A Series of Movies

Once again, this is another blog entry that makes up for the days that I didn't have time to blog. Over the past week, I have watched several movies (home and outside), so here are my somewhat belated reviews for each of them.


1) Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
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Yup, I believe millions of people all over the world couldn't control themselves and downloaded this shortly after its release. Most people know me as a person who strongly supports originals. That is only half true; I support buying original video games, but not movies, anime, etc. Oh, well.

My memories of the FF7 game are very, very vague. I completed the Japanese version of the game at a time when my Japanese was still at the learning stage, so I knew absolutely nothing about the story and didn't know how to read the items. I even foolishly fought the final boss without managing my Materia (I was level 99, though), resulting in a near 2-hour long battle in which I thought my game was bugged. You could say I was playing the game just for the sake of playing it. (Boo to me; I wish I could pick up the game now and play it for the sake of truly enjoying it.)

Anyway, the movie was great. The plot was rather bland and, though it was nothing deep, it was simple enough to follow. (And even though everyone has probably watched it by now, I still won't give spoilers.) The action sequences were simply astounding, with gravity-defying moves and swordplay/gunplay. The characters are great, too; Rude and Reno have been great and Rufus was totally bad-ass. The music fits the movie well and it made me wish that I was watching the movie in a cinema instead of on my little laptop.

This is definitely a must-watch because it is a computer-generated visual eye candy fest and well, because it is Final Fantasy.


2) Brothers Grimm
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On Saturday, JokerZ, Amerell and I went to the movies. We were deciding on Jubilee's somewhat limited selection of movies and we were down with "A Sound of Thunder" and "Brothers Grimm". We decided to go with the "Brothers Grimm" since it was supposed to be a comedy and "A Sound of Thunder" seemed like a futuristic "Jurassic Park" clone.

As the movie began, I felt an uncomfortable tingling sensation down my spine. It opened with a totally lame and unfunny scene. Okay, not a good start. Then the cheesy European humor continued and I was like, "God forbid! Not another Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy!" (for those wondering, that movie won my personal 'Crappiest Movie of the Year Award' seen in this blog entry).

To summarize the plot, the Grimm Brothers are con artists who pretend that they can solve supernatural mysteries and make money off gullible people. They soon stumble across the real deal and must learn how to fight it. The strange thing about this movie is that its premise is in the middle of nowhere: 1. It is not an action movie because the fight scenes aren't like impressive. 2. It is not a comedy cos' the jokes are lame European-style humor. 3. The mysteries are actually parodies of children fairy tales (e.g. Red Riding Hood, Gingerbread Man, etc), so they aren't particularly deep or engaging and therefore, can't be taken seriously. I really felt like walking out of the cinema halfway, but then they introduced a female lead character and only then, it became remotely interesting.

If the Hitchhiker movie didn't exist, then Brothers Grimm would have been the worst movie I have watched this year. Avoid this movie unless you want to see how bad it is.

3) A Sound of Thunder
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On Tuesday, I watched Sound of Thunder with Darrell since he wanted to watch one good movie before he went for his operation (and well, Brothers Grimm wasn't it).

A Sound of Thunder is set in the future where time traveling is possible and a company named Time Safari makes money by sending wealthy clients on trips to the past to hunt dinosaurs. The various clients are actually killing the same dinosaur over & over again, so it does not alter the course of time since that particular dinosaur was about to die a natural death. One day, something bad happens during one of these trips to the past and it totally alters the future when the hunters return. As such, the fate of the world (or time) lies in the hands of Travis and his group of adventurers attempt to fix the mess that was caused.

At first, I thought it was a Jurassic Park clone, but then I realized that they weren't chased by dinosaurs in the alternate future. It was ugly-looking babboon mutants. Yup, of all the cool monsters they could have come up with (dragons? wyverns? wolves? Aliens?), they had to model it after a damn monkey. Sorry if I spoilt it for anyone, but that was my only gripe with the movie. If I were a character in the movie, I would've been insulted if I was ravaged to death by mutant monkey thingeys.

It is a good show, though. There is a lot of talk about the ethics of time travel and the sense of urgency is ever present throughout the movie. It keeps the viewers wondering if they will ever succeed in fixing the mess or will they all just perish in their valiant attempts. With the rather pitiful selection of movies in recent weeks, this movie is a good one to take in while you are at the cinemas.