I just saw it and have to agree with most criticisms.

This, like T3 and Salvation, just feels like fan fiction. "Wouldn't it be cool if..." is the only motivation behind everything.

For a minute or two the movie was awesome, and that is when the visual language suddenly changes when they are imitating the T1 opening and terminator arrivals. Also the music imitates Fiedels classic droning sound.

The music in this film. Jesus. The music is just constantly telling you what to feel. It's just string ostinatos ad nauseam. It feels like it permeates and suffocates every frame with "Epic!" trailer-esque music.

No attention to detail, which is a mortal sin when they aspire to follow T1 and T2, considering James Camerons legacy. Gun shots slow down Terminators only when the plot requires it.

The plot just keeps throwing out new things like it has ADHD or something. It never reaches a point of feeling like "the chess pieces are in place, and here we go!". It substitutes intelligent plotting for "hey look at this, but also this was actually this, and by the way, over there".

There isn't a single action scene that has intelligence behind it, or a sense of craft or planning (they just 100% rip off the "car-hanging-over-a-cliff" setup from The Lost World in one of the biggest scenes). In another scene, the protagonists are being chased by a car with a villain in it. They shot a rocket at the car. The car explodes. End of action scene.
T2 has action scenes that morph and evolve as they go along. Seriously, can it be that hard to come up with something that is engaging and exciting?

Overall, the script and screenplay doomed this from the start. It's just completely incompatible in content, tone and intelligence with T1 or T2. Add to that miscast actors (Clarke especially), a score which deserves to be taken out and shot, it's that generic and mindless, and a heap of other problems too many to name, and you have yet another misfire that doesn't even seem to try to be a genuine follow-up to Camerons films.

Someone made a modified Jurassic World trailer:

I've not actually seen the entire film, I gave up around the hour and a half mark, where there was still a solid hour of bullshit left. You are a better man than me Squiggly.

I have to agree with what you said, and add that T4 is to me by far the most disjointed and idiotic entry in the series. You really cannot follow it, halfway through reading your plot description I already had given up trying to figure out who did what and why.
It's like they purposefully write it as diffusely and messy as possible to make sure people feel compelled to buy the retail product later to assimilate the parts they missed the first time. I've seen the previous entries a few times each with Rifftrax accompaniment, and god knows I still cannot remember half of the plot details in those things. They're like the movie equivalent of Gish gallop, drowning you in stuff and things and look at that flag and shiny metal flying past the screen and short shorts on a 17-year-old and that dude just got burned alive and Mark Wahlberg just randomly chugged a branded drink on the street and please help me I don't even remember who I am anymore.

I guess a character death might come across as cheap or exploitative if it simply seems like the writer is cutting off a story line or character.

Having their death lead to more complexity in the story, like a new plot thread, or some other consequence, might make it seem more meaningful and deserved. Or it being sacrificial would probably also play better, since that would also impart meaning.

Basically, for me, using it as an "out" of some sort would feel cheap. If it seems like a substitute for creative writing. However it adding complexity to the following story would probably have a positive effect, on me atleast.

Nope, not necessary at all. The first few minutes of the film has all you need to know. Max is just a guy surviving in the post-apocalypse. Not much to him to be honest. The title "Mad" Max makes it sound like he has a rich character portrait, but it's really stripped down. The flavor in most Mad Max movies come from the supplemental characters in whatever story they are covering in that film. As in this one.

It's completely self-contained, just sit back and enjoy.

Glad it's not just me. The most I've gone to the cinema for one film before was twice for The Dark Knight Rises. However I've seen Mad Max 4 times now, twice with friends and 2 just for myself. Never thought that would happen.

The Village (2004) - 8/10 (6.5)

Rewatching this and I always forget how utterly mesmerizing some moments are. I have to feel that this is still Shyamalan when he was at his best. Not necessarily the peak of his storytelling, but his filmmaking instincts in general are still very sharp here.

Don't mind the twist ending. Seeing it again knowing it's coming, there is still very effective and moving storytelling underneath that grabbed my attention. My only true quibble in the film is Shyamalans cameo scene. It's junk unnecessary exposition interrupting an emotional climax of score and tension.

