Movie Review: Chappie, Jupiter Ascending, Dawn of the Apes, Divergent

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

Foreword

Each of these big blockbuster movies answers this question in different ways. Perhaps it's a byproduct of our postmodern culture's existentialist angst, but the big-screen movies these days seem to be doing a lot of the following: taking stock of fundamental questions of human nature, civilization, consciousness, matters of right and wrong, etc. If you're watching the action flicks for imagination fodder, you won't be disappointed, but you may miss the overarching plot.

Allow me to invent/define some terms for the sake of this review:

The "plot" is the obvious problem that is directly presented to the audience.
The "sub-plot" is any theme with importance but which may appear to be a distraction at first, since its connection to the plot isn't immediately clear (and if there is no connection, the flow of the movie suffers).
The "meta-plot" is the implicit, overarching theme that the movie makes reference to without ever explicitly addressing. Basically, if you pick out the theme, and ask "what would this cause the characters to be concerned about, or do?" then you have the meta-plot.

Example:
Plot: Simba grows up orphaned and has to somehow right the wrongs that his uncle Scar has perpetrated on the African Savannah.
Subplot: Simba's relationships with his father, Nala, Timon/Pumba and other characters.
Meta-plot: the quest to figure out what's important in life / growing up, becoming a man. Whereas the theme is "manhood," the meta-plot could be summed up as "Simba has to discover something in himself (a sense of duty/honor), and/or find his purpose in life, which will drive him to confront Scar, and help him win."

And the import of the meta-plot is communicated more through the subplot than the main plot. If all you're doing is following along CBS-tv-drama-style, you'll know why the characters are going from one place to the next and such, but you won't grasp the significance, and come away with the real message (intentional or unintentional from the director's/producer's standpoint) of the film.

Let's dive in.

****            ****            ****            ****

Introduction

The last 4 [not-yet-reviewed by yours truly] sci-fi movies I remember watching all had a common theme, explored in very different ways. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes answered the question, "what does it mean to be human?" through exploring the human-like qualities of the fictional ape characters. Chappie asks the question "what is consciousness?" by exploring the journey of learning of a robot, who rapidly traverses formative childhood and copes with the innate badness of human beings as he "grows up." Jupiter Ascending asks, "what is the worth of a society?" or "what makes life worth living?" and answers it through the parallelism of a jaded teenager who feels like she's wasting her life cleaning toilets, compared to jaded interstellar aristocrats who seem to live for nothing but to keep on living. Lastly, Divergent asks whether conformity is necessary for social stability, and asks if suppressing individuality through human government is a) possible or b) promotes peace, or tyranny.

Each film seems to invite the suggestion that how one responds to struggle is what reveals--or defines--one's humanity, and since without struggle, there is no plot, let's investigate the central struggles of these four films.

Last call for spoiler warnings

Review: Fury

It fits easily on the (imaginary) shelf of war-movies I'd like to have as reference for future teenagers to help them understand the severe reality of a world in conflict beyond our present scope of peaceful experience. The only difference between this and other movies I've seen is that you see a lot of the inside of a tank.

As usual, my reviews are almost always plot-spoilers by default.

Fury

Could also have been called: Crouching King Tiger, Hidden Panzerwagen

 "That's an SS officer. You kill every one of them you can."

Synopsis: A green-as-grass private gets tapped as a replacement to be the front-gunner in a tank with hardened soldiers, and becomes the only survivor of a one-against-hundreds standoff against an SS platoon.

There's not much to say, so I'll start with basics:

* no sexual nudity. However, numerous references to sexuality and implicit intercourse, mostly confined to a few scenes in particular after a town had been liberated from the Nazis
* of course, there's cursing. Less of it than in Gone Girl, for comparison (Gone Girl was far more profane than most war movies I've seen).
** A younger child might not pick up on the sexuality. But a younger child shouldn't be watching it for the sake of the gruesome deaths depicted, unless (my opinion) he's already been exposed to it through school or other children or the secular media. The longer you can keep them innocent, the better. Pre teens/early teens are probably the most appropriate age (given the culture we're in) to begin showing war movies to.
* there's a few psychologically intense aggressive scenes. Brad Pitt's character forces the rookie to execute a German soldier, and Jon Bernthal's character slaps the rookie around right after the Nazis bomb the town they were in.

