Blog Archives
Predator: Badlands (2025)
This movie plain rules. I was a nominal Predator fan beforehand but these last two movies, both directed by Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane) and written by Patrick Aison, have taken the concept of a badass alien bounty hunter and made it so much more interesting than its killing prowess. Badlands is the first movie told entirely from a Predator’s perspective, also known as the Yautja. We’re set on an alien world, a proving ground that has claimed many who attempted to make their mark, and we’re following a “little brother” Yautja named Dek who wants to make big brother proud and stick it to dad. There’s also just the general struggle for survival in a hostile world where even the grass can kill you. That’s what I loved about Badlands, how seamlessly it drops you into its perspective and the fascinating sense of discovery along the way. Every ten or so minutes introduces another obstacle, character, or environmental detail that creates such a more vivid picture of this planet, and those details will almost all come back in important and satisfying ways for our climax, proving Dek has learned many lessons. Where the movie goes from great to amazing is when Thia (Elle Fanning) is introduced as a legless android from a Weyalnd-Yutani corporate expedition. It’s a perfect buddy pairing: he’s stoic and inflexible and quiet, and she’s chatty and goofy and friendly. The way the two of them genuinely bond and grow to become allies is surprisingly satisfying on an emotional level, which is not something I thought I’d ever say about a Predator movie. The action is immersive and clever and quite creative with its various details, but the real winning formula is just how structurally sound and engaging it is from the character dynamics. I cared. I celebrated their victories. I celebrated their rewarded faith in one another. Badlands is badass as delightful sci-fi/action but it’s also badass as a funky found family movie that felt like magic. Even if you’ve never enjoyed a Predator movie, or seen one, give Predator: Badlands a well-served trip.
Nate’s Grade: A
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Bugonia (2025)
A remake of a 2003 South Korean movie, Bugonia is an engaging conflict that needed further restructuring and smoothing out to maximize its entertainment potential. Jessie Plemons stars as a disturbed man beholden to conspiracy theories, namely that the Earth is populated with aliens among us that are plotting humanity’s doom. He kidnaps his corporate boss, a cold and cutthroat CEO (Emma Stone), who he is convinced is really an Andromedan and can connect him with the other aliens. The problem here is that the story can only go two routes. Either Plemons’ character is just a dangerous nutball and has convinced himself of his speculation and this will lead to tragic results, or his character will secretly be right despite the outlandish nature and specificity of his conspiracy claims. Once you accept that, it should become more clear which path offers a more memorable and interesting story. The appeal of this movie is the tense hostage negotiation where this woman has to wonder how to play different angles to seek her freedom from a deranged kidnapper. Both actors are at their best when they’re sparring with one another, but I think it was a mistake to establish so much of Plemons and his life before and during the kidnapping. I think the perspective would have been improved following Stone from the beginning and learning as she does, rather than balancing the two sides in preparation. The bleak tone is par for a Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things) movie but the attempts at humor, including some over-the-top gore as slapstick, feel more forced and teetering. I never found myself guffawing at any of the absurdity because it’s played more for menace. The offbeat reality that populates a Lanthimos universe is too constrained to the central characters, making the world feel less heightened and weird and therefore the characters are the outliers. I enjoyed portions of this movie, and Stone’s performance has so many layers in every scene, but Bugonia feels like an engaging premise that needed more development and focus to really get buggy.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Tron: Ares (2025)
Known more for its cutting-edge visual effects, the Tron series has long felt like a franchise that Disney keeps trying to reanimate every generation with the hopes that this time, this time, it won’t be ahead of its time and merely of its time and a measurable hit. I think the issue I’ve had with the Tron movies, the original in 1982 and the 2010 glitzy sequel by debut director Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick), is that the computer world that the characters get sucked into is, quite simply, boring. The world-building of life inside the computer is dominated by design and less by depth. It’s cool-looking and sleek and alien but it’s also over-glorified setting details without a larger sense of life. That’s probably why every movie has dealt with the threat of the computer world coming into the real world. That’s where Tron: Ares does right, spending far more time in the real world than the computer one, with a flesh-and-blood character (Greta Lee) traveling into the computer realm and a digital one (Jared Leto) traveling out to track her down. On the outside is a war between two tech companies, both racing to be able to replicate structures from the computer world into our own, except they disintegrate after 30 minutes. This is a smart limitation as it naturally presents a goal, to outlast this measure, but it also presents a ticking clock for our computer programs tracking down their missions. Much of the characterization is Leto’s security program, Ares, becoming self-aware and questioning the orders of his superiors, which makes for a pretty predictable arc from a pretty stoic if tedious character. He’s simply the cool fighter that we need for cool fighting, and admittedly, there are plenty of cool fights here. The Tron visual aesthetic of force movements creating warriors makes for some nifty images, especially when those barriers are used for strategic purposes in escapes or combat. You could mentally check out from all the tech mumbo-jumbo and just enjoy the pleasure of the sci-fi action, especially with Nine Inch Nails (really Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross) providing the sonic musical accompaniment. I don’t know if I’ll ever really love a Tron movie but there’s enough offered with Ares that allows me to at least like a Tron movie.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Frankenstein (2025)
One of the reasons Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein has been so richly relevant two hundred years later is because of her thought-provoking themes and concepts, which still prove potent with each new malleable reinterpretation from the newest creative caretaker. It’s the “be careful what you wish for” adage combined with man’s hubris and our self-destructive impulses to play with things we don’t fully understand. It’s also a monster story that asks us to reconsider the perception of who the monster may truly be, and under writer/director Guillermo del Toro, the answer is always and forever man himself. This isn’t a surprise from the same filmmaker who gave us Hellboy and The Shape of Water. The man identifies with the monsters more than other people. The man turned his astounding stop-motion animated Pinocchio movie into a deft Frankenstein allegory, so the famous story has been on his mind for quite some time. It’s been an obvious influence, and now that he’s gotten his chance on his own imprint, it’s hard not to see elements of del Toro’s other movies everywhere. It creates this bizarre echo chamber of creative influence where the movie can feel derivative at times even though the source material was an influence on those other del Toro works. It’s just the nature of finally tackling the influence later in his career. It reminds me of 2012’s John Carter, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ highly influential sci-fi series, and yet because it took 100 years to leap to the big screen, it couldn’t help but seem derivative of the same popular movies that were inspired by it. This is a convoluted way of saying del Toro’s Frankenstein is a much better Guillermo del Toro movie than a Frankenstein adaptation.
