Movie Reviews
Here are some movie reviews that I've written over the years. This isn't a large collection, but whenever I feel like writing a one-off movie review, I'll add it here.
- 3/6/1998. The Big Lebowski
— I pay tribute to one of the best quirky dialogue movies of all time with a brief discussion of the movie and a link to my quote generator, DudeQuote.com. - 6/10/1998. Dark City
— A skillful exercise in style and aesthetics from Alex Proyas, director of The Crow. With this film Proyas also manages to go beyond pure mood by supplying a more fundamentally challenging story. - 6/10/1998. Event Horizon — Mediocre sci-fi thriller with a script that seems to enjoy posing interesting questions only to answer them with uninteresting horror clichés, frequently borrowing from other genre pictures.
- 6/29/2016. Independence Day: Resurgence — Twenty years after the original film, this redundant and pedestrian sequel brings the faceless alien threat back to a significantly advanced planet Earth where they threaten to destroy the planet once again.
- 11/10/2014. Interstellar — Haunting, epic science fiction in the true sense of the term, focusing on ideas and feelings alongside each other.
- 5/15/2003. The Matrix — The intriguing action classic of century's end, featuring a melding of visual styles — sci-fi, anime, comic book, wire-based martial arts, dreamlike surrealism, film noir — brought together with impressive skill, design, and vision by the Wachowski Brothers.
- 5/20/2003. The Matrix Reloaded — The much anticipated followup to the 1999 original is a superb sci-fi extravaganza featuring some truly inventive action sequences and a story that offers tantalizing puzzles and possibilities.
- 11/20/2003. The Matrix Revolutions — The disappointing conclusion to the Matrix trilogy cannot live up to the mysteries set up in the previous installments, and instead becomes a titanic battle between the One and his opposite. Visually impressive but not satisfying on a story level.
- 6/10/1998. Sphere — A film with an ambition that proves to be its own downfall. Whenever it starts to work on one level, it grows untenable on another.
- 12/7/1979. Star Trek: The Feature Films — All the Star Trek movies are reviewed in their own dedicated section.
- 5/25/1977. Star Wars: The Feature Films — All the Star Wars movies are reviewed in their own dedicated section.
- 1/20/2000. Supernova — Truly bad sci-fi. Not simply a recycling of predictable sci-fi genre clichés but a very badly executed movie that lacks any sense of coherence, drama, suspense, or competence.
- 7/7/2000. Titan A.E. — Begins and ends with dramatic special-effects sequences that rouse some genuine emotions, but in between are many moments where the plot chugs along the formula lines. A fairly entertaining comic book that's adequate but could've been much more daring and memorable.
- 6/24/2009. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen — Needless, pointless, unwatchably excessive sequel is all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
- 11/13/2009. 2012 — Excessive but you-get-what-you-came-for disaster epic goes all-in with destruction but manages to be faithful enough to its genre formula that it somehow, against all odds, manages to work.
- 6/28/1998. The X-Files — Entertaining movie that captures the essence of what works with The X-Files (atmosphere, intrigue) without belaboring its plot. Strangely, it works equally well as a standalone movie or an inconclusive piece of the broader X-Files mythology.