That last part is pretty much the main thing I want to highlight. All other aspects of the movie are interesting in the sense of warfare tactics and getting a broader concept of the dynamics of a prolonged invasion. But the middle of the movie was a bit confusing, initially. Almost like a detour.

Brad Pitt and the rookie go visit with a woman and her cousin (who he sees through a window) and the film devotes many minutes to a real-time portrayal of the tension when they first arrive, to Pitt washing himself, and to setting the table and eating. The rest of the tank crew comes in and act upset that they were left out, and misbehave in various 'passive'-aggressive ways. Michael Peña's character tells a story about how it took them three days to bury the dead and shoot horses amid flies on a battlefield earlier in the war. Jon Bernthal's character tells the rookie he should "share" the girl he met, which Pitt replies to by threatening to break his teeth. Bernthal then spits on the girl's food. Much of the cinematography shows awkward silences. Nevertheless, it was clearly intended to show that the rookie and the girl made friends, and had a bit of pleasantness and hope amid the war, to be uplifted by.

And then as soon as they walk outside, artillery or rockets impact the town and the girl is buried, clearly dead, in the rubble of her building. Rookie loses it, screaming and punching Bernthal's character who almost selflessly, in a strange way, instigates him to punch him in the face, and then grabs him tight and shouts in his ear, "that's WAR!"

While it likely wasn't Pitt's character's expectation that they would die, his choices and Bernthal's seemed to conspire to make the rookie suffer loss so that he would become battle-hardened like they, and finally want to kill Germans.

That seemed to be the purpose for the uncomfortably long dinner scene. As setting the backdrop for, and helping the audience empathize with, the rookie's loss so that they would understand his anger, and so that they would understand the hatred/will to fight that drove the tank crew to risk their lives to kill their enemies so that others would have the chance to live.

Viscerally feeling disgust and anger over the evil things others do is one way war movies (and to some extent action movies, but usually less confrontationally) do to help you get into the mindset and understand that an action is justified, or at least rational. Fury did this effectively, on a very personal scale.

~ Rak Chazak

PS As an afterthought, this was the only example I've seen in years of a secular movie making a distinction between going to church and being saved. It's right there in the dialogue when "Bible," Shia LaBeouf's character, first meets the rookie. It might surprise you to see it on the screen. If it turned out that it didn't do superbly at the box office, then I would suspect the open religious language between the characters to be the most likely culprit. In this society, no one wants to see people quote Bible verses as if it's a reliable document. They want to see bad guys misquote Scripture so they can hate them better, they don't want them to use Isaiah to comfort each other before a battle in which they would likely die. That's my suspicion.

Review: The Hunger Games, Mockingjay Part 1

I caught the last half of the first Hunger Games movie as a flatmate was watching it on Netflix one day, in my last year of college (first go-round). When the second film, Catching Fire, came out, I included it in a multiple-movie review I posted here. I realized that it was serving as an introduction to propaganda and deception to young people who may not have ever read Orwell's Animal Farm or 1984, let alone studied the politics of Communism in school. The last century of American -- and World -- history is a black hole for many people, seeing as the public education system goes up to the Great Depression and stops there.

That's why these films interest me, and I've been curious to see what sort of messages they're sending, subtly or overtly, to their fans.

The Hunger Games III: Mockingjay Part One

Could have been called: 1984, by Sun Tzu

POLI 201: Propaganda in Warfare

Synopsis: An unwilling hero learns how to fight with words rather than bow and arrow.

Observation One:

The dystopia is far more openly acknowledged now than in the first two movies. You had to look a little closer to catch hints that the characters were "on to" the fact that they lived in a tyrannical serfdom run by a centralized autocratic police state. It should have been obvious that something was wrong, and felt uncomfortable, but if you're not thinking about what you're seeing, you can miss it. Not so much in this movie. The rebellion is openly talked about and you see vivid examples of atrocities committed by the Capitol.

This is good. For the less conscious viewers, even if they're just floating along with the narrative, they should get something out of it. The Capitol's actions will come as more or less of a surprise based on your relative youth and experience or knowledge of totalitarianism, in fiction or reality. Naivete is best dealt with through shock. The film does a fair job at delivering on that.

