Loosely based on the series of books by Cressida Cowell, the How to Train Your Dragon series has grown to become the jewel in the somewhat small and dusty crown of Dreamworks Animation. With Pixar killing it near enough year in, year out, the adventures of reluctant Viking leader Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and his trusted Night Fury pal are the closest thing that Dreamworks have ever come to the quality and visual splendour of its most fearsome rivals. If you've kept up with the series since its debut in 2010, you'll have watched Hiccup grow out of his father's shadow into a battle-scarred warrior and forward-thinking frontiersman, who brought a close to his tribe's never-ending war with the dragons to discover the fire-breathing beasts actually make for useful and loving friends. The second instalment veered into incredibly dark territory, signalling a maturing tone that matched the protagonist's transformation from nervous kid to an innovator destined to change the lives of his people forever.
The third and presumably final entry into the series, The Hidden World, doesn't darken the tone further - it is still a kids' film after all - but you get the sense from very early on that we are heading inevitably towards an emotional parting of ways. Hiccup and his friends continue their quest to rescue captive dragons and bring them back to the village of Berk to live in harmony with humans. The problem is that they've become so good at their search-and-rescue missions that their home is now overcrowded with the lumbering beasts. Hiccup believes their only hope lies in 'the hidden world, a mysterious and possibly make-believe haven at the edge of the world spoken of by his late father Stoick (Gerard Butler). But cracks start to appear in the young chieftan's plans when his dragon and best friend Toothless happens across a Light Fury, the female of his species. Wild and distrusting of humans, the female bolts from Toothless' advances any time Hiccup shows his face to help, and it becomes clear that if he is ever to see his best bud happy, he must also let his dragon run free.
As ever, there's a dragon-hating antagonist to jeopardise Hiccup's plans in the form of renowned hunter Grimmel the Grisly (F. Murray Abraham), whose own mind-controlled dragons have the ability to vomit acid and melt pretty much anything in their wake. He certainly looks and sounds cool, but Grimmel shares much of the same motivation as the bad guys that come before him, and the character really symbolises the film's overall reluctance to dig that little bit deeper. For me, How to Train Your Dragon 2 really stepped up the game for this franchise, but it feels like returning director Dean DeBlois is happy to ease off the accelerator and ride this trilogy-closer out. If this were practically any other series, The Hidden World would be a delightful surprise, offering up great moments like the opening night-time raid and the sight of Toothless clumsily attempting win over his potential mate, the latter proving to be one of the most charming and heart-warming scenes of the entire trilogy. But with the knowledge of how great this could have been, The Hidden World is a disappointment, fizzling out with an ending that undoubtedly satisfies, but when compared to the emotional wallop of, say, Toy Story 3, plays it rather safe.
It's been happening to major releases for decades, but nowadays near enough every big-budget blockbuster comes with its very own straight-to-DVD knock-off. Recently, cult label The Asylum have released the likes of Ghosthunters to coincide with 2016's Ghostbusters, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to sponge off the success of Guy Ritchie's equally terrible King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and even Operation Dunkirk to dupe ill-informed shoppers into thinking it was Christopher Nolan's awards-grabber Dunkirk. When I first saw the trailer for Geostorm, I was convinced that The Asylum had stretched their purse-strings a tad, and that Gerard Butler had finally done the decent thing and stepped away from the big screen. It turns out that Geostorm is actually meant to be a proper movie, and that The Asylum's cash-in was in fact called Geo-Disaster.
With its horrendous special effects, ham-fisted action and completely nonsensical premise, I refuse to believe that I'm the only one who couldn't fathom that this was an actual blockbuster attempt. Geostorm may just be one of the stupidest movies ever made, and the real horror is that the final product is actually the result of 15 million dollar re-shoots after audiences reacted badly to test screenings way back in 2015. If this is a result of expensive re-shoots and a two-year hiatus, then I'm almost curious to see what state it was in beforehand. I can only imagine that the original version wasn't quite as hilarious, although Butler was always attached to play Jake Lawson, the brain-child of a giant climate-controlling satellite dubbed 'Dutch Boy', so it must have been at the very least amusing. Dutch Boy monitors and influences the planet's weather after mankind has ravaged the Earth and turned it into a melting-pot of devastating storms and extreme temperatures.
