We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Cody watched some Marvel, then witnessed terror in the jungle and Australia.
ETERNALS (2021)
Although I had zero familiarity with the characters of Guardians of the Galaxy before that movie was released, at least I had heard of the comic book before that movie went into production. I can’t even say that much for Eternals. The first time I had ever heard of Eternals was when Marvel Studios announced they were going to be producing a film based on the comics as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So I went into this one having absolutely no idea what to expect. Well, I was sure it going to be packed with super-powered people pulling off heroic acts, but I didn’t know anything beyond that.
When I was a kid, it seemed like fantasy entertainment was always stirring up controversy. There were always people who thought the latest movie, game, or book that involved fantastical characters was going to destroy society for one reason or another. So I’m surprised that I haven’t seen more controversy surrounding Eternals. In the days of my youth, if a fantasy blockbuster was released and opened with a text scrawl that tells its own version of the story of creation (complete with “in the beginning”), you would have heard about people complaining, picketing, and burning copies for quite a while. I’m sure this movie was controversial in some circles, but I haven’t seen any of it. Which is refreshing.
The text at the beginning of Eternals informs us that a being called Arishem, the Prime Celestial, was the one who created the first sun and brought light into the universe, creating life. Then a species of unnatural predators emerged from deep space and started wreaking havoc, so Arishem had to send out Eternals, immortal superheroes from the planet Olympia, to eradicate these predators called Deviants. Ten Eternals were sent to Earth to take care of the Deviant problem there: healing leader Ajak (Salma Hayek); Sersi (Gemma Chan), who can manipulate and transform matter; Ikaris (Richard Madden), who flies and blasts energy beams from his eyes; Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), who blasts energy from his hands; Sprite (Lia McHugh), who projects illusions and is stuck in the form of a child forever; inventor Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry); the hearing-impaired and super fast Makkari (Lauren Ridloff); Druig (Barry Keoghan), who can control the minds of others; the bruiser Gilgamesh (Don Lee); and Thena (Angelina Jolie), who can form weapons out of cosmic energy. This group spent roughly five thousand years battling Deviants and seemed to finally defeat them about five hundred years ago. Since then they’ve just been hanging out on Earth, waiting to receive further orders from Arishem. They’ve been told not to interfere with conflicts on Earth unless Deviants are involved, so they’ve twiddling their thumbs for a long time – and since they had no more battles to fight, they split up and spread out across the world.
Jump ahead to present day and Deviants have started showing up again, so the Eternals have to be reunited... and soon they discover that the Deviants are the least of their problems. Things have never been as they seemed.
Directed by Chloé Zhao from a screenplay she crafted with Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo, and Kaz Firpo, Eternals may be the least accessible film in the MCU. Populated by characters that the average viewer – and even a good portion of comic book collectors – had never heard of before, packed with exposition about the film’s own mythology, sporting a running time of 156 minutes, this is surely a rough ride for a lot of people who try to check it out. It totally makes sense that the reviews gathered on Rotten Tomatoes only average out to a 47% positive rating. I would rate it higher than that personally, but I can’t deny that I found the movie tough to wrap my head around at times. The Eternals don’t match up to The Avengers or the Guardians of the Galaxy, as far as I’m concerned. I wasn’t very impressed by them for most of their own movie. I didn’t start to think any of them were cool until the climactic battle – and the fact that Makkari ended up being my favorite may have something to do with me already being a fan of Lauren Ridloff due to her role on The Walking Dead. But she wasn’t the only actor I went into Eternals feeling good will for, so that’s not all that went into Makkari standing out as my favorite.
The other Eternals do fine work in their roles as well, I just found it difficult to care about most of them. Nanjiani turns in a fun performance, and has a great comedic sidekick in his valet Karun (Harish Patel). Lee was a badass in the Korean zombie movie Train to Busan, so I was glad to see him get to play a superhero here. Chan made Sersi a solid heroine. Hayek and Jolie are the biggest names, but their characters made less of an impression for me.
