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I am famously not a huge Zack Snyder fan. I liked Man of Steel for what it was when I first saw it – I think I was just excited that we finally had a modern Superman movie that wasn’t straight up boring – but in recent years have grown much cooler on it, I HATED Batman v. Superman with such a passion that I refuse to ever watch it again, even as an academic exercise, and I thought Justice League (the theatrical version) was better than BvS, but still a pretty horrible movie overall. I also felt that the only parts of the original theatrical cut I liked were pretty clearly the ones reshot by Joss Whedon, a guy whose work I still like quite a bit, but who I, personally, given recent (and, let’s be honest, not so recent) allegations, now believe to be a gigantic scumbag.

That being said, he made Superman smile and save people, and really that’s enough for me to say he did okay with the parameters he was given. Not good enough to justify the apparent abuse he subjected the cast and crew to, but I digress. This isn’t a review of Joss Whedon as a human being, this is a review of a movie, a movie now very definitively called “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” because Warner Bros, HBOMax, and Snyder himself all want it to be abundantly clear to whom all credit (and blame) can be attributed to this time around.

So with all that being said, with four years of obnoxious and abusive fan campaigns, an additional $70 million in reshoots and CGI, and a runtime double that of the original movie, how is Zack Snyder’s Justice League? Is it worth all the hype, drama, and controversy?

When I go to see a film for the first time, I do my best to go in with as few expectations and preconceived notions and/or biases as possible. Even if I’ve seen most of the trailers or TV spots or even read somebody else’s review and feel like I have a good sense whether or not I’m likely to enjoy the movie before seeing it, once I’m sitting in the theater and the lights dim, I’m generally able to push all of that aside and judge the film based on its own merits and decide whether or not I believe it accomplished whatever it is the film appeared to be trying to accomplish. In other words, as best as I can, I attempt to be as objective as humanly possible when judging a movie – this is how, for example, I can watch a film like Call Me By Your Name, be completely bored for the entirety of its runtime, and still come out of it having decided that it is definitely a good film, just not one that I personally enjoyed.

With that in mind, it was extremely difficult to try to remain objective about Ready Player One, on both the negative and positive sides of the spectrum. For one thing, I’m already not a fan of the source material, having attempted to read it earlier this year and almost immediately putting it back down once I realized that about half of the dialogue was going to be the narrator listing things he likes from the 80s. I have the same problem with this that I do with the sitcom The Big Bang Theory and Buzzfeed listicles; it just feels like the author is going through the motions of nerdy pop culture appreciation because that’s what’s “in” right now, rather than actually exploring why people like these things or taking a second to be creative enough to use that pop culture and turn it into something new. It’s the nerd equivalent of one of those Scary Movie knock-offs from the mid-00s, where merely acknowledging that something exists somehow constitutes a joke (“Hey look it’s Lindsay Lohan! You know who that is!”), or in this case takes the place of actual substance and/or heart. And so, I was – perhaps understandably – worried that the movie was going to end up being the 2 1/2 hour equivalent of this brilliant little video from RedLetterMedia mocking Rogue One.

Thankfully, that isn’t the case. Although the movie is certainly stuffed with references and easter eggs – a couple of which specifically hit me right where I live, thanks in no small part to composer Alan Silvestri reusing one of his most iconic pieces – most of them are smartly tucked away in the background as Spielberg refocuses the narrative back to where it should be: on the characters and the story. To that end, he takes the basic plot from the book – a sort of riff on Charlie & The Chocolate Factory where an eccentric genius (Mark Rylance) agrees to hand over his fortune and the keys to his factory… err, highly advanced MMO video game… to the first person to clear three super secret challenges – and reimagines it so that the challenges are no longer so much focused on knowing key pieces of pop culture trivia as they are about understanding the man who built them and where he feels he failed in his life. This adds a much needed human core to the whole proceeding, making moments such as when the Iron Giant gets into a big kaiju battle that ends in a blatant Terminator homage – which would feel like empty pandering in any other film – that much more acceptable. It also helps that when the big fanboy-baity moments do happen, they’re brought to life with a certain winking charm and reverence that it’s hard not to get swept up in how gosh darn cool it all is. In particular, there’s one sequence that everyone is already talking about from late in the second act that is pretty clearly just Spielberg taking a few moments to emulate and honor one of his own biggest inspirations, and the film is all the better for it.