You probably know the story well enough to recite it yourself. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is obsessed with conquering death after his own mother’s demise in childbirth. He gathers the parts of criminals and dead soldiers to reanimate into a new being, a Creature (Jacob Elordi) of superhuman strength and regeneration who cannot die. Victor’s cruelty punishes the Creature and disowns it, setting the stage for a showdown between dysfunctional father and son and the havoc caused by recklessly playing God.
There are deliberate decisions that mitigate some of the more compelling characterization of the novel. With del Toro’s version, Victor is the clear-cut villain. There’s some setup given to his strict childhood where his domineering father (Charles Dance) would quiz him and physically abuse Victor if he failed to recite the correct answers to his medical questions. Dear bad dad was doing this, you see, out of a belief that good doctors need to know intuitively because any hesitation could cost lives. When we witness Victor abusing the Creature in the same manner, we’re meant to see the connection between abusive fathers confusing disappointment with defiance. In the original story, Victor abandons the Creature on the night of its birth and then it’s gone. In this version, Victor imprisons the Creature, keeps him chained, attempts to train him, grows frustrated, and then tries to destroy the evidence. That’s a little more diabolical than simple morning-after regrets. This Victor can also be viewed as a forefather of incels the way he projects his romantic feelings onto Elizabeth (Mia Goth) and then gets huffy when she doesn’t return them. There are other deaths later in the story that are directly attributed to the Creature that are now Victor’s doing, which continues to squeeze out moral ambiguity from Shelley’s novel. If the Creature is purely innocent and Victor is purely villainous, that makes the relationship between father and son, Creator and Creature, far less meaningful and layered. It’s so obvious that another character, in their literal dying words, says to Victor, “You are the real monster.” It all becomes an ongoing cycle of bad fathers and the Creature ultimately trying to reach forgiveness. Even if the Creature ultimately finds that, is this Victor even worthy of redemption?
Another significant feature of del Toro’s retelling is, how do I put this delicately, the inherent magnetism of the Creature, a.k.a. Sexy Frankenstein. Elordi (Saltburn) is a tall, lithe actor to begin with with classical Hollywood features, but there was a conscious choice to portray this figure in a certain light, a sexy light. You might find parts of you that are suddenly alive while watching the character onscreen. That’s why even though he’s a literal assembly of corpses the makeup effects are very minimal and less intentionally grotesque or monstrous. The delicate lines around his body make me think of a cross between the Engineers in Prometheus and the body paint of that Gotye music video “Somebody I Used to Know.” The gentle makeup is meant to further convey the Creature as a sensitive figure; granted, he’s also capable of ripping the jaw off a wolf. By swerving away from the Creature’s physical deformities, the movie is also inadvertently downplaying the isolation that he felt that led to such rage and resentment. Is this man that hideous that some good woman couldn’t love him as is? The movie is already presenting Elizabeth as someone who sees through to his gentle nature, and she certainly also seems more than a little attracted to what he’s got going on. This Sexy Frankenstein reconfirms del Toro’s penchant for identifying with the monster, the outcasts, the underdogs. However, Sexy Frankenstein also takes something away from the horror and cost of the creation if he’s just going to be another brooding, misunderstood Byronic hero. Still, there are definitely worse pieces of meat you could be watching, so enjoy monster sweethearts.
