65 (2023 film)

Category: sci-fi action

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Planet Of The Apes meets The Land Before Time.

Not a bad movie. Not the best, but also not the worst. And Adam Driver is not a bad lead actor at all. Give that man more roles!

However, 65 (as in 65 million years ago) really does come across to me as if it was made and vetted at every step of the way by Sony. There's just a very Sony feel that I can't explain, but if you're familiar with Sony as an electronic publishing outfit (especially in regards to video games) you'll hopefully know what I mean.

As far as plot goes, it is somewhat by the numbers - an intergalactic courier from an earth-type planet does one final job to earn a payday large enough to pay for his daughter's treatment, but it goes pear-shaped with the pear-shaping coming in the form of an undetected asteroid shower causing the cargo ship to conveniently crash on another earth-like planet - complete with dinosaurs and bad weather. Who would have thought that with advanced space travel technology that they couldn't come up with a way to detect asteroids sooner…hmmm….

M3GAN (2022 film)

Category: sci-fi horror with touches of comedy

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I get that the writers of M3GAN were trying to make a movie about the dangers of letting technology take over our lives, and to that end, I don't think they did a bad job. However, considering that most horror films are based on wildly implausible scenarios - and sometimes it is the implausibility itself that is half the fun - but there are also times when implausibility takes away from the proceedings. And in this instance, from the perspective of someone like myself who works in IT and deals with the daily interface of technology and humanity on a daily basis, the implausibility on display here became a massive detraction.

I get that this is a movie and that artistic license is applied, but I simply freaked at the fact that barely anything is given more than a one-time run-test before live operation, that source code is unverified, that a team of three is somehow able to get a whole robotics project up and going clandestinely, that there is a massive lack of information security regarding data exfiltration…in fact, probably the only realistic things about M3GAN are the crunch culture, and Ronny Chieng's over-the-top performance as a manager!

Saw 3 & Saw 5 (2006 & 2008 films)

 Category: Gore/torture horror

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Welcome to the Saw franchise…where the only thing more convoluted than the traps is the plot.

You don't really need to know too much plot-wise - the summary of the Saw series is as such: a man dying of a tumour plays all of God, freelance philosopher, father figure and back shed scientist in order to engineer contraptions/scenarios that test a person's will to live or how far they will go to save others, depending on their misdeeds.

The Offering (2022 film)

Category: Jewish supernatural horror.

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The Offering has become one of my favourite recent horror films, so much so that it now ranks third on my list. Well-crafted, and the monster looks genuinely scary!

The plot for this movie is two-fold - on the surface, Arthur, the son of a Hasidic funeral director has come back to New York along with his pregnant wife Claire to make amends with his father and family friends, but soon finds that the supernatural forces he has accidentally unleashed are pretty difficult to keep at bay. And running parallel is Arthur's ulterior motive in trying to stave off debt collectors back home that ends up breaking his dad's heart (or did it?).