Does watching a movie in the middle of the ocean vastly alter the cinematic experience? A cruise review wrap up (Skyscraper, The Meg, Game Night, Blockers, The Incredibles 2)
The cinema. I love it! It's the one time I'll risk eating popcorn and the subsequent agony I'll most likely endure. I love getting comfy in an oversized seat that countless children have undoubtedly wet themselves in while the lights go down around me; hearing the music swell from all angles and being swallowed up by the big screen. I'm no cinema snob, though. I've had some of good movie experiences on big screens in the park (Ferris Bueller's Day Off for the very first time) with bats overhead, or at makeshift drive-ins on old race courses (a Grease singalong). I'll even have a good movie watch with a streaming service, watching Ghost Ship for the twenty third time on the living room television or falling asleep the the fourteenth season of CSI on my phone so that I dream about Ted Danson.
For a long time, I thought that the worst way to watch a movie was on a plane. Small screen, strange edits to sanitise content, and you're almost always uncomfortable and unable to focus. Plane movies may still be the movies in which I am most likely to vomit - minimal competition - but there's a new contender for the place in which I watch the strangest assortment of movies that have received mixed receptions and am able to recall very little about them, and am also usually deeply uncomfortable. Surprise! It's on a cruise ship. I have been on cruise ships before - my grandmother is unwilling to travel alone, so I've become her travel companion - but usually I don't fuss with the movies (excluding Sing Street, which I loved so much that I watched several times on board and then bought on DVD). I had very little interest in watching something I could barely hear on the top deck of a ship, wrapped in three blankets but still essentially freezing. My most recent trip, accompanying my grandmother around New Zealand, had quite pleasant weather and also lots of very closed-minded old people with strong opinions about my pink hair, and so I found myself watching movies this time.
When I'm in my comfort zone - on a plane or at home with Netflix - I tend to fall into spirals of horror movies or awards bait that I will happily stay in forever. Watching things from the comfort of our room while drinking the ice wine some Canadian friends gifted us? I guess I was being a little bit sillier. It's how I've ended up awful movies in the past, like Murder on the Orient Express, or truly hilarious movies, like Geostorm. Instead of trying to write a whole review on the bizarreness that is Skyscraper, I figured we'd mix things up and try to keep it brief. Am I capable? How did this strange selection of movies hold up under the cruise scope?
The Incredibles 2
Like most people who were in their formative years in 2004 with animated movies forming the bulk of their personalities, I have a strong emotional attachment to The Incredibles. On rewatch over the years, I was always pleased with how it held up. As such, I was skeptical of the sequel. I also felt like I hadn't heard anything about the movie on it's release.
The family are back, and superheroes are outlawed but Helen is bankrolled to get some positive PR while Bob handles the family. There are super villains! There's mind control! There are gadgets! I completely forgot that no one knows about Jack Jack's powers!
For the most part, it was pretty good. This movie suffered the most from the cruise vision, I suspect, because I can't recall my minor gripes. I do remember feeling a little frustrated with the minimal characterisation given to Violet and Dash. Violet especially is quite key to the plot, but her character does occasionally feel sidelined and flattened into a teenage stereotype. I also distinctly remember feeling like, at times, the movie couldn't decide what message it was trying to convey. It was trying to dip its toes into some well worn but interesting ideas of feminism and family dynamics, but it felt like it would place in other ideas that were directly oppositional. So while the movie looks better than ever and feels like slipping on a comfy old t-shirt, it's hard to parse it on an idealogical level. It's just trying to say too much and ends up saying very little.
I still found it incredibly satisfying to watch, all things considered. It was like checking in on old friends who are still doing well for themselves. It also gave me context with which to explain the extremely horny New Yorker review to my friends who had been blissfully unaware.
Rating: 7/10 - For context, I'd have given the original Incredibles a solid 9/10 at the time. I honestly think this one would have scored higher had I watched it less seasick and miserable, but able to dwell in my misery and inability to extricate the metaphors, I was let down.
Game Night
It has only been a short while since I watched this movie, but it also fell victim to the cruise curse. I made notes while watching it and on looking back at them could honestly not have told you what most of them referred to. Rachel McAdams and Jason Bateman are a very competitive couple and Jason Bateman's brother, played by Kyle Chandler, is determined to continue his sibling rivalry. Chandler's character hosts a game night but - shock! The fake kidnapping is hijacked and a real kidnapping takes place, because there are really people out to get him! It's all very contrived - the whole plot is truly exhausting - and there were so many times I just wanted to turn it off out of spite.