Observation Two:

You don't get to control your heroes. Once you choose them, don't expect them to follow your script.

There is a scene where District 13(?)'s leadership is attempting to film a propaganda video with Katniss, the main character. They give her a script to speak and it comes out awkwardly wooden, with no heart to it. Woody Harrelson's character stands up and explains that he thinks the moments that made everyone love Katniss in the past were unscripted, when she did what was natural to her. So their solution to generating an Agitprop clip was to send Katniss to an actual conflict area. Subsequent to witnessing an atrocious act by the Capitol, she passionately delivers one of the most memorable dialogue sequences in the film.

It's true in politics, it's true in war, it's true in everyday life. And it's nowhere more true than in the case of putting your faith in Christ. No matter what foolish people may try to do, or other foolish people might accuse Christians of doing, no one gets to tell God what to do. No one can put Him in a box, or give Him a script to follow. Once you decide to stop trying to be God for yourself, you've let go of your chance to run the show. Now it's your turn to follow the leader. And the leader might not do things you expect or want them to do. The leader might require things of you that make you uncomfortable. That is the nature of following a hero.

This means that (lesson one) you need to be very careful who you select for yourselves as your heroes and leaders.

When you give someone power and influence, (speaking of humans here) you can't take it back easily. They can do lots of good or lots of bad in the mean time. And as for God, whom you don't give power, but merely submit to -- when you give your life over to Him, you don't get "takebacks." Your life is set to change dramatically and it might surprise or upset you, but you need to acknowledge that you don't have control, and stop resisting. You made your decision, and now you must follow through, so follow your Leader.

Observation Three:

The final observation is simply a reflection on the fact that the police force/military in The Hunger Games is composed of soldiers in white armor called "peacekeepers." Their primary function seems to be beating, executing, and shooting people in the back. For those who haven't read 1984, it's reminiscent of "Newspeak," where the government of Oceania attempted to manipulate and redefine the English language to limit how people were able to think or speak about things. Calling soldier-hitmen "peacekeepers" is an attempt to force every reference to them to imply that they are good, helpful, useful, important, and not at all a negative force. Talking about them in a way that suggests they are evil requires extra effort. But for the people who are aware of the truth, every reference to a word like "peacekeeper" is carried on a wave of sarcasm, and thereby undergoes still further alterations of meaning.

When words are used in a certain way extensively, then by way of gaining that association as their primary meaning, they lose their secondary (or even what used to be their primary) definitions. In the end, other words must be used to refer to something with the same intention that the now altered word originally conveyed.

Gay used to mean happy, lighthearted. No one uses it to mean that anymore.
Awesome used to mean terrible, frightening, and yes, awe-inducing. But most don't use it that way anymore.
Likewise, terrible used to mean causing fear, not necessarily something bad. You could describe yourself as terrible if you wanted to present yourself as an imposing figure.
The justice system is the place where people go to seek justice. But it doesn't always dispense it -- so there's a sense in which one could refer to it in sarcastic tones.
Girlfriend -- a friend who's a girl, right? No, now it almost always connotes a sexual partner.
Politically charged terms, like 'free market,' 'social security,' 'birth control,' 'husband and wife,' 'peace treaty,' etc all contain examples that someone could well argue do not represent what the word implies.

Something to think about. How are words changing, and why?

~ Rak Chazak

Review: The Hobbit, Battle of the Five Armies

I will try my hardest to keep my posts short, if only so that I can post them before I run out of time (a guy's got to sleep, you know). I have three short points to make.

The Hobbit III: Battle of the Five Armies

Could have been called: Big Ideas As Displayed By Little People

Aesop's Fables meets World of Warcraft

 Synopsis: A self-obsessed Dwarf king and self-righteous Elven king almost completely lose sight of everything that's really important in life.

Observation One:

Thorin Oakenshield gets struck with what's figuratively referred to by the old dwarf as "Dragon Sickness," which is apparently a literary device of JRR Tolkien's to represent hubris (greed borne of pride). He becomes obsessed with his own greatness and riches, and begins to see everyone around him as an enemy, a threat. He singlemindedly pursues the 'heart of the mountain,' ignoring the welfare of needy refugees and foolishly attempting to fight off an army of Elves with only 13 people (is that term applicable to dwarves? I'm not that into the lore).