There are certainly interesting ideas throughout Eternals, and plenty of character drama. As you might expect given that there are so many characters in play, members of this group tend to have serious disagreements with others. You also have the story of Sersi and Ikaris being an item for a long time, then splitting up. Now Sersi is seeing a regular human, Kit Harington as Dane Whitman. He doesn’t have much to do in this movie, but he has a future in the MCU. You have Sprite being upset about having to be a kid for eternity, sort of like the vampire Homer in Near Dark. You have Thena suffering from a psychological condition that’s amusingly called Mahd Wy'ry, pronounced just like saying she’s feeling “mad weary”. She’s thousands of years old, why wouldn’t she be? This movie also indicates that DC Comics exist in the MCU, with people referencing Superman and Batman. Legends of Ikaris’s powers may have even influenced the creation of Superman in this reality. The Deviants weren’t interesting to me, but thankfully there was more to the story than just scenes of the heroes knocking around these space beasts.
When put up against other movies in the MCU, Eternals would rank rather low for me. This isn’t a movie I’ll feel compelled to return to frequently... but I did enjoy it. Taking it on its own terms and not comparing it to other films in the franchise, it’s an entertaining superhero movie with an intriguing conflict at the center of the story. I probably wouldn’t be hyped to see a standalone Eternals sequel, but I look forward to seeing the characters show up in future MCU projects.
TERROR IN THE JUNGLE (1968)
I have been on many flights to Rio, I have to bounce through there to visit blog contributor
Priscilla... but never have I witnessed a band start playing one of their hits right there on the plane so people can dance in the aisles. But that's what happens in the 1968 film Terror in the Jungle, a disaster of a movie that was cobbled together with footage shot by three different directors.
This starts out looking like it's going to follow the group of characters it introduces as they catch that flight from the U.S. to Brazil. There's the aforementioned band, who have a hit called "Soft Lips"; two nuns transporting the coffin-bound corpse of a third; an actress who is going to Rio to star in a musical, where her lines will be dubbed in Spanish even though Portuguese is the language of Brazil; a woman who is accused of killing her husband; and a small boy who's being sent off to visit his mother. Unfortunately, the plane is losing fuel at a faster rate than it should, and it becomes clear it's going to have a crash-landing in the Amazon. The crash happens about 25 minutes into the 85 minute movie, and I hope you didn't get attached to many of those people we were introduced to, because this isn't a story of those characters trying to survive after the crash. Everyone dies. Those who don't die on impact or in the burning, exploding plane get eaten by caiman. The only survivor is that little kid, Henry Clayton Jr. (Jimmy Angle).
Tom DeSimone directed the film up to the plane crash sequence, at which time the production was going to move to the Amazon. But he was having an unpleasant experience working with the producer/writer, plus the plane crash happened at the 80 minute point in DeSimone's rough cut that he put together before they went to the Amazon, and the producer wasn't interested in cutting it down at that point. So DeSimone bailed. Cinematographer Andrew Janczak was promoted to director for the next chapter of the movie, which sees Henry Jr. floating down the river and being taken in by a tribe that thinks his blonde hair means he's the son of their god. But they soon decide they need to sacrifice him anyway.
Even with a third director, Alejandro Grattan, coming on board to film some more footage in an attempt to salvage this mess, the movie gets extremely dull once Henry Jr. ends up with the tribe and we switch focus to his father's search for him. The ineptitude of the movie made it watchable up to that point, but then there's a long stretch of not much going on until we reach a burst of action and a bizarre twist at the end.
If you like bad movie oddities, Terror in the Jungle is worth checking out. If you only hope to watch good movies, avoid this one. The most shocking thing about it is that the producer actually went on to produce more films.
WYRMWOOD: APOCALYPSE (2021)
The Australian zombie movie
Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead was a low budget labor of love for director Kiah Roache-Turner and his co-writer (and brother) Tristan Roache-Turner. They were so dedicated to bringing their "
Mad Max meets
Dawn of the Dead" concept into the world, they spent nearly four years making that movie, shooting it on weekends. They were rewarded when their film was released in 2014 and instantly earned a cult following. Now they have returned to the world of Wyrmwood for a higher-budgeted sequel called Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, which they were able to get in the can after just six weeks of production. But while the higher budget is evident in the vehicles, sets, and weapons on display in the new film… the first movie was still more fun.
