After sitting through all of the unintentional joke known as season three, I was sorely tempted to bail on this thing despite it being close to the end. But I decided to come back, hoping that SOMEONE in the Apple food chain would recognize and fix the mess. Well, no such luck. This was just more of the same -- about two minutes of plot development and 20-some minutes of someone seemingly trying WAY too hard to impress a former film class instructor, or something. It's almost a parody of itself at this point with its overwrought nonsense, and I'm done. I simply don't care what happens to any of these people anymore. I just don't. Blow up the brownstone and kill 'em all? Fine by me. An 11th hour conversion to sanity and a happy-ever-after ending? Whatever. Go for it. I simply don't care. I may check out a season summary after the fact to see what happened, but at this moment I don't even see THAT happening. If nothing else, maybe this thing will serve as an object lesson on how NOT to do a TV show. As for me, I'm finally done wasting my time hoping for something that's VERY unlikely to happen...
I realize that part of my massive disappointment with this season finale lies in the pent-up frustration that I've had all along with regard to the glacial pacing of the series from the very beginning. On an ALIEN INVASION show, for crying out loud! They could have left half of each episode on the cutting room floor and it would have lost nothing on the narrative front and definitely gained a TON on the pacing front. Something like this should be no less than 75% action and adventure and shock and awe and no more than 25% character study and introspection, and I'm being extremely generous with those percentages. But this FINALE is the worst of the entire season on that front, and I'd estimate that it was easily 95% navel-gazing and useless filler and 5% action and plot advancement. This episode had maybe five minutes of new material, and maybe a single minute of new material related to, you know, the INVASION.
The actors, as always, do fine work here. The production values are good. The director does as much as possible with the script. But jeebus cripes, what a HORRIBLE script. The writing team should be doing lame Hallmark movies, if not waiting tables someplace. And they expect people to come back for more of this snooze fest? Heck, I left THIS episode sitting and waiting for over a week before I got around to watching it, which pretty much sums of how much excitement it has instilled in me. If others are the same way, I'm guessing that the next season won't even get half the audience that this season got. What an incredible waste of potential and viewer goodwill...
The avoidable writing annoyances continue. The three worst culprits for me this time around:
The woman is fired from her national security job, but is allowed to continue working for the rest of the day. Yeah, right. That's how it works.
The virus program seemed to take forever to download in the last episode, but we see in this one that it is only a few pages of text -- and that Gina has to type it in to a computer manually. HA! And she does! HAHAHA! And seemingly in less time than it took LeBlanc to download it. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! And a huge retroactive laugh for the fact that it took LeBlanc so long to download it in the last episode. I mentioned it at the time, but seeing how few lines of code it really is just really drives home the stupidity here.
Standard glasses won't throw off facial recognition. Not at NSA. Not in 2020.
In the end, this is all my own fault. This is a skiffy tech show on network television and I KNOW that such a thing never ends well anymore. Ever. Throw in the lame "human drama" filler and the attendant bad acting and I can see why this one was quickly killed off.
This show started out with a lot of potential, but bad acting and even worse writing is just killing it. This time, the annoying lead -- I'm still not sure if it's the actor or the character that annoys me -- spends time on a workstation in an employee break room at his former tech company because what break room doesn't have a workstation? And he's there because he backed up a virus program -- because of course he wrote a virus program because virus programs are cool and who doesn't write them? -- that he needs right there on-site instead of half a world away, which sorta totally destroys the purpose of having a backup in the first place. And he has to go there to download the virus using what must have been a USB 1.0 port, given how long it takes to download the thing. And then he escapes through a panic room that opens up into a public stairwell because that's how panic rooms work, too.
As usual with network offerings like this one, it's as if someone said, "Hey, let's do a show with a tech-heavy premise and hire a bunch of liberal arts majors to write it, and then also have them throw in some marital drama and a workplace love triangle while they're screwing up the tech stuff."
Oh, well. Only two episodes to go. And yes, I'm going to watch them despite the mess that they've made of things, and I'm pretty disgusted with myself over it already.
