Yonggary (1999 / 2001)

Yonggary (1999 / 2001)

Dir. Shim Hyung-rae

Alien intervention on Earth causes a 250 million-year-old creature estimated to be around fifty times the size of a Tyrannosaurus to go on a wild city-smashing rampage.

It's a South Korean monster movie with a plot that's objectively no worse than some of Japan's lesser works in the same genre, but the acting is mostly awful and the creature effects are an utter travesty. And even though it's an East Asian production, the spoken language is English, so every face-palm bad one-liner from the militia hit my cringe-meter directly.

Wikipedia reports that the creature scenes were filmed with suit actors but replaced with CGI in post-production. To me, that's like swapping a potentially worthy vinyl record collection for mp3 versions of the same. To carry the analogy further, the cartoonish look of the CGI is the audio equivalent of a 128 kbs encode, at best. It's doubly depressing when you consider that the miniatures (e.g. city buildings and alien space craft) are pretty good.

The Legend of Zelda Manga: Legendary Ed. Vol. 01 (2016)

Ocarina of Time: Parts 1 and 2 (2000)

Author and Illustrator: Akira Himekawa | Page Count: 378

"You're certainly popular with the ladies."

The first TLoZ manga from Akira Himekawa* was a two-part work based on the excellent Nintendo 64 game of the same name. The Legendary Edition reprint collects both manga into one larger format HB book, with better paper and some additional colouring.

It essentially tells the same story as the game but there are some differences in how characters are introduced, none of which I found to be in any way disrespectful to its source. In fact, I feel the opposite was true - the narrative makes new connections between existing characters, enabling some very successful emotional moments to surface as a result.

The drama is never underplayed but nor does it take itself too seriously; it has an occasional playful laugh at its own expense (e.g. see the quote above).

The artwork is excellent; even the rough sketches that are included are fantastic! Child Link world has a different feel than Adult Link world and the danger level in each reflects that.

Stargate Origins: Catherine (2018)

Stargate Origins: Catherine (2018)

Dir. Mercedes Bryce Morgan

If you've watched the Stargate (1994) movie, you'll maybe remember the little girl at the story's beginning that gets given an ancient gold amulet by her father, or the elderly woman that likewise gives a gift to archaeologist Daniel Jackson before he sets out on his journey.

In both cases it was Catherine Langford, played by Kelly Vint and Viveca Lindfors, respectively. Stargate Origins: Catherine has that same character, but is set ten years after the little girl receives her gift in the movie's timeline.

Her father, Professor Paul Langford (Erik Holland in the movie, now played by Connor Trinneer), is still trying to figure out what the circular device he found at Giza was used for. SGO's Catherine (Ellie Gall) is helping out.

Lords of Chaos (2018)

Lords of Chaos (2018)

Dir. Jonas Åkerlund

As a long-time fan of early Norwegian Black Metal, I didn't know what to expect from LoC. Would it be parody, satire, mockery, or bullshit sensationalism? Wikipedia describes it as a 'horror-thriller film', which was worrying.

The answer, as I see it, is that the film is none of those things entirely, but it does lose its way as the narrative goes on. Before that, however, for about an hour of its runtime it's a pleasingly straightforward presentation with a comfortable amount of black humour and a half-decent (but mostly surface deep) depiction of the lifestyle that informed the music, and vice-versa.

It's based on the book Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground (1998) by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind. I've not read the text, but am familiar with how the stories were reported across Europe, firstly by having been a reader of the UK music presses at the time of the happenings — which might seem like too peripherally a connection, but is itself something that the film alludes to, in one of its most daft scenes — and later through personal research on the internet.

Godzilla: Reiwa Era Films (2016—)

29. Shin Godzilla (2016)

Dirs. Hideaki Anno + Shinji Higuchi

NOTE: numbering continues sequentially from the Millennium Era. For simplicity I've used English titles, but it's always the Japanese language versions of the films that I refer to.

Another hard reset of the franchise, with a new creature design and new origin story behind it.

The majority of the film involves politicians, bureaucrats, military leaders, etc, talking about how to deal with the irradiated daikaijū threat.

It utilises fast cuts to give the impression that things being discussed hurriedly is some kind of compensation for things being uninteresting - but it's really not. The first hour in particular is dense with such dry, ponderous dialogue.

Godzilla, referred to as male more than once in the English subs, is mostly CGI, mo-capped so that it moves kind of like a man in a suit. It gets points for good intentions, but ultimately it's just another CGI creature with zero personality. If I wanted that I'd watch the American films.

God Save the Queen (2007)

God Save the Queen (2007)

Author: Mike Carey | Illustrator: John Bolton | Page Count: 96

"Okay, these are the rules. We run fast, we dance like animals — and we say yes to everything."

An adult tale filled with visceral imagery and harsh realities that merge the aesthetic of British Punk with the magical but equally fearful nature of the cautionary tale / fairy story. Those two things on the surface would seem to have nothing in common, but author Mike Carey somehow makes the pairing work.

You'll meet characters from other well-known DC Vertigo titles, namely The Sandman, The Dreaming, and The Books of Magic, but the book exists on the fringes of all three titles, so you don't need to have read any of them prior to settling down with God Save the Queen.

The story revolves around Linda, a bored, alienated, self-absorbed and self-destructive young adult. If trouble doesn't find her, then she'll actively seek out and embrace it. The rebellion of the individual against society and family is concurrent with the catastrophic repercussions that follow when Titania, the Queen of Faerie, receives an unwelcome visitor to her realm.

Stargate: Continuum (2008)

Stargate: Continuum (2008)

Dir. Martin Wood

The Ark of Truth (2008) had a fairly pleasing final scene, the kind that draws a line under what came before while acknowledging the role of an unwritten future in franchise-land, so there was no real need for a second TV Movie. But one could argue that the villain of Continuum was a loose end from the TV series that needed tying up, I suppose. Whatever the case, Continuum is definitely not as good as the previous TV Movie. I've watched it twice and grew bored both times.

Among other things, it's a story of the Stargate itself, before it got transported to the US to become the central part of the Stargate program at SGC. Well, it's kind of that, but in a more science-fictiony way. It connects an event on the Tok'ra homeworld to a ship carrying a special cargo in the Atlantic Ocean in the year 1939.

It's good that it doesn't introduce a new 'one time only' big-bad, but what I enjoyed most was seeing some cast members from yesteryear alongside the regular ones. Fan-service it may be, but it's also complementary to the plot.