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Reviews
Leave the World Behind (2023)
I didn't hate it, but I didn't understand what the point of it was.
I was hooked in the beginning of the movie like many other reviewers seem to be mentioning. The movie seemed to be a simple look at a normal family's attempts to figure out what's going on after they catch a lucky break and somehow manage to avoid disaster by taking a trip to an AirBnB mansion in the Hamptons from New York. The owners of the house, a man and his daughter, show up after the cyberattack or whatever starts off because they thought it would be safe and familiar.
The family tries to put some pieces together of what's going on, the dad makes an attempt to go to town and figure out what's going on from someone in the know but has a bizarre encounter with a woman who says in Spanish that she hasn't found anyone, there's some kind of plane spraying red chemicals (which turn out to be red pamphlets saying death to america) and the dad panics unable to understand her, and drives home in a panic.
The son who is just a total jerk, unlikeable character appears to be affected by the weird loud noise that's playing and falls ill from it, but we are later told he was bit by a bug in the woods and that's what caused his teeth to fall out? What?
The weirdest part for me is the whole "The animals know something" silliness that's explained in-universe by some kind of environmental disaster brought on by the cyberattack. Deer are really stupid creatures and they don't travel in big packs, ever. Also, what on earth could they have been trying to tell Ruth, the Mom, or the girl? It doesn't make any sense.
Some of the messaging is on the nose, like when the dad delivers that poignant soliloquy about being useless without all the conveniences of modern technology. There's also a poignant line about the US making a lot of enemies globally and maybe some of them decided to team up to cause some kind of horrible destabilizing disaster to our country. There's also the talk of some kind of weird military plan to confuse and destabilize a country, which, sure, is real, but it follows basically the procedure the US used to capture Iraq during desert storm. It's not revolutionary, it's the basic kind of scenario military planners absolutely have contingencies for so it's a pretty preposterous explanation. Almost as preposterous as the guy talking about the Koreans being behind it. It's hard to take the movie very seriously when none of the characters seem to be putting forward anything realistic as an explanation for what's happening.
The movie ends with the daughter finding the bunker the rest of the family wants to make their way to with a horde of DVD's after loading up on junk food. We see ruth and the mom watching in the distance as giant explosions which I believe we are meant to interpret as nukes go off across New York City. How they aren't vaporized by the blastwave is beyond me, same with all the buildings that miraculously remain standing. Maybe that wasn't in the CGI budget.
This movie has a little bit to say but it does it in a way that's so obvious and on the nose that it's really hard to care. None of the characters seem to have arcs, other than the mom who when she's drunk wants to sleep with the owner of the house, mr. Tall dark and handsome. There's some obligatory race baiting. But not much of substance really happens beyond some tense, stupid scenes where self-driving teslas are causing a pile up on the entrance to the expressway (A very strange product placement), the scene with the latina woman, and the standoff on the front porch of the guy who has medicine but these all get resolved without any major consequences for the characters.
This is an airplane movie, the kind of thing you leave on in the background. It's not scary, it's mildly interesting, but it really doesn't have anything special to say. Wouldn't recommend.
The Wheel of Time (2021)
Not very good
The first book of the wheel of time, the Eye of the World, does suffer from some pacing issues. I expected we'd be getting a condensed version of most of their journeying time, which is where I think the original gets bogged down, but we're also missing so much and adding in... so much. Why?
First things first, we're setup from the very beginning understanding what Moiraine is doing and why she's hunting in the two rivers for the dragon reborn, instead of that being left for the end. We go through a large part of the book not wondering if Moiraine is someone we (or the main characters) can trust, because of the stories of Aes Sedai and how they might be darkfriends. Doesn't happen at all here.
We also introduce a lot of characters from later books, add a long show about a depressed warder and his backstory (why?) and choose to paper over some of the bigger, key moments in the original book for the sake of goofy changes and spectacle. We don't get to see how Rand and Mat barely escape with their lives from much of their Journey to Caemlyn. We don't get to see Perrin be introduced to being a wolfbrother by Elyas. We don't get to see Egwene be tempted by Aram, or Mat descend into madness because of his own selfishness by stealing a dagger from Shadar Logoth and lying to Moiraine. We do not get to meet Elayne or her mother, who are very important to the story as it progresses. We do not get the scene with The Green Man and his garden, or the subsequent battle with the forsaken. The book has a great many more moments in it, but I'm just picking the broad stroke highlights that I believed a good adaptation would need to hit in order to adequately distill the world into something that's faithful to the original.
Instead we get:
Alanna sedai being involved with keeping logain contained (she and this plot are not in the first book at all), and a random aes sedai dying at his hands. An episode from the perspective of a depressed warder who is not in the books and how he deals with that loss. We spend an inordinate amount of time on Liandrin who is not in the first book at all. The Dragon reborn is also now potentially a woman even though in the books it is 100% meant to be a man. Siuan and Moiraine are involved in a lesbian relationship (hot, but why? Siuan isn't in the first book at all). Thom is relegated to a pure background character when he is meant to serve as a plot device to teach the two rivers folk about the world when he is also pivotal to later parts of the story. Min isn't mentioned at all. We get some hints of political intrigue in the world of the Aes Sedai, which is something borrowed from later chapters, but it's very... dumb, and shallow. The show focuses a lot more on the relationships between characters and adds a lot of "sexy" moments, like Lan showing his ass in the bathtub, Rand an Egwene, Perrin having a wife who sticks around for like 20 minutes then he has to kill her. The aforementioned Siuan and Moiraine.
The show isn't awful, and in the broadest sense it is set in the world of the wheel of time, but it doesn't explain much of the broader world and its relevant plot points and instead replaces it with the typical network drama BS. It also beats the audience over the head with the main, obvious themes, instead of being able to more subtly reveal what's important to the character. The story begins with Moiraine literally narrating to the audience what she's doing, when we never really quite get a clear picture of what she wants until almost the very end of the story.
Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire (2023)
Boring and a waste of time
I'm quite a sci-fi lover but this movie just didn't hold my attention.
The first 30 minutes were so repetitive and cookie-cutter that I just couldn't find a way for me to be interested in any of them. The bad guys are disgustingly evil for virtually no reason, with ironically a robot they all seem to have some sort of disdain for serving as their conscience? Lmao.
The rest is just... ugh. Fight, travel, rinse, repeat, blah, blah, blah.