With all that being said, del Toro’s Frankenstein is still a sumptuously made and entertaining Gothic spectacle. The production design is immense and immersive with del Toro’s knack for perfect details to create such a lived-in sense of mood (never enough giant stone face edifices). I loved Victor’s models of human torsos that looked almost like ballet dancers at rest; granted, ballet dancers having their skin peeled back by dozens of hooks. I just wanted to spend as much time as possible soaking up these sets and this heightened Gothic realm. It’s the kind of world where Victor’s laboratory needs to be an opulent abandoned castle complete with a pit in the middle of the floor plan that goes through several floors to a sewar/aqueduct basement level. There’s even what appears to be a water slide out of the estate, and the Creature gets to escape it in the most fun way. The movie is gorgeous with del Toro’s signature orange/green color palette bathing his universe. Even if the story isn’t quite reaching the heights it could, the visuals are always sterling and inviting. There’s also a surprising amount of gore, which maybe shouldn’t have been that surprising. I don’t know if we needed as much of the Arctic framing device, which itself was structured as a series of letters in the novel. It’s a platform for del Toro to demonstrate the Creature’s physical prowess and get some quality big-screen bloodshed flowing. I don’t know if we needed to keep cutting back throughout the whole running time like it’s a Christopher Nolan movie. Regardless, if you’re a general fan of monster movies, there’s going to be plenty here to proverbially sink your teeth into and savor on that super Netflix budget.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein gave birth to science fiction in 1818 and the James Whale movies from the 1930s gave birth to some of cinema’s most iconic and lasting images and influences. There’s quite a legacy for anyone who wants to put their own stamp on the material, so it helps that Guillermo del Toro has quite a legacy himself, a career built upon the dark recesses of a verdant imagination (I’ll always lament what could have been his version of The Hobbit movies, alas). His Frankenstein has all the hallmarks of a classic del Toro film experience, from the impeccable technical qualities, to the celebration of the mythic and Gothic, to the sympathetic portrayal of the outsiders condemned by a society too square to accept them, and an unironic emotional undercurrent that can approach self-parody. It’s a little long, a little ungainly in its shape, and a little too simplistic with its themes and characterization, but it can also be fittingly transporting and romantic and easy to feel that swell even if it’s all too familiar. For my money, the best Frankenstein adaptation is still the 1994 Kenneth Branagh version, flaws and all.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Lilo & Stitch (2025)/ How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
Two new live-action remakes are recreating Millennial staples, Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, as transparent facsimiles, and they’re both reasonably fine. If you’ve never watched either animated movie, you’d maybe even call the live-action versions pretty good for your first experiences with these stories. Both movies understand what works essentially from their predecessors and don’t reinvent the wheel. They keep things pretty safe and strict, which translates into pleasant but predictable entertainment for anyone familiar with the originals.
I don’t even know how to fully review these entries, which is why I’m combining them together. They’re both so thoroughly fine yet one is the highest-grossing movie of 2025 so far, the popularity of which I cannot explain. My conceptual issue with the nature of live-action remakes is the implicit belief that animated films improve when they are brought into a real-world setting. I strongly disagree. Animated movies can be vibrant, stylistic, and exaggerated in such daring and artistically enigmatic ways. Translating that into real-life often strips away that style or liveliness; take for instance how un-expressive and dour the “live-action” Lion King was, a collection of possessed (cursed?) taxidermy. Animation does not require verisimilitude to be entertaining or engaging. I’m also worried over the speed of which these live-action remakes are coming, now refreshing fairly recent movies. Has there been enough distance between now and 2010 to have compelling artistic differences with the original How to Train Your Dragon? Apparently not. When the live-action Moana comes out in 2026, will it be dramatically different or better than the animated version? I strongly doubt it. We need more distance from the original animated movies so the remakes aren’t just slavish yet inferior versions of the originals. There needs to be more than simply a tracing over. I don’t see this ending any time soon considering the commercial rewards, and so the live-action Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon continue to be good stories, just unnecessary.
Nate’s Grades: B
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The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
Apparently there must have been an ancient curse that brings forth a new attempt at a Fantastic Four franchise every ten years, even further if you want to include the 1994 Roger Corman movie that was purposely made and never released just to hold onto the film rights (I’ve seen it, and once you forgive the chintzy special effects and shoestring budget, it’s actually a pretty reverent adaptation). The 2000s Fantastic Four films were too unserious, then the 2015 Fantastic Four gritty reboot (forever saddled with the painful title Fant4stic) was too serious and scattershot. Couldn’t there be a healthy middle? There has been an excellent Fantastic Four film already except it was called The Incredibles. That 2004 Pixar movie followed a family of superheroes that mostly aligned with the powers of the foursome that originally made their debut for Marvel comics in 1961. It makes sense then for Marvel to borrow liberally from the style and approach of The Incredibles because, after all, it worked. There’s even a minor villain that is essentially a mole man living below the surface. Set on an alternate Earth, this new F4 relaunch eschews the thirty-something previous films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). You don’t need any prior understanding to follow the action, which is kept to under 105 minutes. The 1960s retro futurist visual aesthetic is a constant delight and adds enjoyment in every moment and every scene. The story is a modern parable: a planet-eating Goliath known as Galactus will consume all of Earth unless Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), a.k.a. Mr. and Ms. Fantastic, give over their unborn son. The added context is that they have struggled with fertility issues, and now that at last they have a healthy baby on the cusp of being theirs, a cosmic giant wants to call dibs. It makes the struggle and stakes much more personal. It makes the foursome genuinely feel like a family trying to resolve this unthinkable ultimatum. I cared, and I even got teary-eyed at parts relating to the baby and his well-being, reflecting on my own parenting journey.