Thankfully, in spite of one of those plots that could have just used some good old fashioned communication, the majority of the supporting cast have enough charisma and screen presence to pull you along. McAdams is really having fun, and Lamorne Morris is funny in almost everything he touches. I could exhale whenever the camera was on them. There was a lot of potential for this movie to be a real silly fun movie, but there were just spots where the writing wore on me so badly. Perhaps I was just irritable, but I could not get on board with any of the jokes surrounding Jesse Plemons' cop character, where the joke seems to be "he doesn't understand social cues". I think the movie occasionally knows what it is, and when it does it is much better. It leans in, and gets sillier, and it's fun. But when it's trying to establish its world, or to create empathy for our proposed protagonist, it's far too self-serious.
Rating: 5/10 - if you need a silly comedy, this will presumably do fine. It is functional, and has some above average performances in it. I personally was just not into what it was trying to sell me.
Blockers
So many comedies that were so close to being great, but just slightly outside of being my thing. Blockers and I might be star-crossed lovers. It is thematically perfect for me, but was advertised so poorly that I avoided it for months, and it is packaged in a gross-out comedy that is everything I hate in a movie. If you took this plot, these actors, these characters, and just maybe took out a bunch of the jokes about butts and balls and vomit, you'd have a coming of age movie I'd be mad about. And so many of these jokes that ordinarily isolate me also landed for me in this particular instance! There's a part of this movie where a guy ejaculates and then immediately places his fedora back on!
The basic plot, as you'll have seen, is that three high school girls make a pact to have sex on prom night and their parents find out via convenient plot point, determined to block this from happening. The deeper element of this is, of course, that one of the girls is gay and her father wants to stop her from feeling like she needs to have sex to be a part of something. I truly did not care at all about the parent plots - they were sweet when they needed to be, and their hypocrisy and sexism was lampshaded by multiple characters. Where the movie came into its own was in showing the three girls, in what I felt was probably accidentally one of the most accurate depictions of modern adolescence I've seen in a long time. They're all in different places with regards to sex and their futures and their relationships, but they're all empowered and coming into themselves in very different ways. I wanted the movie to let them make the mistakes that the premise was built on preventing. All of teenage characters were played honestly and empathetically and kudos to all of the actors on the realism even in the more ridiculous elements. Obviously, Sam's storyline resonated deeply with me, with the struggle between individual identity and collective identity. The parents I am somewhat less enamoured with, probably because I don't care for their plot as much, but they all do their jobs well and are obviously well in their comfort zones.
I wish this movie had trusted itself enough not to get a bit trigger happy with the insertion of goofy bits. It's got such a strong core, and knows what it's doing on a thematic level, but it just gets a bit confused in execution. If they'd have cut that projectile vomiting scene short, nixed the butt-chugging bit, and maybe taken the domestic abuse revelation a little more seriously, this might have been in the ranks of my favourite movies of the year.
Rating: 7.5/10 - More than a serviceable comedy, let down by the production's lack of faith in their own material and definitely by how it was marketed.
Skyscraper
Dwayne the Rock Johnson needs to save his wife and children from a skyscraper!
This movie was utterly ridiculous and basically nothing happened in it and yet somehow it was engrossing in the way that these movies are. I did fall asleep during my first attempt at watching it, which surely docks points, as does the fact that literally nothing happens in this movie. It is just...a building is set on fire, and The Rock saves his wife and children from the building. At one point a character is revealed to have done a double cross and I didn't realise we weren't supposed to have assumed he was evil all along!
Rating: 3/10 - I fell asleep during this movie in spite of all the fire and yelling and claims of a building that dwarfs the Burj Khalifa.
The Meg
In terms of silly action movies, The Meg was both better and worse than Skyscraper. A lot more happens in this movie, in terms of actual plot points, but the quality of the movie is also objectively quite awful. It is essentially a movie wherein some sea scientists go through some fog on the ocean floor and discovered that there is more ocean beneath it, and that ocean contains a Very Big Shark that is Out To Kill.
The best thing about this movie is that it is very easy to watch as a good-bad movie. Sometimes the characters talk but do not seem to understand each other, and other times they capture one shark only to have another, unexplained, larger shark come and eat that shark. Jason Statham is good in it, but he's about the only good thing (there are a couple of supporting actors who give good performances but are killed almost immediately) - everyone else is disconnected. There is a scene where a dog appears to be killed, which made me very angry, but at the end the dog is revealed to have survived with literally no explanation. We are apparently supposed to witness a love story bloom, but it feels like we are just watching a competent Statham carry a crew from disaster - on several levels.