The story continues to be extremely compelling, but the lack of any sort of chemistry between the actors playing Young Jonas and Young Martha is getting to be almost painful to watch. The Jonas actor actually seems to be getting worse all-around over time instead of better, with it being most noticeable in those scenes with Martha. To call it wooden would be an insult to trees. And it's unfortunate since their tragic love is supposed to be the focal point of it all.
My other problem with this one is the stupid way that Claudia creates a false sense of urgency by telling Ulrich to meet her at 10 that night. As a result, she HAS to get that key card right away. Dramatic? Sure. Idiotic? Also true. A far better option would have been to just tell Ulrich that she might need some time, and that he should be there every night at 10 until she shows up and NOT get discouraged if it doesn't happen the first night. Or she could have compromised by bailing on the first attempt to get the key card and going back to see Ulrich so that they could regroup and reset things a bit. But, no. She needed to get that key card RIGHT NOW and, well, go figure.
Beyond those complaints, though, the rest of it, as I said, is still terrific. I'm just a bit disappointed to have any complaints AT ALL since the show has spoiled me up until now...
Way to go, David E. Kelley. You suckered me into sampling this one even though I knew, deep down, that you weren't capable of sustaining anything from start to finish. And you didn't let me down. I watched it all, going from being pleasantly surprised to hoping that things weren't going off the rails the way that they appeared to be going off the rails, and now I want those six hours of my life back.
In the end, there were no surprises in this one. No red herrings. No culprit cleverly revealed to viewers early on if they were paying close attention. It was about as linear as something like this can be and it played out like a lame Lifetime Channel movie.
So no more chances, Kelley. You made me think -- for a few episodes, at least -- that you'd finally gotten good at what you do. I won't make that mistake again.
Oh, and two last notes. First, the "greatest defense lawyer money can buy" was once again an idiot in the courtroom, but that, of course, is a reflection on Kelley's inability to write and not on a fictional character's ability to be a competent lawyer. And second...Jonathan took the hammer and held on to it all the way to the lake house? So that he could leave it there? Gee, it's too bad that there was absolutely NO PLACE that he could have ditched the thing between the crime scene and that cabin. Oh, wait. There were probably a hundred decent options. Huh. Go figure. Oh, never mind. I just need to put this thing in the rear view mirror and never look back.
I'm as much of a fan of "Show, don't tell" as anyone, but you can overkill on the show part, and that's what they did at the beginning of this one. I didn't need them to spend so much time on the whole "Oh, look, LeBlanc is a genius with poor social skills" or "Bullying is bad" messages, and the show's pacing shouldn't be geared to those who do. Still, after that shaky start, things got pretty interesting, but I'm again paranoid that having this on a network is gonna mean that the filler and time-wasting stuff is gonna get worse before it gets better. And frankly, the LeBlanc character is ALREADY getting tedious, so there's that concern, as well. Don't blow this, writers.
And on a related note, if you're gonna create a tech-heavy show, have some tech-savvy writers or advisers. Because I wanted to throw a shoe at the screen when LeBlanc asked C.M., "Where'd you learn how to code, in a trailer park?" Because that WASN'T CODING. That was command input. Coding is something else entirely, but liberal arts majors writing for TV must think that using the word as a verb sexes things up in their script, or something. But it's wrong and it's stupid and it's a mistake that a person like LeBlanc would never, ever make.
The fan service is strong with this one. So strong, in fact, that it generates a few cringeworthy moments where the plot and logic are sacrificed for some quick feelz.
Still, I have to give J.J. credit. Rian Johnson left him with a lot of bad lemons in various stages of rot and decay, and J.J. managed to make a pretty good pitcher of lemonade out of some of it. Yes, there were some lemons that were completely tossed aside, but that was the best thing to do with them.
And as much as I continue to hate what he did to the Star Trek franchise, I do believe that J.J. truly grasps what Lucas was always trying to build here. Johnson mistakenly believed that there was room in Star Wars for a lot of navel-gazing and uncertainty and gray, but it's ALWAYS been about good versus bad in a simple Saturday afternoon matinee sort of way. And J.J. understands that really well. So while there were not a lot of profound moments here, that was a good thing since it got things back to their roots and brought it all home in the end.