From a dramatic standpoint, this movie has it. From an action standpoint, it leaves a little to be desired. It incorporates the different powers well enough, but there are really only two large action set pieces with some wonky sci-fi mumbo jumbo. There’s a whimsical throwback that makes the movie feel like an extension of a Saturday morning cartoon show except for the whole give-me-your-baby-or-everybody-dies moral quandary. While I also appreciated its running time being lean, you can feel the absence of connective tissue. Take for instance The Thing (The Bear‘s Ebon Moss-Bachrach) having a possible romance with a teacher played by Natasha Lyonne (Poker Face). The first scene he introduces himself… and then he appears much later at her synagogue seeking her out specifically during mankind’s possible final hours. We’re missing out on the material that would make this personal connection make sense. The same with the world turning on the F4 once they learn they’ve put everyone in danger. It’s resolved pretty quickly by Sue giving one heartfelt speech. The movie already feels like it has plenty of downtime but I wanted a little more room to breathe. I was mostly underwhelmed by Pascal, who seems to be dialing down his natural charm, though his character has some inherently dark obsessions that intrigued me. He recognizes there is something wrong with him and the way his mind operates, and yet he hopes that his child will be a better version of himself, a relatable parental wish. There are glimmers of him being a more in-depth character but it’s only glimmers. The family downtime scenes were my favorite, and the camaraderie between all four actors is, well, fantastic (plus an adorable robot). Kirby (Napoleon) is the standout and the heart of the movie as a figure trying to square the impossible and desperate to hold onto the baby she’s dreamed of for so long.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is an early step in a better direction. It’s certainly better than the prior attempts to launch Marvel’s first family of heroes, though this might not be saying much. It does more right than wrong, so perhaps the fourth time might actually be the charm.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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War of the Worlds (2025)
It’s almost refreshing when you discover a movie that is so bad it becomes a feat of amazement. Pitching a War of the Worlds remake primarily starring Ice Cube staring at his work computer sounds akin to pitching a Pride and Prejudice remake starring Jojo Siwa and it’s entirely about her gardening. You could do something like that but why would you? It’s almost like some setup for a joke. This movie was originally made in 2020 and has sat on the shelf for five years, enough so to make one wonder why anyone felt like now was the time to release it, especially in this final condition. I’m dumbfounded simply thinking about this movie. It’s so misguided in about every creative decision, from its stylistic approach to its thematic emphasis and especially making what may be the most boring alien invasion movie into an afterthought about government surveillance laws. Sheesh.
Author H. G. Wells published War of the Worlds in 1898, and it’s since been turned into many popular radio serials, movies, and TV series, including the 2005 Tom Cruise-Steven Spielberg hit. Whenever a filmmaker or production company shakes the dust off a story that we already have many versions of, the question arises what this new version will bring to the table. How will this one stand out? How will it connect in a way that the other movies had not? In short, why do we need another version? Naturally, Hollywood doesn’t think about the creative necessity of movies, only their profitability. The core difference with the new 2025 movie is that it’s a “screenlife” movie where everything we see is meant to approximate a computer screen. It’s a variation on the found footage genre. This technique was used to great effect in 2018’s Searching where John Cho tried to uncover his missing daughter’s digital footprint. That was an inventive updating of the detective thriller. Here, I cannot imagine a more boring way to illustrate an alien invasion. We’re watching one man behind a computer screen react to the news and cycle through camera feeds for exposition, having Face Time conversations with loved ones and Zoom meetings with government officials, and he apparently seems to be the only guy capable of doing his job during this war of the worlds. It reminds me of 2010’s Skyline, a smaller alien invasion movie that tried to mask its limited budget by following a group of characters trapped in an apartment that would worriedly look out the windows. It’s a bad approach, making the events feel too limited and like we’re missing out on more interesting events. Suffice to say, when the world is going to war and aliens are destroying cities, you don’t want the focus of our movie to be Ice Cube staring at you and furiously typing key commands.
Another significant blunder was making this less an alien invasion movie and more about government overreach when it comes to data mining. There will be spoilers in this paragraph, dear reader, but honestly I would actively advise you to read them anyway to just better appreciate how ridiculous this all is. The powerful aliens aren’t here for our natural resources, for turning people into food, or even a hostile takeover of the planet as their new home world. Oh, it’s far worse than that. What these dirty dirty aliens are really hungry for is… our personal data. Yes, you read that correctly. The aliens literally consume electronic data. What dull lives these creatures lead. This is less an alien invasion and more a stark literalization of data mining. These aliens are advanced enough to travel through space but need to be in such close physical proximity to harvest our data? They can’t just hack the Pentagon wifi? It turns the aliens into big dumb technological mosquitoes who just need to be directed elsewhere. I’m astounded that War of the Worlds presents an alien invasion and says that nosy government is the real problem. The movie tries to argue that these advanced aliens wouldn’t even be here if Big Government wasn’t wantonly collecting our data for their nebulous spying purposes. It’s an attack on the post-9/11 surveillance state born of the Patriot Act, but it’s also 15-20 years too late for this to be politically relevant.
The movie also picks the wrong character to serve as its moral awakening. It’s nonsensical that Ice Cube could be a trusted DHS official and be unaware of these systems and their reach. He seems to be the guy that the FBI is waiting on for door-breaching warrants that he tidily uploads as PDF files. He’s the guy NASA wants to clue in on their latest reports. He’s the guy the Secretary of Defense calls directly. He’s not the head of Homeland Security; he’s just a guy in the office, and seemingly the only guy in the building (was it a holiday weekend?). Ice Cube plays a man with some extreme boundary issues. He’s literally using government surveillance to spy on his pregnant daughter, hacking into her fridge, and I think even installing cameras into her apartment. He’s using government resources to criticize his daughter’s grocery choices. He’s overstepping his bounds and taking full advantage of that same government surveillance state that he decries at the end of the movie. At three different points someone will say incredulously about the government spying on people’s “Amazon carts,” and it’s just remarkable that something like that would politically galvanize this man when he’s already spying on his kids with that same surveillance apparatus. He’s knowingly breaking into their messages and social media and personal data. This can’t be a “what have we become?” epiphany when he’s always been there.