The plot of what was originally I thought save the farming village turns somehow into a plot to chase the assassin who killed the king? The empire and its whole little cadre of toadies gives me Warhammer vibes mixed with a touch of Starcraft with a plot that rips off star wars while somehow managing to be worse than all of these.
The acting is just not very good, the characters all look very wooden, and the visuals look like a bad videogame from 2006.
I hope to god there's not a part 2 because nobody is going to watch it. Netflix is is singlehandedly ruining the Sci-Fi genre by crapping out movies and TV shows of the worst possible quality year after year. It's starting to feel intentional at this point.
Friends & Family Christmas (2023)
Kylie was the Villain, prove me wrong
I've watched a few of these this Christmas season and I was very excited to see Hallmark's first Lesbian iteration of its classic rom-com formula. Given that it's hallmark my expectations were on the floor, and I was pleasantly surprised by this movie as it featured something we rarely see in hallmark movies: character development.
The main conflict of the story is that the two main characters are set up by their overbearing parents who (kind of funnily) want them both to just find someone already. Being sympathetic to each others situation they decide to "fake" being together in order to relieve some of that pressure for the holiday season, and in a surprise twist nobody saw coming, actually kind of fall for each other.
The movie develops this by placing the characters in (somewhat) realistic situations where their feelings and pasts are tested, such as when Kylie (the villain) name-drops the blonde character's ex-girlfriend and awkwardly shoehorns in that she moved to WeHo which causes her to pass on a karaoke night because she was feeling a bit overwhelmed from that. Idk, there were lots of small moments like this that made the movie feel like it had some actual meat to the characters here versus the usual one-wordedness of the vast majority of them. It's something you do not usually see in most of these movies.
The two main characters had a little chemistry that didn't actually fel forced between them, which was a nice surprise!
I also need to mention that Kylie, the poet, visual artist, (& more) is the source of like 90% of the movie's conflict for basically no reason. She's the reason for the disaster Karaoke scene, she's the reason behind the giant teddy bear pickup, and she at the end of the movie just blabs that Humberly's character is going to be travelling to Japan (something she ABSOLUTELY was never told) to the blonde main character which obviously causes a rift and deprives them of having an actual discussion. I never expected to see a villain in a hallmark movie, but it was a funny surprise that they seem to have created this accidental one.
Overall, one of the more watchable movies of the season featuring some actual characters versus cardboard-cutout stereotypes. More like this hallmark, please.
Holiday Hotline (2023)
Horrendously Bad
It's difficult for me to even call this a movie because it is missing some of the key components, chiefly a plot. Sure, we have main characters, they do things that don't make any sense, we have some manufactured conflict, and one of the worst fake british accents i've ever heard.
The two main characters develop alter egos of sorts and fall in loev with each other while the british lady is working at a call center for helping people cook turkeys??? Only this apparently causes them both some anxiety after british lady figures out who jack "john" really is (How she didn't recognize him by voice alone is just silly). For some reason, the guy, after she confesses to being peggy, is really hurt by this and is like omg i cant believe this and then theyre all happy again.
The plot was just nonsensically bad. None of the actions the characters took make any sense in any context outside of a hallmark movie. None of this would ever happen, it makes no sense, and it's just, so, very bad.
The Creator (2023)
Why is everyone in movies so dumb these days?
I've never been in the military but it doesn't take a genius to see that people in the first hour of this movie with the exifltration of the weapon mission... don't have a lick of logic or sense in their bodies.
If they know where the superweapon is, and as we later find out from the colonel, they just want to destroy it instead of studying it, why not simply blow up the entire base from the sky with a giant missile and not get a bunch of soldiers killed in a pointless mission to discover it? Why waste the energy and manpower instead of just levelling the place from the getgo?
Also, am I really to believe they cut someone's face off for a facial recognition scanner instead of simply holding the body up to it?
Also... the escape hatch for the vault? Why go through the front door when vaults apparently have escape hatches that are very obviously placed in the middle of open fields?
It's clear this story is for whatever reason trying to make us sympathetic to the idea of AI and giving them personhood in the future. The movie's setting is strange. Characters make horrible decisions. We are frequently reminded that the main pair are wanted fugitives but they spend an awful lot of time in public, acting like fugitives and being american and somehow they don't get caught until it's convenient for the plot.
The main character lost his parents to the AI detonation over los angeles but somehow is the best candidate for a covert intelligence gathering mission to get information on Nirmata from the woman he eventually falls in love with and marries? And he isn't pulled out sooner?
In the movie, everyone behaves as though they've drunken some kind of concoction that makes them behave as though they've lost all sense and logic. Nobody behaves with an ounce of intelligence and the plot meanders along a predictable path without ever really going anywhere and saying anything. It requires far too much suspension of disbelief and makes utterly no sense.
Pretty visuals do not make up for a movie that is fundamentally boring and unwatchable.
Christmas by Design (2023)
Ladies, throw your career away for a man you met a week ago.
Oh boy. Where to begin on this one.
The main character is just a spoiled brat, entitled woman who was annoying for the entire movie. The entire plot is letter for letter exactly what you'd expect from a Hallmark Christmas Rom-Com, with a special dose of awful thrown in for good measure in this one.
Some Highlights:
The meet-cute is her rear-ending him, being rude as hell and making fun of his outfit (his car doesn't have a scratch on it but on hers the bumper fell off) and inexplicably the guy is a mechanic and fixes her car... for free? I guess? There is never any mention of payment or insurance.
She is kind of abusive to her stepdad because he "replaced" her actual dad for like no reason. She later apologizes when it's convenient for her and apparently he can sew!
She gets a lifeline to save her struggling business in the form of a fashion competition for a major retailer. The design prompt is "A family-oriented outfit for a mainstream chain that's christmas themed" She somehow turns that into pajama overalls (because she loves her dad's overalls so much). However, when she gets to the fashion show that she just drove 4 hours though, things are running a bit behind and she has to be late to a christmas event her family has already said they don't care about. In the conversation BEFORE she left, her sister says, and I quote "As long as you're back before Christmas Day." They understand it's an important moment in her career and she just throws it away because the guy says they're running behind, makes a huge scene in his face, and runs home to profess her love to the male love interest, who she told two sentences prior that she just met a week ago and drove all the way back here just so she could be with him. He of course reciprocates and then there's a christmas mircale and somehow her hideous pajamas won the competition and she got a contract even though the guy saw them for all of 5 minutes before she stormed out of the room like the princess she was. Wow.