It serves, through Bilbo and Dwalin's perception of him, as a poignant (and almost awkwardly lengthy, in terms of screen time) reflection of how people around us -- or ourselves -- can become self-destructively prideful in pursuit of greatness, glory, power, autonomy -- whatever you see the Heart of the Mountain as representing.

But the best part was the way Thorin recovers. Many other movies have done poorly with portraying a character who's fallen into a ditch, typically showing a spontaneous and total conversion upon the sudden realization of a one-liner that another character conveniently spoke to them at just the right moment. Reality is nothing like that. What the Hobbit did better was to show the character's transformation as taking place within his own mind. Ultimately, other people can only support you, but repentance is something that happens on an individual level. Thorin is walking in the hall of the castle and multiple thoughts are shown going through his head. The cinematography represents the collective weight of these as guiding him to a realization and awareness of what he's done wrong, and as he feels sincere remorse over it, he is shown seeing himself sinking into a pit. The best thing the director did was to, without any dialogue, have Thorin grab his crown in disgust and throw it down.

That is the root truth. Repentance and restoration comes from dethroning ourselves as the kings of our own lives. Thorin Oakenshield fancied himself a great king now that he had a crown, but Dwalin said that "you have always been my king," and that now he had become something shameful. When Thorin's life had been about a greater purpose than himself (reclaiming his people's heritage), he had been a lightning rod for his friends to rally in support of. But when he thought that because he wore a crown, that he now had authority, and his purpose became to seek his own ends, then his friends were grieved.

The symbolism is apparent; we become restored as heirs to the kingdom when we cease trying to be king and put others before ourselves. At the end, Thorin sacrificed his life to fight the enemy, laying it down for the sake of his friends. That's not to equate the character with a Christ-figure. Tolkien, catholic though he was, differed from C S Lewis's more overt Christian themes and in his own stories attempted to bury them more deeply in the narrative. Being willing to give ourselves for others is a theme consistent with Biblical Christianity, without needing to pigeon-hole the characters in LOTR or the Hobbit as representing Jesus or Satan.

Observation Two:

When Thorin lies dying, he calls Bilbo his true friend. In context, Bilbo had found the heart of the mountain and hidden it from Thorin, and then sneaked out of the castle and given it to Thorin's arch rival, the Elf lord Thranduil. Bilbo's hope had been that when Thranduil would offer it to Thorin, the latter would be willing to give aid to the refugees and return the treasures belonging to Thranduil in return for that which he wanted so badly.

As it turns out, Thorin refused, showing that pride is always stronger than greed. The desire to have things is really an outgrowth of the desire to have power, which is an expression of the desire to be in charge, make the rules, be your own King... Only somebody who's willing to step off the throne can be reasoned with.

At the end, Thorin gratefully acknowledged Bilbo's trustworthy friendship. He had not been a 'yes man,' doing what would make Thorin happy, or doing what would evade his wrath. He had been willing to risk his hatred, or even death, to do the right thing. Whereas I suspect neither Tolkien nor Peter Jackson had this intent in mind, I saw this as easily representative of the fact that telling someone the truth -- i.e. the Gospel when they don't want to hear it -- is always the right thing to do, and if they are later converted, they will be grateful that you did the hard thing and stood against them and were not willing to compromise.

Observation Three:

The dynamic between elves and dwarves has served in the Lord of the Rings series to provide commentary on how people from different social classes, cultures or "races" could initially have animosity toward each other but eventually come to see each other as friends and respect each other despite coming from or going to very different places.

The fact of elves being functionally immortal (living tens of thousands of years if not prematurely killed in battle) made for interesting analysis of some things Thranduil said with respect to Kili and Tauriel's budding romance. At one point in particular, he told her it wouldn't be worth it for her to go after him to save him, because since he was mortal, he would die anyway, indicating that he thought her efforts were futile. A similar dialogue occurs regarding Galadriel and Aragorn in the LOTR movies. "They are mortal."