I like Ice Cube as an actor. He showed surprising depth in Boyz n the Hood, was hilariously applied in the 21 Jump Street movies as a stern sourpuss authority figure. There’s a natural intimidation factor, which was recently played for clever laughs with his appearance on The Studio. This is a performer that can be a great addition when aligned with his strengths. However, range is not a word one would readily use when describing the acting capabilities of Mr. Cube. Hinging this entire movie on Ice Cube’s emotional journey is too much of an ask. Having this man listlessly read gobs of exposition is not good for anyone. He doesn’t have that kind of arresting voice that could hypnotize us, like a Morgan Freeman or Jeremy Irons. It’s even worse when you feel the lackluster effort on his part. Strangely, despite his children being in direct danger, and the whole alien invasion backdrop, the moment that draws the most dramatic response from Ice Cube is when the aliens delete his deceased wife’s Facebook account (I would have accepted you consuming the planet, but when you delete Facebook pictures, now you’ve gone too far). The movie was filmed in the early days of the COVID pandemic and feels it, restricting everyone to their own little screens with nary the physical interaction. When you’re watching Ice Cube race through empty rooms of Homeland Security to insert a thumb-drive in the nick of time to save the world (along with shouting to the unconvincing alien special effects, “Movie bitch, get out the way”) it all just reminds you how painfully myopic and agonizingly restrictive this alien invasion approach ultimately proves to be.
Special mention needs to be made for the over-the-top Amazon product placement in this movie. The company is referenced several times, even used as a motivator for a homeless man (what computer?), but it’s much worse when one of the characters is a proud Amazon delivery driver and he’s going to use their cutting-edge drone delivery tech to make sure Ice Cube gets that all-important thumb-drive in record time. Amazon helps in saving the world thanks to their logistics in package delivery. Thank you corporate overlords, and please enjoy this movie on your life-saving Amazon Prime account, dutiful citizen.
War of the Worlds 2025 is a fascinating and maddening case study in bad adaptation choices. It feels more like an anti-government surveillance state thriller that got awkwardly grafted onto an alien invasion. The way the movie just abandons its larger scale drama for lessons in modern-day privacy laws is creatively criminal. This is an astonishingly bad movie that gets just about everything wrong at every turn. I’m almost tempted to recommend people watch it just to try and reconcile it for themselves. There have been dozens of adaptations of this classic science-fiction tale, and I feel confident in declaring this one the absolute worst even if I haven’t seen every one of them. There can’t be a worse one than this.
Nate’s Grade: F
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Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)
“Rebirth” might be a bit optimistic in that title. The issue with the still-quite-popular Jurassic Park/World franchise is an ongoing lesson in diminished returns. Back in 1993, Steven Spielberg and special effects breakthroughs enchanted audiences on the peril of man’s hubris and the core love and undying appeal of dinosaurs getting to be wrecking machines. Thanks to the marvels of modern big-budget blockbusters, we can bring realistic dinosaurs back to life for perilous adventures in survival, but much like the famous line, the producers eager to crank out a new Jurassic movie every so many years only focused on whether they could and not whether they should. The movies are still significant moneymakers; the worst film in the franchise, 2022’s Dominion, still made over a billion dollars at the global box-office. Just imagine how much that could have raked in if it was actually, you know, good. Jurassic World touched upon the nature of diminished returns through satire, that audiences that were once wowed by the very presence of real dinosaurs have grown bored and need more to capture their flagging interest. Since then we’ve had a movie about dinosaurs eating the rich in a haunted house-style horror-thriller and a nostalgic-heavy conclusion that was more about giant locusts and far less about dinosaurs cohabitating with mankind. The interesting storyline (man co-existing with dino) has been there for multiple movies, and yet the producers keep neglecting that glorious potential. Now here comes Jurassic World: Rebirth, another attempt to keep this franchise chugging along with more mediocre sequels that have fleeting moments of popcorn thrills. Ultimately, it’s a bit more of the same, and like the characters in this world, I too am growing restless.
There are two groups of characters that we follow. The first is a clandestine science team funded by a large pharmaceutical company looking to create the next big drug as a result of studying dinosaur blood and tissue. This is the familiar movie world of quippy security experts and ex-CIA agents and panicky scientists thrust into danger in the field. The other group is a family going on a sailing trip through… dinosaur-infested waters for some reason. The first group is on a mission. The second group is just trying to survive, and possibly for the teen daughter’s boyfriend to grow on her skeptical father.
Rather than reinvention, Rebirth is once again more of the same old same old. There can still be intrigue and spectacle from simply interacting with living dinosaurs brought to life by the best special effects money can buy, so the Jurassic movies will never be without some level of primal appeal. There are some fun moments and sequences throughout Rebirth, but it’s hard to stitch together the whole movie from these minor pieces. I think the premise could have worked. The team on the mission has to track down and retrieve blood from the three biggest dinosaurs by habitat: one by land, one by sea, and one by air. There’s some flimflam excuse that these creatures have the biggest hearts and therefore the live blood they extract blah blah, but it doesn’t really matter. The premise of having to track three of the biggest dinos in different terrains makes for an episodic but varied structure that is easy to follow and engage with. All along the way, we know what the total number needs to be and the progression provides mini-climaxes. It’s just that the retrieval of all of these is completed before Act Three. That’s right, it’s all done before the movie is supposed to get really climactic and intense. The land dino isn’t even a challenge, more just an attempt to recreate the majesty of when we first saw those plodding apatosaurs in 1993. This feels like a mistake, and each of the dino retrievals should be getting moderately harder to succeed. There should be escalation so that each one feels more like an accomplishment with the team getting better not worse.
