This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Have slept on this to allow things to settle and here goes. WARNING: THERE ARE SPOILERS JUST ALL OVER THIS.
So, The Rise of Skywalker was not totally, absolutely, completely unwatchable in the way The Last Jedi was; this was a start. And some explanation and acknowledgement was given to the return-to-life of Emperor Palpatine, unlike the reappearance of Darth Maul in Solo. Again, a start.
The use of the Emperor is a massive problem, though, in itself, and around…
Snowden never, ever recovers from its premise: that Edward Snowden, a super-capable, pure-hearted all-American, found terrible government crimes against the American population while working at the National Security Agency, and was moved to disclose them to the world after being stymied in official channels.
Literally none of that is true. The Snowden revelations found mistakes that were generally cleared up by an efficient and functional bureaucratic oversight mechanism. Snowden did not try to go official channels in the way he…
"Do you understand that god's work hangs on six hundred miserable dollars?! … What is faith but hanging on the impossible? … If god can't find four people [to give $600] what is Christianity?"
So said Gene Scott in a white-hot rage at some point in the late 1970s, on live television. Mark the sequel.
Having been told that his viewers have in fact coughed up the required monies—only after the poor dear manning the phones has been reassured ("come…
It is simply impossible to see what the fuss was about. Was it the visuals perhaps—surely surpassed now by Life of Pi (reviewed here)? It can't be the acting—I like Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver as much as anybody, but reality is still reality. My impression is that the supposed wondrousness of the thing was political: this is a film that presents a vision of what idiots believe the Iraq War was about—and indeed what people now commonly take to…
