WONDER WOMAN 1984 Review

Wonder Woman 1984 is not a good movie. Unfortunately. It's not that it's soul-crushingly bad, but it's just not good and it for one reason or another feels like it's completely mistaken silly for entertaining. Absurdity for ambition. There is a wealth of good intent imbued on the project as writer/director Patty Jenkins returns to continue crafting the titular character into more of a beacon of hope than ever, but come the end of this bloated two and half hour epic it's nearly impossible to see how anyone associated with the project could have mistaken it for quality rather than recognizing the bizarre (and often times extremely cheesy) choices that were made, not to mention the incredibly preposterous nature of it all. It's almost as if the film actively goes out of its way not to necessarily make its message more convoluted, but rather like it's trying to do or say more than what is actually on its mind. In other words, it's trying to make the simple idea at its center feel more complex and therefore more sophisticated when in reality said execution simply feels perplexing. The oddity that is this Wonder Woman sequel is difficult to describe as it's still somewhat mind-blowing that Jenkins along with co-writers Geoff Johns (a former executive at DC Entertainment and a prolific writer and producer) and Dave Callaham (seasoned franchise screenwriter) submitted this screenplay to Warner Brothers with the confidence not only that it would be approved, but that it was good while it's even more confounding that Warner greenlit this $200 million experiment. All of this is difficult to come to terms with as I very much am in the bag for excessively bombastic superhero films that have a distinct point of view and while Wonder Woman 1984 is most certainly excessive and most definitely carves out where it wants to stand in the pantheon of the genre none of what transpires on screen ever feels satisfying despite the virtue of what the film is trying to convey. Its a baffling misfire, an ill-conceived attempt at looking to the past in order to enlighten us about our future, but most of all it's disappointing. With the first Wonder Woman film three years ago Jenkins crafted an equally ambitious, but more balanced film that honed in on the titular character’s optimism and slight naivety while utilizing the tangible and rather terrible world she entered as a way of highlighting those qualities. 2017's Wonder Woman found the right avenues to take in order to balance the many ambitions it hoped to accomplish with its story and characters whereas Wonder Woman 1984 crams in so many disparate ideas and goes so far out of its way in such ludicrous fashion in order to say what it wants to say that hardly any of it resonates.

LUCY Review

Lucy is lightning fast. As soon as Luc Besson's latest European-tinged philosophical reflection disguised as an action film begins we are in the throws of multiple ideas and unknown situations. There is never a moment as the film begins to unfold where one wonders past what Besson's intent was with the film for, despite Morgan Freeman preaching to a choir of eager college students, we easily become wrapped up in these universal questions and ponderings. Not three years ago the highly regarded Terrence Malick crafted a film Roger Ebert placed on his "Greatest Films of All Time" column that contributed to the Sight & Sound poll. Malick's Tree of Life is a film that attempts to cover the span of not just one human life, but the existence of life on our planet and in some weird, off-beaten way Lucy attempts to explore the same thoughts and ideas with the added-bonus of putting our central human subject in a state of heightened reality. This all may sound quite strange given the trailers for this Scarlett Johansson-starrer made it look like a science-fiction action flick in which Scar Jo kicks ass after being betrayed and infused with a product that unlocks the other ninety percent of the human brain. Still, while all of this is somewhat accurate in the vein all of those things happen and you would certainly classify the film as science fiction, this is a movie more about the endless possibilities than it is who our heroine will fight next. Taking its cues from the myth that says humans only use ten percent of our brains, Besson explores what might occur if we were enabled to use the full capacity of our cognitive reach and he thinks some strange stuff might begin to happen. The thing about Lucy though is that this is a film you can't take overly-serious or become caught up in the semantics of if this could really happen and if it did, what it might actually mean if the entire human race were enabled to do as Lucy. No, what one must be able to do with a movie as (somewhat) outlandish as this is to take it all in on its own terms and enjoy it or leave it alone altogether. For me, I love an interestingly strange premise, the science fiction genre in general and Johansson has been on somewhat of a streak as of late so I was more than willing to look past any breaks in reality and simply enjoy Lucy for what she is: Besson's exploration of the nature of life through the eyes of the kinetic energy with which he directs.