Rating: 3.5/10 - I enjoyed this slightly more as a silly fun action movie, because there's more silly fun, but I wish these movies would stop taking themselves so seriously.
So in retrospect, we've learnt that it is physically impossible for me to keep things brief, and also that I guess Blockers was secretly the best movie I've watched in a long time. Maybe I was so desperate for something joyous and young and honest in a sea of old people who wouldn't stop complaining about how there was "too much foreign food" at the International Buffet.
For a long time, I thought that the worst way to watch a movie was on a plane. Small screen, strange edits to sanitise content, and you're almost always uncomfortable and unable to focus. Plane movies may still be the movies in which I am most likely to vomit - minimal competition - but there's a new contender for the place in which I watch the strangest assortment of movies that have received mixed receptions and am able to recall very little about them, and am also usually deeply uncomfortable. Surprise! It's on a cruise ship. I have been on cruise ships before - my grandmother is unwilling to travel alone, so I've become her travel companion - but usually I don't fuss with the movies (excluding Sing Street, which I loved so much that I watched several times on board and then bought on DVD). I had very little interest in watching something I could barely hear on the top deck of a ship, wrapped in three blankets but still essentially freezing. My most recent trip, accompanying my grandmother around New Zealand, had quite pleasant weather and also lots of very closed-minded old people with strong opinions about my pink hair, and so I found myself watching movies this time.
When I'm in my comfort zone - on a plane or at home with Netflix - I tend to fall into spirals of horror movies or awards bait that I will happily stay in forever. Watching things from the comfort of our room while drinking the ice wine some Canadian friends gifted us? I guess I was being a little bit sillier. It's how I've ended up awful movies in the past, like Murder on the Orient Express, or truly hilarious movies, like Geostorm. Instead of trying to write a whole review on the bizarreness that is Skyscraper, I figured we'd mix things up and try to keep it brief. Am I capable? How did this strange selection of movies hold up under the cruise scope?
The Incredibles 2
Like most people who were in their formative years in 2004 with animated movies forming the bulk of their personalities, I have a strong emotional attachment to The Incredibles. On rewatch over the years, I was always pleased with how it held up. As such, I was skeptical of the sequel. I also felt like I hadn't heard anything about the movie on it's release.
The family are back, and superheroes are outlawed but Helen is bankrolled to get some positive PR while Bob handles the family. There are super villains! There's mind control! There are gadgets! I completely forgot that no one knows about Jack Jack's powers!
For the most part, it was pretty good. This movie suffered the most from the cruise vision, I suspect, because I can't recall my minor gripes. I do remember feeling a little frustrated with the minimal characterisation given to Violet and Dash. Violet especially is quite key to the plot, but her character does occasionally feel sidelined and flattened into a teenage stereotype. I also distinctly remember feeling like, at times, the movie couldn't decide what message it was trying to convey. It was trying to dip its toes into some well worn but interesting ideas of feminism and family dynamics, but it felt like it would place in other ideas that were directly oppositional. So while the movie looks better than ever and feels like slipping on a comfy old t-shirt, it's hard to parse it on an idealogical level. It's just trying to say too much and ends up saying very little.
I still found it incredibly satisfying to watch, all things considered. It was like checking in on old friends who are still doing well for themselves. It also gave me context with which to explain the extremely horny New Yorker review to my friends who had been blissfully unaware.
Rating: 7/10 - For context, I'd have given the original Incredibles a solid 9/10 at the time. I honestly think this one would have scored higher had I watched it less seasick and miserable, but able to dwell in my misery and inability to extricate the metaphors, I was let down.
Game Night
It has only been a short while since I watched this movie, but it also fell victim to the cruise curse. I made notes while watching it and on looking back at them could honestly not have told you what most of them referred to. Rachel McAdams and Jason Bateman are a very competitive couple and Jason Bateman's brother, played by Kyle Chandler, is determined to continue his sibling rivalry. Chandler's character hosts a game night but - shock! The fake kidnapping is hijacked and a real kidnapping takes place, because there are really people out to get him! It's all very contrived - the whole plot is truly exhausting - and there were so many times I just wanted to turn it off out of spite.
Thankfully, in spite of one of those plots that could have just used some good old fashioned communication, the majority of the supporting cast have enough charisma and screen presence to pull you along. McAdams is really having fun, and Lamorne Morris is funny in almost everything he touches. I could exhale whenever the camera was on them. There was a lot of potential for this movie to be a real silly fun movie, but there were just spots where the writing wore on me so badly. Perhaps I was just irritable, but I could not get on board with any of the jokes surrounding Jesse Plemons' cop character, where the joke seems to be "he doesn't understand social cues". I think the movie occasionally knows what it is, and when it does it is much better. It leans in, and gets sillier, and it's fun. But when it's trying to establish its world, or to create empathy for our proposed protagonist, it's far too self-serious.
