Alita: Battle Angel. Robert Rodriguez. 2019.

The title character is CGI, but moves around in a non-CGI environment. (Well, FSVO.) It’s pretty good! I mean, the CGI. As usual, they animate the hair list a bit too much: Not modelling how greasy hair (and all hair is greasy to some degree) just doesn’t move that much.

So it’s a novelty movie based on a Japanese comic book. The weird thing is that the performances by the human actors (like Christoph Waltz) are even more stilted than the CGI performances.

That’s pretty incomprehensible. Not the tomatometer: That sounds about right. But 93% of the audience liked it? Odd.

Because this is pretty dull stuff. I mean, it looks good, but it’s just hard to find anything here that’s interesting. Perhaps if you’re a fan of the comic book, then it’s exciting to watch this version of it? I don’t know?

I expected the big action scenes to be as exciting as watching video games on Youtube. But they manage to make you forget you’re watching CGI creatures in a CGI world. Either that, or it transcends the entire thing into a cartoon. It’s kinda exhilarating, anyway. It’s when they’re not fighting the movie has a problem.

So I liked the last half of the movie a lot more than the first half. But it did feel a bit like the pilot season to a TV show. Unusually with movies these days, it actually felt a bit on the short side?

It cannot be!

Spider-Man: Far From Home. Jon Watts. 2019.

Oh right. This is after Avengers: Endgame. It starts off with a quite funny recap of the events.

I really enjoyed the first Holland Spider-Man movie. This one starts off a bit slower. It’s amusing, but so far (I’m just 15 minutes in) it’s not as exciting as the first movie. But… it’s got a kind of Bond vibe? Super-glitzy, super-professional shots; repartee that’s crackles without snapping; and a reassuring feeling that we’ll soon be embroiled in some silly adventure or other.

[two seconds pass]

And there we are! Silly adventure!

The plot of this movie makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but I think that’s an advantage. It just makes the movie more like festive. More Bond.

I did smile through large parts of this movie, but there were surprisingly boring bits. It’s like they only had plot enough for … like … an hour, and the rest is padding.

I’m not quite sure how to roll the dice on this one. There are bits here I really, really liked (Peter tingle hee hee), and there’s at least half an hour I was bored silly. And the CGI Spidey doesn’t look as good as in the first movie.

Still, it looks lovely, and Holland is wonderful, and Gyllenhaal is perfectly unhinged, and basically all the actors are charming.

Dark Phoenix. Simon Kinberg. 2019.

They did this storyline before, didn’t they? Back in the noughts? And it sucked back then so they’re doing it again?

I guess that makes sense, because this time it could perhaps not suck? But it’s weird: The first third is like watching a long recap or something. Was this cut down from a three hour movie?

And it’s weird seeing a jock-like guy playing Cyclops. I’m constantly thinking “ah, Cyclops” but then it’s Beast instead.

Ah, this is why it’s so fucked up:

According to Olivia Munn in September 2017, the movie was meant to be a two-parter. Deadline Hollywood had reported that this was true and that the film was originally meant to be a two-parter but was condensed to one film in late pre-production by the studio and Kinberg had struggled to make major changes to the script. Chris Claremont confirmed this happened, saying the first one was to make the audience fall in love with Jean and the other to break their hearts.

So it feels like a recap because … it is.

The Shi’ar were left out because Kinberg felt that their appearance would draw attention away from Jean and said he would have kept them if the movie could have been four hours long. The aliens then became Skrulls, but later, after reshoots, the D’Bari were chosen as the alien race.

Oh geeze.

It’s a slog. It’s humourless and pompous and there’s nothing to hold your interest. It’s easily the worst of the X-Men movies, and I’ve seen X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It makes no sense and the big emotional beats are like “er… what…”

And I don’t understand why they’re calling the Skrulls D’Bari. I’m guessing Sony owns the Skrulls or something and they didn’t discover that until they’d made the movie so they just renamed the aliens from some aliens that had something to do with Dark Phoenix?

I mean, these ones don’t look like asparagus at all.