Also, just screw her assistant I guess? She says she's moving her company's headquarters from New Jersey (She says manhattan but the store is obviously in new jersey) to her small town so she can be with her man and her family. No mention of what happens to the assistant, I guess we just forgot about her!
It's really just an awful movie that doesn't make any sense. People do not fall in love in the span of a week and give up their entire careers on a whim (her business was on the verge of closing due to water damage without this win for her) to be with a man... they met a week ago!
Horrible. Good movie to have on the background as you fall asleep.
Encounters (2023)
Hours of interviews with basically no evidence
I do recognize that in the second episode that lawyer guy was like "we view eyewitness testimony as crucial in the legal world" which, sure... but we really shouldn't.
Lots of research has been done into human psychology over the years that shows that people's memories, especially over the long timeframes that are discussed by so many in these films, to be very suggestible and prone to mis-remembering details. People have what are called "flashbulb" memories where they remember key details that they believe stood out to them when the event happened. However, in plenty of cases, these memories never actually occurred. A common example of this is 9/11, where thousands of people have reported they remembered being in New York witnessing the planes crash into the towers, when in fact they were not in a position to do so.
Having studied Psychology, the vast majority of the people inside of this documentary (with the exception of a few of the Japanese people) seem to have had an experience that triggered a flashbulb memory experience for them, whether it be some kind of dream or nightmare, or in the case of that Navy Cryptologist guy, sleep paralysis. Most of the people didn't appear to have even an ounce of credibility as they discussed connections of their experiences to other parts of their lives, like one guy in the Zimbabwe incident who connected it to finding his "african-ness," the guy from Texas who kept connecting it to the bible and teaching his kids that angels were actually UFO's, to some of the Welsh kids who gave off the appearance that they were simply repeating what their fellow students were saying in order to fit in and look cool.
It really didn't help their case that they didn't offer a shred of evidence in any of these videos besides eyewitness testimony. The only one was the video of "lights" over Fukushima in the final section, but that video was debunked as fake back at the time of the actual accident occurring. It's not hard for a random person to make that kind of simple animation inside of AfterEffects and post it to YouTube.
I believe these people believe they experienced something. Whether that experience was a pure fabrication of their minds and memories or something that really happened is a purely open question. I don't find many of them very credible and the fact that the entire series is just hours of eyewitness testimony of people talking about events that happened decades ago does not make me feel inclined to believe them given what I know about how fallible human memory is. I came into this with an open mind prepared to learn more about this subject, but I was sorely disappointed.
Flipping for Christmas (2023)
This is a movie of all time
This movie is exactly what you think it is. The plot is revealed in the first 10 minutes. Bo is unbelievably rude to Abby for literally no reason at all, but somehow she falls in love with him.
The script was written by an AI. The dialogue is horrible. The actors are the worst.
I'm not convinced that Bo is a human. He is referred to as a "rebel" and apparently has this crazy ability to make a huge amount of handiwork and raid a West Elm and fully furnish a house all within the span of a day or two. My guess is that he rebelled against santa's oppressive use of child labor and became a real boy in this fake hallmark town.
Abby has literally no reason to love this man. He's like actually a horrible person to her but she's like omg he splattered paint all over me this is so hot and funny omg let's be besties and love each other.
Also, there is no house flipping that occurs in this one. They turn the house into a B&B because of course they do. Deceptive title, 0/10.
The Lincoln Lawyer (2022)
Some Good Parts Inside of a Mostly Filler Plot
This show just screams "network TV 'drama'" it would easily find its place on any of the major networks broadcasting mediocre television to millions every night. It follows the tried-and-true formula laid out by hollywood executives, of a main character who kind of overcame a drug issue, a diverse cast of characters to make sure everyone has someone they can identify with, and overarching plots each season with predictable twists at the end of both revealing the main client of the season as someone who we thought they weren't. It's very cliche, but there are some good moments buried in here.
I'll join the cacophony in saying that most of the side characters, their plots, and lives, are utterly unnecessary and mostly detract from the main story each season in which the main character, Mickey, is preparing a defense for someone in a murder trial. Maggie, the first ex wife, has a mildly interesting plot in season one where she's trying to help a gangster's pregnant girlfriend get out from underneath the relationship she's had with him. I actually don't mind Maggie as a character, but she basically disappears in season 2 for reasons I still don't fully understand.
Ex wife 2, Lorna, is just really annoying. She's that typical sunny blonde trope and for some reason she's dating Mickey's investigator, Cisco. The two are slated to get married. That whole subplot of them figuring all of that out and what it means for their relationship is purely pointless filler to pad the runtime of each episode where every cliche wedding planning conflict you could think of gets thrown at them. I just skipped over these parts when watching these episodes.
Izzy seems like an okay character, although her role within the organization just seems weird. She's Mickey's driver? And also his kind of fill-in assistant, but she also has her own dreams of running a dance studio that she and her partner who only ever pops up randomly have access to funds to procure? There's a whole racism subplot in season 2 over the lease which disappears as quickly as it is introduced and it really doesn't make sense but again, the showrunners needed some kind of dumb subplot to pad the runtime. SHe's not a bad character but she doesn't add much to the show.
Mickey's Daughter is fine, your usual teenage girl who is really in nearly every scene I managed to watch with her just kind of annoying and not very endearing as a character. I skip over scenes where she's the main focus.
Well up to this point it seems like I do a lot of skipping and you'd be right. The show is very formulaic, the first 5 episodes are mostly filler with little tidbits of "case building" interspersed with random other subplots and crime issues that just feel like they're there to pad out the plot for a full season and nothing else because of how quickly the characters resolve them and with seemingly little challenge or adversity.
I recommend basically skippinng the first half of each season. Watch the first episode, skip the next 5, and jump back in when the courtroom scenes of the case beginning actually start. I actually tried doing this for season two instead of watching the entire thing through and I was shocked at just how well it worked. There is very little missing information you'll wish you'd watched 5 hours of boring television for, and you get the good stuff: the courtroom scenes.
The courtroom scenes are definitely where this show shines as a series. Mickey and his team come up with some very clever defenses and pull some daring maneuvers in service of getting their clients acquitted in each season. Watching the trials themselves is the most entertaining part of the show, and it makes me sad and upset that an entire season is building up to what amounts to less than a full episode's worth of runtime in each season. The writers of the show need to give us more of that, the interesting, creative Mickey in action, and far less of the other boring subplots that I guarantee you literally nobody actually cares about. If Lorna and Cisco's marriage plot completely receded to the background and we focused entirely instead on Mickey and his preparation and action inside of the coutrtoom, the series would immediately go from a 3-star one to an 8 star one at minimum.