So what could be Act Three? Well you see, dear reader, this is yet another new island. I can already hear you asking how many islands there are, and the answer is however many the studio needs. This island could have been nicknamed Monster Island because it was the dinosaur experimentation labs. Here’s where the InGen scientists threw darts at a board and said, “What if you mixed a [anything] with a raptor?” That seemed to be their go-to for these sequels. We’re introduced into mutant T-Rex in the opening, presented like a monster lurking in the shadows, and then we come back to our giant lab-designed monstrosity. Except this is the silliest looking dinosaur mutant. I laughed out loud when I saw its full form. It made me think of the xenomorph and human hybrids from Alien Resurrection. Its head is so bulbous like he’s part mushroom, but there’s no contours or anything menacing like spikes or something evolutionary useful. It’s just a big goofy head. This is the kind of dinosaur that would be made fun of by the other dinosaurs who snicker when his considerable back is turned. It has larger forearms but walks with them like a hunched gorilla. A T-Rex was already frightening because of its size, as evidenced during one of the movie’s better sequences where a normal T-Rex chases after the beleaguered family in a raft. This just made the T-Rex’s head comically oversized, like somebody glued a shower cap on this guy. This guy has a bigger head but it doesn’t mean bigger brain. It makes for a rather perfunctory and silly ending fighting against a disappointing dino Frankenstein. We shouldn’t have held our expectations too high considering this mutant’s lab breakout all stems from a lone Snickers candy wrapper getting loose.
The characters are also pretty disposable and strictly archetypal. Scarlett Johansson (Fly Me to the Moon) is the lead as our quippiest ex-CIA agent, more or less playing a version of her Marvel persona. She has a slight arc about joining the mission for the money and being convinced by the idealistic head scientist (Jonathan Bailey) to release the medical information to the entire planet. I don’t think this is as hopeful as the characters think because it seems like you’re also making it so plenty more mad scientists have access to dino DNA to make their own at-home Jurassic Parks. The other lead character is played by Mahershala Ali (Leave the World Behind) as the boat captain who provides the movie with the most disposable of characters so that the dinosaurs have something to feed upon. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the one lost family is gifted a dinosaur baby that they trot around like an adorable puppy. That thing’s going to get extremely big and I don’t know if anybody is going to be able to pick up after it. I wouldn’t say any of these characters are memorable or even that likeable, mostly stars coasting on charm autopilot.
I didn’t know where else to put this but I loathed every time the Jurassic Park musical themes would start to trinkle into a scene, especially since so many of them are perplexing. Why would you insert that familiar theme over this scene? It’s intrusive, tone deaf, and just a bizarre creative choice.
It’s hard to really see the added value of returning veteran screenwriter David Koepp (Black Bag) and new director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, The Creator). This whole enterprise feels a bit like a runaway train rushing to meet its release date deadline. The development needed for a relaunch seems to go by the wayside so that we can squeeze in more set pieces, and I suppose two sets of characters equal always having a new and fraught action sequence we can jump to. It’s just that everything feels so rote and familiar, so much of the same kinds of thrills and chills we’ve gotten from the previous six movies. The most exciting development across these new movies since 2018 has been the reality of humans having to adapt to an Earth with dinosaurs in our ecosystems, and yet this again is hand-waved away in exposition that limits the dinosaurs to a much smaller band of the Earth. Turns out they only really live around the Equator now. Okay, if that’s the case, then tell me a story from that setting. It can still be done. Jurassic Park: Rebirth doesn’t feel like the start of something new or exciting or even promising. It feels like more of the same, sliced and cut up with different actors getting their turn to make frightened faces. It’s not as bad in design or execution as Dominion but Rebirth is no more than more of the same.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Superman (2025)
Has the world ever needed Superman more? I don’t know about you, but I could really use a symbol of good right now who represents the best of us, fighting for justice and protecting the innocent against the diabolical in power that seek to profit and prey upon the vulnerable. Vulture film critic Allison Wilmore has a fantastic headline for her review: “Superman [the movie] isn’t trying to be political. We just have real-life super villains now.” James Gunn, the quirky filmmaker who made us fall in love with a raccoon and a tree in the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, ascended to be head of DC movies in 2022, and he eyed reigniting Superman as the top priority, selecting himself as writer and director. It’s a lot of pressure to rebuild the DC movie brand by yourself, as there are only two other movies with scheduled release dates currently. This movie could make or break the fledgling DC Universe (DCU) rebuild soon after the smoking demise of the DC Extended Universe (2013-2023), informally dubbed the Snyderverse. Fortunately, Gunn’s take on the boy in blue is a reminder why this character has lasted so long and why the world still needs a symbol of hope.
Superman (David Corenswet) a.k.a. Clark Kent, has been a defender of Metropolis for three years now. He’s romantically involved with ace reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Bosnahan), who knows his secret identity but still chides Clark on somehow getting all those “exclusive interviews” with Superman. He’s also been a thorn in billionaire industrialist Lex Luthor’s (Nicholas Hoult) side and become an obsession of his. The world is still debating Superman’s unexpected intervention, thwarting a powerful military from invading its neighbor’s sovereign border (very reminiscent of Russian aggression). The U.S. government needs actionable proof that Superman is a threat, and Lex is determined to eliminate the alien for good.
