Look, I am the first to admit I don't like DC movies. They are too dark. They are too melodramatic. They try to hard too deliver that "the world is awful" realism that I just avoid in movies in general. I know a lot of people are into that, I am just not one of them.

HOWEVER. Wonder Woman, the first super hero movie about a woman. Wonder Woman, the first super hero movie directed by a woman. Wonder Woman. This movie is not one of DC's standard lineup, and that is why it might just save the franchise. But enough about DC. I wanted to talk about why women have been flocking to this movie in droves. Why they have literally been breaking down in tears while watching it. Why this movie is so damn important.

I just want to say that, apart from everything I am about to discuss, Wonder Woman is a really good movie. It is a genuinely a good movie, not just a miracle for women everywhere. I won't really be going into plot here, but on a scale of 1-10 I give it a solid 8.

The story introduces a society of perfect women. They were made to be compassionate, loving, and wise. They are warriors. They are strong. They live in a perfect society where there is no crime and the sun is always shining. What a vision. Immediately the audience can sense something different from what you would expect. What is it? It is the women themselves.

• In the world oh white washing that is a staple of Hollywood, this society is diverse and vibrant.  This spreads beyond the Amazons and to the male side characters as well. It is not a world made up of white and light skinned racially ambiguous characters. 
• In a world where ageism is rampant in movies and many actresses careers die as soon as they hit 40, women in their 50s and more are portrayed as powerful, intelligent, beautiful leaders. They are not airbrushed. Their wrinkles and age stand strongly and proudly on their faces for the entire audience to see as they ride down their enemies and stab them in the throat. 
• There is no one body type of strength. There are lean and fast women. There are solid muscular women. There are women's bodies on display that would never make the screen if this was made by a man, and they are shown to be powerful, not eye candy for the male audience. 

That leads to my next point. The infamous "male gaze" that dominates cinema? Or the "boner lens" as I like to call it. This is the view almost every movie made. It shows us every woman through how straight men would want to see them. Sexualized. In many cases its so subtle most people don't even realize it until it is pointed out to them. It can be as obvious as a scene where the male hero accidentally walks in on the female nude or partially nude (which is hilariously reversed in this movie), or as subtle as scenes with women fighting shot just at the right angle to accentuate her breasts or butt. A close up of her lips. Filming the scene to deliberately show the male hero looking down at the woman.

None of that crap was in this movie. Even though the Amazon's outfits showed most of their legs, they was not a single sexual shot of them. Their boobs are not pressed together and up for male consumption. Their legs and arms jiggled. JIGGLED. Women are never allowed to jiggle, especially in super hero films (unless it is their boobs). The women in this movie were god damn heroes, and they were shown to be that, nothing less. They are not there for men to drool over. They are there to save the day.

Our leading lady, Diana, rejects the "strong female character" trope that men (and sadly many women) think is good writing these days. You know the type. She can fight (but not as well as the man), she is emotionally distant (for the man to break down her walls), and usually says something like "I am not like other girls" or "I was raised with brothers, that is why I am good at this traditionally male activity". And usually in the end needs to be saved by the male hero.

Diana is strong, but vulnerable. She is innocent, but tough as nails. She is driven, passionate, and stubborn, but she is compelled overall my love and compassion. She doesn't do what she does because she can't leave her violent life behind, or is too traumatized to do anything else, or because she doesn't know how or can't (in the case of mutants) live any differently. She is a hero because she loves so deeply and so much she physically can not stand to let people suffer around her. This is a female hero we have never seen before.

And let us examine our leading man for a second. Steve. Oh Steve. He is the male love interest we have been waiting for. He is above all, kind. He is driven by a sense of justice. He understands the cultural norms concerning women that he was raised with, but he does not accept them as right or natural. He is continuously baffled by Diana and her strange behavior, but he does not try to stop her because she is a woman. When he does try to stop her it is because he genuinely believes she is putting herself or others in danger through her actions. He easily hands command over to Diana and never makes a stink about being led by a woman. He doesn't have an ego. He doesn't care if he is humiliated or mocked. All he wants is peace. He is inspired by Diana but his morality does not depend on her. He was going to do everything he could to stop the war and save lives whether he met her or not, but is more than willing to do whatever he can to support and help her.