Invasion (2021)
Better than I thought, but also worse...
It's hard to properly encapsulate my feelings about this show. I'm nearly done with the first season and so far there have been quite a few moments and storylines I enjoy, some that really should never have made it to the screen, and some that are just... middling and a bit illogical? The show has plenty of redeeming moments. It's definitely more of a slow-burn type of drama that had me skipping past multiple moments. I think on paper the series seems way more interesting than it actually is. It's written in the style of a multi-character narrative novel, but it's like the writers forgot to give the characters an actually interesting plot and most of them rely on kind of silly tropes and nonsensical actions. I'll be going through a list of the main characters and briefly summarizing their arcs so far through the first season in order of my favorites to worst
1. Yamato Mitsuki
Mitsuki's character is the most interesting of them all in the sense of she has some actual natural conflict and appears to be trying to do something about the alien invasion --- making first contact. Her tie-in to the conflict is also pretty heartwrenching, the secret love with an astronaut whose shuttle collides with an alien ship on the way to the ISS and is destroyed, sending her in a chaotic spiral of self-destruction and illogical action as she tries to figure out what happened to her. Mitsuki forces her way into the recording and video sections to figure out what happened to Hinata, loses her job in the process, and tries to commandeer a radio telescope to make first contact in order to see if she can figure out what happened to her. She's an actually solid character, and it seems like she has a decent blend of exposition of her story with a decent mix of actual furtherance of an overall plot (she's actually doing something interesting, not just existing like so many other characters are). Some scenes, like the initial one with Hinata, feel like something was lost in translation because of how illogical they are, but there's maybe something missing? Mitsuki is interesting and likeable and her story is the best of them all.
2. Sheriff Jim Bell
It's a little bit of a shame we only get to see him for like the first episode before he's killed by an alien but he clearly seems to be smart enough to intuit something else is afoot, and wants to do something about it. He has the impression of the grizzled old cop who ends up embroiled in something way bigger than he ever imagined. His storyline as he tries to help keep his town in order or ends up embroiled in the larger conflict would've been more promising, but he's dead in the first episode. OH well, he was interesting while we had him.
3. Navy Seal Trevante
Trevante's a bit of a stereotype, a powerful navy seal who is working in afghanistan when evertyhing hits the fan. He's dispatched to a rescue mission on another squad where he makes his first encounter with the aliens and is the only one to survive their attack. He manages to make his way to his french (not american, weirdly) transport vehicle which isn't working and eventually back to his forward operating base which was strangely in tact but apparently evacuated in his absence. He manages to make contact with his wife, with whom of course he's having some sort of marital problems because he keeps running away as she puts it, and sets himself on a mission to try and make it back home to her. It's a pretty overdone storyline, more or less exactly what I expected, and I feel like they're not going to find each other, but hey, it's a moderately interesting perspective and at least he has some clear goals.
Now, these last two stories are tied in my mind for both being equally awful and illogical. So consider them both in last place even though I have to give them numbers for consistency's sake.
4. The london school kids (Caspar)
Based on the bus line that Caspar gets off in the beginning of the second episode we're somewhere in west-central London getting ready for a school trip. There are evil bullies, Caspar has some sort of seizure problem. The school trip is taking them who knows where, really? Nobody ever mentions and then some sort of meteor thing crashes in front of the bus and it drives off a cliff into a quarry killing the teacher and miraculously leaving the students mostly unharmed. They then all manage to scale a sheer cliff face (how they do this without any climbing gear is just miraculous) find a truck on the road to grab some food and split off in their own directions. My main gripes with their story is the huge convenience of the bus crash separating them from the rest of the country and broader events because well that's all just a bit convenient, isn't it? The crash not really injuring them, and also... where were they going? It seems like it would be hard to get somewhere this horribly rural that close to London within a few hours at all. The story is incredibly contrived, has too much deus-ex into it, and really just feels unnecessary.
5. Aneesha
God, I really just hate Aneesha as a character. She is by far the least logical and most contrived and silly character yet we spend so much time with her! I found myself fast forwarding through her moments on screen more than anyone else's and I'm happy to outline why.
We first meet her as she's dropping her kids off with a stereotypical happy life that is quickly marred by infidelity on the same day her random neighborhood in long island is damaged in some sort of alien attack. She has a bit of a crazy moment after catching her husband in the act with another woman and goes a bit psycho on him with dinner. Then events outpace them and they stay together. Eventually they decide to leave their house and they have trouble getting her husband's tesla working when her BMW SUV is blocked by some rubble in their driveway. It was a very strange problem, it's an SUV, it wouldn't really have any trouble simply driving around the rubble instead of the Tesla. They get to the bridge into the city, get out of the car, and observe all the power going out. Cool? Why did they do this? We don't really dwell on it because the next time we meet the family they're stopping at a gas station somewhere in upstate New York where they're being harrassed by some white people in an electric car (What???) because the tesla needs to be charged. Rather than trying to sort this out Aneesha for some reason steals the keys to another woman's car from basically right in front of her, steals the car, and leads her family up north.
On a stop to pee they abandon the car (no explanation) when Luke, the child who has some sort of connection to the aliens, stops to pee in the woods and just wanders off for reasons that are never explained (What?) They make their way to a house somewhere in the woods with a kind elderly couple who takes them in. Luke is never scolded or asked why he simply ran off, it's just brushed over. Aneesha decides to try and go get some food and heads to the local supermarket where she has a run-in with some national guard troops. She lets it slip that she's a doctor (She isn't really, I guess) and allows herself to be led away to help people without ever mentioning her family, apparently fully forgetting the reason why she was there in the first place. While playing doctor she performs a surgery to remove some kind off alien crystalline thing from a man's chest saving his life. It gets put into a tray and that's it. She gets moved again to a new location, suddenly remembers she has a family, sprints out of the back of an ambulance and literally runs an unknown distance back to the house she in an unfamiliar area. How does she manage all this? She must be some kind of navigational genius. We don't get to see any of it. She makes it back to the house just in time for an episode straight out of a horror movie where her family is being hunted by an alien that happened to find the house. We don't know why. Everything is dark, things are happening, it's actiony, but you hardly get to see anything at all. She manages to kill the alien by stabbing it with some... thing? Her son just has it and she doesnt' ask too hard about what happened. She performs some kind of impromptu surgical procedure to save her husband's life and somehow he appears to be fine without much repercussions and basically just sleeps it off in the back of their SUV. They make it back to the original national guard group she had before in a college now and she's a doctor again.