Amazingly, this movie feels like the second in a series rather than a reboot kickoff. From the opening text, Gunn drops us into this world already in progress. We’re skipping over the origin story, the character introductions, and all the table-setting that comprises many first films in franchises. It’s usually that second film that really takes advantage of the setup and patience of the first movie, expanding the world and deepening the character relationships and conflicts. Gunn has mercifully skipped over all that and gotten us right to the good stuff. The opening minutes of the movie drop us into a super-powered battle with the declaration that this is the first time our Superman has lost, and that beginning follows the most powerful alien on Earth having to patch up his injuries. I think that’s a very intriguing first impression, but I’ll detail more of that in a later paragraph. The world that Gunn establishes already feels well underway but the story is still accessible and the supporting characters have meaning within this world. This is a world that has been used to super heroes, a.k.a. metahumans, for some time, so when Superman finally dons his red underwear it’s not a complete shocker. This is not necessarily a reality where one super-charged character has reconfigured mankind’s entire sense of identity. The world is accustomed and adapted to extraordinary figures and monsters. This is where the Justice Gang comes in (Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, and Mr. Terrific). They’re the corporate supes, the ones called in to sign autographs, smile for pictures, and save the day for good P.R. Perhaps that’s too flippant, but the trio of established heroes doesn’t feel the same call to activism like Superman. It’s hard to fully articulate, so bear with me dear reader, but Gunn’s Superman already feels fully established, with the figure known, his relationship with Lois already in play, and Lex having already put nefarious time, research, and lots of money into combating this super obstacle with his own lethal experiments. With Gunn, there’s no time to waste. It’s already fully formed from his imagination, and the parts have their reasoning and meaning, making the whole much more satisfying.
Another way to differentiate this Superman is less from his strength than his vulnerabilities. This is a character long regarded as overly powerful, too indestructible and therefore lacking realtability. Well with Gunn’s version, here is a Superman that gets beat up. A lot. Ben Affleck’s Batman pointedly asked Henry Cavill’s Supes, “Do you bleed?” Gunn has answered in the affirmative. Much like Matt Reeves’ 2022 Batman, we get a work-in-progress superhero that is still feeling out how to best be a superhero. It’s a version that takes lots of lumps and Gunn finds interesting ways to test Superman’s limits, both emotionally and physically. The introduction of nanites into orifices certainly provides nods to Gunn’s body horror roots. While this is a Superman that gets knocked around quite a bit, his biggest vulnerability is his doubt. He’s simply trying to do good and save lives regardless of the political ramifications, but the world and its people, and especially their fears and paranoia of an Other, are more complicated. Superman explains he intervened in an international border war for the simple reason of saving lives. When Lois pushes him in a practice on-the-record interview, during one of the better scenes, about his decision-making, thinking through the consequences, consulting with world leaders and the like, he gets flustered and says there wasn’t time. All he wanted to do was save lives that would have been lost, so why is the rest of the world having a hard time with that? Over the course of those two hours and change, we watch this Superman battle through his self-doubts in a very real and compelling way that I don’t feel like any other Superman movie has better demonstrated. This is a world already rife with heroes, but is it better with a Superman? Is his existence a net positive?
Gunn truly understands the character in a way that Zack Snyder never did. With Man of Steel and the subsequent film appearances, we were given a Superman that didn’t really want to be Superman. He was an overburdened superior being tasked with serving as mankind’s savior, and came across as annoyed. That version of Pa Kent famously told his super son that it might have been best if Clark had just let a bus full of kids die to keep his secret. Thanks for the life lesson, dad, and oh, by the way, your sacrifice was ultimately meaningless when your entire worldview was proven wrong by the end of Man of Steel. Regardless, here is a Superman that is unabashedly sincere and even a little corny. That’s who this character is, a do-gooder wanting to inspire others and wanting to save all life, even the villains, even the wildlife (my theater took special note when Superman saved a squirrel from being crushed). Snyder’s Superman was part of an entire Metropolis 9/11 of horrible collateral damage disaster porn. Gunn’s Superman works hard to make sure the giant kaiju monster, when teetering over, doesn’t fall on any building to protect the people inside. This is also a Superman that feels compelled to be a hero, to do better with his super gifts, and to keep trying even when he fails, that there can be dignity in losing a fight but continuing on because you know that fight is worth it. The depiction of Superman/Clark makes him feel much more a character worth closer examination. He’s not a detached god feeling above these petty mortals always needing saving. The real super power is his empathy and desire to help others, and that may sound corny, but Superman is too, and that’s completely fine in a world that would be better if we had more Supermans and fewer wannabe super villains.
The big question for me was whether Gunn could adapt his cheeky, irony-rich goofball sensibilities from the Guardians movies and make a Superman movie that was earnest and restrained. He has, and let this be a lesson that Gunn does not disappoint when it comes to superhero projects. There are still unmistakable elements of Gunn’s humor and style, like the ironic distance from action serving as an extended joke while characters discuss an unrelated topic, the bouncy and specific needle-drops that cue extended fight or action sequences, and of course the quippy sense of humor. I don’t agree with some of the early reviews I’ve come across that accuse Gunn of undercutting his drama with too many jokes. That is exactly why I was afraid that Gunn would be too insecure with straight drama and earnestness that he would have to rely upon an awkwardly squeezed-in ironic joke to, in his mind, balance the tone. There are jokes, some of them wild and unexpected, but this is most certainly not a movie in the same tonal space as anything Gunn has done before either as a director or a screenwriter. I did not feel that the comedy ever undercut the stakes or the sincerity of the scenes and the movie as a whole. Gunn has shown he can re-calibrate his style and comedic voice while at the same time still making things his own without copious slow-motion. The action is refreshingly staged to be immersive, with few cuts and wide camera swings in order to present everything on the screen in an easily oriented field of vision.