He may be highly intelligent, but as he's played by Butler, he's also punchy and obnoxious, and has his toy taken away from him by a Senate cub-committee after he refuses to cooperate. Jake's brother Max (Jim Sturgess) is placed in charge instead, but Jake's skills and experience in the field may be called upon again when Dutch Boy starts carrying out seemingly random attacks and threatening to cause a 'geostorm' - a super-storm of which none will survive. Abbie Cornish is also in the movie for some reason, even though she's way above this sort of schlock. Soon after starting to navigate through the unnecessarily complicated plot you will realise that very little of Geostorm makes sense, and you can probably work out who the bad guy is by reading the cast list. However, for all its utter stupidity and boring set-pieces where millions are indifferently massacred by bad CGI, I can never say that Dean Devlin's Geostorm was boring. It made me laugh more than once (albeit unintentionally), and although I say this through gritted teeth, it's moderately entertaining, if brainless fluff.
Alex Proyas's return to directing following a 7 year hiatus couldn't have come at a worse time. Just as the film industry was up in arms about the #OscarSoWhite debacle, Gods of Egypt arrived in cinemas boasting a near-all Caucasian cast despite being set in Africa. The demand for diversity in Hollywood duly followed, and rightly so, but the questionable casting isn't even the worst thing about the film. Gods of Egypt is a bloated, garish and nonsensical piece of trash, the cinematic equivalent of Raheem Sterling's bathroom. Is this really the same visionary who brought us The Crow (1994) and Dark City (1998)?
Sadly it is, and it completes a steady quality decline in Proyas's output which began in 2004 with his middle-finger to Isaac Asimov, I, Robot. On paper, the big-budget tale of Gods living amongst humans battling it out for the throne may seem like the perfect the opportunity for some campy, brain-on-auto-pilot fun. However, it fails to even offer any sort of camp appeal due to a cast either gobbled up by the video-game cutaway special effects or so utterly devoid of charisma. The main offender is Brenton Thwaites, a young actor who looks like he's been custom-built to appeal to any teenage girls in the crowd. He plays Bek, a human living in a thriving Egypt governed by ten-foot Gods, and sadly he is our protagonist.
Bek, along with his pretty girlfriend Zaya (Courtney Eaton), witnesses the handing-over of the crown from the abdicating Osiris (Bryan Brown) to his dashing and popular son Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). The coronation is rudely interrupted by Osiris's uncle Set (Gerard Butler), who feels that the time has come for him to rule, killing his brother and ripping out his poor nephew's eyes in front of a terrified crowd. With the Egyptians forced into slavery to satisfy Set's greed and vanity, Bek, a talented thief, swipes the plans to Set's vault in the hope of stealing back Horus's eyes and assisting him in defeating his uncle. But when Zaya is killed after the successful theft, Bek strikes a deal with Horus to help guide him through Set's pyramid in exchange for returning Zaya from the underworld.
The main question lingering over the head of Gods of Egypt is why was this film made? For a modern blockbuster from a talented director, the film lacks maturity and brains. For a film possibly designed to appeal to fans of explosion-heavy sci-fi/fantasy extravaganzas such as Michael Bay's Transformers franchise, the CGI is often embarrassingly bad. And for anybody hoping for a throwback to the kitschy B-movies of the 1950's and 60's, where giant monsters and grotesque gods mingled with us puny humans, you will find more charm in one frame of any movie involving the work of Ray Harryhausen than you will for the entire 2 hours of Gods of Egypt. The whole thing just feels oddly out of place, paling in comparison to even the most sickly of recent CGI-fests. Re-telling essentially the exact same story told a thousand times since Homer put ink to paper, this could be re-titled as A Simpleton's Guide to the Hero's Quest. Utter tripe.
The Hollywood sequel is a fearsome thing. Most notably in recent years, we have seen an endless supply of re-hashes and cash-in's based on it's predecessor's success, commonly to disastrous effect. Animation especially - or even more so, Dreamworks animation - have churned out drivel with no heart; their only intentions being to offer something to parents that will keep their children busy for 90 minutes and to fill their own wallets. Take a bow, then, How To Train Your Dragon 2, which not only capitalises on the first film's charm, off-beat humour and dazzling dragon battles, but deepens it's mythology and expands it's world, while at the same time offering a visual spectacle to delight the kids and pose some extremely grown-up questions to the adults in the audience.
Five years after the townsfolk of Berk were given a lesson in allegiance and acceptance by unlikely hero Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), the Viking village thrives with domesticated dragons. It's chieftain, Stoick (Gerard Butler), has named Hiccup his heir, but the one-legged adventurer is not ready for the responsibility and would much rather be exploring the surrounding areas on the back of his dragon, the Night Fury Toothless. His relationship with the feisty Astrid (America Ferrera) has developed into a romance, and his friends fight over the attention of Ruffnut (Kristen Wiig). While exploring one day, he comes across an island decorating in strange ice formations, and is attacked by dragon-catcher Eret (Game of Thrones' Kit Harington).