There will always be room for grayness and ambiguity and uncertainty in my movie diet, but there's also plenty of room for Star Wars as Lucas built it and as J.J. so lovingly continued it. So props to Abrams here. Just, you know, keep him the hell away from Trek.
A stylish and reasonably solid 90-minute sci-fi film. Sadly, it's actually over two hours long, and most of that extra time is spent taking itself Way Too Seriously. You know that it's Very Serious because we get a closeup shot of Pitt looking his age. And then another. And then 1,482 others, all accompanied by Very Serious Monologues given in a Very Serious tone of voice by a Very Serious Pitt while the camera pans across his Very Serious face.
In the end, it's almost easy to forget that the whole thing is about a remote and stoic guy who breaks all kinds of rules and laws and gets people killed so that he can ditch his estranged wife and track down his crazy father, who has had way too much solo time to contemplate his utter failure to find signs of intelligent alien life, and who would rather die alone in the dark and cold emptiness of space rather than return to Earth with his Very Serious son. On the bright side, the Very Serious Son seems to finally see the error of his ways and the film ends with him meeting up with his wife back on Earth where, oddly enough, it would seem that he'll be suffering no consequences for his actions. So there's hope for him, perhaps, but c'mon. The guy just a ticking time bomb at this point. Seriously.
There wasn't a single moment of this one that wasn't either (a) a complete waste of time or (b) stupid beyond belief or (c) both at the same time. My faves from this one:
Let's start with a minor, but annoying one. Olive knows when the cult is gonna be getting more disposable coffee cups and the response is: "How did we do anything around here before you joined us?" Um, there are maybe 50 people in the cult; just buy a sleeve or two of disposable cups at the local grocery store, Einstein. You don't need to "order" them.
Every word and action from Prince Charming when he showed up at the hit-and-run site.
Leap #1: A suspect's "They're just some guys from the club" IMMEDIATELY becomes Michaela's "We believe this is the HEADQUARTERS [emphasis mine] of a violent group."
Leap #2: Michaela sees a blue truck and, without ANYTHING to back it up, IMMEDIATELY tells her boss that "That truck was involved in a hit-and-run with another passenger."
Jared gives the bad guys one tip and THAT SAME NIGHT gets to meet one of the group's apparent bigwigs because...they're grateful AND stupid, I guess? And that's on top of the fact that Jared just HAPPENED to find that bar and that bartender to get the hots for in the first place. Now it's possible that all of this has been a setup (undercover op) since BEFORE he met the bartender, but for now, it's going in the stupid pile since I doubt that the writers have it in them to make any of it make sense. Besides, even if Jared IS working undercover, the bad guys are still being really stupid here.
Prince Charming's actions at the very end.
Meanwhile, we get NOTHING this week from the awesome and lovely Saanvi, and only a passing mention of her progress. And there was a lot of soap opera stuff that I skipped entirely. So yeah, this one was horrendous.
A few bits of dialogue that were cut from the final script to varying degrees. And trust me, this barely scratches the surface:
[A]
"I'm pretty sure that we can't trust your daughter to not mess up our plans to kill millions of people. But rather than just be the homicidal maniacs that we are and kill her while her mom is distracted, let's leave her unattended in a room from which she can easily escape because that makes a lot more sense."
"Brilliant! I guess that's why you're the boss, boss."
[B]
"We have been developing a prototype for a new weapon. An oxygen destroyer. It kills oxygen. But not the oxygen in water. It kills all of the oxygen except for THAT oxygen. But it still kills the fish IN the water. Because reasons."
[C]
"Is there any reason why we can't use an unmanned vehicle to take the nuke to Godzilla so that we can then detonate it remotely?"
"Absolutely none whatsoever, but where's the fun in that?"
"But what about Dr. Noble Death?"
"He's always been a drama queen. Let him have his moment."
[D]
"Should we be worried that Godzilla is so radioactive that he's glowing and about to explode and we're only about twenty yards away from him?"