The Wyrmwood movies are not your typical zombie flicks. These take place in a world where fossil fuels no longer work. Luckily, the zombies have flammable blood and exhale methane, so these walking corpses can be used to fuel vehicles. The movies also happen to have characters who can telepathically control zombies – so even if you're feeling burnt out on the walking, living dead, these films can still offer entertainment by doing some things differently. There are some wild moments in these movies that you won't find in any other zombie projects. But I did feel that this second one had story issues.
I spent half of Wyrmwood: Apocalypse feeling like the Roache-Turner brothers had made a big mistake in crafting the story for this follow-up. That's because the lead characters are not returning Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead stars Jay Gallagher (as the shotgun-wielding Barry) and Bianca Bradey – whose character Brooke was turned into a human-zombie hybrid in the previous film and gained the ability to control any zombie in her vicinity. Apocalypse begins with a scene that makes it feel like we missed a sequel along the way, one in which Barry and Brooke teamed up with sisters Maxi (Shantae Barnes-Cowan) and Grace (Tasia Zalar), the nieces of Benny, a beloved character from the first movie. Like Brooke, Grace is a human-zombie hybrid who keeps her zombie side in check by drinking vials of blood. Once Maxi and Grace decide to leave Barry and Brooke behind, we meet the film's actual lead character: Luke McKenzie as a soldier named Rhys. McKenzie was in Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, and made a strong impression as a villain called The Captain… but the character he's playing in Wyrmwood: Apocalypse was not in Road of the Dead. He's the twin brother of The Captain. And we spend a whole lot of time with him. Some Wyrmwood fans will probably be able to go along this, but I'm sure there are going to be plenty who are going to be as disappointed as I was to find out that we weren't going to be spending the majority of the running time with Barry and Brooke.
We're about a year into the zombie apocalypse that begin in the first movie, and Rhys is working for a scientist called The Surgeon General (Nicholas Boshier) – yes, just like in the first movie, there are still weirdos in hazmat suits conducting strange experiments on zombies and humans they have strung up and strapped down. Rhys's job is to traverse the wasteland and capture civilians so he can deliver them to The Surgeon General; as far as he knows, he's helping search for a cure to the zombie plague. He doesn't realize the people he delivers to The Surgeon General end up dead. But for a good portion of Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, it feels like we're following a random villain instead of getting to spend more time with the characters we're actually hoping to see.
Eventually, after he captures Grace and hands her over to The Surgeon General, Rhys will get his shot at redemption. Maxi arrives to show him the error of his ways, and with about 40 minutes of movie left Barry and Brooke finally return to play prominent roles in the climactic action. That's when Wyrmwood: Apocalypse finally starts to reach the level of fun that its predecessor delivered. The first half of this movie felt like a slog at times. I didn't understand why the Roache-Turners had chosen to focus on Rhys. I didn't care about this guy who makes horrific experiments possible and wants to kill the hero of the first movie (to avenge his twin brother). I wanted to cut away to Barry and Brooke. But there are no more storytelling decisions to question in the second half. Then it's just time to kick back and enjoy the insanity. When a movie gives you the sight of a cyborg zombie being controlled by a mad scientist through a VR headset, the time for nitpicking is over.
If you liked Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, you'll definitely find things to like about Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, even if you don't agree with all of the choices. Like I didn't. If you haven't watched Road of the Dead, I wouldn't advise just diving into Apocalypse. If you do, you will be less bothered by the fact that the movie centers on Rhys instead of Barry and Brooke, but other aspects of the movie are likely to be baffling to you. I think the best course of action would be to catch up on Road of the Dead and watch it back-to-back with Apocalypse. Spend three hours basking in the glow of Australian zombie madness. Like I did.
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