Eret tells them about the warlord Drago (Djimon Honsou), who is amassing a dragon army after learning how to bend the creatures to his will using violence and intimidation. Hiccup and Astrid escape and ride back to Berk to warn the others, and learn that Stoick knows Drago and that he is a madman not be reasoned with. Hiccup, however, feels different and rides off on Toothless to treat with Drago but instead comes upon another hidden island, where dragons live in harmony under the influence of a colossal Alpha dragon known as a bewilderbeast. Also living on the island is environmentalist Valka (Cate Blanchett), Hiccup's long-lost mother.
Cleverly written without heavy lessons on morality and impeccably voiced by a star cast, How To Train Your Dragon 2 stresses the importance of finding your own place in the world. The film could easily have been some kind of eco-crusade, but instead questions whether the human race reserves the right to bend it nature to our will, or if we are a mere significance who have a duty to preserve it, or even if nature is a tool which we can use to serve the greater good. This is startlingly darker than it's predecessor - humans and dragons die - and even questions whether war can be just. Drago is a psychopathic tyrant - can these men be bargained with, or should they simply be wiped out? Thrilling, emotional and extremely thoughtful, this beautiful-looking sequel is the possibly the biggest surprise of the year.
Bringing Alan Moore's cerebral and sprawling novel to the screen was always going to a near-impossible task. It's very much an anti-superhero story, where the 'heroes' are merciless psychopaths, government weapons of mass destruction, or sexually impotent. Spanning decades and featuring snippets from books, comics and newspaper reports within the world Moore creates, any film adaptation simply could not match the level of details and authenticity of the much-lauded novel. Zack Snyder, a fan of the original, and a director who was just off the back of the surprisingly excellent Dawn of the Dead (2004) and the shouty, crass 300 (2006), puts all of his heart and soul into Watchmen.
Using a no-name cast, a convoluted and dangerously slow story, and an adult rating thanks to all those snapped bones and a massive blue willy, it's a wonder this ever got made at all. It was in development hell for years, with names such as Terry Gilliam and Paul Greengrass becoming attached and then quickly detached from the project, and even the nerve-jangling possibility of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the movie's only true superhero was banded around in the mid 1990's. It's almost impossible to think of a more faithful adaptation than Snyder's, often re-creating frames from the comic in the minutest of detail, and even including Tales from the Black Freighter, the comic-within-a-comic from the novel with the voice of Gerard Butler (this is a review of the 215-minute cut, which I feel is the best version out there). Yet, you could still argue that Moore's book is un-filmable.
The 1980's, and President Nixon is running his fourth term in office, and superheroes have been outlawed. Ageing government assassin The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a former member of two superhero groups named the Minutemen, is murdered in his home. Vigilante and wanted man Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) investigates the murder, and brings his theory that someone is hunting down retired superheroes to his friend and former partner Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson), formerly known as Nite Owl. With the threat of nuclear war with the Soviets becoming frequently more inevitable, heads turn to Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a neo-God with the ability to bend matter to his will. But when he learns that he may have given his friends and loved ones cancer, he flees to Mars, leaving the world vulnerable to complete annihilation.
The Watchmen world is thick and meaty, re-writing history as if masked heroes and super-villains actually existed. In the film's opening titles, we are treated to an impressive collage of famous historical events, such as the Moon landing, but here it's Dr. Manhattan photographing Neil Armstrong. It's a hell of a lot of back-story to fill in, and the movie spends most of it's time filling in the gaps between the 1940's and the 1980's. Luckily, the characters Alan Moore wrote so beautifully, are fascinating, and the extended segments dedicated to portray their personal evolution are arguably more interesting than the movie's main plot. These are not flawed superheroes like Batman or Wolverine, they are complete fuck-ups, getting sexual stimulation from violence, battering minor offenders to a bloody pulp, or, in Dr. Manhattan's case, literally losing every trace of his humanity.