Corenswet (Pearl, Twisters) has some big tights to fill, as I would argue while there have been iffy-to-bad Superman movies there hasn’t been a bad Superman. Obviously the one that all others are defined by is Christopher Reeve who was the greatest special effect the original movie had (I know the flying sequences were groundbreaking for their time, but they play out so cheesy and dated, complete with sudden Margot Kidder poetic resuscitation). Watching him switch from suave hero to clumsy Earthling in a split-second was the best. Corenswet certainly looks the part, clean-cut All-American looks, even though he’s British. He really channels the character’s big heart with his struggle to be accepted, by the public, by the media, by Lois, by even his enemies. He’s got the presence to fill out that suit but the emphasis is not on the contours of his abs but on the unfailing dedication and goodness of a character trying to do right. He won me over early, and it doesn’t hurt hat he has terrific chemistry with Brosnahan, who has been readying herself for this part for years with The Fabulous Mrs. Maisel. She’s great too. Hoult (Nosferatu) channels his smarm perfectly as a very punchable Lex who might make you think about a certain DOGE-master and his team of flunkies wreaking havoc on the rest of the country through unchecked hubris. I loved his pettiness and thinly-veiled vanity, like during an approaching apocalyptic cataclysm and he says to screw the people of Metropolis. “They chose him, let them suffer.” It sounds a lot like, “Your state voted against me, so you won’t get immediate emergency assistance.” You will cheer hard for Lex’s defeat, even more so when his plan involves literal extra-judicial forever confinement.
However, the real brreak-out star of the movie will most certainly be Krypto, the adorably jumpy super dog. Every time this pooch makes an appearance it is welcomed and he’s utilized as more than just easy comic relief. I expect a sharp uptick in the number of good boys named “Krypto” afterwards.
James Gunn has alleviated all of my fears about him tackling the Man of Steel, and he’s created a Superman that soars above the superhero field. It’s so vibrant and funny and accessible to anyone regardless of their prior feelings or understanding of Superman. It’s also a clear-cut example of what a Superman movie can and should be, sincere and bright and, yes, a little bit corny too. We need this character, and we especially need film artists that know how to craft engaging stories with this character who’s existed for almost 90 years. There’s an inherent lasting power to Superman, and it’s his sheer goodness as an outsider, a feared alien, who has all the powers in the world but just wants to help others. Many have long viewed Superman as boring, a Boy Scout in a world that has grown too morally murky to maintain such a morally unwavering figure of truth, justice, and the American way (what does that last part even mean any more in the bleak environment of 2025?). Gunn has shown us how necessary the character can be, a balm to our troubled times, and the reality that do-gooder figures can be inspirational and aspirational no matter the circumstances. He’s made a Superman movie with an intriguing, lived-in world, one that I now believe can easily support a fuller universe of stories and side characters. He’s also made what I consider the best Superman movie to exist yet (apologies to the nostalgia of the fans of the Richard Donner/Christopher Reeve originals). I have some minor quibbles, like how Lois fades into the background for the second half, but they are only quibbles. This movie was exactly what I needed. I’m sure there are millions of others yearning for the same. Superman is proof that the DC film universe might actually have the perfect person in charge of charting their cross-franchise courses. Kneel before Gunn.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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The Old Guard 2 (2025)
I wasn’t a big fan of the 2020 immortal action movie The Old Guard, but apparently it became one of Netflix’s most viewed movies, so here we are five years later with a sequel about the ancient conspiracy of warring immortals co-starring Chiwetel Ejiofor (not to be confused with Infinite, which is about an ancient conspiracy of warring immortals who are reincarnated into new bodies co-starring Chiwetel Ejiofor). I found the action and the general world-building to be underwhelming, but Old Guard 2 makes The Old Guard look like Michael Bay in comparison. There are two key developments in this sequel. Uma Thurman plays the first immortal and she wants to destroy the world or whatever. The second is that anyone injured by our newest immortal, Nile (Kiki Layne), loses their immortality. The rules of this universe get awfully hazy. I’m taking this directly from the film’s Wikipedia summary: “Additionally, anyone who has lost their immortality can regain their power by another wounded immortal who can transfer their power to the host they choose.” Still following? So we have one person who can make immortals mortal, but any mortal immortal can also choose to have their absent immortality bequeathed to a mortal immortal of their choice, reasserting their immortality. Okay. The confusing rules would be mitigated if we found any of the characters compelling. The sequel does bring back Andy’s (Charlize Theron) ex-beloved Quynh (Veronica Ngô) who was locked into an iron maiden coffin and dumped overseas. The established rules had immortals reawaken from death, so this poor woman would keep waking back up again only to drown instantly and repeat the horrifying process again. Let’s do the math here. On average it takes about two minutes to drown (FYI, I typed into Google “how long does it take to drown,” and now my computer is worried about my mental health). Let’s cut that in half from the extra water pressure filling her lungs. So let’s say she dies every minute. That means she dies 1440 times a day. Over the course of 500 years she has died 262,800,000 times. Rescuing this woman should be a recognition not just of her relentless suffering but the fact that her mind should be shot. Having to endure that horror would break anyone, and Andy coming to terms with her inability to heal someone who cannot die but is also unable to continue life any longer woukd be interesting. That’s my preferred sequel. Instead with The Old Guard 2 we get a bunch of lackluster fights and convoluted lore, and it doesn’t even offer a conclusion, more an implied hand-off to a third movie where the characters may indeed be able to finish what they’ve started. It’s time to let these mortal immortals just die in peace.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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