Several movies over the past few days.
Surprisingly, Ender's Game wasn't the best of them, IMHO. Some of this came from heightened expectations. Some people have been waiting for this movie since before I was born. So if Orson Scott Card had given the green light, then obviously something amazing was in the works. It was worth watching the once, and I'm impressed by Asa Butterfield's performance as Ender (and Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff was a wonderful thing). They changed a fair amount of the story but I was okay with that. Strangely, I find myself having to say that they should have changed more. They tried to put too much into the story and as a result too much of it felt cramped, especially the ending scenes. When the supposed wham moment of the movie takes less time to resolve than it did for the Little Doctor to recharge, I think that there's a problem.
But I'm glad that I saw it anyway, if for no other reason than having some closure. Ender's Game was filmed. It wasn't horrible. We can stop worrying and go to bed, okay, thank you, goodnight. That alone was worth the time and money.
I was surprised by The Croods too, but more pleasantly. The title alone leads one to not expect very much but, while I have to say that I don't know how much potential it has for repeated viewing, the first time was more than tolerable. I was most impressed that they didn't make Eep conventionally attractive, especially since she felt like the main driving force in the cast. Yes, she's a cavewoman, but when has that stopped Hollywood? Kudos. My only strong disappointment was that Grug didn't seem to get much respect from the writers. He grows, sure, but until then he seems to always be an impediment to the point that you wonder how, if this was how he did things, how they had survived to this point in the first place. Yes, Grug needs to get with the times and until he does they won't be as effective as they should be, but it's as if everybody forgot that Grug's way had ever worked before.
Without a doubt the best movie that I've seen since my mission ended was Iron Man 3. The series has always been my favorite set of films in the Marvel Universe since the first one came out, and the third one beats both of its predecessors with its hands tied behind its back. The film's take on the Mandarin was genius. He is such a completely Tony Stark kind of villain. But really, I can't find much to complain about at all. The fight at the end went on just a little too long, I think, but I can handle that. Maybe the next time that I see the movie, I'll decide that it was just right, or even too short.
I think that I like Iron Man the most because Tony Stark is the most human out of the heroes that I've gotten a glimpse of yet. He has flaws, and those flaws are magnified to an epic scale, but that's as far as it goes. Other heroes in the Marvel films have been bitten by radioactive spiders, or come from other worlds, or were given super-soldier serums. Tony Stark is just a man with a brain and an ego, both writ large, and when Time Magazine, Newsweek, and CNN came onto the screen his feet were firmly placed on our world. How many other superhero movies had a major plot point about the protagonist's alcoholism?
Iron Man has a heart has the other Marvel films lack. Some people have complained about Tony not needing to be in the suit anymore. "This should have been called Tony Stark 3." But of course, as he says in the conclusion of the film, the suit is just a suit. Tony Stark is Iron Man, and a movie without his suit at all could still be the best of them.
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