Rating: 5/10 - if you need a silly comedy, this will presumably do fine. It is functional, and has some above average performances in it. I personally was just not into what it was trying to sell me.
Blockers
So many comedies that were so close to being great, but just slightly outside of being my thing. Blockers and I might be star-crossed lovers. It is thematically perfect for me, but was advertised so poorly that I avoided it for months, and it is packaged in a gross-out comedy that is everything I hate in a movie. If you took this plot, these actors, these characters, and just maybe took out a bunch of the jokes about butts and balls and vomit, you'd have a coming of age movie I'd be mad about. And so many of these jokes that ordinarily isolate me also landed for me in this particular instance! There's a part of this movie where a guy ejaculates and then immediately places his fedora back on!
The basic plot, as you'll have seen, is that three high school girls make a pact to have sex on prom night and their parents find out via convenient plot point, determined to block this from happening. The deeper element of this is, of course, that one of the girls is gay and her father wants to stop her from feeling like she needs to have sex to be a part of something. I truly did not care at all about the parent plots - they were sweet when they needed to be, and their hypocrisy and sexism was lampshaded by multiple characters. Where the movie came into its own was in showing the three girls, in what I felt was probably accidentally one of the most accurate depictions of modern adolescence I've seen in a long time. They're all in different places with regards to sex and their futures and their relationships, but they're all empowered and coming into themselves in very different ways. I wanted the movie to let them make the mistakes that the premise was built on preventing. All of teenage characters were played honestly and empathetically and kudos to all of the actors on the realism even in the more ridiculous elements. Obviously, Sam's storyline resonated deeply with me, with the struggle between individual identity and collective identity. The parents I am somewhat less enamoured with, probably because I don't care for their plot as much, but they all do their jobs well and are obviously well in their comfort zones.
I wish this movie had trusted itself enough not to get a bit trigger happy with the insertion of goofy bits. It's got such a strong core, and knows what it's doing on a thematic level, but it just gets a bit confused in execution. If they'd have cut that projectile vomiting scene short, nixed the butt-chugging bit, and maybe taken the domestic abuse revelation a little more seriously, this might have been in the ranks of my favourite movies of the year.
Rating: 7.5/10 - More than a serviceable comedy, let down by the production's lack of faith in their own material and definitely by how it was marketed.
Skyscraper
Dwayne the Rock Johnson needs to save his wife and children from a skyscraper!
This movie was utterly ridiculous and basically nothing happened in it and yet somehow it was engrossing in the way that these movies are. I did fall asleep during my first attempt at watching it, which surely docks points, as does the fact that literally nothing happens in this movie. It is just...a building is set on fire, and The Rock saves his wife and children from the building. At one point a character is revealed to have done a double cross and I didn't realise we weren't supposed to have assumed he was evil all along!
Rating: 3/10 - I fell asleep during this movie in spite of all the fire and yelling and claims of a building that dwarfs the Burj Khalifa.
The Meg
In terms of silly action movies, The Meg was both better and worse than Skyscraper. A lot more happens in this movie, in terms of actual plot points, but the quality of the movie is also objectively quite awful. It is essentially a movie wherein some sea scientists go through some fog on the ocean floor and discovered that there is more ocean beneath it, and that ocean contains a Very Big Shark that is Out To Kill.
The best thing about this movie is that it is very easy to watch as a good-bad movie. Sometimes the characters talk but do not seem to understand each other, and other times they capture one shark only to have another, unexplained, larger shark come and eat that shark. Jason Statham is good in it, but he's about the only good thing (there are a couple of supporting actors who give good performances but are killed almost immediately) - everyone else is disconnected. There is a scene where a dog appears to be killed, which made me very angry, but at the end the dog is revealed to have survived with literally no explanation. We are apparently supposed to witness a love story bloom, but it feels like we are just watching a competent Statham carry a crew from disaster - on several levels.
Rating: 3.5/10 - I enjoyed this slightly more as a silly fun action movie, because there's more silly fun, but I wish these movies would stop taking themselves so seriously.
So in retrospect, we've learnt that it is physically impossible for me to keep things brief, and also that I guess Blockers was secretly the best movie I've watched in a long time. Maybe I was so desperate for something joyous and young and honest in a sea of old people who wouldn't stop complaining about how there was "too much foreign food" at the International Buffet.
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