#negative review

-Possibly the most uninspired of the Showa-era aliens, which is saying something. We see them once and they're jibbering jawas who all die easily, they have sort of a gimmick where they only speak over the radio behind a cloak of advanced technology, so I thought they would go with a Wizard of Oz gimmick where they were actually a paper tiger, or in some way fraudulent, but nope.

They can, through fairly inefficient means, take control of the minds of Earthlings and control them And for the first hour of the movie, that's basically all they do beyond what can only be described as highly destructive pranks with a hybrid freeze ray/anti gravity gun.

The Natal are not the Mysterians from the eponymous movie I saw yesterday, they are just generic 'mwahaha earthlings shall be slaves' Showa-era aliens. And, like, I can think of other Godzilla universe movies that did that way better. Mu from Atragon (they were Earthlings too, but you get my meaning) and Planet X from Final Wars, just off the top of my head.

-Humanity bands together to fight the Natal, and the only compelling concept in this movie is the United Nations pulling a Space Pirate King to frantically bootstrap and resist the aliens who have built a base on the Moon.

There is something compelling in the idea that, while space travel is internationalized in this universe and not done to further Cold War rivalries, but is instead enacted in the panicked defense of all mankind. The Moon landing is not solely a scientific achievement, but a military one. The first in-universe moon landing (I think, at least) is two rockets, sixteen people total, armed with pulp science heat ray guns.

Humanity was so strapped for time they retrofitted two Oscar Meyer Weinermobiles to serve as their moon rovers / hovercraft.

I liked the climax / last fifteen minutes of this better than the beginning of the movie, but the cool-for-the-time effects just are not good enough to save an otherwise dull movie with zero compelling characterization.

-Space travel's a lot less revered in universe than you'd expect - this was also a thing in one of the Godzilla movies, forget which - in that one, there's an international landing on a whole new planet, and the two guys involved are just like 'yep, landing complete, let's go out there and survey it', no speech or anything.

No one in this universe seems to be in awe of the fact that they've achieved a moon landing. It makes a degree of sense, given that this was written and created before the moon landing, which reframed how we view space travel. But it feels jarring that the characters in universe are so cavalier about it.

-This movie really only makes sense as an implicit subtle sequel to the Mysterians - the events of that movie are kinda sorta implied to have happened here but are never really mentioned. The only way humanity could have this sort of tech on such short notice is if it's reverse engineered or repurposed Mysterian tech, so you kind of have to assume.

I think they reused the Mysterian space station from the last movie - never destroyed by humanity - as one of humanity's space stations, so maybe we went up there and kicked their ass in between movies.

Bad movie - duller and worse than the Mysterians. I can maybe see this being slightly more redeemable if completely rewritten as a purer sequel to the Mysterians, but the Natal suck ass as villains, there's even less characterization in this. The sets and ambition of it are kind of cool, I guess. But nothing else about it is all that great. Don't recommend. Tied with Varan as my least favorite Toho movie.

5/10, F. I hated this - I'll admit that I'm biased by going in with the expectations of the 1991 Disney film, but this comic was a miserable slog.

Cliff is a myopic self-absorbed asshole you are basically never rooting for and who makes everyone else worse off for his presence without showing all that much guilt, his love interest has basically zero depth and is just a pinup girl expy of Bettie Page, the supporting cast are basically nothing characters. The villains don't have a fraction of Neville Sinclair's charisma, the plot is super disjointed, the comic eventually gets bored and starts doing disconnected plots.

There's a plot where his girlfriend gets fed up with him and leaves to go to Europe, and Cliff spends the last of his money to go and yell at her and grab her, basically. The happy ending for these two is being far away from each other, not getting back together. Comics!Cliff is a drain on himself and everyone else around him.

The thing about comics!Cliff Secord - I'm fine with protagonists who are bad people if they are also interesting. But Cliff was not interesting! He was a selfish asshole with no depth! Characters have to be likable or interesting, and Cliff was neither. Jennifer Connolly's natural charisma helped Jenny a lot in the movie, but the writing was also far kinder to that character than Betty in this comic, who is literally just a pinup girl.

