Movie Review: The Jungle Book (2016)

Details: Under two hours long. Stars Neel Sethi, Bill Murray, and Ben Kingsley.

I was not looking to watch this movie at all, but after coming across some positive reviews I decided to give it a chance. I’m glad I did.

This movie is almost a direct retelling of the Jungle Book movie Disney put out in 1967, with some changes which I think were good for the tone of this movie. Firstly, this movie has a more serious tone while still being funny and a children’s movie. There is less singing. The animals are all also much more imposing and definitely scarier. The effects team on this film did a great job. There are also some plot differences from the original film which actually help to move the story along and make it more believable. But at its heart, this is still the same movie.

The actors do a great job. Idris Elba and Scarlett Johansson (even though her role was small) stick out for their performances. Bill Murray, Christopher Walker, and Ben Kingsley basically play themselves as they have often done in prior films.

Visually everything looks greats. The core concept is a real actor plays the boy/protagonist and everything else is generated by computer effects. It works.

Score: 6.9/10 Entertaining film which I can safely recommend to children.

Movie Review: Star Trek Beyond

Of the three Star Trek reboot movies (including Star Trek Beyond), I think the first one is easily the best. When going to see it, there was this anticipation of what J.J. Abrams was going to do with this franchise. What we got was a welcome, modernized re-imagining of Star Trek with a healthy dose of heart. Star Trek: Into Darkness stepped away from that to retread some old ground and retell an old, but fan favorite story. Star Trek Beyond steps even further away from the heart in the 2009 Star Trek film and delivers a films that feels like an episode of the TV series, except with a bigger budget.

The premise is this: the Enterprise crew answer a distress call in an uncharted nebula, then plot twists occur. It’s a basic story.

I feel like there were an inordinate amount of jokes in this movie. Which is fine as long as you throw in the requisite amount of drama to  buttress that. They did not. I walked away from this movie entertained, but ultimately feeling like this was a pointless movie. There was no real overall progression or meaningful character development with the crew.

Some additional notes:

Interesting that Sulu is now officially gay married and has a kid. I’m sure George Takei is happy about that.

Lot of dead red shirts in this movie. Kind of odd how little the primary cast feels so little for these dead extras. Also promotes that TV show feel rather than the feature film feel.

Villain had an interesting plot twist, but not enough to make him matter.

Inclusion of modern music and calling it classical was a nice attempt at a joke that fell flat with my audience.

Special effects were on point. Nice job.

Score: 5.8/10 Ultimately, this was an entertaining movie. In my opinion, there were no narrative reasons for this movie to be made. Clearly a film made just for the money, not because there was a story that needed be told.

Movie Review: Beasts of No Nation

As you can see from the trailer above, Beasts of No Nation seeks to be a film that takes a hard look at child soldiers in Africa. Directed by Cary Fukunaga and produced by Netflix, my expectations were high considering their recent string of hits (Fukunaga directed True Detective season one and Netflix is behind Daredevil and Orange is the New Black).

The film centers on a boy orphaned by war and chronicles his transformation into a child soldier.

It’s a sobering tale. What’s also interesting is what this film attempts to achieve. On the one hand, it is a war movie in the vein of Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, but to a far lesser extant (no one’s charging Normandy beach here). It seeks to take a look at the horror and intensity of war in this part of Africa. Where it differs is that the protagonist soldier who fights this war is a child. And that is very jarring when compared to the old soldiers of World War II.

The actors are all fairly good. Sometimes during the film I felt like the portrayals were fake and superficial, full of overacted bravado. But after further thought, this may be exactly how the participants in this war act. I’ve met criminals in real life, and they weren’t criminal masterminds or heroes doing that last job before they quit their life of crime. They were just people doing things. Those things don’t need to make sense to everyone. The characters fighting in this film often times do horrendous things for seemingly no reason. Beasts of No Nation then, as a film that is based on real events, helps to show that real life is often stranger than fiction (even though this film is fictitious, it still helps show the pointlessness of real life events).

Also worth mentioning are the performances from the children, especially the protagonist played by Abraham Attah. Directing children to put out a performance like this is impressive in any kind of theatrical context and the children here, with this kind of subject matter, were amazing.

Score: 8.0/10 A cold, hard look at a shitty situation. Worth watching. It’s horrific that this happens in the real world and that it is probably more violent and grotesque than what was portrayed in this film.