Again, it's not a perfect analogy, and I'm not trying to construct one. What I have been doing here has been to use themes in the movies to stimulate contemplation of similar themes in the nonfiction world. In this case, the comparison of dwarves, elves and men on the basis of mortality and disposition makes me think of the differences between the Gentiles, Jews and the Saints as described by Romans 9-11. In reality there is overlap. More similar to the movie, in reality we all interact, even though we note differences between each other.

Elves (saints) and humans (gentiles, incl. professing believers) are superficially similar, whereas dwarves (Jews) are obviously different from both, as well as withdrawn, stubborn and consumed with yearning for the return of their long-ago glories. Men and dwarves are both quite capable of forming romances with Elves, but because only the Elves are immortal, romances with non-elves are guaranteed to result in a long separation, and the knowledge of their mortality induces heartbreak even before their death occurs. Thranduil (compare to a Christian who has no compassion for the Lost) rightly discourages Tauriel from pursuing romance with a dwarf ("a house divided against itself cannot stand"), but he does it with no love in his voice. At the end of the film, it seems as if he has a bit of a wake-up call, a hint of temporal redemption for himself, when Tauriel says "why does it (love--or the loss of a loved one) hurt so much?" and he replies, "because it was real." Perhaps the lesson here is that even if a lifelong love -- marriage -- cannot be, that does not mean that those who are promised immortality should not love or show love to strangers, those who are outside their earthly or heavenly society.

If you as a Christian watch the movies again, and put yourself in the shoes of the often snotty and self-righteous, self-concerned Elves ("the elves are for the elves," to borrow from a twist on a C S Lewis' Narnia line) and imagine the dialogue between elves and dwarves, or elves and men, to be as dialogue between a saved Christian and unsaved of various stripes, then it might be uniquely convicting for you, or at least very thoughtful, in ways you may or may not have already perceived.

That's the thought I leave you with.

~ Rak Chazak

Review: Gone Girl and The Imitation Game

I'm initiating a blogging blitz. I have a dozen+ subjects that have stacked up over the month or two past, and if I don't get them out of my system, it'll be too distant to write about. That sadly happened with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which is still in the back of my mind but I never got the chance to write anything for. So the next several posts will be short, or so I shall attempt.

Gone Girl

Could have also been called, "How to Frame Your Husband for Murder and Get Away With It."

Synopsis: A cautionary tale against marrying a psychopath.

Verbatim from my notes:
"Other than being original from the standpoint of plot, there was really nothing to take away from it that would make it worth seeing, especially for the Christian. The nicest thing I can say for it is that it very effectively serves as a cautionary tale against marrying someone you don't know, or having extramarital sex. And for the aspiring murderous female psychopaths, it will come across as a documentary on "how to stage your own murder and get someone else to take the blame."

More worrying is perhaps the instructions on how to fake evidence for rape. Just another in the list of hundreds of reasons why the Biblical model for relationships is superior.

At the bottom line, you'll have many young women concluding "she was justified, he deserved it," in much the same disturbing way that I've heard people try to sympathize with the fictional character Saw in the horror franchise of the same name. Why do they rationalize this? Because they sympathize with the main character, and therefore don't want to see their actions as wrong, or because they can't comprehend how "good" people could experience such suffering. They fail to realize the truth, that not only does everybody deserve far worse than that, because none of us are remotely good, and at the same time, none of us deserve to be treated that way by our fellow human beings, because all of us are image bearers of God and therefore deserve to be treated with dignity by others, no matter how despicable we happen to be. There! A Christian comparison.

Conclusion: Do not watch, on account of unnecessary (and gratuitous) sex and cursing
---

The Imitation Game

I have very little to say about this, save that for once there was a film without female nudity, though it does deal with sexuality -- however it's done maturely, perhaps influenced by the time period it seeks to portray, and likely wouldn't be comprehended by young children. There are references to sexual relationships but not in a graphic or vulgar way, so -- unless you're British -- there shouldn't be anything to overtly offend the senses.

Aside from the unnecessary plot holes/additions, as mentioned here, it was well done. Probably one of the safer award-nominees to allow yourself to watch.

I have little to add that wouldn't be a plot spoiler, and since the movie's worth watching for how the producers dealt with the subjects I have in mind, I will leave it here and not go into more depth.

~ Rak Chazak

Brief Review of Interstellar

I grabbed the first Redbox movie in a long while and watched it earlier this week.