"No, it's a magical radiation that is only effective out to a two-foot radius."
"Well, that's convenient."
"Isn't it, though?"
"What about all of this radioactive asbestos-laden dust that we're inhaling?"
"Geez, would you give it a rest already, Debbie Downer?"
Three outings into things so far this season, I can say that the Joyce and Hopper story line is starting to get interesting, but the acting is iffy. Their timing is off and it seems as if they're trying to do everything in one take. The El and Max stuff is great (if you downplay the stalking stuff) and the young actors are doing solid work. The same goes for Nancy and Jonathan and their investigation. And the same goes for the Dustin and Steve and Robin stuff, and they're doing a good job with the comic relief, as well. Billy has also really grown on me after being more of an annoyance than anything else last season, and he's got a great story going on. So those are the good things. On the bad -- sometimes really bad -- side of the ledger, the Mike and Lucas and Will story is terrible, and only the Will actor is showing any acting ability while Mike and Lucas flail their arms around a lot -- which is also a problem with the directing since it's become a consistent distraction and no one has put a stop to it yet. They're equal parts painful and boring to watch at this point and they're dragging down the show for the entire team. I'd rate them a 4 and the Joyce/Hopper stuff a 7 and the others an 8 if I were grading them separately.
For Curtis's sake, I hope that the paycheck cleared.
This was...not good. So much stupidity. First among the biggies is the table setting of it all, which required some rocket scientist to decide that just before Halloween would be the perfect time to transport Michael by bus to a new facility. And let's do it at night just for fun! And with a bunch of other inmates along for the ride and only a guard or two to ride along on the bus. And no support vehicles to accompany the bus. Golly gee whiz, what could go wrong with that plan?
Then fast-forward to the end and there's the fact that Laurie had 40 years to prepare for a showdown by building a safe room and stockpiling guns and rifles, but her first move when the time comes is to leave the safe room with only one weapon and hunt room by room in the dark. Hunt for Michael. Who somehow magically knew where she lived after 40 years. Then they get him in the safe room and instead of emptying every weapon of its supply of bullets into his unconscious body, they just leave and, in typical Halloween fashion, he revives. Because of course he does. But at least he doesn't escape the fire. Or does he? By not putting a few hundred bullets into him before torching the place, they leave room for a sequel that I won't be watching.
In the end, they still haven't come close to equaling the original, let alone surpassing it. And it doesn't seem like it's going to happen anytime soon if this is the writing quality that we can expect at this point.
I knew that they'd want to get their money's worth out of using Chris Pine in this miniseries, but I thought that he'd play a fictional composite of various real people, and that his role would be to keep the plot moving along. Instead, in the end, Jay Singletary was entirely his own fictional person, which made him more of a distraction than anything else. Still, he had Fauna's back and earned the degree of tropical redemption that he found in the end. George Hodel, on the other hand, ended up being every bit as sleazy and skeevy as one would imagine based on the actual facts, and it's too bad that art imitated life here and he didn't die a horrible, slow death in a fire. Finally, Fauna proved to be every bit as smart and resourceful as she'd been all along, but I found her crushing critique of Hodel to be beyond what a typical 16-year-old would have been capable of. Nonetheless, I enjoyed hearing her deliver every word of it. Overall, the ending was anticlimactic, but mostly satisfactory if for no other reason than the fact that Hodel didn't win while both Jay and Fauna did, in a manner of speaking.
