The Wild Robot

If you have seen the trailer for The Wild Robot, you might ask yourself, "Haven't I seen this movie before?"  The Iron Giant gave us a robot that fell from the sky but didn't know its origin or purpose and eventually rebelled against its creators. Over the Hedge gave us animals that talk and must cooperate to survive, along with a bear that is a bad guy.  Zootopia gave us an unscrupulous fox who helps the main character.  Logan's Run gave us humans living in a dome.  Silent Running gave us plants being grown in a dome.  Wall-E gave us robots with compassion while on a voyage of self-discovery, along with an evil robot trying to do them harm.  Bicentennial Man gave us a robot that rewrote his own programming to become more than he originally was, and so therefore the robot is wanted by his creators to find out what those changes are.  

Many of the elements we have seen before, but the movie is so well-written and well-executed that it is one of the best films I have seen in a while.  I was impressed.

Rating:  A-.

The following section contains spoilers:

I have one big complaint about a plot point that doesn't make sense and is likely there to push an agenda.  The robot is on an island with animals that normally compete with and kill each other.  While the animals are hibernating for the winter, a massive snowstorm threatens life on the island.  The robot takes it upon itself to bring some of the hibernating animals to a large shelter that it has built.  While in the shelter the animals agree to overcome their natural instincts and cooperate for their mutual survival.  Logically this makes no sense.  If the animals are adapted to hibernate on the island, then they have already found shelter to survive the weather.  The robot, which has overcome its own programming, gets the animals to do the same and make a permanent truce.  So if the animals aren't going to hunt each other, how do they survive going forward?  The message is that competition is bad, and cooperation is good, which reminds me of Our Daily Bread, a Great Depression-era movie with a socialist message.  Both movies have a climactic scene about diverting water.

Reagan

I did not think Dennis Quaid would be the right person to play Ronald Reagan.  This is the same actor who played Gordon Cooper 40 years ago in The Right Stuff, one of my favorite movies.  In that film, Quaid displayed his wide boyish grin, which is on display here as well, and gives away that under all that makeup we are watching Quaid and not Reagan.  However, Quaid gives an Oscar-worthy performance as Reagan, capturing perfectly not only the voice but also the essence of who Reagan was.

The problem with any two-hour biography is that it is going to be rushed.   Ronald Reagan's entire life was much more complicated than what can be shown in two hours.  A single event in his life might take two hours to tell perfectly.  The movie is more of a collection of brief highlights of Reagan's life.  There are so many details left out that I feel shortchanged.  For example, we see David Stockman for only about 5 seconds, and the film barely covers the Iran-Contra scandal.  However, the movie succeeds brilliantly at capturing the emotional feel of Reagan.

Had this been a three-hour movie like Oppenheimer, it could have captured more detail about Reagan's life, but Oppenheimer didn't do this very well and was more of a soap opera.  However, a longer run time wouldn't have made the film any more entertaining.  You can tell that the movie had a limited budget and they did the best they could with the budget they had.

I'm impressed by the performances of a great many supporting actors.

The negative reviews have much to do with how people feel about Ronald Reagan.  If you lived through the 1970s and 1980s then you are going to have a different perspective than people who didn't.  The 1970s was likely the worst decade for the nation in my lifetime.  There was the Watergate scandal, the oil crisis, and then during the Jimmy Carter presidency, we had monstrous inflation,  high interest rates, unemployment, a deep recession, and the Iranian hostage crisis.  Ronald Reagan came along and said that we as a nation are better than this, and we have only forgotten what a great nation we are.  Things did improve significantly under his presidency.

The rushed presentation reminds me of "The Iron Lady", but the difference is that "The Iron Lady" is highly critical of Margaret Thatcher, and this film adores Ronald Reagan.  For older Americans who also adore Reagan, it is preaching to the choir.

The story is told from the perspective of a fictional KGB political analyst whose job was to monitor Reagan as a potential threat to the Soviet Union.  I have no doubt that such people existed, but here it comes off as a gimmick, but it also works by putting Reagan into the context of the Cold War.  Reagan was such a strong anti-communist that the movie made that the main focus of his life.

Since the movie was released during an election year some people might view it as political propaganda.  However, the plan was to release three years ago but the film was delayed by COVID and the writer's strike.

I was so impressed that I wanted to applaud at the end.  I didn't at first because I thought that it might look silly to applaud a motion picture, but when the rest of the audience applauded, I joined in.

Rating:  A-.  Although far from a complete biography, the movie does an excellent job of capturing who Ronald Reagan was.

The irony of loving Star Wars too much

@john2001plus
0 seconds ago

Hey Thor, 

I have many thoughts, so sorry if this goes long. 

The ideal sequel trilogy would have been one of Luke, Han, and Leia, but we needed that thirty years ago before the actors got too old.  Disney was stuck where they couldn't continue the story right after Return of The Jedi, so they tried to go down a path of discarding the old characters and introducing new ones.  The decision to discard the old characters seems like a bad one because the fans wanted the old characters.  With current technology, it is not too late to have a story that takes place after Return of the Jedi. 