Interstellar is a film that thrives on making the special effects scientifically accurate -- there's no sound in space, waves are caused by the gravity of a nearby spacial body, mechanical equipment can tolerate lots of stress and collision damage but depressurization catastrophically tears it apart, the sensation of gravity in space must be generated by angular rotation, areas of high gravity play havoc with our straight-line perception of the surrounding space, bigger black holes are better black holes because they won't spaghettify you, the relativity of time is significant when spending time near high gravity ("every hour on the surface is 7 years back on earth" / "this little maneuver will cost us 51 years!"), etc.

The film also leans heavily on the human drama, with success. By that I mean that unlike many sci-fi epics, it doesn't feel forced, or added-on as an afterthought to please the crowd, but that it holds a central role without being uncomfortable or distracting from the plot. Indeed, the human drama is what drives the plot: resource scarcity on earth is what drives Matt McConaughey's father character to take a risk in order to make a better life for his children.

PROs:

• no sexuality. Not even kissing between the main characters, except one shot in the end between Jessica Chastain and Topher Grace, intended as humor and not depicted sensually
• no grotesque violence. The violence in the film is realistic and restrained, hardly characterizing the film but punctuating it at key moments to emphasize the heightened tension, if you somehow missed Hans Zimmer's mood-setting organ music.
• very little hint of any political punditry underwriting the plot -- considering that the director is Christoper Nolan, whose Batman movies have had such great success, I suspect, because of their distinct tendency to avoid promoting Hollywood Liberalism, it makes sense; I think, whatever his personal views are, that he's got a keen sense for the sort of messages that turn off or turn on a broad American audience.
• the closest thing to it is a government-issued textbook a public school teacher describes to McConaughey's character, as being 'corrected,' to show that the moon-landing was faked in order to bankrupt the Russians by making them waste resources on an imaginary space race. This is a very limited dialogue, and it leaves no one a glaringly obvious hint as to whether the censorship is supposed to be more consistent with a Republican or Democrat ideology.
• As for the setting, there is a hint that there was a global conflict some years or decades earlier, and that as a side-effect, it damaged global crops to the point that society reverted to become primarily automated, mechanized subsistence farming-based. It's implied that it's several decades if not a century or two in the future, but not too far, because historical events like the Dust Bowl and moon landing are referenced. The film avoids making statements that could be interpreted as overtly 'peacenik' or environmentalist, and thus succeeds at being a cautionary tale that's vague enough for anyone to import their own ideas into, as to what could be done to stop it. However, the line about "repeating the excess/wastefulness of the 20th century" is something that viewers might variably agree with or find just cause to label the teacher character as representative of their political opponents.
• The science is accurate. Assumptions are made about things that we don't know enough about, such as the nature of wormholes and black holes, and a few other things (mentioned below), but nothing that we know from physics is controverted. This makes it a better film than most, for an authenticity-hound like myself.
• Robots work the way they're supposed to.
• It promotes selfless sacrifice of oneself for others, and condemns the premeditated dismissive 'sacrifice' of some others for the sake of other others.
• It highlights the bonds of family and by cutting and scoring, present loving relationships as being one of if not the strongest driver to persevere in the face of difficulty.
• True to its departure from other space movies, and in part because it's more like Apollo 13 than Aliens, it doesn't start with 20 cast members and slowly kill them off until there's two left. The deaths are fewer and therefore more significant in terms of moving the plot, or providing closure on a subplot.

CONs:

Movie Review: Hercules ft. Dwayne Johnson, and Edge of Tomorrow

I used my day off to take scrap garbage to the landfill, and watch two movies from Redbox back-to-back. The $2.50 for two movies is sweet, sweet free market delight. I might never go to the movie theater again, save once a year for auspicious occasions. Let the lowest-priced DVD-quality video provider win.

Hercules:

What I liked: With the exception of one flash-back of his wife, there really wasn't any sexual innuendo aside from wordplay that younger children would miss.