Sadly, the title of this one has nothing to do with changes in the writers' room. To begin with, we get about 30 seconds of advancement on the mystery front once again. This time around, we seemingly get confirmation that Cal is precognizant with regard to certain events, but not the cause of them. That's good information, but it's the only pertinent information to be found in this outing. Because other than that tidbit, this one was another 40+ minutes of nothing but sheer stupidity, soap and "drama." Even Zeke's brief flashback to his sister's pickle experiment was more of an unintentional and rushed and corny parody than anything else. And the whole New Religion nonsense? Embarrassingly bad. And as a fan of Saanvi, I found what they did to her in this one to be especially unforgivable. She won't lie to a nutjob holding her hostage and threatening her life?!?!?!?! And her reason is...she was lied to by the Mystery Person who ghosted her and skipped the flight? Also on the soap front, Mick's love triangle continues to be an utter waste of time. If people want this garbage, why not watch daytime soaps and be done with it? And once again the lead is the strongest actor here after being the very weakest link on ONCE UPON A TIME, so that says all that needs to be said about the acting quality, as well. The only positive was seeing Ben and Grace and kids working as a team. But no way is that enough. It's time for me to drop this disaster. Again. I'll skim future recaps for updates on the mystery front, which clearly aren't going to be coming in a hurry.
The worst episode yet by far, and that's saying something. Once again there was minimal -- about 30 seconds this time around -- plot advancement and mystery-related stuff and the rest was filler and angst and "drama." First, more secrets. Yay. To "protect" people. Yay. Both Jared and Olive are kept in the dark on separate matters by Ben and Grace, so apparently Ben is a moron who never learns and Grace is a hypocrite. Then there's Zeke, whose backstory gets way too much time for a character who's not clicking with me because he's portrayed by a really bad and miscast (he looks way too old for the character's age) actor. It's remotely possible that I could care less about the blossoming romance between this guy and Mick, but I don't see how since Mick's not high on my list, either. And then there's the stupid Truthers plot that just popped up out of nowhere, presumably so that the writers can postpone any answers about the flight itself until season two or later. Ugh. I quit this show early on and came back to it when some people convinced me that there was movement on the mystery and skiffy stuff, and they were right. For a few episodes. But then it started downhill again and it's never been worse than this one.
The mystery/thriller stuff was top-notch and there was a lot of interesting progress along those lines. Sadly, it was overwhelmed by the soapy stupidity, all of which stems from...people keeping secrets. And it makes no sense. Ben's story can be confirmed by Michaela. And Cal. And Cal's doctor. But Ben won't explain things to Grace because reasons. Seriously, WHY NOT? And as worried as he is about Cal, he'd rather be separated from the kid and leave him unprotected when he could fix it all by just being honest and specific with Grace? How does any of this make sense on any planet? Note to writers: it's possible to do "drama" without this much stupidity!!! Meanwhile, what the heck was Lourdes doing that was so important that she she never made it to the hospital after her husband was blown into a coma? One passing name drop from Michaela doesn't cut it, especially since hours had apparently elapsed. The mere existence of that tedious love triangle has already been annoying enough, but now they had to go and add this to the mix.
In short, this one gets an 8/10 for the mystery stuff and 0/10 for the "drama," and I'd give it a negative score if I could.
A huge letdown from the season premiere. I love this show when it's being stupid in a goofy and charming way, but this one was stupid in all of the wrong and annoying ways. Rather than pile on, I'll just mention two obvious things. One, how many times and in how many different ways are Our Heroes going to have to be told that they can't change time and history? This week, it's Z's turn to need a reminder because...why? And two, while I can almost forgive that and what she does next since a little defiance can be a good thing once in a while, it's going to take some time to get over how stupid AND incompetent she was in allowing herself to get caught AND to lose her totem in the process when it all could have been so easily avoided since escape would have been easy. And those are just two of the more blatant examples of the overarching problem in this one. In short, someone in the writers' room must not like Z and must have decided that it was time to do some damage to the character in stupid ways -- the wrong kind of stupid ways. Hopefully this was a one-off and the writer responsible will be doing nothing more than copy editing work in the future.
"Please...give us an ending."
I don't think that any show will ever be able to give us a better ending than this one just did, but I hope that they all try. Because this one was just phenomenal and hit on all of the timey-wimey and character points that the show has always been good at hitting. Everyone who needed a shot at redemption got it and nailed it. Well, except for Olivia, but we knew that all along, pretty much. (But even there, her bones served a purpose.) And perhaps most importantly, everyone got an ending. Or the beginnings of endings. And happy ones, at that.