You have fairly minor issues, like this bizarre lettering choice where certain words are GIANT and in DIFFERENT COLORS AND FONTS because I guess ordinary means of emphasis aren't clear enough anymore? The title feels fairly dishonest given that Sonja and Vampirella are only on page together and at odds for maybe a cumulative half-issue across a five issue miniseries, and it also seems like it seeks to trick people into buying a third entry in the Projectverse rather than just pitching itself honestly.

Somehow, Abnett has managed to create the feel of a scattershot, corporate-mandated company-wide event comic from the big two inside of fifteen issues, which is an accomplishment, I'll give him that - Vampirella and Red Sonja only feel like they're half of this comic, but there are so many other members of the Project who get focus that it doesn't feel like the Project members get all that much focus either.

It feels like a comic that doesn't know where its attention should be going. I'm also just not too fond of the world-ending stakes here - I think this comic would have been better if it had just kept going with the team-up stuff like you saw in the prior two volumes, maybe even cut the Netherborn plot altogether.

Also excuse me if I'm repetitive at times, this is a whole bunch of ramblesss

7/10, C-. I went in with fairly low expectations that were not met. This film seems to only be interested in celebrating what I consider the least interesting elements of the franchise, and even those adapted elements are fairly dully executed.

Spoilers for Garo: Taiga follow. Minor spoilers for the superhero webnovel Worm are also included.

-The protagonist, supposedly Taiga Saejima, is basically an OC with the same name as Kouga's father. This movie is like if you made a My Hero Academia prequel where Endeavor was a typical teenage shonen protagonist or something.

Garo: Taiga has sort of an audience alienating premise in that it focuses on Taiga Saejima when he was young - Taiga Saejima being Kouga's shithead dad whose only on screen accomplishments were cameo appearances and a spotlight episode where he was basically an abusive dad who raised his son like Doc Savage's dad did.

There's a scene in the 2005 Garo show where we see kid Kouga looking at toys in a toy shop like he's never seen them before, and his lack of understanding of the world outside of being a Makai Knight nearly gets him eaten by a Horror.

Kouga Saejima was such a dysfunctional adult it took the world's bravest Manic Pixie Dream Girl to fix him, and that's all because of Taiga Saejima, a man who never showed affection to his son while he was alive, and only left a ghost answering machine to do so after his death.

So I mean, maybe he was nicer when he was young, but if your only exposure to Taiga is that, then of course Taiga being a generic hero guy is going to feel weird. Especially when the actor playing him is by far the most stilted of the three men. I think I even prefer Ryuga's actor to this guy.

-The movie introduces a new concept into the Saejimaverse - the Four Auspicious Beasts. (I think the subs call them the Sacred Beasts, but I think the former name is cooler, and we've already seen creatures called Sacred Beasts in the franchise before, so we need something to differentiate these newcomers from that.)

I don't care for them. The whole point of the Garo setting is that the world is fucked up, weird, alien, offputting. The Big Good of the Saejimaverse looks like this!

The Four Auspicious Beasts feel too humanized, too whimsical, too Studio Ghibli. They feel like embodiments of a placid nature humanity can understand and work with, there are Makai Priests who specifically work as Guides of the points of the Compass they represent. And it's not even because the 4AB are too alien to comprehend.

Byakko is just a guy. Supernatural beings in the Garo universe should not be just a guy. It doesn't help that he basically takes over the movie because this actor is the most charismatic one in the entire cast, even if his story is not interesting in the slightest.

The scene where the 4AB basically go Dangai with Taiga is cool - but it feels like they went 'you'll sacrifice everything if you merge with us' and then Taiga didn't sacrifice anything.

-Fuki is the female lead in this movie. She is yet another woman is a receptacle for an object, and she doesn't get the dignity of being humanized and expanded upon like Mayuri from Flower of Makai. They give her a paint by numbers survivor's guilt thing that vaguely connects to the rest of the story, she delivers mediocre material in an equally mediocre manner, she's not the worst female character this franchise has had but she's still pretty bad.

