(2002) Time Machine with Guy Pierce and Jeremy Irons

Wasn't a big hit when it came out and it'll never be as iconic as the George Pal Time Machine from the 60's. But the 2003 adaptation has the coolest looking time machine to come around in a while (at the time it was the most expensive prop ever built, might still be but I'm not sure.)

Critics shit on it for not having the cataclysmic event that destroys humanity be global warming. While I'm all for talking about global warming I can kind of understand why they didn't use that and why they didn't reuse the 60's disaster of nuclear war.

But to be fair to the writers their choice to destroying humanity was original, kind of a tongue-in-cheek joke about the elderly crisis we're currently entering into and the plan is in fact an idea that has been discussed before.

Aside from that the film is pretty solid. In the book by HG Wells and the 60's film the Time Traveller (doesn't even have a name) has zero motivation aside from achieving a new scientific advancement. Thats cool and all but modern audiences, having had several successful time travel stories since Wells time, do need a better eureka moment than that. The 2002 film provides a good and believable motivation.

The film also features a believable super-distant future where the human species splits, just like in the original stories. Samantha Mumba is a member of the tribe of humans that live above ground and are technologically ignorant, thought not exactly like the child-like race we see in the 60's version. They do maintain that there are no old people and why that is.

Samantha Mumba did a great job in her role and while I don't normally discuss a persons race the fact her father was Zambian and her mother Irish did kind of lean into what a future race of people could look like. She has a distinct look which played to the role.

Orlando Jones makes a couple appearances as a sort of AI librarian. It's nice to see him in the odd movie role.

Jeremy Irons is the head morlock, the race of humans that stayed underground, and doesn't disappoint, although his character is more of a cameo.

The film also had a good soundtrack and special effects that features the classic "years passing in seconds" stuff that was iconic from the 60's film.

But ultimately the film is mostly forgotten to audiences.

The Emoji Movie. I get it, the trailers looked awful. It had 'shallow crap' written all over it.
But my kids loved it, and honestly, it was a perfectly fine movie. Better than a bunch of other animated movies I've had to sit through.

Hogwarts Legacy. It was surprisingly good!

I love that show. It’s just… fun.

I was a young man when this came out and I certainly remember Samantha Mumba's performance.

I’m alone in this

Alone with every single girl coming of age in the 90s who swooned over it cuz of Leo "Heartthrob" DiCaprio.

I skipped it back in the day but my gf made me watch it last year and I liked it. Very stylish.

I still like watching the time traveling sequence.

He was actually annoying in it I felt.

Sucker Punch

The internet has been shitting on it for years. I don't even remember why. Maybe something along the lines of sexualizing female hero figures. I think a lot of people don't like Zack Snyder. I don't care. It's stylish as hell, looks awesome, has fantastic action sequences, and a killer soundtrack. And it has a whole inception vibe. I love watching it.

But that’s the thing, they only have one song. (They all sound the same.)

Mumford & Sons, Hootie & the Blowfish, and Live all say "Hi!" and want to know if they can join the party.

Dragon Age: Veilguard. Was it MCU-ified? Sure. Still enjoyed it quite a bit. More than Inquisition, actually.

Rogue One has some banger set-pieces, and it's a decent enough war movie in Star Wars cosplay, but while it's fun to watch it after Andor, doing so also really underlined to me how thin and overhyped I think it was.

Which Ultima are you talking about here? I don't know which of the Ultima games has a post-apocalyptic setting.

It's just a fun movie. I don't know if I only think that because I grew up with it though.

For my money Dehaan was the worse of the two. She was sort of written as a stick in the mud, but Valerian himself was supposed to be, y'know, fun.

While I know we've all soured on Chris Pratt, I do like the joke that Passengers and Valerian should have just traded leads.

Especially back in the day. It was a major action movie event.

I kind of feel the same way about Cutthroat Island. It was a massive failure, but the production value was great and I thought it was a fun action flick.

Side Note: Waterworld is one of the few movies I recommend NOT watching the extended cut. The scenes are very low quality and feel like a TV production compared to the rest of the theatrical cut scenes.