What I really liked: The movie avoided cliche'd supernatural cinematic overtures, and left the question of Hercules' mythology largely ambiguous. The movie even ends with a narration asking whether Hercules was more myth than man and whether it mattered; The Rock doesn't do anything that's necessarily impossible, just in two scenes he performs deeds that seem highly, highly improbable, which I suppose are included to offer the viewer something to grumble about--whether it indicates superhuman strength or not. In the legend of Hercules, Zeus' jealous wife Hera possesses Hercules to murder his family, driving him mad. But in the movie, it's part of a very human, larger plot twist that plays an integral role in the theme of who the man is, where he stops and the myth begins.

What might make you think: I appreciated that the film offered a "mythologically accurate" retelling while at the same time eschewing the cliche's and offering you a suggestion of how it might have happened if there were no gods or demons involved at all, just larger-than-life men who inspired embellished storytelling for one reason or another. I also appreciated that for once, this was directed at an actual myth, and not like so many modern movies, an attempt to undermine the Bible's account of history by recasting it as an after-the-fact hagiographical depiction of a much different reality.

It's a war movie, so there's blood and depictions of dead bodies, implied just-barely-off-screen breaking of bones, and intense emotional grief/anger, on people's faces as well as in the audio, so it's not a fairy tale movie but because of its lack of sex and obscene gore, as well as comparatively minimal profanity, it should be fine to watch with your preteen.

Edge of Tomorrow:                  (Groundhog Day, or Source Code, with guns and aliens)

Movie Reviews: Guardians of the Galaxy, Catching Fire, 47 Ronin, and More…

Redbox has become a middle road between the convenience of Netflix and the tangibility of what once was Blockbuster. Do you remember Blockbuster? It was a movie library, where you could go and peruse the classics on the shelves as well as pick up the new releases advertised around the wall. This was how I saw Terminator as late as 2008. But the internet era killed Blockbuster. The prices for rentals and the 7-day return was a relic of a pre-internet era. I mean, most of the movies were in VHS format! After this, my family finally joined the 21^st century and got ourselves a DVD player. Now a new contender has popped up, taking advantage of the ease of storage of DVDs and securing a reliable business model with one-day rental, allowing the prices to be low, ensuring customer loyalty. Redbox has become an overnight hit and I see them everywhere. There are at least five that I’m aware of in my town, at gas stations and supermarkets, but there are probably several more, and we’ve definitely taken up the habit of bringing home a movie in the evening some days and returning it the next morning after watching it. The calculus is too appealing to forgo: I can go to the movies and pay $8 for a ticket, $13 for 3D, and double that price if I’m paying for another person because I’m treating them. Compare this to the $1.20 price (increased once, so far, after starting at a flat rate of $1) of any DVD at Redbox. I can watch every single blockbuster of a single year for the price of taking me and one other person to the movies. This leaves plenty of room for snacks, not to mention that I can choose when to watch it, which is a convenience not afforded by small theaters, and it offers the opportunity to watch a broader range of movies than I might otherwise bother to go to theaters for. I would suspect that Redbox has therefore been a boon to independent films, and films that don’t get wide releases or make it to the aforementioned small theaters. In summary: all but one of the following I have watched on a Redbox rental, the sole exception being Guardians of the Galaxy, which we had to stay up til 9:30 for the latest showing, getting out around midnight, all just to avoid giving 3D a chance to ruin it for us. I don’t need 3D gimmicks to tell me that Object X is in front of Object Y. My eyes’ depth perception works just fine with a flat image, and the 3D glasses make the picture less sharp, which is my biggest irritation with it. A useless gimmick is one thing, but for it to reduce the picture quality? Why am I paying more for this, again?!

On to the reviews!

I determined that I could group some of the observations I made from these into different categories. Seeing everything through a lens of Christian theology is making me pick up on intriguing themes, whether intentional or unintentional as far as the director/producers are concerned. Some of the movies have little applicable themes, like Lone Survivor, which since it was made to be an accurate retelling doesn’t try to go outside of its realm, artistically speaking. The Last Days on Mars is another example of one without any sort of Christian parallels, seeing as it was (to my surprise) a good old-fashioned space zombies horror thriller. I’m honest with this and if I don’t pick up on something that I consider poignant, I won’t try to pigeonhole a movie to mean something it doesn’t. Yet, several of the movies were fascinating in this regard. Others were just good because they didn’t have “unnecessary gratuitous boobies” or suchlike.

There will be some spoilers.
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