This film has some of the absolutely gorgeous sound design Shyamalan employed in Unbreakable. The artistic use of echo and reberb on certain sounds is very effective, and other techniques, like leaving only low frequency rumble and atmospherics to put you into the mind of a character, can really turn what on paper is a pretty flat scene into a real attention-grabber.

Acting is actually pretty great overall, though I can see how the dialogue as written could come across as unappetizing. Scenes have Shyamalans early trademark of feeling quite stilted, but that also yields an uneasiness which also keeps your attention.

Add to that Roger Deakins exceptional visuals. Truly wonderful in their understated beauty. Together with James Newton Howards hauntingly beautiful score they both collaborate to really steal the show. If you remove some of the visual flair and the score, what's left is probably again pretty flat and drawn out, but the devil is really in the details here. Shyamalan really manages to make pretty much every scene interesting by virtue of either the score, the lighting, uneasy tension, effective camera work, or great atmospheric sound design. It's just really tight and controlled. Everything feels intended. With a purpose.

It can be a truly hauntingly beautiful film, and one scene in the film (my guess is you will know it when it happens) is still one of the most effective I have ever seen.

The cheesy-feeling elements could get in the way of enjoyment for some. However if they do, I feel you are missing the deeper meaning. This isn't so much a supernatural thriller, as an almost Malick-ian poem to nature and love and loss. I almost wish there was even less plot than there is, leaving me free to infer events further and really make the film more my own in that sense.

If you haven't seen it, really recommend it. Maybe check out Unbreakable first as a primer to Shyamalans particular style. If you saw it a long time ago, might be worth a rewatch for the visual and aural experience.

I read on a  reddit thread that they had 2 years go work on the 3d version, and it might be the same company that halped with titanic etc (someone might be able to dig through company credits).

I saw it in 2D though. And seeing it again tonight, I decided on 2D again. FWIW.

Interesting topic Teague.

I just watched Avengers 2, and I was simultaneously impressed at how deftly it manages to handle all the characters, while also realizing these films are just way too overblown for their own good, and they are suffering greatly because of it.

I should note that I still have the first Avengers at an 8/10 on IMDb, and I think I would still agree with me-from-x-years-ago on that assessment.

Avengers 2 was 2 hours and 21 minutes, and the editing pace in general and always felt like it was kind of racing to make it to the finish line on time. There just isn't enough time to do all characters justice. The bloat bleeds through to all areas of the film.

The plot becomes kind of muddled with various character motivations and need of differentiation.

The action scenes to me where the biggest problem, both in terms of motivation as written on the page, aswell as execution.

It's constantly a flurry of quick cutting back and forth, as every sequence needs all characters to have little mini-sequences with some context of beginning, middle and end. The way the action scenes are filmed in general is lots of short shots, rarely longer sequences. This might be just to give the editors as much leeway in post to trim the film to a tolerable length.
An exception to this is the intro scene which is one long take, but that also suffers from such chaotic juggling of characters that in the theatre seat, it's just hard to keep track, and the filmmakers can't easily emphasize one moment over others, or create some sense of structure, because they just need to get through the somewhat automated-feeling motions of giving each character their allotted screen time and scene weight. In comic book form this would probably work great, it would create dense panels the reader can study and absorb. The film version though, is the equivalent of an intro scroll of text at double the comfortable reading speed. Sure you might be able to read it all before it goes off the screen, but you retain none of the information once you power through it. You read the words, but you don't know if there was even anything of relevance there.

I don't know, maybe I'm getting older and my brain is slowly turning as elastic as a rubber band left out to dry in the crispy heat of the summer sun. I'm only 29 though, surely I've got some time left before that sets in?

