I hadn't seen Tim Burton's version of Alice in Wonderland before and knew little about it: I was
surprised to read that it is one of the highest grossing films of all time,
earning around $1 billion at the box office (five or six times what it cost to
make). Although I was of course familiar with the book as a child I hadn't read
it since then so, although I recalled odd details, I didn't know what to
expect, except a lot of nonsense! I read through the Wiki summaries afterwards
to see how the plots compared.
The first point is that the film is not simply an adaptation
of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
but takes elements from the sequel (Through
the Looking-Glass) plus adds some original ones and spins a rather more
coherent story around the mix. While the result still contains a lot of surreal
nonsense – I wasn't disappointed in that respect – it makes for a reasonably
understandable tale. The acting is good with some well-known names (Johnny
Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway to name but a few) and the film is
visually very rich and appealing. Not really my cup of tea, but entertaining
enough to be worth watching.
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I watched Battle: Los
Angeles with low expectations, supposing it to be another juvenile popcorn
movie like Battleship. In fact, I
was pleasantly surprised: it is instead a grittily realistic war movie that
just happens to involve an alien invasion. The hero is a war-scarred US Marine
Staff Sargeant (Aaron Eckhart) who is about to retire when clusters of
"meteorites" landing in the oceans next to major cities turn out to
be alien invaders. He leads a squad on a mission to rescue civilians trapped in
a part of Los Angeles due to be heavily bombed by the USAF to clear it of
aliens. His task is not helped by the fact that he has gained a reputation for
losing his men in combat. Naturally, all does not go smoothly and what follows
is a violent, confused running battle with the aliens not even seen for some
time, except for brief glimpses.
I've not been a soldier (let alone a US Marine) so I may be
mistaken, but the combat action seemed convincing to me – especially in its
early, confused stages – until the finale involving laser-guided Copperhead
missiles streaking horizontally across the sky and leaving flame and smoke
trails. In fact the Copperhead is a guided 155mm artillery shell without a
rocket motor and would have arrived in a downward trajectory at far too high a
velocity to be visible (obviously unacceptable to Hollywood!). Despite this
quibble it is a solid film, worth seeing if you like SF and enjoy war movies.
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