Moore's novel made them a parody of the idea of masked superheroes protecting the weak. The Comedian especially is a piece of work, gleefully frying a Viet Cong with a flame thrower, while a giant Dr. Manhattan stalks the jungle vaporising any enemies in his way, helicopters whizzing by his head while 'Ride of the Valkyries' plays. Like with 300, Snyder way overplays it. The comic itself wasn't exactly subtle, but Watchmen the movie amps everything up to 11, and while this admittedly makes the film more exciting, it makes the themes heavy-handed and sometimes plain laughable. Dreiberg can only get it up for the Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) after he's murdered some criminals, but when he finally does, Snyder captures it like a soft-core porn movie starring Shannon Tweed, with the cringe-worthy use of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' in the background. In fact, the entire soundtrack feels as if it's been picked by some stoner student with Jimi Hendrix posters on his wall.
It's no surprise that, after a very successful opening week, Watchmen plummeted once word-of-mouth got around. Audiences drawn in by the possibility of another superhero spectacle were no doubt left baffled by the existential musings of it's characters and the extreme darkness of the film's themes. Perhaps it was what the film deserved, as when it's good, it's the work of a true artist, and when it's bad, it's quite embarrassing. But it's the best that us fans are likely to ever get, and we must be thankful that a director who really knows and loves the source was on board, and insistent that it wasn't destroyed by the studio butchers. Snyder has also rounded up an excellent cast, with Haley and Crudup standing out especially (Akerman suffers from some dodgy delivery occasionally but she sure pulls off that costume). It will continue to divide it's viewers, but it'll be somewhat cherished by it's fans.
In the Viking village of Berk, Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), the young, idiotic son of the village chieftain Stoick (Gerard Butler), longs to follow in his father Stoick's (Gerard Butler) footsteps and become a famous dragon warrior. When their village is ambushed by dragons, Hiccup shoots down the most notorious dragon of all, known as Night Wing, who's penetrating scream is all that can be heard before a flash of light and the inevitable destruction. Of course, nobody believes him, and when he finds the wounded dragon, Hiccup realises he cannot bring himself to kill it. He instead invents a contraption that will help it's damaged wing, and after earning it's trust by bringing it food, begins to ride it. But while on a flight trying to impress his potential girlfriend Astrid (America Ferrera), the Night Wing is swept into the dragon nest, where an even bigger threat to the village is laying dormant.
For a Dreamworks animated effort, How To Train Your Dragon holds up refreshingly well when compared to the likes of Pixar, and to the rest of Dreamworks' rather shoddy past output. What works best is directors' Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois desire to keep things more grown up. This is a film more for the Lord of the Rings audience than those who somehow enjoyed the Shrek sequels and Madagascar (2005), with its execution rooted in fantasy and folklore. There are many different types of dragons in the film, each with a different 'power' and level of danger it brings with it, keeping the whole dragon mythology refreshing amidst a flurry of post-Rings fantasy efforts involving the giant fire-breathers. The opening battle scene is an explosion of action and comedy, an exciting way to discover the world these characters inhabit and witness Hiccup's ineptitude compared to his father's unrivalled prowess.
This being Dreamworks, it then decides to pander to the much younger audience, by introducing the (admittedly cute) Night Wing, whom Hiccup renames Toothless, and the younger inhabitants of the village (voiced by the likes of Jonah Hill and Christopher Mintz-Plasse). It was at this point where I asked myself why the elder villagers all have Scottish accents, while the younger ones sound pre-pubescent Americans in a mall. Obviously, it's a way of helping the younger (American) audience to relate to these characters, but to me it's just damn lazy and often quite annoying given Baruchel's weakling protagonist who sounds like only one ball has dropped. And with this comes the inevitable and familiar messages of acceptance and friendship. But ultimately, How to Train Your Dragon is a highly entertaining film, full of clever ideas, lovely, fluid aerial animation, and an exciting final battle with the giant dragon Red Death.
The third and presumably final entry into the series, The Hidden World, doesn't darken the tone further - it is still a kids' film after all - but you get the sense from very early on that we are heading inevitably towards an emotional parting of ways. Hiccup and his friends continue their quest to rescue captive dragons and bring them back to the village of Berk to live in harmony with humans. The problem is that they've become so good at their search-and-rescue missions that their home is now overcrowded with the lumbering beasts. Hiccup believes their only hope lies in 'the hidden world, a mysterious and possibly make-believe haven at the edge of the world spoken of by his late father Stoick (Gerard Butler). But cracks start to appear in the young chieftan's plans when his dragon and best friend Toothless happens across a Light Fury, the female of his species. Wild and distrusting of humans, the female bolts from Toothless' advances any time Hiccup shows his face to help, and it becomes clear that if he is ever to see his best bud happy, he must also let his dragon run free.
