Sci Fi – Page 4 – Movie Meister Reviews

January 21, 2022July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

2025: The World Enslaved By A Virus (2021) – What The Actual Hell?

Released: 15th January 2021
Seen: 21st January

Technically I don’t need to review this. I really don’t, there is no requirement. I’m not being paid here and I have a personal rule that once a year is over I just move on, only returning if a film is Oscar-nominated and I need to watch it for the inevitable Oscar post. This film had its release in Jan of 2021, I could move on with my life and just pretend this never happened… but I saw the trailer for this, found it and watched it. I have suffered and I must scream about it.

Let me make this clear though, do not look this film up to watch yourself… I did this, you don’t have to!

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January 20, 2022July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Project Power (2020) – A Fun Pill To Swallow

NOTE: Here is my review from Soda & Telepaths that was posted back on August 23, 2020

For the last decade or so, the Superhero genre has dominated the cinemas. It felt like every couple of months there was some new Marvel or DC property coming out that would be the only thing worth talking about in the world of cinema. This year was meant to be no exception, with movies like Black Widow, Wonder Woman 1984 and The New Mutants scheduled to drop roughly three months into the ongoing apocalypse we’ve decided to have instead.

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January 7, 2022 leebutler Review

Altered Carbon Season 2 (2020)

NOTE: Here is my review from Soda & Telepaths that was posted back on March 17th, 2020. This is from when S&T gave out percentage scores on a fancy layout and I somehow kept track of that

Altered Carbon first popped up on Netflix on the 2nd of February 2018. Based on the 2002 novel of the same name by Richard K. Morgan, the series made waves before a single episode aired by being one of the most expensive shows to be created by the streaming service. Once the series hit the internet it turned out to be very popular, popular enough to get a second season that dropped on the 27th of February and an upcoming anime film on the 19th of March. The first season of this cyberpunk noir detective series was certainly one that required your full attention but rewarded you for it with some of the best characters on TV and some incredible action scenes that made it stand out. Season two certainly started that way, but it stumbled right near the finish line.

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December 27, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Don’t Look Up (2021) – Look Straight Ahead

Released: 25th November
Seen: 26th December

There’s a joke that’s been going around lately that relates to the way that the entire planet has responded to the insanity of the covid pandemic. “Guess we have to remove the phrase ‘avoid like the plague’ from our lexicon since we apparently don’t know how to do that”. It’s a dark commentary on how we as a species just seem to be unable to mildly inconvenience ourselves in the short term in order to avoid long term catastrophe. Of course, this isn’t a new phenomenon, it’s been happening for years around Climate Change among a host of other issues. This strange behaviour is what a film like Don’t Look Up is trying to comment on but it has the slight problem of having to compete with the actual insanity of reality.

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December 2, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) – Love A Little Carnage

Released: 25th September
Seen: 30th November

In 2018, a little film called Venom came out and I’ll be honest, I didn’t think it was that good. I still don’t, it was badly edited and rushed with a tone that felt all over the place while also being incredibly restrained by the PG-13 rating that it was going for. It got a serious critical thrashing and was just kind of mediocre, and yet, audiences loved the thing. It made nearly $900 million at the box office and was guaranteed a sequel. I won’t lie, when I heard about a sequel, I let out an exasperated sigh because I was so sure we were going to get another bland film… and then Venom: Let There Be Carnage turns around and ends up being one of the most obscenely entertaining films of the year.

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August 24, 2021August 27, 2021 leebutler Review

Infinite (2021) – Endless Boredom

Released: 11th August
Seen: 16th August

Little behind the scenes info here, I normally only watch films once before reviewing them. Streamed, in cinema, copy I have on DVD, one viewing and then start work on the review. Why? Well, a few reasons. The main reason being time, I do not get paid to do this and don’t have extra time for multiple viewings. The second reason being cost, this is especially true with films I see in a cinema (you know, that thing I haven’t been inside of for 7 weeks because my state decided to be run by idiots who can’t seem to get other idiots to stay inside their idiot homes so we can stop the spread of a deadly plague!).

In general I just don’t feel the need to, one viewing tends to give me a pretty solid opinion and when my opinions change it isn’t due to subsequent viewings but just due to having more time to think about the film… this is to say that I had to watch Infinite twice, not due to lack of understanding but because it actually bored me to sleep on the first go round and almost took me out on the second viewing.

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August 23, 2021August 23, 2021 leebutler Review

Voyagers (2021) – Lord of the Tries Too Hard

Released: 8th April
Seen: 16th August

In 1954, William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies was released and quickly became a cultural phenomenon that would become so well known that the title of the book is able to describe almost any group of people devolving into a mass of internal conflict and violence. You may also be aware of the multiple movies that’ve been adapted from it or, possibly more likely, the Simpsons version of it in the episode Das Bus (Season 9, so back when the show was universally considered “Good”). It’s a classic story that lends itself well to adaptation provided you have a charismatic young cast and can do something interesting to the material that’s been adapted multiple times… and here we find the issues that plague Voyagers.

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August 1, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Occupation: Rainfall (2021) – Does The Job

Released: 28th January
Seen: 31st July

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os0gnI19So8

In 2018 the film Occupation was released in July to an audience of… uh… almost none. On a six million dollar budget the little Aussie Sci-Fi invasion flick brought in a worldwide box office total of about $150K. To put that into perspective, in July of that year the 2007 film Across the Universe got a re-release for three days and made about $200K. To put it bluntly, Occupation was a flop.

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July 24, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Synchronic (2021) – An Interesting Time (Travel)

Released: 11th February
Seen: 23rd July

Time travel in movies is always a fun thing to try and deal with because everyone will try to logic around it. I saw this happen most recently with Endgame where a large amount of people kept trying to explain away how none of the time travel stuff made sense because it should’ve created alternative timelines and things of that nature (something that grew so large that Marvel just spent a full season of television going “look, if an alternate timeline did happen, these space cops would come and stop it”). I have a personal rule about time travel in movies, which is “It’s not a real thing, it’s literally a trick to explain why modern day people are in the past, stop overthinking it” which is possibly why I had a somewhat good time watching Synchronic which might have one of the more interesting uses of Time Travel I’ve seen in a while.

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July 22, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Cosmic Sin (2021) – Nap Time

Released: 11th March
Seen: 21st July

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNxsB6o6DJs

There was a time, long ago, when Bruce Willis wasn’t just a movie star. He was, without hyperbole, one of the most famous entertainers on the planet earth. He was the lead in Moonlighting, which was a global phenomenon, he starred in absolute classics like Die Hard, Pulp Fiction and 12 Monkeys. Hell, the man made two albums with the legendary Motown records and had a top 10 single with the Pointer Sisters as his backup singers, he was the definition of a global superstar… so why the hell is he still working now when he clearly stopped giving a fuck way back in the 2010s and hasn’t put in a decent performance since… what, Looper? He’s certainly not giving a decent performance in Cosmic Sin, but then again no one is.

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