No offense to anyone, but Star Wars fans appear to be very hard to please.  If a new movie or show is not exactly what they want or expect, they will claim it is bad when it might be entertaining.  We saw that with the prequel trilogy where right away people claimed that Episode 1 was terrible.  However, I loved the entire prequel trilogy. George Lucas tried to make every movie different, but this turned off some people who claimed, "Not my Star Wars." 

The Last Jedi is a dilemma for most people.  It has some bad dialogue.  It has a couple of bad scenes.  It could have been a better film.  However, I will swear to my dying breath that it is an entertaining movie because I found it entertaining.  I enjoyed it quite a bit.  Would I have preferred something a little different?  Yes, but I don't see it as my story to tell.  People are upset by how the movie handled Luke, but I was open to a story about Luke that was different from what I expected.  Had the movie gone exactly the way we expected it could have been boring. 

There is a difference between a movie or show being entertaining and great.  We want Star Wars to be great.  However, it isn't always great, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad.  I like watching shows about Star Wars and I enjoyed most of the TV series even if they were far from the greatness that we wanted them to be.  In particular, I liked Kenobi quite a bit. 

I have a big problem with The Rise of Skywalker.  Bringing back Palpatine undermines Darth Vader's sacrifice.  The movie has other issues.  It is a weaker film than The Last Jedi.  It is a disappointing conclusion to the trilogy.  However, I did enjoy watching it and I might enjoy watching it again.  But I hold movies to a higher standard than I do TV shows. It could have been much better. 

I have a concern that the Star Wars story is too limited in scope to keep making more movies and shows. According to George Lucas, Star Wars is a soap opera about the Skywalker family.  That story has already been told.  Anything that follows is either going be be repeating the same story, or too different for the fans to embrace.  I think that we both would like to see a new set of characters set in a different period.  The Acolyte tried to do this but was mediocre at best. 

Best wishes, 

John Coffey

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@john2001plus
I was turning 20 when the movie came out.  The critics loved it.  The Louisville movie critic called it an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10.  The movie blew me away and it is still my favorite movie.

We spent 3 years wondering if Darth Vader was really Luke's father.

This was released just five months after Star Trek The Motion Picture which was a bit of a bore.

Man of Steel

 I wrote of review of Man of Steel right after it came out.  I simply noted that I liked it much better than the average review on Rotten Tomatoes.  I am a sucker for Superman stories.  I very much liked the slightly mundane Superman Returns, and I was a big fan of the television show Smallville until it overstayed its welcome by stretching out to ten seasons.

Man of Steel is a near-perfect Superman movie despite a few minor flaws that turned off a few people and critics.  

Just to get this out of the way, the second half of the movie is dominated by over-the-top battle scenes between Superman and other Krytonians, like General Zod.  These superbeings hit each other with such force that they send their opponent flying through multiple buildings doing enormous damage.  Yet, the Kryptonians don't take much damage personally despite the force they inflict on each other.  Superheroes in movies often do physically impossible things, which takes away from the believability, but if such powerful and nearly indestructible beings actually did fight each other on planet Earth, this is what it would look like.

What I like about Man of Steel is that this is the first Superman story to put extra emphasis on him being an alien from another world.  We see Krytopn, and we see their technology and how it is more advanced than ours.  On Earth, the people's initial reaction to Superman is to be fearful, and rightfully so.

Henry Cavill makes a good Superman.  He portrays stoicism and morality in the face of lifelong adversity.  He does a good job of displaying angst over trying to fit into a world that he wasn't meant for.  

But a good hero needs a good villain and we get it in General Zod, who is Superman's apparent equal and played menacingly by Michael Shannon.  Zod isn't just a cartoon character.  He is pursuing the logical goal of preserving the Kryptonian race, even if he has to wipe out humanity to do it

Amy Adams is perfect as Louis Lane.  Kevin Costner and Dianne Lane do superb jobs as Jonathan and Martha Kent.  Many of the other cast members have small but memorable performances, like Laurance Fishburne as Perry White, and Christopher Meloni as a military officer who puts his life on the line.  

However, I feel that Harry Lennix is typecast in most of his roles, always playing similar predictable characters, but he is memorable nevertheless.

I noticed television actors popping up in a bunch of different roles.  I recognized Alessandro Juliani from Battlestar Galactica.

I cringed in just a few places where the dialog seemed simplistic or just unnecessary.  Movies have a compulsion to explain what is going on in the simplest possible terms just to make sure that we get it.

Rating: A-.

P.S. The CW series Superman & Lois feels very derivative of Man of Steel.  The show uses a similar storyline, and similar props and effects.  Since the show is 80% soap opera, I don't care for it.  The 20% that is not a soap opera makes for a good Superman story, but it is not that different from what we have seen before.

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@frankpoperowitzmusic   2 days ago
I could watch two straight hours of Jane just strolling around the apartment.