holabendez blog

A 3D movie involving Sam Worthington riding a majestic flying beast to save the day – what’s not to like? It’s no Avatar but Clash of the Titans moves along at a brisk pace, foregoing inefficient movie elements like character and plot development for more substantial meatier things like set piece action sequences and rapid pacing. I loved it for that. I don’t quite know if it was intentional but the movie employs a standard Hollywood standard of making Ancient Greeks sound British, whereas the demi-god Perseus, who is neither human, nor god, not necessarily Greek, but something else, gets a good old Aussie accent. A great touch.

The effects are great, the action is intense. Even the scene with Liam Neeson roaring “Release the Krakken!” which will obviously go down in movie history as one of the cheesiest moments in film, seemed kind of rad to me. The 3D is clearly an afterthought, and is unfortunately a weak attempt to make viewers pony up extra money when the film was clearly not originally shot for 3D but rather altered in post production. The quality of the 3D suffers for it, but it’s a minor quibble for an otherwise great fun film.

Four stars.

Wow, I feel like I have watched a movie from the future. Not just a film set in the future, but a movie FROM the future. I don’t want to over state things, but after seeing this film, I know that movies will never be the same again. I saw this movie in IMAX 3D, and it was a visual experience unlike anything I have ever experienced before. Visually the movie was absolutely amazing. It is beautiful, it is mind blowing, it is the sort of movie that only James Cameron could make.

From a story point of view it is not exactly original. Thematically I felt like I had seen a lot of it before in both “The Last of the Mohicans” and “Dances with Wolves”, both entirely excellent films. Now imagine those films set in the future, with amazing special effects, in 3D and with some awesome kick ass action scenes – that should hopefully give you an idea of how good this film is.

It is a long film, over three hours long – but it tells such a grand, epic story, you couldn’t do the movie justice being any shorter. Cameron creates a world so wonderous, so beautiful, you are never bored, and you are always amazed.

Would I be gushing so much if I hadn’t seen it in glorious IMAX 3D? Not sure, I’ll tell you when I go see it again, probably for the fourth or fifth time, after seeing it another two more times in IMAX.

The future is now, and god damn it’s beautiful. Five stars.

I’m now in no doubt, the Terminator series ended, and ended well at Terminator 2. Man, that was a good film. I was unsure about whether or not Terminator 3 was necessary, but after watching Terminator Salvation, I’m now sure that everything since T2 was redundant.

Like Live Free or Die Hard, this fourth film in the series has none of the qualities that made the previous movies so good. It lacks everything that makes Terminator the brilliant films they were. In fact aside from having the checklist of items that have previously featured in a Terminator film, it didn’t feel like a Terminator film at all – instead just some mediocre sci-fi action film, with a lame plot and some nice effects.

Note to McG: firstly, you have a stupid name, secondly just having the lines “Come with me if you want to live” and “I’ll be back” doesn’t make it a Terminator film.

Such a disappointment, don’t waste your time. Two stars.