Good lord, man? What is that story? Things are just happening to her with no rhyme or reason. It's like the writers forgot they needed to write something where cause and effect and logical behavior are all pieces of the puzzle that makes up a character instead of just driving her to do weird, bizarre things. I really dislike Aneesha as a character and hope they fix her.
Ahsoka (2023)
These are not the characters you're looking for
The first few episodes I've watched so far can be best described as "viciously mediocre." They aren't outwardly offensive to even someone not familiar with the star wars universe like the sequel trilogy films are, but that's setting the bar very, very low. We do get to see a few really nice moments such as the opening shot of the new republic ship crawling across the screen at the start of episode one. We also get some lovely moments like Sabine figuring out the key, and seeing Lothal with its renovated cities and massive highways restored and gleaming. It's a shame, though, that these moments seem to be more of the exception than the rule in this show. So little seems to be happening, and the characters have made such dramatic shifts from their former selves in the animated series, that it's too much.
We'll start off with Ahsoka, who is is kind of, maybe, not sure, who really knows, a Jedi now? She took a padawan apprentice, in the form of Sabine Ren? And tells her she would've been a good Jedi? What? Are you one? Why was she one? What happened after that whole multi-episode series in Clone Wars where she left the Jedi Order behind after being falsely accused of murder and bombing the Jedi Temple? If she's considering herself a Jedi again, sure, but this seems like a giant character leap to make offscreen. It's not even clear so far in this show. It's more plausible than what happens to Sabine, though.
For the uninitiated, in Star Wars Rebels, the slightly better but also mediocre TV series on Disney XD in which Sabine Ren is a main character, she is a tenacious, confident fighter. But in the show she also serves as a character foil to the two force-wielding users, Canaan and Ezra, a point the show (and the character, Sabine) highlights many, many times over its multi-season run. It's kind of her whole thin: she's a very gifted fighter and artist in spite of not being a force user. On top of that she was with an actual Jedi, for literal years, and he never once noticed she was force sensitive?
In that fight scene in the first episode where she punches an obviously armored droid in the face then elbows him (somehow without breaking any bones) is just... not the character we knew in Rebels? Both she and Rosario Dawson appear to have not spent any time actually studying the animated series and learning about their characters, their mannerisms, and how they behaved. I'm not sure if it's just poor direction by the show's producers or lazy acting, but I'm not happy regardless. Sabine is a very gifted fighter and in the first episode she gets her lung punctured by a lightsaber. She fell off.
The shift from Sabine, gifted fighter and artist to Jedi Padawan to former Jedi padawan of Ahsoka Tano all happens in the blink of an eye offscreen to the audience and we never get to see the intervening years or what precipitated this conflict. Given that it's such a massive character change it feels incredibly cheap and silly to have it be waived away as simply having happened "before." Maybe Dave will bless us with a flashback episode to tell that story.
Speaking of that story, where is it? What's happening? Ahsoka thinks thrawn is up to something because of "Rumors" and of course there's a macguffin with a map to him and maybe Ezra, and there are some bad guys who apparently aren't actually totally bad? According to Dave Filoni, the show's creator, this is supposed to be evident by the fact that their lightsabers are red-orange instead of pure red. Why he thought anyone would read that deeply into a color is beyond me. But really the bad guys are just here, they blow up a ship, have a conversation, and nefarious things are indeed afoot, but the audience after 3 episodes is almost entirely in the dark about what the plot of the show is supposed to be. Now, I don't mind a bit of mystery and it's clear some of the tension is that Ahsoka is trying to figure out what they're up to, but the bad guys give no hints and there's really no tension here.
To summarize, the show is just... bland, it's like eating white rice. It's filling, it's inoffensive, but it's also very boring. It's not the outright offensive nonsense of the sequel trilogy, and it's not the actually good storytelling of Clone Wars. It's got potential, I guess, but this is like exactly what I expect of Disney Star Wars.
Red, White & Royal Blue (2023)
The Gays Needed This (Spoilers for the Book)
I read the book (and reread it somewhat recently to prepare) and, like pretty much every book to movie adaptation, there were some rather glaring and (I think) Important omissions. Like Alex's sister being completely erased from the movie when she was so important?
Not to mention the entire plot about how in the book, Henry is really allowed to come out after his mom basically threatened to blackmail the queen? That version of the ending wasn't the greatest but at least it had some more tension and resolution to it than the total dud the movie's was.
However, I don't want this to be taken as me saying it should diminish the contribution this movie makes to queer people around the world. We finally have our first good gay romcom from a major studio !!!! And it's good!!!! Unlike that stupid billy eichner movie that just didn't work, at all. This one follows the romcom script rather classically and normally and honestly there's nothing wrong with that in this case. It just works, and it made me so very happy in the end to watch them be on screen together. The pair of them, Taylor and Nick really do shine well together. It's pretty believable that the two would really actually fall for each other.
Just watch it! It's kind of trashy and bad but it's also just a classic rom com for the gays. I'm so glad we finally have one!
The Idol (2023)
It's often said that pilots have the most nudity. This one lacks a story too.
This episode makes it pretty clear where the creators are trying to for this series, and it's not quite as subtle as they'd like us to think. I daresay it's even a bit on the nose. There's the Britney Spears reference with the choreography, which gets called out by the vanity fair writer lady. There's the way they cast her as some sort of broken person, the people around her scheming to keep her popular and relevant like puppetmasters controlling a hapless woman. It's very clearly inspired by her story, but with an aesthetic that reminds us of Basic Instinct. The writers want you to know that too, so they make sure to play it about 40 minutes into the movie. Jocelyn and her friend/handler are sitting on the couch watching it together. Well done. Very subtle guys!
The weeknd's character is just... well, her handler puts it nicely. "rapey." You get that vibe basically from the moment you see him. You really get it from the very strange "You're dangerous. How does someone not fall in love with you?" lines. Maybe if you're a superstar like the weeknd these kinds of lines work on women. But for a scenario where it's meant to be the other way around in this case---a weird club owner meeting a pop star, it feels like the kind of thing that would set off alarm bells in a normal person.