I've always liked the Postman. With the exception of

Some projects are weaker than others, of course, but there is a part of the Marvel audience that can let an Antman movie slide by with little comment, but if they have to watch a girl be strong for 100 minutes, and it's not some hybrid of peak George Lucas, Mel Brooks, and Shakespeare, then clearly it's fucking awful garbage and they need to tell everybody how bad it is, but also they're not sexist because they liked Scarlett Johansson in those other movies.

The Marvels was fun and better than several Antman and Thor movies, among many others.

I can't bring myself to hate Nickelback because they gave us one of the greatest meme templates in meme history.

I've never understood the hate for the prequels. I thought The Phantom Menace was kind of boring and I've never successfully removed Jar Jar's voice from my head, but I straight up liked Attack of The Clones and Revenge of The Sith.

I had a love/hate relationship with Bubsy. Loved the almost surreal environments. The difficulty almost drove me to preteen violence though. Not sure I ever beat the two titles I have.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted.

Every single person downvoting you likes art from an artist that's a piece of shit. It's inevitable. And you didn't indicate you still financially support the artist, which is what everyone is concerned about. And you shouldn't, because she's a real piece of shit.

Sucker Punch

This was a movie that was like "hey! wouldn't it be awesome if there was a world where the nazis brought back dinosaurs to fight with- Wait! wouldn't it be cool if there was like, a world where space travel was affordable and we had a moonbase an-wait! wouldn't it be cool if there was a world where-"

And each time I'd be like "hey, there will be cool lore and world-building I'd love to see aaaand they already shifted into a different thing." That movie pissed me off so much. Shoulda just been either a softcore porn, or leaned more heavily into the idea of a real-life "Heavy Metal" remake.

I've been with my fiance for over 4 years now, and we've kinda always been very open about how we want our life to be and where it might lead us

I preferred Inquisition, especially in terms of the stories and challenges of the characters, and especially their use of LGBT storylines.

In Inquisition, Krem is trans. Is that an issue? No, it's just part of their character. Is that even the most focused on thing about Krem? Absolutely not, Krem is a badass, that's the focus on Krem.

Dorian is gay. Is that a problem? Yes, but not specifically for some particularly homophobic reason, it's mostly about his role and the pressure to marry his betrothed and generally come back to Tevinter and their ways, which Dorian has been fairly steadily against (not just the pressure to not be gay). It wasn't a simple "I'm gay and want my parents to accept who I am" story.

Then there's Veilguard. Where we have a drawn-out thing about how Taash is non-binary, and for some reason that is a huge problem for their mother, even though the Qun have been accepting of trans people the whole time (but supposedly get their loincloths in a wad about non-binary? Come on). And that becomes their, like... whole deal. They're even bisexual, which is treated as a non-issue (thankfully). And they're the big dragon-slayer person, who rarely offers anything in terms of killing dragons. It seems like Taash's entire existence in the game is for a ham-fisted egg story, and it just gets tedious, frankly.

Every other character has interesting storyline and interesting interplay. Taash gets... one story, and a beat-you-over-the-head allegory in terms of accepting her Qun parts or her Rivian parts, with the painfully obvious answer of "both." Basically, we are too far along to have the cardboard cut-out non-binary character in a story and calling it representation.

Gameplay-wise, I missed the tactical system for fighting from Inquisition, though once I got the hang of the ability system of Veilguard it was an okay replacement. Definitely more fluid.

Can't think of anything on top of my head, so instead I'll ask: What makes you say that Resident Evil 4 is a "masterpiece"? For me it completely ruined the series. It went from survival horror to action shooter when RE4 was released, and every game since has been an iteration of that.

To me that's not Resident Evil. The fun of these games comes from the horror of not knowing what's lurking behind the next corner, and the fact that even one zombie can ruin your night. RE4 removed all of that by placing the camera behind the player, and then turning zombies into cannon fodder that swarm you by the masses. That's not Resident Evil for me, and for that reason I consider RE:0 to be the last good game in the series. (Not including the remakes of course; I'm only counting new entries.)

The thing is, your opinion is the majority. I'm the odd one out here, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. One theory I've been told is that for a lot of people, RE4 was their first Resident Evil game, in which case I can understand liking it if you never knew how good the old games were. I also understand that the tank controls can be off-putting, but that can be bypassed by mapping forward to a button other than up, that way you can move and turn at the same time (also the remakes give you an option to turn off the tank controls). So I really can't think of any other reasons why one might prefer RE4 to past titles.