Taken as a whole, Ready Player One is not the best film of Spielberg’s career. It’s not the best sci-fi film released so far this year, probably won’t be remembered as the best blockbuster of the year, and isn’t even the best pop culture mash-up film ever made thanks to The Lego Movie having already done pretty much everything this movie did a million times better four years ago. But, that all being said, I’d be lying if I said the movie wasn’t a hell of a lot of fun. It’s like an eager-to-please vaudeville performer, pulling out all the stops to try to make you like it, and I’d be surprised if pretty much everyone who goes to see it doesn’t find at least one moment that puts a huge doofy grin on their faces. And the fact that it’s able to do this while turning its Watch Mojo-wannabe source material into something with a beating human heart? That’s something almost worth celebrating.

I give Ready Player One 6 “XXXXXXXXXX-WINGS!” out of 8.

The Planet Of The Apes reboot franchise is such a crazy anomaly in the current blockbuster landscape that I still can’t completely wrap my head around its very existence. From its inception with 2011’s Rise, the concept of not only bringing back a sci-fi franchise with such a goofy premise, but one that had already had an attempted and failed resurrection just ten years earlier, and taking it completely seriously just seemed… wrong. And yet, while Rise certainly isn’t a perfect movie – and, indeed, is now far and away the trilogy’s weakest entry – it works. Continue reading “War For The Planet Of The Apes Review”

Spider-Man has had an interesting cinematic life. The original Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire take on the character can largely be credited with the popularization of the superhero movie as a genre in the early 2000s. The final movie in that trilogy, the much maligned (and criminally underrated in my mind) Spider-Man 3, was released in 2007, just one year before Iron Man and The Dark Knight both showed up and completely changed the game in terms of what superhero movies could be. Then The Amazing Spider-Man franchise came in as a fairly transparent cash-grab, first trying to ape The Dark Knight‘s dark and gritty realism in a movie where the main villain is a giant lizard who wants to turn other people into giant lizards, then trying to create its own cinematic universe in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, a film with so many unnecessary and unresolved plot lines shoved into it that it almost rivals Batman v. Superman in terms of raw incoherence. Continue reading “Spider-Man: Homecoming Review”

To say I have not been a fan of the recent DC movies would be an understatement. Up until now, I have personally held the view that the DC Extended Universe films have been an unmitigated disaster: in their failure to build compelling characters, their failure to honor the spirit and tone of the source material, and their failure to craft what can even be described as “coherent movies.” The best of the three, 2013’s Man of Steel, is a jumbled mess of randomly placed flashbacks, over-bearing and destructive fight scenes, and speeches about humanity and morality that sound good coming out of seasoned actors like Kevin Costner’s mouth… but make absolutely no goddamn sense when you think about them. The worst of the three, last year’s Batman v. Superman, is best described as a “crime against humanity.” Suffice it to say, I was not looking forward to seeing any more entries in this franchise. Not even the prospect of a Joss Whedon Batgirl movie gave me hope; instead it just left me confused. Why on earth would Joss jump onto the Titanic? As it turns out, the answer may be that somebody showed him a screening of Wonder Woman. Continue reading “Wonder Woman Review”

Sequels are one of the hardest types of movie to get right, doubly so when the original movie was a smash hit in part for being original and groundbreaking and unique. On the successful end of that equation, you have movies like Empire Strikes Back, Spider-Man 2, Toy Story 2, and Marvel’s own Captain America: The Winter Soldier, all movies that cashed in on the success of their predecessor by doubling down on the characters while allowing themselves to be largely very different movies in style and plot. On the opposite end, you have movies like Ghostbusters 2 and Men in Black II that shamelessly rehashed the originals in an attempt to capture lightning in a bottle twice; meandering studio-noted messes like Iron Man 2 that tried to do something different but ultimately weren’t allowed to go different enough; and, of course, ego-driven “bigger is better” affairs like the Star Wars prequels, The Hobbit trilogy, and both Matrix sequels. Continue reading “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Review”