Arrival's strengths are not its plot, but instead its filmmaking. They made the fuck out of it. There are various aspects to the plot that make absolutely no sense at all, but the way the scenes are stitched together is top-level shit.
I am currently watching The Bourne Something...
uh... So I've got it in the player right now, and I can't actually think of the name of the movie.
Oh, "Jason Bourne"
It's fucking dogshit. I actually love the Bourne films. They're sorta guilty pleasure flicks, but they've got decent action and aren't stupid or anything so they're fun to watch.
I have to find out what the fuck happened here. The movie is intriguingly terrible. Like... some of the worst shit I've seen in a movie in a good while. I mean, a fight just started, and I have no fucking idea why. There was no reason for this dude to just jump Matt Damon, but he did for some reason.
And somehow this bitch hacked a cell phone and used that to magically delete the files on a laptop that it wasn't connected to?
There was an early scene where hacker woman was hacking things, and some other lady was trying to counter-hack her, and she typed "run tracking algorithm" or something and little blips with faces and bios started popping up on some other computer, and then some kind of facial recognition thing happened and that's how she discovered who was hacking them or something. None of it made any fucking sense at all.
They do the "enhance!" thing where a blurry low-res photo becomes a crisp HD image. There's some internet startup company that the government is bullying into giving them everyone's information, but the company hasn't even launched their product yet, but they're already huge and making these huge announcement things on a big stage telling people that they're information will be secure, and that's like the entire announcement? "Your information will be secure with us forever!" Like... is their service just a 'store all of your most important personal information in the cloud' service or something? What the fuck do they actually do, besides store personal information that they secretly give to the government?
The government has access and can track everyone with no problem in any country on the planet, but as soon as the action sequence ends because the cops show up, I guess they have to turn all of that shit off to be fair about it? They just let him go, even though they could easily just keep tracking him with all of the cameras and shit, including cel phones and shit as well, apparently.
The dialogue is the most fucking retarded shit I've heard in a while. The covert CIA guys have to fucking hold their arms up to talk into mics that are apparently wired into their sleeves? Bourne gets a thumb drive with some data on it, and the thumb drive is this giant black stick with the word "ENCRYPTED" written in big white letters on it.
The thing is, the previous films in the series made by Greengrass weren't terrible or anything. They were kinda shakey and had some questionable dialogue and plot stuff, but they weren't fucking retarded like this. They have an action scene during a fucking shit-on-fire-everywhere riot, and they're just casually driving vans and cars and motorcycles and shit through police lines and through crowded streets at like 60 MPH like it's no big deal.
Jesus, this movie has gotten even worse in the few minutes I've been writing this.
And the "Iron Hand" thing. They may as well start a new covert black ops project and call it the "Illegal Assassination" program.
"I installed some malware into her laptop and I can track her when she uses the files next!!"
God this movie is just the fucking worst. Like, I haven't felt the need to do a blow-by-blow write-up before the movie is even halfway through since that one movie about the black gangster dudes that decide to start a turf war with asians over land that they want to build a WalMart on. This movie is THAT BAD.
There is no fucking way in hell I would recommend this movie to anyone with half a fucking brain. It is upsettingly bad. I know this was sort of an incoherent rant, and the paragraphs are sorta jumbled with sentences sorta randomly strewn about with no rhyme or reason, but that's pretty much what watching this movie feels like. Random nonsense that is hard to understand.