For being a first episode to the series it's really not a great introduction to the person who is ostensibly the main character: Jocelyn. We hardly even get to know her other than she for some reason wants to show her nipples at a photo shoot for her album cover and there's a whole conflict over that where the intimacy coordinator who is trying to stop the shoot because she's getting nude is locked in a bathroom? It's a very bizarre series of events that just doesn't feel very real. As the show says itself again, from Basic Instinct,
"Yeah, it teaches you to lie."
"How's that?"
"You make stuff up. It has to be believable. It's called The suspension of disbelief"
Consider my disbelief unsuspended. Jocelyn seems more like a kind of abstract stand-in for Britney spears mixed with Catherine Tramell (the character who delivers the quoted line). Except she hasn't killed anyone, we don't really have much reason to be interested in her other than she's hot, and we really don't even get to know her at all in this first episode. We get to se her boobs, which is great, I guess, but like, what even happens? She just makes some bad choices? Why? She has mental health issues? Why? Do we get to stop and unpack any of this, or is the show just going to plow us through a series of events and not really stop to wonder why we're supposed to care? Yes!
Abbott Elementary (2021)
It's fine
I don't really hate the mockumentary style of storytelling but something about it in this show just feels out of place. Like, I get it, the Office was successful and people have been copying the format for a while, but for me it just kind of highlights the "fakeness" of the sitcom format, because we see the characters hamming it up for the "interviews."
The characters too really just are very meh people who are all just literal sitcom archetypes without much additional flavor. You've got the new, naive, goody-two-shoes girl who wants to come in and make some change. You've got the grizzled, kind of rude, but effective, veteran of the school. You've got the comic relief in the form of the racist-feeling Italian teacher who seems to be connected to some sort of criminal enterprise. You've got the brand new substitute teacher who is a mostly normal guy just trying to navigate the craziness of the show, and finally, the incredibly annoying and never funny principal who just comes off as very selfish. I haven't seen a single redeeming quality out of her four episodes in, and I'm wondering if she's just supposed to be like the villain or something? This type of show doesn't seem like it should have one, but it definitely does.
All of the characters are just one-note archetypes that can be summed up in the first few words I mentioned above. That's basically all there is to know about them. None of them seem like very interesting or funny people, and after a few episodes I was just bored. I wasn't very interested to see how any of them navigate their situation, because frankly, I just didn't care lol.
Glass Onion (2022)
Rian Johnson is all about subverting expectations. In this one, that means not making any sense.
Alright, the movie had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
It's clear to me from the beginning that Rian is up to his old tricks again, the same ones that got him in so much trouble with Star Wars. One would think his obsession with chekov's gun and mystery boxes would lend itself well to the murder-mystery genre, but it is not the case here. Unfortunately this movie just doesn't live up to where its predecessor shined.
The original one did a good job of subverting expectations in an appropriate way. The knife display, one would assume was important given... well, I mean, just look at it! We sort of get something similar with the giant glass onion dome on the middle of the main building in the island, but like the movie we'll return to that in a bit.
My three big qualms with this movie are: The surprise twin reveal in the middle of the movie, along with the incredibly stupid ending, and the "actual murder." Both were clearly done with the intention of "subverting" your expectations, but they both do so in a way that invalidates other parts of the story, which is... well, something Rian did quite a lot of in Star wars so Knives out is starting to look more like the exception than the rule. We'll start with the murder itself.
So by the end of the movie it's revealed that Miles was actually Andi's Killer, and her death is the one the story is actually about. Miles does it in a pretty obvious way that makes me wonder how the police didn't ever catch on given that Andi was literally poisoned sitting down at a table (and knocks her coffee cup over), and we then see him basically rushing away from the crime scene without much attempt to cover it up. To any person, even a low-level beat cop, this probably doesn't look like a suicide, because who kills themself by poisoning their morning coffee? Yeah, Helen, I believe your sister didn't suddenly decide to off herself in such a boneheaded way! How didn't this get investigated? Why does Blanc even need to be involved at all?
The twin bit was, at first blush, I thought, kind of clever! But after the movie ended I took a step back and realized, well, okay, actually it was really stupid! Since we know Miles killed Andi, and the movie shows us that he sat there and watched her die, presumably, he would be able to put the dots together basically immediately that this woman on the island is not in fact Andi. Given the long relationship between the two of them before it turned sour, he probably also knows that she has an identical twin sister... I mean, I guess the whole point of the movie appears to be a bit of a big middle finger to people like me and reviewers who often look for depth where there is none (hence the whole glass onion thing) but this one just feels a little too stupid. If Miles KNOWS Andi is dead, because he's the one that killed her, why does she get an invite sent to her house in the first place? An invite that her sister conveniently picks up and then contacts Blanc about... because she received? Why would you send a mystery box party invite (which is presumably quite expensive to make) to a person... you murdered? Not to mention, even if you take the point charitably and assume he did it to try and throw off the police or some such, it's not like it isn't well-known that there was a high-profile court case between the two of them that basically destroyed Andi's career, which would probably make him a prime suspect in her murder! Basically, there is no universe where Helen, through a chain of events based in reality, would ever come to need the services of Benoit Blanc and not just go straight to the regular police. That's the problem with having such a stupid villain as your main character, they make stupid mistakes, that would lead them to... well, get caught! Furthermore, when he first sees Helen on the island, why doesn't he just kill her or do something immediately? Why does he let her prowl around and try to piece things together? Why does he have a conversation with her? Maybe he's just that stupid... but, god, it just feels so wrong!
The ending, too, good lord, what a nonsensical ending that was. I could see it, right there, Rian sitting in a writer's room telling everyone that he wants to subvert expectations in the ending. What better way to do that than to have the main character literally set fire to everything and cause a massive explosion that somehow all of them survived? The movie was about how an incredibly wealthy man who got pretty lucky managed to stack the deck against the woman who actually had done most of the work and was responsible for the central idea of their business. Apparently Rian thought that too often these people get shafted and just never get to do anything about it, so he wanted her twin sister to be able to literally destroy all of the things Miles had built (and probably commit a few crimes herself in the process, lol). I think the biggest problem though, is that it comes off feeling completely unjustified. She doesn't come up with some clever way to make sure he gets his comeuppance, we don't see some off screen banding together... she literally just sets everything on fire and in doing so loses most of her credibility as a character the average person could relate to. Yes, sure, he killed her sister, but like, could she not just go to the police and prove that through a regular forensic process and get this guy thrown in jail? Remember, he showed up to Andi's house, there is a witness who can corroborate this, he didn't seem to be very careful and probably left traces of his presence on cups... and he literally admitted it to a bunch of people who, as the movie establishes, all have reasons... to want him dead!!!!!!!