Two nice touches that I really appreciated: (1) They didn't actually show Cassie hitting the Big Red Button, so we don't know for sure if she did. The results either way are similar, but also different in terms of where Cole ended up. I choose to believe that Cole ended up in the same new timeline as the "real" others. (2) As it clung by a thread to a tree limb, that red (!) leaf that the camera panned to so that it could lead us out of the show at the very end was perfectly symbolic of all living things having an ending. Cassie and Cole and the others have one life now. Free will over destiny. Do it right or go home. No do-overs. The way that it should be.
This is a solid espionage tale, with Australia and China playing the primary roles and the U.S. mostly lurking about in the background. Anna Torv once again comes across as competent and cool as ice, this time as a renegade reporter for a major Australian newspaper. The story centers around Canberra and Torv's Dunkley character, and many of the alphabet agencies mentioned throughout are surely familiar to Aussies if not to me, but I'm okay with accepting that they're, more or less, the counterparts of the likes of the F.B.I. and C.I.A. and Homeland Security.
It's a conspiracy tale, so it's probably a non-starter for opponents of conspiracy plots out there, but those like me who like their spies and lies will appreciate this one a lot. And it's international intrigue and skulduggery rather than just the national or interagency sort, which is a critical distinction for me. I had a few eye-rolling moments with a few plot points but decided not to rush to judgment and, sure enough, those things were explained in the finale and it all made sense and I was able to stop rolling my eyes.
Overall, this one's a perfect example of why I think that journalists make terrific protagonists in fiction. I'm looking forward to the second series on Netflix (later this year?) and highly recommend this six-episode series one.
After way too much soap and way too much filler in pretty much every episode this season, the writers explode every plotline and every character arc and every loose thread in this one. Or to put it another way, they went from screwing up the pacing from one direction to screwing it up from the other, with plenty of head-scratching details to go along with it. This season could have been SO much better if they'd just spread the wealth better. It's as if they got late word that the show was being canceled and they needed to wrap things up NOW. The one bright spot? The amazingly annoying and smug and self-righteous Jughead is dead. Or should be, based on how many thugs were pounding away at him with no end in sight. But I wouldn't put it past this show to have him survive somehow, even though you'd think that FP would have taken him directly to the hospital instead of going with the cliche-ridden option of carrying his downed son back to his "family" -- if Jughead was still alive at this point. Time will tell. Meanwhile, one Black Hood is caught while one is still out there. With one episode left in the season -- and probably the last that I'll be watching of this hot mess -- we'll see how they wrap things up next week.
Cisco and Gypsy have relationship issues because plot. Seriously, can't they pop in on each other's worlds more easily than the rest of us can move across town? So why not just be a couple and spend some of their free time together there and some of their free time together here? Why so much soapy drama over something so incredibly stupid and easily solved? So Cisco wants to wake up next to her every morning? No problem. Breach there or have her breach here, spend your quality time together and then breach back to your own world the same way most couples part in order to go to different jobs every day. It would be one thing if there were only a finite number of breaches possible or if each breach was incredibly costly in some way. But that's not the case and, again, it's beyond stupid. It's like watching two people cry every time one of them has to walk through a door and into a different room.
Bottom line: this one had some good moments, but none of them could possibly drag it up very far up from the lows of the completely contrived, tedious and extremely soapy Cisco/Gypsy story line.
Okay, first things first. Has everyone behind this show -- including Duchovny and Anderson -- been replaced by pod creatures, or something? Because on more than one occasion in this one, they make a big deal out of Mulder having to rely on glasses to see some things. And yet the very first time that we saw him in the pilot episode all those years ago, he was working with photo slides and HE WAS WEARING GLASSES! Right after his classic "F.B.I.'s most unwanted" line, and all that. So why did no one point that out here? Needing glasses now isn't a sign of aging (which I assume was the intended message here) when you've been wearing them since at least 1993!