Spader('s voice) was great, his character I felt was bland all around, and his motivation was basically that of the bad guy in MI: Ghost Protocol; Kill all humans and let the world reset itself. The character as stated by Whedon himself is freshly formed in the film, and so gets a skewed world view from taking in information and processing it with an immature sensibility.
However this also leads to the motivation for him also being devoid of any real meaning. He wants the world to end because... nothing really. And... fight! Queue endless hordes of mindless drones that, like stormtroopers in the prequel trilogy, are picked off so easily they never feel threatening in the least.
It's a cliche which seems to persist only because not having that element there to kill a lot of time, while they are disposed of in almost comedic numbers, would immediately make obvious how little else in the film there is. It would just be James Spaders robot flying around and punching Avengers (or shooting a non-defined energy from the eyes/hammer/palms/forehead) until either side can't fight anymore. It would become immediately clear how devoid of substance the characters and their movitations are without the free energy that comes from sheer numbers.
Like if you and 9 friends are playing soccer one evening, and suddenly after an hour of darn good fun, 5 of them have to leave suddenly. And now there's just 5 people left and the energy level just drops as the intensity dissipates, the 5 of you running around a now comically oversized arena, you can't have goalkeepers anymore because then there'd be no outfield players, and now with no goalies everyone would rather just take potshots from long range rather than actually play the game. Suddenly the underlying mechanics and dynamics of the game are unbalanced, and made very obvious, and the fun just drains. 10 minutes of long-shots and dithering later, everyone finally realizes this and collectively decide to put an end to the evening before it becomes embarrassing.

Contrast this with something like The Terminator. It's basically 2 vs. 1 the entire film (3 vs. 1 in T2), and the singular goal of the villain is simply to kill a protagonist. Yet those films are filled with energy, excellent editing structure and flow, and carefully choreographed tension in the plot and script.

The sound design of Avengers, something you might also agree or disagree with Teague, is generally just a wall of chaotic action noise. I do think that if the sound mix and design were more scaled back and with better layering in terms of which sounds are important to the moment and which aren't, that might help the editing and general frenetic feeling of the film. I'm sure even 2001 would feel stressful with the wrong musical accompaniment.

T2 on the other hand has a delicate, often very quiet sound mix, which has moments of rise and fall, and plenty of dynamics even in action scenes. In T2 every gunshot stands out, every glass shard clatters against the floor, and low sound levels are used before, or interspersed with louder moments
Avengers was just a blur of nonspecific noise to me. There was twice as much audio info there as there needed to be, and not enough separation in terms of dynamics and volume to be remotely helpful in aiding my brain to decipher the action.

The only moments the movie got a welcome sense of life were the character scenes, because you can tell these people really enjoy working with each other, and Joss Whedon can direct actors and can get their energy across to the audience. In those glimpses it feels like a cameraman just got sneaky and caught some shots without anyone knowing, capturing real joy and camaraderie.
Oddly enough, for the same reason, those shots almost became jarring to me, suddenly I was watching a different movie with enjoyable characters that act like real people, and I would find myself grinning like an idiot. And I always felt sad when those moment ended and the (frankly, at the end) gosh darn plot-serving action had to start up again.

This film also has the Quicksilver character, the same fast-moving character that appeared in X-Men: Days Of Future Past.
Bryan Singer and crew created some truly memorable scenes with that character in DOFP (if you've seen that film I shouldn't have to say anything else, you know what I mean). In Avengers though, that character really doesn't do much of anything. We do get some scripted backstory which was surprisingly effective at explaining the motivation of him and his sister, but once in action, the character is as figuratively invisible as he is literally invisible to the naked eye. There are very few moments of slow-mo to let the audience see his perspective, and the rest of the time his characters scenes are just shoved in among the rest, in an editing flow which felt droning, and relentless.

I realize most of these complaints can be levelled at most of these films. I guess I've just been pleasantly surprised enough times (Days Of Future Past for instance) where franchice films have far surpassed what might be expected of them in terms of storytelling, script and acting.

I don't know. Maybe not having Joss Whedon would be a blessing in disguise. Having more limitations might be what these films need, so even the Avengers films could benefit from some specific plot focus, rather than constantly having to fan-pander by trying to fill the film with so many different flavors that it ultimately just comes out a muted grey.

Time will tell I guess.

Haha, thanks. Almost deleted it a bunch of times as I was typing because I couldn't believe I was still spending time writing about FSOG...

Fast 7 was pretty bad.

I like silly action films when done right, but they need some semblance of weight to them.

When they jumped the car from skyscraper to skyscraper, I just sort of gave up. I had a tough time swallowing Vin Diesel flying through the air saving Michelle Rodriguez, aswell as the runway length in Furious 6. But this just went into Transformers territory. There was no reason to care after that, that was my honest feeling. The ending juggled 4 different plot threads leading to an unfocused feeling at best. The Gods eye concept is... almost laughable in how childish it is. Atleast the earlier ones for the most part didn't focus too long on things like that, but here they made it a focal point of the story.

No, not much landed right for my tastes unfortunately.