The Covenant (2006)

I really wanted this movie to be good. Well, let me be completely honest and say, "good for this kind of movie". This kind of movie is as the box said from the producers of Underworld which stars the delicious Kate Beckinsale and is all about the war between vampires and werewolves. This movie is about witchcraft. Okay, sounds good to me. Witches keep their power secret...passed along blood lines...yadda, yadda, yadda. Okay, I'm still with you. The bad warlock wants the good warlock's power, which even seems like a plausible story line to me.
I am set for a somewhat straight-forward super natural action film with cool special effects. But, instead I get a group of the most mature looking 17 year olds I've ever seen who spend the first hour of the film stuck between a teen romance and a horror suspense film, neither of which it's doing well. By the time the reveal happens letting the good guys know who the bad guy really is, I've known for at least 45 minutes. When the action finally starts happening, it's not a bad film.
I didn't buy a single one of the actors as being 17 or 18. Why didn't they just set the story at college and make them 21 or 22? I might have gone for that. The school they all attend is an upscale boarding school, which at least to me translates well to small private university.
There are some rather big things left unanswered in this film that I presume they planned on answering over the course of several sequels, like what the hell is a darkling? Or, where are all the other witches? Maybe even, where does the power come from and why does using it ravage the body if used too often?

The Covenant on IMDb

Savages (2012)

This was less of an action film than the trailers made it out to be. That's neither good nor bad, it just wasn't the film that I was expecting. In some ways, that is for the best since it turned out to be a more compelling story than I was expecting. In other ways it was worse than I respected as there are several long, slow scenes where you want to them to move along. I also had a hard tiem with some of the characters, but not the actors. Del Toro's character, while well-played was more of a caricature than a character. In fact this caricature would have fit better into a Quentin Tarrentino or Richard Rodriquez film playing opposite Antonio Banderas, well a character played by him at any rate.
The standout performance is by John Travolta as a crooked DEA agent, or as he would have us believe one of many. He showed off his receding hairline and made it work. He brought a bit of a beer gut to the action scenes which he mostly stayed out of. Travolta wasn't the only actor to land a complex character, but he is the only one that sells it. The rest of the actors do from fair to very good but none of them standout. If Salma Hayek's drug Cartel leader had been written better she would have wowed us too. Instead, I just kept thinking in every one of her scenes that this was the scene that we were going to see the other side fo the character. By the time she does get the opportunity, it's her last scene of the movie and by the nature of the scene we don't get to see very much. That was a waste.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the graphic violence including scenes of torture and executions. I'm not sure if Stone was trying to keep what he thinks of as real or if he was trying to make some kind of point. With Stone it might even be both or neither. Hard to tell. The word that instantly pops to mind is, "gratuitous". Sure, by the nature of this film there is going to be some violence and by the nature of the topic of this film, some of that violence is going to be extremely graphic. But, you couldn't spent the rest of the time showing us some more complex characters.
Actually one other thing worth mentioning, and that is the character of O, played by Blake Lively. Good for her for being in scenes where the boys are nude but she keeps covered up, but on the other hand, her character, whom is also the narrator is so boring - which is completely not related to the whole clothes versus naked thing.  Even undressed, her character would have been boring. My only thought on this is that in the novel this film is based on that she must a have a lot more going on, like actually analyzing things instead of just reporting them. There is nothing wrong with reporting, but in the case where the narrator is trying to get stuff across, especially the inobvious and internal dialogues, she can't be boring.

Savages on IMDb

Battleship (2012)