Oh, well. As for this most recent effort, it's your basic Hallmark story of a carnivorous organ-harvesting cult that eats some of its members and surgically attaches others together back-to-back in order to cheat death in a bloody adaptation of SUNSET BOULEVARD. Until a religious zealot who really hates cults puts a cast iron spike through some chests, at least. All in all, this one was somewhat reminiscent of "Home," and that's not a bad thing. Just a gory one. Beyond that, someone should really explain to Mulder about the life span of the average dog. Even one named Queequeg.
This one provided some decent backstory for AltClare and even generated a fair amount of sympathy for her from me...until she showed me that the same events that generated my sympathy had turned her into someone who could kill an innocent bystander with no apparent issues of conscience. I also found it interesting that, prior to her insertion on "our" side of things, she showed intermittent signs of warmth mixed in with the general coldness. Other than that, there were a few things that bothered me with this one. (1) There were ways that AltClare could have mirrored Clare's lost virginity that would not have involved potential exposure to STDs or pregnancy, either of which would have not only presented the usual problems but would have killed the mission. And there's the fact that someone who knew "her" could have seen enough of what was going on to report it back to Peter. I assume that the writers intended this to serve as more evidence of her automaton personality at that point, but I couldn't ignore the lack of common sense. (2) The lack of a team in place to assist her and the resulting "You're on your own" sort of mentality were more than a little hard to accept, especially given the importance of her particular mission. (3) Would it have killed Peter to stash those cigars somewhere else? Someplace far, far way? Or at least in a locked drawer? Or at least in a drawer that he freaking shuts all the way? Oh, well. At this point, now that Peter has made it clear that he knows what's going on with her, I'm all the more curious about how things will move forward with our not-so-happy couple...
In terms of story, this one gets a failing grade for the first 30-40 disjointed and badly flowing minutes that come across as if they were written by someone with a five-second attention span. Not that the decision to basically do three introductory origin-ish stories in this one made it any easier, of course. Seriously, would it have killed them to do the first team movie after Aquaman and Flash each had his own solo movie under his belt? (I'm not sure if there are any plans for a Cyborg solo movie at this point.) Oh, well. On the bright side, once the team was together, things improved dramatically, and the comic relief elements were long overdue in a DC movie -- although having so much of it coming from Barry Allen is going to make it hard to take the character seriously at all in the future.
In terms of casting, good marks go to the established Henry Cavill and Gal Gadot, and while Ben Afleck has grown on me to some extent as Wayne, he just doesn't work as Batman since I'm just not a fan of a soft, middle-aged superhero who looks more like a cosplayer having a midlife crisis. Of the three newcomers, I like Jason Mamoa (Aquaman) and Ezra Miller (Flash), but not in these roles since they're too far removed from the original characters for my liking. Ray Fisher as Cyborg was okay, but it's not as if they gave the actor or the character any chance to show much personality.
All in all, this was an extremely uneven movie, but it's to be expected, given its somewhat messy and chaotic production history. In the end, if the future holds more of the latter and funny bits of this one and less of the badly done beginning, then DC just might have turned a corner here, especially coming on the heels of Gadot's solo introduction. So there's hope -- both for the future solo movies and for a team reunion at some point down the road.
This show worked really well for me in season one because there was a good season-long mystery arc and both the adults and the kids were mostly smart, whether they were on the side of good or evil. This season, there's no worthwhile mystery -- the Lodges buying up a bunch of land is hardly compelling drama -- and no end to the stupid things that are being done. In this episode alone, Alice Cooper covers up a death and ignores the drug connections. Dumb and dumber. And Betty goes along with it. Dumb. And Archie is convinced that Hiram Lodge is a wonderful human being even though there is zero evidence to back that position and tons of evidence to refute it. Dumb. And along with the stupidity and the lack of an overarching mystery, there's just too much soap. In short, the show has deteriorated to a huge degree and I don't know how much longer I'll be sticking with it since the writers didn't seem to plan anything beyond the first season and it's really obvious at this point. As usual, they offer a nice hook at the very end -- if it's even true -- but it's getting harder and harder to sit through 40 minutes of dreck every week for that one minute of payoff.