-Jado is the bad guy - he is also nothing you've not seen before and there's nothing really compelling about his execution. His clockwork twin minions are kind of cool.

-There's a scene in this I thought was cool that I don't remember seeing in prior Garo entries - Spiritual Precognition, where the Golden Knight gives up a bit of his lifeforce to simulate the future and know the outcome of an action.

It reminds me of the superhero webnovel Worm, where Scion, the source of the setting's superpowers, can briefly use Path to Victory, an ability that perfectly predicts, well, the Path to Victory, but it costs him so much energy he only uses it at key points. I like stuff like that.

-The action in this is fine - I can remember a few scenes where I was like 'ok that's pretty cool' but the emotional stakes were just not there like they were in the best moments of the show, or, to use a better comparison, some of the better movies like Red Requiem or Beast of the Midnight Sun.

The best moments in Garo almost universally involved monsters of the week with either a very cool gimmick, an emotional connection to whatever the protagonist was going through at the time, ideally both. The overarching plot - the world-ending stakes, the monster who wants to eat something to grow stronger - those were almost never the part that was compelling or interesting, it was the almost perfunctory conclusion to the story.

Garo: Taiga doesn't celebrate the moments that make Garo great, it celebrates the mediocre, underwhelming afterthought climaxes that fill huge portions of the franchise (and the entirety of the Ryugaverse.) It's disappointing, and indicative of the downturn in quality the Saejimaverse experienced when it kept going after Flower of Makai.

Spoilers follow.

-I think the movie's biggest sin and strength is Blackbeard. Some of the only times I was really invested in the movie were when Blackbeard was doing something fucked up and supernatural, but his actor wasn't convincing in the role, the character wasn't intimidating or charismatic, the writing wasn't good around him.

The idea of a pirate captain with unexplained supernatural powers of various types is really cool! Wish the execution had been as cool as the implication.

Making Blackbeard Mother Theresa was a really cool choice. I also really liked the 'cabinet full of shrunken ships as trophies.' Just a shame how the character was written and portrayed and directed-

-Angelica was there. I had basically zero emotional investment in her and Jack's relationship - she felt like they ported in a 'spicy Catholic Latina' for Jack to have history with and didn't give her much more depth than that.

-Something I really liked was Syrena - especially the ending of her story, where she shows her true nature and kills the clergyman. That is a predator race mimicking humanity. I guess you could say that the ending of Syrena's story is ambiguous but no it's fucking not. That is a predator race that evolved to hunt humans. The whole thing with the clergyman was a long con, you'll never convince me otherwise.

Waiting for the shoe to drop with the clergyman was basically the entirety of the anticipation I felt while watching this movie, so I'm biased on that score.

-Why did they direct the actor to portray the King like that? Bad comic relief was a bit of a rough introduction to this movie.

-On the note of the mermaids besides Syrena - while I like the idea of them (familiar theme in this review), I feel like calling them mermaids was deliberate edge. Like, they act way more like sirens in this

Why the fuck did Barbossa not see the Spanish sooner? Like, this is how close the armada is when somebody finally spots the Spanish ships - what the fuck was the lookout doing?

-Something I liked was that the 'up is down' from the Chinese map comes back in this movie. Because you have to go up to get into the cave with the Fountain of Youth.

-On that note, the Spanish showing up just so they could destroy this abomination to God was so fucking funny - only delighted laugh I let out in this entire movie.

(I felt a bit of grim satisfaction at the ending of Syrena's plot, but that's mostly because I was sure they'd go for some saccharine bullshit there. Even the ambiguity they went for was better than that.)

Most of this movie is bloated, convoluted gambits from like nine different actors with competing goals, very rarely spending too long with one POV focus, and its action scenes match that - chaotic frenzies where you don't really have time to appreciate anything.

It's telling to me that the supposed finale of a trilogy that revolved around freedom, the fact that pirates view their codes as more guidelines, a trilogy where the first two movies have fairly small stakes, ends like this.

We go from fairly narrow focuses on major POVs to a scattershot ensemble where I'm not sure anyone besides Jack and maybe Elizabeth gets the narrative focus they need for their plots to resonate with the viewer.