This is one of my favorite popcorn flicks. The first half of the movie is amazing (up to the part where the moon gets destroyed), but I feel like they could have done more to make the second half more entertaining. I don't know what, but it feels like it's missing something. I also like how the film predicted the concept of LLMs and giving them an avatar, even though they predicted it happening about decade too soon IIRC.

Yes but how do you write a plot around emoji? Are they literally the emoji in your phone becoming sentient, or did the scriptwriters come up with a whole alternative universe that they exist in or something? I'm mildly intrigued but don't care enough to look up a summary.

It was alright but the fact that they didn't modernize the language is what ruined the film for me. Who the hell spoke like that in the 90s? It made no sense.

Saw it in a packed theater and I agree. The entire movie was enjoyable, especially the Emo subplot. I was actually suprised when I went online after and found out that a lot of people didn't like it. It was my favorite film in the Raimi trilogy!

David Lynch's Dune. I understood the hate it got. It is a horribly difficult book to put on film. I thought the style and feel of it was great and so over the top at times. I read the book so I knew what was going on but I understood the criticisms. Sting in a speedo though, wtf? lol

Edit: Almost forgot, a great lineup of actors too.

Sounds like Ultima VIII.

The core problem is the source material is also boring. Aside from the motivation issues and the fact Wells never even bothers to name the Time Traveller, the whole plot is a bit slow. Sure, the morlocks eating people is creepy but it never manages to get to the horror level like how Jurassic Park or Jaws was able to achieve. You never really felt like they were going to sneak up behind you and slash you or tear you limb from limb.

The changes they made to the story helped: named the character, moved him to New York instead of London, gave him a deep motivation, even the morlocks had a more organized system that was more believable (hunted the Eloi and were controlled telepathically by Jeremy Irons.)

Maybe having more Irons in it would've helped but with the plot elements they had to work with it would've been tricky. The good thing is they didn't drag it out, 90 minutes is the proper length. Nowadays they'd try to make it 2 1/2 and it'd be bogged down.

That and the machine itself are the real star of the film. I came across some behind the scenes of the build years ago and it was impressive. The wood deck is all steel painted to look like wood. Since the spinning bits weighed a ton, acrylic and brass, they had to have it be secure. Even the geared computer (forget what it's called... a baggage computer?) worked. Really impressive prop that doesn't get enough love. Makes the Pal time machine look like a joke.

Yeah she was fun. Shame she didn't do more stuff. I'd probably blow up my time machine and live with her instead of going back too.

Best Dune movie ever and I'll die on that hill. Never read the books and I had no problem following it.

How do you even cheat at that game?

He fudged die rolls. Claimed he hit or rolled a crit waaaaaay more often than statistically likely. I 100% saw him roll low and claim a hit anyway multiple times.

It needed different leads, for some reason those two give off huge and I mean HUGE brother/sister vibes... Ruins the movie.

It was about being more than just what you are expected to be. Every other emoji stayed what they were, he was able to change. That's... it.

Romeo is annoying as a character, in all fairness.

The hallucinatory scenes on Giedi Prime horrified and fascinated me (I was way too young when I watched it).

They're both annoying af I think that's half the joke. I'm a big fan of Shakespeare's sense of humor.

Weirdly, I think that is a strength of his performance. Romeo is a misunderstood character: people associate him with romance and chivalry when the Romeo from the play is obsessive, fickle, and impulsive. Kind of a dweeb, really. Juliet fails to see through his bullshit because she is so, so young.

Big Bang Theory. I don't think I would enjoy it on a rewatch but watching that show became a ritual for me and my family.

I'm pretty cautious of attributing hatred of the women-led movies purely to misogyny-- I think it's usually overzealous-- but I really can't think of (and haven't heard of) any other reason to dislike this particular film, so... yup, seems like it.

Side note but I actually really like the antman movies. You have to like them for what they are though. I think The Marvels actually leans a bit towards a similar fun atmosphere.

Thanks!

"I did not say this. I am not here." Goes so damn hard. Too bad only the guild decided to act in that scene.

I'll join you on that hill.

That's... that's the point. It's Shakespeare's words given modern visual elements to make it more comprehensible by a modern audience. It's the prose of Romeo And Juliet that make it Shakespeare, not the swords and doublets.