His most powerful scene for me was near the end, when Diana realizes that it is men, not the mythical Ares as she has led to believe, that are behind war. That darkness is a part of humanity and she cannot save them from themselves. She doesn't understand, and Steve is in tears trying to explain it to her. He has always known this fact, that humans are corrupt. He knows he is part of the problem, that they all are, that they don't deserve someone as pure as Diana, but he cannot stop fighting for them anyway. He is shaking, crying, grasping for words desperately trying to make her understand. And even though he fails to do so, and she refuses to help him, he charges in to the fight head first anyway. He cannot possibly do anything else. It is who he is. He is not the male hero we have come to know. He is a common man, he has no tragic back story, but though he is common he is uncommonly good.

Diana herself has many scenes that are stunning to watch. The final battle is certainly one of them. And her scene of discovering WW1 era women's fashion was fantastic, but there is one scene that stood out. It has been much talked about for its ability to make women spontaneously burst into tears. It is the scene where Diana, when all the men are shouting around her to stay put, that she can't save the village, she sheds her cloak, dons her armor, and steps out of the trenches into No Man's land anyway. She is taking heavy fire from the Germans, but she continues on. She holds up her shield and drops to her knees as thousands of bullets are rained down on her, but she does not stop. In that moment, millions of women watching the movie, including myself, were overwhelmed by emotion, and teared up or began to openly cry.

It has been kind of hard to figure out why that scene hits home so hard, but I think the best way to put it is that women didn't even realize how starved for a woman superhero that was not sexualized, not eye candy for men, and is THE hero of her own story they were. A hero that they can look at and see themselves and their own struggles without a hint of having to look through a man's eyes. When they see that on the big screen, all the repressed feelings, anger, resentment, along with pure joy come pouring out. Representation is important. The response to this movie shows that.

And that, overall, is why this movie is so important for women, and men to see. It shows us what can be in the future of not only superhero movies but of cinema in general. A woman in the director's chair was a key factor in this, and the world has shown the skeptics that these times of movies ARE financially viable. This movie may just go down in history as the turning point for women in film, and I am very excited that I was able to see it.

In the land of Hollywood, where reboots of classics that are probably better off left alone are now the bread of butter, comes another reboot of the iconic King Kong. Kong: Skull Island promised to be a fresh and new imagining of the tale, set in a slightly more modern time and disregarding the common features of the previous films.

Unsurprisingly, it failed...miserably. In fact I would go so far as to say this is the worst King Kong movie ever made. There are many reasons why this mess of a movie is a disaster, but the summary is this: it was extremely boring. To be boring is possibly the worst crime an action fantasy film can possibly commit, and Kong is absolutely guilty.

Let's explore that claim a little bit more, shall we? And for the record, in the following review I had to look up every single character because even minutes after the film ended I could not remember any of their names.

The film opens during a dog fight in World War 2 where an American and Japanese fighter pilot somehow manage to crash land (and survive!) onto Skull Island. They try to murder each other, but their fight is rather rudely interrupted by the ape himself, will he kill them? No bc Kong likes humans for some reason. Cue time jump.

It is now the 1970's, and the announcement that the USA is pulling out of Vietnam has just gone through. In a series of montages, we are introduced to the main group.
There are quite a few soldier main characters in this film, but don't worry about trying to keep them straight because they are equally interchangeable and forgettable. We know one personal detail about maybe three of them, but beyond that they are not the fleshed out individuals the film wanted to pretend they were. Samuel L Jackson plays their war obsessed and unhinged colonel, Preston Packard.

