows that he's a man used to war and is now settling into "peace time" and that takes some getting used to.
You can tell that he feels like he doesn't exactly need a companion or Rose in particular, however, you can tell that he wants one and that proves to be necessary down the road as Rose begins to show him his humanity.
Now all of this is pretty high concept for someone coming in cold and not having the rest of the series in mind but it still is something that can be caught onto, especially in the performance of Eccleston himself.
He is very kind but at the same time there are several points in the series where his guilt shows for what happened during the Time War. There are several creatures who were displaced from the Time War and Rose and The Doctor's adventures put them in the path of these creatures.
This performance is only made better if you've been watching the show for a while and you see the fallout of his decision, the events that have happened since, and the 50th Anniversary where you actually see The War Doctor fight in the Time War and make the horrible decisions that The 9th Doctor comes to regret so much.
Watching this season just makes me really bummed that Eccleston did not return for the 50th Anniversary and did not reprise his role as the 9th Doctor. As much as I like The War Doctor, I don't know if he would have existed had Eccleston returned. I could be wrong on that, but even if he had, it would have been fun to see all three modern Doctors interacting together, with or without the talent of the great late John Hurt.
The thing that makes the 9th Doctor so fun is that he's both very serious but at the same time incredibly goofy. He's not Matt Smith goofy where he falls down or makes a fool of himself, but he's got jokes and he brings a lot of comedy to the show as well as some really deep and profound performances. He is unapologetic of who he is and when Rose says in the last episode that he taught her the importance of standing up and fighting for what's right, you see it in his character.
Something that I thought was missing from Peter Capaldi's Doctor was a sense that the Doctor cared for the people he was trying to save as opposed to just saving them because he could. Again, Eccleston struck a balance between being a serious character to having incredible empathy for those in need.
I think back to the episode Father's Day where the couple getting married say that they're not important and the Doctor refuted that saying that their far from unimportant. It was lines like this that I felt were missing from the 12th Doctor's tenure and something Eccleston did really well.
And that empathy was brought out by his relationship with Rose. And my thought was, between the 9th Doctor and Rose, it never NEEDED to be romantic.
I always thought the kiss at the end of The Parting of Ways was always a little bit strange, especially since Rose is supposed to be 19, which is legal, but Eccleston looks like he's in his forties so it was a little bit of an age gap. It made sense with Tennant because they looked as though they were closer in age and there was a little more chemistry between the two of them, but with 9 and Rose, I never felt like it needed to be a romantic relationship. They were just friends traveling and he was like the Magician and she was his apprentice. There's even an episode where the Doctor miscalculates and Rose goes missing for a year and her mom actually questions what a 19 year old girl is doing with a guy like the Doctor, and yeah, it's a valid question.
I have to keep reminding myself that a lot of people who have watched Doctor Who since the beginning were very young when they started. I think having such a young protagonist with such a naive look and feel was necessary to introduce new people to the series, especially those who had never seen the old series.
Rose has always had some awkward lines here and there, especially in season two, however in season 1, it fits in as she is just a regular girl. She's not really special in any way, she's just a regular girl and in that way she relates to the audience in that we are just normal and yet there's a possibility of jumping into the TARDIS and going on an adventure, and that's very appealing to people.
Rose is still my personal favorite companion but objectively I understand why there are two camps when it comes to her, people who love her and people who can't stand her. I've met both kinds of people and I understand both arguments. I personally think that at the very least, Billie Piper was phenomenal in the first season of Doctor Who and she was a great companion to begin the series with.
So what does this season of Doctor Who mean for future seasons and where we're at now?
I personally think the first season of Doctor Who is quite the underrated season. Is it the best? Far from it. While I have found an appreciation for all the episodes with the Slytheen and the repetitive Satellite 5 episodes, let's live in reality, they're not the best episodes Doctor Who has to offer.
But if you're an avid Doctor Who fan, I suggest going back and checking out the first season. It only gets better with more context and the knowledge of later episodes.
If you have never watched Doctor Who before, I will warn you, the first season is not the best. There are some really slow episodes and yeah there is an episode where the bad guy is a stretched out piece of skin. However, I highly recommend pushing through and enjoying every minute of the first season as you can because it really does pay off later. It creates a foundation for what Doctor Who is and while it definitely is not the best season, it creates a lot of room for growth, especially for the characters they introduce in it.
I want to continue rewatching seasons of Doctor Who and give full season reviews. Unfortunately now that I've said it I can't say it will come true, however, I'm on a pretty big Doctor Who/Sci Fi Fantasy kick right now so every so often a review like this might pop up.
I want to know your thoughts on this seriously though. Where does the first season land on your list of favorite Doctor Who episodes? Did you start with the first season? Or did you start later on? Let me know what you think of the first season with the knowledge and viewing of later seasons and how it lives up today.
Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for films and TV shows I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.
I'll leave you with this. I actually don't think I ever watched this short. If you're familiar with the end of the first season, you'll know that Christopher Eccleston regenerates into David Tennant. This is the interaction that happens after that regeneration. Enjoy!
