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kuppiii
Reviews
Game of Thrones: No One (2016)
What were they thinking?
I can honestly not fathom how the writers wrote down the ending for Arya's storyline in Braavos, read it through a few times, perhaps asked a few other people for their opinion and put it into action without thinking "this is ridiculous, contrived, Hollywood nonsense".
The rest of the episode is mostly fine. King's Landing was enjoyable, for once something actually happens in Mereen and the Riverrun siege...well, I suppose I don't understand how the Blackfish can get all teary-eyed over Sansa being just like Cat but refuses to go with Brienne because he wants to hold his home, yet when his home is lost he STILL refuses to go with her just to die off-screen for no reason. Never mind that, though. This is way worse.
So at the end of last episode, Arya acts entirely out of character by wearing fancy clothes, tossing around money, strolling around like a fancy lady, all while being unarmed while being hunted by the faceless men, which she must've been aware of given her, you know, spending two and a half seasons with them and acting all prepared for an attack at the end of S06E06. Predictably, she gets stabbed by the waif but manages to survive and get away.
Since Arya acted so tremendously out of character, we were led to believe that either she had prepared some sort of trap or perhaps this wasn't even Arya at all. Or at least that she had some sort of basic plan. NOPE! As if she had not at all considered the possibility that she may be attacked by the assassins who she betrayed a few days ago, she goes off to Lady Crane who magically heals her wound. "Never mind getting stabbed in the gut, I'll just sleep it off!"
The waif tracks her down, kills Lady Crane and after some Terminator-esque monologue from the waif, she chases Arya, who has regained all her strength after being stabbed all of a sudden, even though she could barely walk after she got out of bed, through half the city. Stuff happens, Arya leads her to her hideout and kills her in the dark and off-screen. She returns to Jaqen, confronts him and then leaves.
The thing is, had Arya knowingly lead her to her hideout in order to fight her in the dark, that would make some sense. She knew she would be attacked, so she baited the waif (with the fairly risky tactic of getting herself stabbed) and lured her to her safehouse. But no. Arya has no idea what's going on. It's absolutely absurd and completely out of character. There's no way Arya would not know she was being hunted. There's no way she would be unarmed and strutting around like she owns the place, unless there was some plan behind it all. There wasn't. It was just awful writing.
In my opinion, this is the lowest point of the series. To see such a long, drawn out storyline of a major character end like some awful cliché Hollywood action movie is just baffling.
Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)
What a waste.
If you were to look at this movie without any of the previous Star Wars movies in mind, it's a decent action movie. The acting is okay, the characters are meh, the special effects are very pretty and some of the one-liners aren't entirely cringe-inducing.
But since you probably haven't recently crawled out of a cave in which you've spent your whole life, you've probably heard of the original Star Wars trilogy. Everyone who's been around for a while has. Apparently, so have the makers of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I don't quite know how to begin since I could probably ramble about this movie for two hours, so let me get right into it:
It's the same goddamn thing as Episode IV, with some V and VI thrown in. It's the same. Down to the smallest details. Even the parts that aren't precisely the same are very similar. "They rhyme", as good ol' George Lucas used to say about the prequels. The plot is pretty much identical. Rebels vs Empire, a deathstar, a droid carrying an important message, a new version of Luke in female, a new version of Han in black, a new version of Obi-Wan in Harrison Ford. After the first third of the movie, you're already aware of how the movie will play out and will be able to predict every scene, because it's almost entirely the same thing as the original.
At this point I would like to add that nobody talked about this as a "reboot" or a "remake" beforehand. My interpretation is that after the failure of the prequels (with fans anyway, not so much at the box office), they wanted to play it safe. And what's safer than just remaking the movie everyone loves?
It absolutely blows my mind. I just couldn't believe what I was watching. You have so, so, so many resources at your disposal. Not just money, but the vast Star Wars universe that extends far beyond the previous six movies. Books, video games, comics, even fan fiction. If you're gonna just straight up copy something, at least do something that hasn't already been made into a movie. I never liked that they chose to connect these new movies to the previous ones, in my opinion they should've just started from scratch, say 1000 years earlier, but if you're going to do it this way, at least don't do the same story again. Or at the very least, don't put the most interesting stuff the opening text crawl. The Empire came back? How? Kylo Ren turned to the dark side? How? Why? The Republic is struggling to keep order? Why? An so on...What a wasted opportunity to tell an interesting story.
The only way to redeem this movie is if the next two movies go in a different direction, although it's hard to imagine that they could. Kylo Ren aka Darth Vader survived, Snoke aka the Emperor survived, Rey aka Luke Skywalker being trained by Luke aka Yoda, it's all set up to be basically the same all over again. I'm sure a new, even bigger and better Death Star is already under construction.
I'm not even going to get into all the little details, like how Rey is essentially flawless and how the original concept of the Force has been ruined even further by making her able to mind-control a stormtrooper and kick Kylo Ren's ass in a lightsaber fight, despite having no training with the force at all. There's tons of stuff to talk about, but in the end, to me it comes down to this:
If you've seen the originals, you already know what happens.