There is a really good 90-minute movie here, but it gets smothered by an additional 50 minutes of padding that kills the pacing and dulls the focus. Too much time is spent on inconsequential elements and then there are rushes through things that deserve more attention. On the whole, it almost had me falling asleep at times.
On the bright side, Caesar's quest is terrific and he is a great role model for those around him, and there is no shortage of material for philosophical or moral discussions based on what transpires. His commitment to his group is commendable, and the loyalty of his key people is inspiring.
On the negative side, his battle with the Colonel could have been epic, but it ends up being anticlimactic because of the writing, which seems to want to rush past that particular resolution even as it takes too long in doing so. This is followed up by another anticlimactic choice in the form of a lame deus ex avalanche. And really, how did the Colonel ever rise above the level of captain, at best, when he seemed to be incapable of making an intelligent and tactically wise decision at any point?
Nonetheless, top marks all around for the acting here, and props to whoever found that adorable little girl who plays Nova. All in all, an extremely mixed bag of good and bad here, but the glacial pacing and the overlong runtime made for a pretty disappointing effort overall.
Things had already reached the point where I was watching this show for the Hannah stuff while fast-forwarding through everything else, so of course they had to go and ruin that with a couple of big bits of stupid. First, she meets with her shady British boy toy alone when neither she nor anyone else should have allowed it, and then, after shooting him, she just goes off to have a drink or ten. So much for contacting the appropriate people and finding the body and confirming the death, or anything like that. And then, of course, we get the requisite scene of the boy toy showing us, the audience, that he had been wearing a bulletproof vest. Because that trope never gets old. Beyond that, it's sad to see that a show that began as an investigation into something as monumentally huge as the bombing of the U.S. Capitol Building in an attempt to destroy the American government has degenerated into lame and boring story lines like this one that involved a small group of people in a fire zone. Seriously? This is the sort of nail-biting successor to that initial story line that's supposed to keep people watching? And lastly, we get one more overused trope: the T-boned vehicle crash. Not only is it unoriginal, but it's also an impossibility in the context of the Secret Service protecting the First Lady. Those side streets would have been shut down during the drive. Oh, well. I'm done. As I said, I was in it for Hannah and now they've finished ruining her for me, so it's a good time to bail on this mess.
Too much soap opera again, with Jughead's monologue telling us that he knows way too much about Archie and Veronica's private lives. Not that they're keeping it particularly private themselves while at school, of course. Still, I really don't want to know how Jughead knows the specifics of what he knows, so I'll just assume that he's a creepy voyeur and leave it at that. And things were only made worse by the fact that, this time around, the soap opera silliness also included having Betty act both stupid and trashy (at the same time) in the process in some monumentally misguided attempt to make herself a part of Jughead's new-ish life. And they found time to slip in a little bit more of Cheryl's developing obsession with Josie for good measure, as well. On the mystery side of things, we learn that what appeared to be clumsy attempts at misdirection on the part of the writers in the past when it came to the high school janitor were just that: clumsy attempts. In short, we got a lot of bad soap opera combined with nothing in the way of advancement on the mystery front (beyond being able to take the janitor out of consideration, which was already pretty obvious). Next week is the Fall finale. I can only hope that things rebound in a big way because this was just a terrible episode.
This season, I've been fast-forwarding through all of the White House nonsense so that I can follow the Hannah stuff and only the Hannah stuff. As such, it was beyond disappointing to come to realize that they've apparently put the story involving FLOTUS and her mother on hold and have sent Hannah on a trip overseas with POTUS for some reason that I don't even care to contemplate. And to make matters worse, I caught some bits of Hanna on some field mission with Mike over there, of all people. Which would never happen in the real world. But then again, the White House Counsel would never be doing personal lawyering work for an ethical president, either. And on and on. Either the writers for this show are beyond stupid or they just assume that the audience is. I'll keep fast-forwarding through episodes in the future and it will take all of a minute or two (as this one did) to cover it all if they don't have Hannah focused on the FLOTUS story. Because that's the only thing that I'm remotely interested in at this point, and even that is far from the most compelling television out there. But White House Secret Service agents playing Rambo? That's something that I can do without.
