I saw Master and Commander, which was a brilliant movie. It's kind of depressing to watch though, because it reminds you that a movie like this would never get made today. There's so many slow scenes, everything builds up slowly, there are slow scenes with speeches and deep interactions between the characters. The kids and young adult population of today does not have the attention span required to process this and enjoy it. They need fart jokes and explosions, and super fast camera cuts, so whenever this movie gets remade it will be much different than the original.
One thing I didn't understand though. The French ship is faster and has more guns.. In the first hour of the movie they run from it, because it can mess them up. But then.. They leave the decoy. and.. after that they start chasing the French ship? I didn't really understand what happened there, I must have missed something. I thought the decoy was a great idea, but I thought that they were going to rig it with explosives or something, or sneak up behind the French ship while it investigates the decoy. But.. nope? Deploy decoy, then run away? Then suddely it doesn't matter that the French ship is more powerful, and you can just chase it at your hearts content? I obviously missed something here.
I gotta say though, the scenes with the ship engagements are so great.. Everything feels so real. It really pulls you right into the action. Seeing the kids on deck get called "Mr. Johnson" or whatever was eye opening too. These days kids have it too good. Let's throw a bunch of them on a boat! If they live through it, it should lead to a great amount of personality growth and maturing.
I also loved all the scenes that were a bit philosophical and all the scenes hinting at Darwin and evolution. Amazing that such details made it into the movie. These days like I said it would have all been fart jokes and exploding buttholes
I also saw Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to rule them all.
Wow, this movie was visually stunning. It was like a comic book brought to life pretty much, with beautiful landscapes and dog/dragon/things and .. the fighting scenes were very intricate, done in a way that made me think "I don't know if I've seen anything like this before". I mean, I have seen kung fu action scenes, but these ones seemed a bit more.. cartoony? Maybe it was that the camera wasn't bourne jerking around so much? I'm not sure, but the fighting scenes were fun to watch.
And like, the more you watch this movie, the more silly stuff they throw at you.. but it's done in amounts you can easily accept, so by the time there's flying dog dragons you just think: "Ok, there's flying dog dragons now, let's do this". It gets sillier and sillier, but you're there to witness more of the spectacle, and it doesn't ever get too silly it seems. It was way over the top for sure, but somehow they made it work. So overall I enjoyed this movie.
1/10.