I went into this with two things on my mind. First, I will watch any movie with Liam Neeson and at the very least enjoy his scenes. Second, I played the game Battleship often enough to realize that a game based upon it is like basing a game on yahtzee - it's mostly random with strategy only coming into play based upon your results. This thinking very effectively set the bar low. It became almost a logical impossibility that I could watch this movie and not be entertained.
Something happened while watching this movie - I actually found myself liking it. Sure, the story is a bit predictable, but that didn't stop me from liking Independence Day or Minority Report, and it didn't stop me from liking this film. For an Action/Adventure movie, it had surprisingly good acting and almost know catch-phrasism. Taylor Kitsch in the starring role was a very pleasant experience, supported by Rihanna and Alexander Skarsgard (who it turns out is more than just a sexy vampire) who both do an excellent job.
The special F/X were top of the line, and that's good since they no doubt spent top dollar on this bad boy. The aliens were pretty cool. They were us with more thumbs and more toys. The alien ships and the way they moved, kind of like giant water skeeters, was not something I'd seen done before. I know that science fiction isn't all about seeing a new spin on an old theme, but sci-fi action/adventure often is, and this movie offers that. The alien grinder balls were ingenious. I don't know how they come up with that concept, but it seems like something you might see in a comic book, but far more effective, as drilling devices in comic books when not being used for transportation have a way of crapping out or not doing very much damage. These grinders though were pretty kick ass.
This movie did something different from most alien versus earth movies, they had the aliens be fallible. In your typical AVE movie, the aliens are all powerful until the earthers discover the one weakness that will lead to their ultimate downfall, the alien Achilles' tendon if you will. But in Battleship, the aliens screw up right off the bat by running into space debris and destroying one of their own ships. Sure, the plot needs for that ship to be destroyed in order to work, but the ship's destruction is believable and I think it works.
I was thinking about Michael Bey while watching this film. I know, god help me. There was more than one occasion when the visual effects reminded me of one or more of his Transformers films, yet this film still managed to be largely character driven, for an action/adventure movie at least. I concluded that I'm glad taht Bey did not direct this, but also that I hope he watched this and is moved by the use of characters and lack of catch phrases for Transformers 4.

Battleship at IMDb

John Carter (2012)

I usually prefer to read the book before I watch the movie based on it, but "The Princess of Mars" by Edgar Rice Buroughs is still in the queue on my Kindle. It's not that I didn't want to read it, it's that I still haven't made it through the giganto book I'm reading (and yes, I'm still working on that book).
Okay, let's deal with this movie being a flop. Did it make back all of it's money playing in theaters in the United States? No. So, the media started calling it a flop and Disney supposedly fired the head of their film division over this. Supposedly. By the day this dropped on DVD, this movie which had cost about $265M to make had grossed $70M in the U.S. and $230M world-wide. Now, you're probably thinking, "300 is more than 265, so how can this be a flop?" Exactly. It's a political maneuver to write off on taxes. It's been out on DVD for a while now and has sold like gangbusters. Plus, Disney is still going to release the video game - they would be stupid not to since when doing the CGI, they were doing it with a mind towards using the collected works in a video game. All this really means to Disney, is that they can get out of their contracts to do sequels, which is too damned bad (not even counting that they've spent all that money on the CGI that could be used again - sure they would need to add new stuff, but they would already know how the aliens worked and have models, etc).
This is a Disney movie, so no profanity or illicit sex scenes. I'm pretty sure that the Buroughs book didn't contain these either, so I wasn't terribly put off by that. I am always more concerned with Disney movies that they will be formulaic. And while this is not the worst thing in the world, if it's completely obvious from the beginning, especially to the point where it becomes cliched, it's horrible to watch. Now, I won't say that you can't predict certain story elements of the movie, but it wasn't bad at all. Actually, a buddy of mine who thinks this is one of the best sf films in years and also loves the books claims that the book is even more predictable, because written about a century ago, it has oft been copied in style. So, perhaps this film is predictable because we're so familiar with the copycats of the original story.
This movie had a real grit to it, which I mean as a compliment. Part of it takes place on Earth, in the "Wild West" in the last part of the 19th century, a time which in movies past is often portrayed as full of happy-go-lucky and/or down-on-their-luck former gunfighters ride through the scrublands for days or weeks without a bath, yet still look clean and clean-shaven. This movie brings a fair bit of reality to the look of that time period of American history. I can't really speak to the Mars part, or I should say Barsoom, as I've never been and all I've ever seen of footage of the planet has failed to capture any of the four armed aliens or the communities or anything.
If its not already obvious (I think that it is), I liked this movie. If Disney changes their mind and makes sequels, I will watch those, too. It is a grand and weeping sf story in the Space Opera vein, a la Star Wars: A New Hope, but with better acting. Did I just say that? I don't think it's a better story, nor do I love it more, but come on, you can't tell me that Mark Hamill is a brilliant actor. That doesn't mean I love Luke Skywalker any less, in fact I find the portrayal quite endearing (in a way that Lucas totally missed when using Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christainsen).

John Carter on IMDB