Archives July 2024

Challengers follows a tennis couple as they push to return to greatness and explore their relationship from the past.

The folks at Warner Brothers were kind enough to send us Challengers, staring Zendaya, for the purpose of our review. The film follows three tennis players that become part of a love triangle while also keeping their focus on their game. Tennis is one of those sports that I only can enjoy watching when I can watch one of my favorite players, Venus or Serena for their skill or John McEnroe with his energy and attitude. Even when watching them, it still isn’t a sport I really enjoy watching. I would rather play and I’m terrible at it.

I knew watching this film would center most of it around the game and I intentionally went into this with the plan to focus my review on the story, relationship and production itself but not on the sport. The production quality of the film was absolutely great, transitioning between decades back and forth, the characters looked perfect in their ages, so good in fact that you’d believe that there really was that much time between parts of the filming. The acting of the cast was fantastic, I expect there to be awards for this film, seriously.

Most of the story it was hard for me to engage with due to the heavy focus on the game but by the end it tied itself up cleanly and didn’t take the “logical” ending I expected, which is rare. Holy crap though, that ending was utterly fantastic, well written and brilliantly acted. Their tennis skills, as far as I could tell, were just as brilliant too. I wouldn’t be surprised if we learned that they all truly play with the level of skill and passion as they were able to display. That or the director and effects team out did themselves.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the third installment in the Planet of the Apes reboot franchise and the first we’ve seen.

The folks at 20th Century Studios were kind enough to send us a copy of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes for the purpose of this review. Humans are nearly extinct from a virus of their creation leading to the start of the film. The film truly starts with three apes searching nests for eggs to collect, ensuring to leave at least one behind in each nest. this is for a bonding ceremony. After losing his egg, one of the apes ventures out that night to try for another, accidentally leading a group to his village, condemning them to death and giving our protagonist a reason to venture beyond his village.

The imagery of the world and the film is a more organic version of a dystopian landscape where everything that had fallen to disrepair has now been covered over or removed removed entirely by green. Reminds us that nature is just waiting for the chance to replace us and return what we’ve built to the land it could have been and it is beautiful. The dialogue is a bit disjointed through most of the film but I suspect that is intentional due to the still evolving nature of the apes and the de-evolving nature of the humans or echoes as they are referred to in the film. The story itself was well told but the voice acting and dialogue seemed to detract from the film as a whole. It felt incomplete like there were scenes cut that would have made the story much better. Now this could be because I hadn’t seen the previous films since the reboot and barely remember the classic versions but it just felt like it was missing some big pieces that would have helped made the story much stronger if they had been there.

Between King Kong teaming up with Godzilla and the latest Planet of the Apes film, 2024 may just be the year of the ape but let’s hope it would be more of the former than latter.

Check out the trailer for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes:

Twister is the story of a group of scientists that chase tornados in the hopes of finding ways of predicting them in this classic from Warner Brothers!

The folks at Warner Brothers were kind enough to send us the 4k edition of Twister for the purpose of this review. To be clear, this edition of the film is the exact same story told in the exact same way as previously released. The only difference here is the quality of the visuals. For those that have yet to see the film, it follows a group of scientists that are attempting to send a device into the center of a tornado. This device is meant to map out the tornado itself and better study how they work, how they move and to help create a way to more effectively anticipate their arrival.

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest I was lucky enough to never see a real tornado and only ever saw the aftermath on the nightly news. Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton and Cary Elwes lead the film and are joined by a talented supporting cast full of names that went on to be big names of their own. The cast in it’s entirety are fantastic and even after 20+ years the film itself holds up. Overall the film remains a classic but just looks a hell of a lot better than the old DVD copy we had previously and will continue to get regular play in our house.