2018 - OCCUPATION, space alien invasion stuff from Australia

Yet another space alien invasion story.  Let's get this out of the way the film is clearly beholden to War of the Worlds, Battle:  Los Angeles, Independence Day and particularly Red Dawn.  Space aliens have landed on earth in particular the Australian Outback.  A plucky group of survivors flee into the woods and set up a makeshift camp where they learn survival skills and begin to carry out a commando war against the aliens who are up to a nefarious purpose.

You can't argue there isn't enough action in this film, it has lots of shooting, ray gun blasting, car chases and explosions to keep the non discriminating action freak satisfied.  There is some attention paid to characterization.  One guy suffers from depression, there is a pregnant young couple, an ex-con whose family has been put in an alien concentration camp, the usual stuff.  

 

The is a B-movie with a fairly decent budget but it's still a B-movie.  It's entertaining in it's own way and has the required big action climax which feels a little tacked on.  The acting is decent for the most part. The special effects are not that bad.  

 

An attempt is made to send a message of brotherhood between the earthlings and the space aliens but who the hell is interested in that.  Peace is peachy but fighting is more exciting.  There is actually a sequel to this thing called Occupation: Rainfall. 

The film was written by the director, Luke Sparke, the running time is 119 minutes. 

2018 - Wes Anderson's tribute to Japanese film , or a dog ate my film.

Wes Anderson is nothing if not quirky.  This is the second time he is involved in a stop motion film.   Previously he produced, directed and wrote (along with Noah Baumbach),  Fantastic Mr Fox.  Nine years later he was at it again with a stop motion film set in Japan about an island full of abandoned dogs.  Fantastic Mr. Fox was at least based on a story by Roald Dahl, so there was a way into that film.  Isle of Dogs was an original story with a lot of writers and seemed to be loaded with lots of cliches about Japanese life and dog fights for some reason.  It  also is a rather lopsided tribute to Akira Kurosawa even using music from one of his films at one point.

The primary story line is about abandoned dogs stuck on an island who are infected with some virus.  They are all exiled to a trash heap of an island to fend for themselves.  Onto the island lands a Japanese kid who befriends the dogs and helps them return to main stream Japan after they find a cure for this dog virus.  The whole film with fighting dogs, evil politicians, robot dogs and a dog love story just never comes together in this mishmash of a story line.

As in all of Wes Anderson's movies, there is a very formal visual look to his films.  In this film the animation while carefully composed, is rather on the stiff side.  After a while, one longs for the days of  Ray Harryhausen or Phil Tippet who could have at least made the puppets seems a little more natural in what is already an artificial setting and situation.  This style of animation may play on old TV Christmas specials like Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer or The Year Without a Santa Claus but over an hour of watching this gets pretty tiring.  

 

As with the latest Wes Anderson films, he loads it up with lots of celebrity voices, so here we go.   Bryan Cranston,  Bill Murry, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDonald, F. Murray Abraham, Fisher Stevens, Bob Balabn, and Greta Gerwig.  I'm sure I missed  a few.

I usually only list screenplay credit but in this case I think it's important to see how many hands were involved in writing this film.  Wes Anderson takes the screenwriting credit.  But the story is credited to Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Kunichi Norma.  That's a lot of cooks in the kitchen.

  The running time is 101 minutes.

2018 - MORTAL ENGINES, great visuals stupid story.

The director/producer Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame, bought this series of books about cities actually traveling around the world like they were souped up cars or something, he clearly hoped to turn the books into another film franchise.  Frankly the plot of the first book Mortal Engines is just plain stupid.  After some sort of apocalyptic war, cities called "Traction Cities" race around in what is left of the world gobbling up smaller traction cities and using them for fuel.

Once you get past the basic silliness of this setting you have to settle for what is essentially a rehash of story elements from Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return Of The Jedi and The Terminator.  A teenage couple travel around in what's left of the world as they attempt to stop the Darth Vader stand-in, in this case the actor Hugo Weaving, who is building a Death Star like destructo ray to blow up stuff.  The couple is pursued by some kind of robot guy who is clearly a stand-in for the T-800 Terminator.  After a lot of explosions the question is will the teenage couple succeed?  

 

What the film has going for it are the special effects talents of Peter Jackson's WETA studio, the same bunch that did the effects for his Middle Earth series.  They certainly are talented artists.  Unfortunately that's about all this expensive film has going for it.  In a film like this the cast is secondary to all the special effects and action. Mortal Engines failed to find an audience probably because no one watching the film was engaged in the plights of the actors.  

 

Peter Jackson chose to sit this film out and turned over the directing duties to his visual effects supervisor Christian Rivers.  Probably as good a choice as anyone since the film is just completely loaded down with some amazing visuals.  But anyway you cut it the film as a piece of storytelling is a flop.

Written by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens with a heavy borrowing the the George Lucas Star Wars series.

The running time is 128 minutes.

2018 - DETECTIVE DEE: THE FOUR HEAVENLY KINGS, the third in the Detective Dee series

This is the third film is Tsui Hark's revival of the Detective Dee character and probably the lesser of the three films.  This film still has all the wacky action scenes and over the top CGI that is expected from Hark when he gets involved in a fantasy film.  

This time Dee must guard something called the "Dragon Taming Mace" from the Empress of China who fears that Dee will use it to overthrow the Tang Dynasty. To be honest the film is so confusing I'm not even sure what "The Four Heavenly Kings" are.

As expected the incorruptible Dee must work to stop the Empress and expose a cult of magicians that wants to take over China, and so it goes.

 

This is entertaining foolishness on a big budget.  No one knows better than Tsui Hark how to use CGI and very wild and rapid editing to make his stories an entertaining blends of fantasy and action which as usual borders on the insane side of film making when he's involved.

Written by Chang Chia-lu and Tsui Hark.  The running time is 132 minutes, probably a little on the long side.