There is Bill Randa, played by John Goodman, who puts the entire expedition together to fuel his obsession with finding monsters, and his assistant? partner? Houston Brooks played by Corey Hawkins. Brooks is a scientist who wants to study geological features I guess. They have their soldiers, they have their money and brains, now they need a photographer. Cue Brie Larson. An anti-war photographer by the name of Mason Weaver who is apparently up for the cover of TIME and a Pultizer for some reason that is never explained thinks this trip is her ticket to even more fame. Finally they need a tracker to get through the jungle, because what do soldiers fresh out of Vietnam know about navigating jungles am I right? They find their tracker in James Conrad, former British Special Forces and current mercenary played by Tom Hiddleston. Oh yea there there is another scientist named San (no last name) played by Chinese actress Tian Jing.

The last important character out of this boatload is that soldier we met at the beginning, now aged 28 years into John C. Riley. He lives with the natives of the island and his Japanese companion has recently been killed by a monster.

So you have all these characters thrown together on the island where the god ape Kong protects the people from giant evil lizards. The landscape of the island is stunning and the CGI is fairly good, but I am afraid that is all I can say that is good about this movie.

The performances in this movie were extremely lacking, probably from the actors having so little to go on. Samuel L. Jackson delivered the best performance of the film as a man who is obsessed with war and killing, and is desperate to start another one now that the war in Vietnam is over. His soldiers, as previously mentioned, are completely interchangeable and  you never quite end up developing an attachment to any of them.

John Goodman's character falls flat as his scenes are limited and mainly exposition. You are supposed to see a man driven by obsession, but it was of those tell not show situations. His scientist companions do not fare much better. We know very little about them as people and only what they are there to study. In fact, Tian Jing spend most of her time in the film in the background and in silence. She had maybe three or four lines which is a real shame because she was wonderful in The Great Wall and deserved much better.

Brie Larson did alright, but her character was pretty bland. With no real depth, she was there to make some sort of emotional connection with Kong that is never really developed and to take pictures. She is compassionate, and that is her main and only character trait. Tom Hiddleston managed to give the worst performance of his career as the action hero Conrad. The character was introduced as a bad ass mercenary with loyalties to no country and no one; a man only in it for a money. We kind of saw that in his introduction scene, but the rest of the movie it was like Hiddleston forgot who he was supposed to be playing and was a even more cuddly version of his Night Manager character. The two characters form an instant bond despite their complete lack of anything in common other being exceptionally pretty people and remain unwavering loyal partners throughout the rest of the movie.

John C Riley had the most potentially interesting character, but that character was trapped in an endless cycle of exposition that he never really got out of. Delivering the only funny lines of the movie, he flip flopped between the wise man who tells everyone what is going on, and the unhinged island goof. It is a balance that is disconcerting and has no flow, and you end up feeling like they should have just gone with one or the other as they do not convincingly do both.

The film was seriously un-funny or fun, lacked heart, and took itself a little too seriously and not seriously enough at the same time. It relied too hard on gimmicks, particuarly Sam Jackson yelling his most famous lines from past movies("Hold onto your butts" being the most notable) and lengthy fight scenes to tell the story. The title character, Kong, does very little except fight other monsters, lacking the emotional depth of previous adaptations. You get the sense of what they wanted Kong to be, but in the end he is so much less than that. Also it really bugs me that he walks upright like a human. Nitpicking, I know. The fights themselves are nothing audiences have not seen before and therefore lack entertainment value. It was predictable and had no suspense, as we know Kong is coming back for a Kong vs Godzilla film in the near future. It was basically one of those crappy superhero origin stories no one really needs made solely to set up the real movie coming soon to a theater near you.

There are much better movies out there right now, and I suggest you spend your time and money on those. If you are looking for some mindless fun fantasy action, I highly recommend The Great Wall, which was about 100x more fun to watch than this mess.

The following contains my SPOILER FREE review for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Enjoy!

Escapists be warned: Rogue One is way too real. You want to shove your head in the sand for a few hours to forget the horrors of the reality of our world right now? This movie is not for you! There is a lot of violence, tyrannical governments, and literal genocide in this movie.

Set in the months (or days? The passage of time is kind of vague) leading up to the events of A New Hope, this film will be familiar to fans of the Original Trilogy. It is the story of the team who stole the plans to the Death Star for the Rebel Alliance. It is the gritty, dark war story that Star Wars fans have been waiting for.