It's only when you sit back and try to place the events in order on a timeline as they actually happened that the entire story completely unravels itself, because they do not make any sense happening in the order in which they actually did. In the goofy reverse order way the movie presents them to us, they do if you don't think very hard, but... well, some of us do, and I think that's why this movie fell so flat with so many people. There's a feeling that something's just wrong here, something doesn't quite fit, something feels like... this just shouldn't be how this goes. Rian is good at mystery boxes, sure, but he isn't nearly as clever as he would like any of us to think. The problem with subverting expectations just for the sake of doing so is that it requires a fair amount of creative abilities to marry that with a story that actually makes sense afterward. Unfortunately, this is where Glass Onion falls severely short. His metaphor, of the glass onion, is somewhat ironically very apt in this way. Glass Onion, the movie, is at its core, is very stupid and devoid of meaning, but tricks you into thinking there's something there.
The Boys (2019)
Season 1 Was good, 2 Was just a series of evil superheroes
For a show that focused very heavily on the consequences of superheroes and their actions on the world, how hypocritical they might be in reality, the corporate environment surrounding them, and just felt... realistic, kind of gritty and real, things really just got off to a bad start in season 2.
In season one we get things kicked off by one of our main characters having his girlfriend killed and turned into a pile of mush by a superhero for standing in the wrong place in the street. This kind of sets him on a path of retribution where he makes new friends who are bent on some degree or another of taking down the big corporation that underpins the superheroes. It was interesting and it really highlighted a bit of how unrealistic so many hollywood and tv adaptations of superhero movies are by glossing over the consequences and painting a more realistic picture. People get hurt all the time by the actions of superheroes, a painful fact highlighted within the very first moments of the series. As we progress we delve into the soulless corporation that handles superheroes and how morally bankrupt it all is for the sake of making money, a good take on modern capitalism and the state of life in America---where even our highest figures in life and idols are victims of the same circumstances as the rest of us. It's a poignant, interesting criticism that's got some dark, witty humor and focuses on providing a proper foil to established franchises like Marvel and DC by adding a harsh injection of disappointing reality to the series. It's interesting, refreshing, and just overall good television. The characters and their backstory become evident, and you feel like they are people who actually have some autonomy and make decisions.
Season 2 basically does away with this entirely and most of the characters regress in some form or another into inferior versions of themselves. They don't seem to evolve or change much or are forced to by the circumstances of the story. Starlight sort of does and Hughie is kind of dragged along with her as they unravel the secrets of how superheroes are made and what Vought has done.
What really seals the deal for me is that a show that was focused on consequences and realism just kind of tossed that all out the window and has become very hypocritical itself by placing such a large emphasis on action scenes where characters who are also portrayed as very real people who can get hurt by superheroes are repeatedly put into situations (car crashes in particular) where no real person would survive. A great example is towards the end of the series when Hughie is in a van and it gets flipped over and he ends up with a large piece of glass lodged in his abdomen. Starlight has to perform an emergency cauterization of the wound so he doesn't bleed out.
Not two episodes later we witness three other characters flips over in an SUV no fewer then seven times and they all walk out of the car unscathed, as though he didn't just participate in a car crash that would have turned them to jelly just like hughie's girlfriend was in episode 1. A few seconds later an incredibly massive explosion rips apart an small, open aircraft hangar and two of the main characters again, get up, and walk off completely unschathed. I remember screaming at the TV wondering if the writers just got totally lazy in season 2 or if they were replaced by people who forgot what it was supposed to be about.
The political message of stormfront and her antics was kind of cool but she just seemed like a problematic evil character who was problematic and evil because the story needed a foil. The political allusions and subplot seemed interesting but we never really delved that much into her character or her motivations like I would've liked. She's honestly cool in the moment but after you finish the season you realize just how forgettable and irrelevant she was.
Season one is good. Two was disappointing. Three is... well, I'm not planning on finding out.
Westworld (2016)
The first season was the best, and Second was pretty good too. Third was garbage.
The first season is one of the best shows ever brought to modern television. You could tell the writers kind of thought they wouldn't be asked to keep going with the series because where things leave off feels like a complete story. The characters are interesting, deceptive, and have complex motivations and reasoning behind them. They feel like real people trying to find their way in the world, people you might not like, but people you can empathize with and understand. It felt like a character-driven show where people were making choices---a central theme of the first season as a whole, if I'm being honest. It's good that they give the show the appreciation it deserves in this regard.
Season two is fine, the plot thins out a bit and becomes a lot more meta. The characters seem to go a bit bananas and take a dive off the deep end as we get further along and things get weirder. The sense of drama and tense suspense is still prevalent, you can see that there are deeper games being played here, but the mystery is still keeping things interesting. The characters kind of take a backseat this season and we get a lot more of a plot-driven storyline than a character-driven one. Some big reveals are made and some worldbuilding happens to establish Westworld in a larger context, we come across how the park got acquired and got to where it is today, and why the owners were even interested in it in the first place. It gets twisted, dark, and interesting.
Season 3 is just a crazy mess of pure nonsense, fantasy, and just... I don't even know anymore. Did dolores get infected with a virus or something? She's not acting in ways that make any sense, and neither is anyone else if i'm being honest. The new main character is really just kind of weird and I don't like him all that much. It's been a long time since I watched it and I totally forget his name, he's really just kind of a stand-in for the audience as we all go through this crazy ride of a season together because it feels like he's more there just to experience events happening to him than to be an actual driver of the plot. Corporate politics happen in Valencia, Spain, because despite all the CGI garbage plastered all over the third season they couldn't come up with a futuristic headquarters for a company like delos and opted for a plaza dedicated to scientfic progress. Honestly, I think a big, imposing glass and steel tower makes a lot more sense for Delos but hey that's just because I've actually watched the first couple of seasons and understand the themes going on here, but it seems like whoever wrote this season basically completely forgot or just didn't bother. This whole season is a fever dream rush of adrenaline, action, and pure hollywood nonsense. I have no idea what was going on and why for most of it because we don't get any meditative or interesting character study type episodes like we used to, it's all plot, all the time, and feels like they took an action movie script and adapted it for television.