Action sequence wise, until the last thirty minutes (and even that's debatable) - there's nothing like the waterwheel scene from Dead Man's Chest, where there are a lot of actors involved but it feels cohesive and never convoluted, where everything makes sense and flows naturally and effortlessly.

The pirates somehow have an actual ruling system that was never alluded to in prior movies. Blackbeard is there to enforce a code that was previously implied to be unenforceable save by the own moral codes of the pirates in question.

I do like that the movies have had this consistent throughline of both Will and Elizabeth getting further and further entrenched in the pirate lifestyle, and I think their ending spot in this movie works for both of them. I think that basically everything else about the movie was a mistake.

-I'm not sure why Barbossa is the one to marry Elizabeth and Will, wouldn't it work better narratively for Jack to be the one to do it? Wouldn't that better match what was alluded to in prior films?

-I didn't really care about Davy Jones and Calypso. I found the eventual ending for Beckett's plot to be fairly underwhelming. Never really got attached to any of the Brethren. The afterlife segments were alright.

This movie felt too bloated compared to its predecessors, and its epic stakes didn't feel like they naturally followed from them either. It felt like there was someone urging them to make the then-finale 'Bigger, bigger!' and they couldn't convince me to care about the way they went about it.

I only kind of liked the last thirty minutes, because that's the only time Jack, Elizabeth, and Will seem to get singular focus and straightforward individualized action scenes. I was pretty bored by the other one hundred and thirty minutes. Wouldn't recommend this one.

(If you're following me for my Godzilla Plus reviews, I haven't stopped that. I try to watch something on the treadmill every day, but I had a busy day today and didn't have the mental energy left over for something with subtitles, so I decided to just watch a short movie I wasn't attached to and figured (correctly) would be bad. I'll be back to Godzilla Plus tomorrow with Heisei Gamera 2.)

Once she lucied (25 minutes into an 82 minute movie), I was baffled and fascinated. There's a fairly dull opening with the Korean equivalent of the Triads (for some reason, this movie centers on the Korean mob while taking place in Taiwan. ???), and then some baby growth hormone the triads stuffed in her stomach turns her into Dr. Manhattan.

This movie is kind of like if you mixed Limitless and Warren Ellis' Supergod, with much worse writing than either of those products. The '10% of your brain' stuff is dumb - if this movie was just 'we accidentally turned this lady into Dr. Manhattan' it would be a lot less stupid.

-Scarlett Johansson does not convincingly play Lucy the inchoate goddess in this - her performance in this reminds me of Will Smith in After Earth. She's trying to do this aloof, above it all thing but it just comes across as stilted and lifeless.

-Morgan Freeman is in this, sleepwalking through the role effortlessly, and plays a scientist whose theories are so laughable that he must be at this French university (that doesn't speak French - all the students and professors speak English with a French accent) as the court jester. But, hey, I guess his theories were right so why am I poking fun.

I will say - I really liked this specific moment where Lucy's powers are revealed through her conversation with Freeman's character. Like, you know what, her suddenly appearing on his TV screen because she keeps spontaneously developing superpowers until she turns into God - it's a good moment - it reminds me of some bits in Pluribus where the Hive communicates with Carol Sturka - I like stuff where superhumans are unintentionally alien and offputting.

-I kind of like how myopic she instantly became upon her apotheosis, like the reason I bring up Dr. Manhattan is because she's full 'a dead body and a live body have the same number of particles' in this. She kills so many innocent people in this, it's hysterical.

There's no gradual change, no buildup, she's just instantly disregarding all other forms of life which… I can kind of see working in a smarter movie?

The decisions she makes in this are wild. I was constantly taken aback, like 'wait why the fuck did she do that?' You'll notice I'm not really talking about the specific actions she takes in this, because they very rarely made sense to me.

It's like she has this single-minded tunnel vision for whichever specific goal is in question. Her mind just doesn't process second-order consequences, and she just sets out to achieve whatever goal is in mind regardless of how else it might harm her. She's like a glitchy superintelligence.