The [fascist] Empire has firmly taken control of the galaxy, and the Death Star is finally complete. Our main character Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is a criminal, in jail for crimes committed against The Empire. Not rebellion type crimes, mind you, just normal crimes that she would have been imprisoned for had this been The Republic. In fact she makes it very clear in the beginning that she is not interested in rebelling against The Empire. She is forcibly recruited to the Alliance to help find her father (A criminally underutilized Mads Mikkelson), the man who The Empire forced to build the Death Star. She is placed under the command of Rebel captain Cassian Andor and his wise cracking former Imperial robot K-2SO (Diego Luna and Alan Tudyk) to find her father and stop the Death Star from being completed.

This is the basic premise of the film, one that promised to not only expand upon the Star Wars Universe as these one shot films are intended to do, but also fill in some gaps left by A New Hope. I think the movie did so fairly well. I enjoyed watching this movie much more than I did The Force Awakens, which I was not thrilled with. My biggest problem with that movie was how it was all something we had seen before (Read my review here) and a complete rip off of the Original Trilogy.

Rogue One took place at pretty much the same time and yet managed to give us something completely different and fresh. We visited many different planets, were introduced to a bunch of new characters that bear no resemblance to characters we have seen before, and showed us a different perspective than we have ever seen in a Star Wars film. It was dark. Death was everywhere and you saw good guys doing "bad" things. This movie showed us the sacrifices a person makes in war when fighting the ultimate evil.

There was no Luke Skywalker being the beacon of justice and everything good. It was ordinary people doing whatever they had to in order to get the job done, and at times it was not pretty.  The Force played a role in the film, mostly through the character of Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen), who the first ever Force user we have seen in the films who was neither a Jedi nor a Sith, but it was a pretty small role compared to what we have seen in the past. 

The visuals of the film were amazing, arguably the best in Star Wars yet. It was a beautiful movie to watch. It also filled in some plot holes from A New Hope that fans have been arguing about for literally decades in a satisfying way.
I know a some people will disagree with me on this point, but I found the fan service in this film to be just the right amount and made sense to the plot. We were shown characters we have seen before and loved, characters that were in the background but we now get to see in action, and some familiar sights from the Original Trilogy. However they were there for a reason other than evoking fan nostalgia, and that reason is because this is a story of that era and those people and visuals needed to be there. This does not apply to everyone of course. Did we really need a two second shot of C-3PO and R2D2 in the Rebel hangar? No probably not, but I enjoyed seeing them there all the same. 

Then of course there was Darth Vader. I am a huge Darth Vader fangirl. No shame there. He was my favorite fiction character of all time for most of my life. So when I heard he was going to be in Rogue One, seeing him was the thing I was most excited about. Although he had only two scenes, those two scenes were the best scenes of the film. He is the epic bad-ass we all remember from the Original Trilogy, but with modern technology they were better able to show the terror and skill that he was capable of in a greater capacity than when the Original Trilogy was made. I squealed and jumped up and down in my seat every time he was on screen.....yea. 

That was all the good, now for the bad. 

No, this was not a perfect film. For starters, it was way too long. At a whopping two and a half hours, it did get a tedious. The set up to the story took up a lot of time that we did not need to spend it on. Everyone knows where the story is going, let's just get there already! In fact, there were many elements of the story that were way too predictable. They followed a series of tropes that anyone who has ever seen a movie is probably familiar with, and the plot was extremely predictable at pretty much every turn. 

The characters were not very well fleshed out or developed. They were certainly likable and interesting, but by the end of the film we barely knew who they were. We had a superficial understanding of their basic personalities, but nothing more. The emotional connection that we felt for say Finn, Ray, and Poe in Force Awakens was just not there, and therefore the climax of the film lacked the emotional punch I think they were going for. 