I'm not planning on watching season 4 as much as HBO would like me to. Season two is where the good story ends, I would only watch past that if you're a glutton for the disappointment, generic scripting that permeates every modern TV show.
Ozark (2017)
Meh
I've seen a few reviews of people saying the writing used to be better, and the seasons used to be tighter... I don't know, I just kind of disagree.
Seasons 1 and 2 were good. Season 3 started to feel a bit like it was droning on, some of the plot points didn't make much sense, and season 4, well, I almost immediately lost interest after thar idiotic car crash scene with the stupid flashback motif they've used in other seasons. Seriously, why does Hollywood still persist with the stupidest trope ever that people can survive car crashes that would turn a normal person to jelly? Ridiculous.
Anyway, the plot in this final season basically completely devolves into total nonsense and I basically stopped paying attention after the first episode of part 2. Seriously, Marty just lets Wendy call Javi and bring him in to her office to be shot, and the CEO lady just goes along with it? Like oh yeah, the woman who has been very uneasy this whole time about getting into bed with a drug cartel but is doing it literally as a last resort is suddenly totally okay with murder in her office and doesn't object or try to stop it?
Also the scene in the hotel right after sees Wendy pulling some very twisted logic on Marty and him completely falling over and like yeah ok mhm. When he was the one who actually tried multiple times to get Ruth to stop it, or did anything to even keep her away from Javi... and Wendy just decides that what? She can't be stopped or convinced? I mean it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy at that point. This basically scrambles their whole plans laid up to this point and leaves them... well, back at square one again, as the FBI lady puts it, trying to put it all back together. This is basically all this show is. The Byrdes manage to put things into a tenuously good spot and tepidly see some success, a fire comes along that to me feels like they should've prevented, but somehow, they manage to hold back on and get back to that tenuous place... another fire... I dunno. It's gotten a bit tired at this point, I'm glad the show is ending.
Ruth then takes ownership of the Casino for some reason, even though I expected she would be smarter than this, and tries to take the whole thing fully legit??? What??? Why? What a random thing for her to do, and did she completely lose her brain? She's lost sooo much at the hands of the Byrdes and their cartel nonsense and family, and yet she just warms back up to their good graces and goes down this path.
She ends up biting the dust in the end which makes all of the struggle to get to that point feel even more pointless. Why didn't they just get rid of her before she killed Javi? Certainly would've saved a lot of problems! It makes the ending feel even cheaper than it should have been. People get so easily fooled by "subverted expectations." My expectations were subverted alright, I expected a good ending, I got a total devolution.
Heartstopper (2022)
Wish I had this as a kid
Watching this show so far has just brought nothing but happiness as two goofy kids with nothing more important going on try to navigate their lives while making something work. Nick and his troubles are a bit cheesy and so are some of the lines but honestly we gays need something like this. The characters are just a little over the top but the actors seem like perfect fits for the roles they play in a very diverse cast. It's hard for me to fault it because it does grapple with one of the most important parts of someone's life; figuring out and questioning your sexuality, while learning to love and accept it with someone else. It's an easy way to just escape for a half hour and appreciate the life people get to live.
Honestly when I watch this show I feel a sense of longing to show it to the younger me to help him figure it all out. It's amazing how far we've come, and that young gay kids will have something like this they can turn to to help make them feel better. I really appreciate it.
Also I can't believe the queen thinks Keira Knightley is attractive. How scandalous!
Ad Astra (2019)
High Minded Drama with a Terrible Plot
Ad Astra is the latest in a series of psychological sci-fi movies with dramatic visuals, music, and premises. It's quite a shame that it can't live up to their standards.
The entire plot hinges on mysterious bursts of energy emanating from Neptune, which have completely wrecked electronic transmissions across the civilized parts that humanity has managed to reach. Fortunately a station on mars is still working, so the protagonist is sent there by the people in charge of US Spacecom...
If this is supposed to be some sort of commentary on military excess it certainly hits the nail on the head, but perhaps too hard that it might get missed by most members of the audience as stupid. Could he not have simply recorded his message on earth, then had a physical copy sent to mars for it to be transmitted? Unfortunately though had a smart person been in the room, the entire plot would've had no reason to happen. This simple fact alone makes this movie so utterly unbelievable and terrible that it's not worth watching at all.
This transit from Earth to Mars seems to happen solely for the purpose of getting the main character to mars, not because he actually needs to be there. Why didn't he just start there? The entire first 30 minutes of the movie feel completely useless and unnecessary, and written by people who should not be writing movies, or even children's novels.
Moon pirates? How does that make any sense? Where do they live? How do they survive in the harsh environment of the moon? The moon isn't just some place people can go and live easily, as it lacks certain things like... Water, Air, food... light... You know, just the basics for human life? Also why is everyone walking around on the ground so easily on the moon? That's not how lunar gravity works. There's enough to send you not flying into space but not enough to keep you from bouncing and jumping around with every step you take. If we're meant to believe they've mastered some sort of artificial gravity... why is it not also present on spaceships?
Norwegian Space Baboons?
I'm just going to leave that there, the sentence and thought are so absurd that it's very clearly nonsensical. Norway can not into space.
The trip out is neat! He gets there and his dad is still alive having survived 16 years in space by himself. How? Who knows, that's an absurd amount of time for any person to survive without a food and water supply on a station that wasn't meant for that kind of habitation. I have no idea how this is possible and the movie doesn't try to explain either. Moving on!
The nuclear explosion sending the ship home isn't as implausible as it sounds. NASA actually studied doing this for a long time but concluded that the harmful effects produced from the detonation of nuclear weapons made them unsuitable for use on planet earth (radiation kills people and causes cancer, go figure) However, using it in space where such problems don't exist would be possible.
Despite this though, if you were to use a nuclear explosion as a means for generating velocity you would require proper shielding to not get vaporized by the blast---meaning the ship would need to be designed to handle this. Most spaceships are designed with a significant amount of radiation shielding to protect astronauts from the sun's radiation (on earth we have the Magnetosphere to do this for us) however it's very likely that this would be wholly insufficient to withstand the force of a nuclear blast, and would shred the ship, and even if they managed to survive, they would develop radiation sickness and die very quickly ( see chernobyl for an idea of what this looks like).
Don't waste your money on this. If you're interested wait for it to get to netflix.