The CGI characters. I will not reveal who, but there were two characters from the Original Trilogy brought to life through the use of CGI. Many people I spoke to thought it was well done, many others thought it was creepy and looked off. I am part of camp creepy. I appreciate how much work it took to accomplish what they did, and that they did a very good job, but it still took me out of the story every time I saw one of these characters and made me shiver a little. 

Overall, it was a decent movie. I am sure on a second viewing I would enjoy it a lot less than I did the first time, but after one viewing I was pretty pleased with it considering I was expecting the worst. I have higher hopes for the future of these Star Wars one shot movies than I had previously, and am glad that this one was made. I highly recommend seeing it, just don't expect a masterpiece. If anything, it made my appreciation and interest in the Original Trilogy grow even more. 

Thanks for reading! If there is interest expressed I may do a spoiler filled review in the future of specific things in the film I loved/disliked, but we shall see. Till next time! 

I actually made it out to the cinema this week and saw the film Arrival staring Amy Adams!

Arrival is an alien invasion story, but deviates from all the worn out and tired tropes of the genre we have become familiar with over the last few decades. It all begins with the arrival (haha see what I did there) of our elusive aliens. Twelve ships arrive on earth in seemingly random locations throughout the world, and naturally all of humanity freaks out. What do the aliens want? Do they intend to wipe us out? What do we do?

This is all happening in the background. The real focus of the story is on Louise, a highly respected American linguist. She is plagued by memories of a different life, a life spent with her daughter, who died young of an unspecified, but incurable disease. It is through Louise's perspective that we see the beginnings of how earth responds to the aliens. The respective governments where the ships have landed are telling the public nothing, not admitting to any contact with the aliens and generally staying pretty mum on the entire situation. Naturally this incites panic, and the world begins to fall into chaos. Louise attempts to keep calm and continue her life, but that quickly falls apart when she is approached by a colonel who she had done translation work for in the past. He gives her a recording of the aliens "speaking", asking her to translate. This begins Louise on her journey to establish contact with the aliens, learn how to communicate with them, to figure out what they want and why they are there. Louise, our hero, believes fully that the aliens are there in peace, that they wish to help humanity not harm them. She must work against the fear taking over the globe in order to prove it.

As someone who has studied linguistics, I really appreciated the approach they took to the entire process. Usually in these types of movies, the aliens have some sort of magical translation box, already know English, or there is no attempt at communication and war is inevitable. In Arrival, all the countries in the world send in their own language experts, they all attempt to communicate in their own languages, and they all make progress based on their different approaches that arise from their cultural differences. In the beginning they all share what they know with each other, but as time goes on and chaos erupts around the world, this collaboration falls apart. The methods used to decipher the alien's language, and attempt to teach them all were all based in actual techniques used by linguists working today. There is a feeling of realism in this film that is gripping, despite the ten foot tall octopus looking aliens that are a main feature. The way that people react, the way that governments react, are all very relevant and familiar to how we see people behaving in today's difficult climate.

Amy Adams was spectacular, flexing her acting muscles to portray this complicated, intelligent and driven woman. Louise is a character that never doubts herself, knowing that she is right and never gives up till the very last moment to solve the puzzle and ultimately save the world.

The story is emotional, complex, and riveting. I found myself on the edge of my seat more than a few times. When the climax hits and all the pieces come together it is a moment of pure triumph. I wanted to cheer in the theater I was so delighted. And, without giving anything away about the ending, it tackles another subject common in sci-fi that I have always found to be very poorly done, by giving you just enough to for it to make sense but not so much that you are confused and over analyzing.

There a lot of good films out right now, and bigger ones are just around the corner (Star Wars strikes again, will this one be any good? Stay tuned...), but if you get the chance go and see this movie, I highly recommend you do so. Not many movies are made anymore at this caliber.

WARNING: This *review* contains spoilers! ....and is a super nerdy, way too in depth review of the new Star Wars film.

To begin I want to state that I, during the most formative years of my life, was a massive Star Wars nerd. I had no less than 15 posters on my wall and spent most of my time on Star Wars forum sites, writing Star Wars fan fiction with my friends, and re-watching the movies until my eyes bled.