Topic: Movie thread.

@N00BiSH
Just because some of Disney live action movies are bad apples it doesn't mean every Disney live action movies are bad apples too.
I found some good apples from certain Disney live action movies that become my new favorite, much better than cartoon version and the reason I watched them for multiple times at cinema.

@N00BiSH You know, Nintendo got back up even after the disaster that was the Wii U era, which was filled with games that were either lacking in content or just underwhelming. If Nintendo was able to regain their worth, who says Disney can’t? You shouldn’t immediately judge a book by its cover, even though I do agree that the live action everything is getting old. Maybe their movies will continue to suck, and maybe they won’t. Only time will tell.

@StewdaMegaManNerd the difference is that between the two, Nintendo was able to recognize where they failed during the Wii U's run and learnt from that, taking those mistakes into account when it came to making their next system. Disney however is still actively continuing with a practice that really has no right to be as commercially successful as is, capitalizing on the nostalgia-blind consumers who feel insecure about enjoying cartoons and don't know any better. It's another sour spot on their record - not helped by the various poor corporate decisions they've been making as of late.

@N00BiSH
I know which is better between Disney cartoon version and live action version since I have ever watched both version and decided which is better.
Just because I prefer certain Disney live action version, it doesn't mean I have insecurity with cartoon version or I blindly defend Disney products.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs - Saw this after seeing the second Ice Age sequel, The Meltdown. I actually kind of binge watched the Ice Age sequels earlier last week (despite the consensus that the films get increasingly worse plot and writing-wise with each installment) and this is the next one I watched.

In this sequel, the main characters, travel to an underground land inhabited by dinosaurs after Sid takes three seemingly abandoned dino eggs and is subsequently kidnapped by the eggs’ mother and taken away to this dangerous world.

A lot of people say this sequel was worse than The Meltdown, but if I’m being honest, I kinda liked this more than the previous one, though I’ll admit I probably feel this way because I liked Buck’s character a lot and the creativity with the dino land, as well as the subplot with Scrat finding a love interest.

I really liked the animation on this one, and I think this is where the animation in the Ice Age movies starts to get really better. I was a bit shocked at how much the animation improved, especially since this was released a few years after the second film. It holds up well for a late 2000s movie, and I especially liked the way Buck was animated. Some of his flexible animation in certain parts reminded me a bit of rubberhose animation, so that was nice.

The dino world was also something I really liked. It’s super creative and so visually stunning when the film introduces it for the first time. One part I remember was this part where Manny and Diego get stuck inside a plant with deadly acid, and the plant had these red and blue vines Buck had to cut to shut off the plant, and I really liked how creative that part was.

Then there was also the subplot with Scrat, which was also kind of a standout for me. In this one, he also falls into the dino land by accident, and meets another squirrel named Scratte, and after that, a bunch of romantic antics ensue. Their subplot was so silly and stupid I liked it a lot. I’d say that Scrat’s segments in the films still manage to be consistently good, and provide a bit of nice comedy without dialogue, and right at the end it kind of becomes a stupidly weird and hilarious love triangle with Scrat, Scratte, and the acorn.

Though, I didn’t think this one was funny as well. It was funny at some times, but also not really. There were two jokes that did catch me off-guard, that being Sid’s silhouette when he was hugging the dino eggs and a small scene with Scrat and Scratte on a tree branch. I think that a a lot of the Ice Age movies aren’t real knee-slappers, but they do have maybe one or two funny jokes occasionally, or a few that catch you off-guard.

Ice Age: Continental Drift - Yes, there’s a million more Ice Age movies left. I honestly didn’t like this one a lot compared to the previous one, and I feel like this is where the movies begin to get worse in terms of unoriginality, jokes and get so random.

In this one, Scrat accidentally causes Earth’s continents to break apart and drift away from each other, separating the main three and Sid’s granny away from their home and the rest of their family. As they try to find their way back home, they encounter and fend off a group of pirates that disrupt their trip back home.

Again, the animation is good and I feel like that as the Ice Age movies go on, the animation gets increasingly better and more detailed. The environments also become a standout with the animation making them look soft and detailed.

But, this movie has an unoriginal plot and cliches. My main issue came from the relationship between Manny and his teenage daughter Peaches. It’s so cliched and unoriginal, and it’s that type of story where the dad doesn’t want his daughter to grow up or hang out with this group of friends that he thinks are bad influences, then the daughter and dad argue and the daughter doesn’t think her dad understands her. That type of story has been done to death so many times, you can just predict what happens at the end, and then I also think one of the newer characters, Shira, is super cliched as well, since she is a bad guy at first but then Diego convinced her to leave the pirates after it turns out that their captain doesn’t care about her going missing when they lose their ship, not to mention the captain treats her badly when she fails to kill Diego.

I also think the pirates were a random addition. They did try to make them fit by making their ship a gigantic piece of broken ice and making it made out of natural resources rather than be an actual pirate ship, but I still think pirates are not fitting for the setting and premise of the movie, and it feels like they were solely there so there would be conflict besides the world drifting apart.

Also, this wasn’t funny either. Compared to how Dawn of the Dinosaurs had a few funny jokes and scenes, I didn’t really laugh and the jokes seemed focused more on stuff like vomiting, random stuff and kind of nothing else. Again, like The Meltdown, I thought Scrat’s segments were more funny than actual spoken jokes.

Ice Age: Collision Course - This is considered the worst Ice Age movie out of them all. Gave it a watch, and I think it’s the weakest and most unoriginal Ice Age film.

Scrat unearths a UFO encased in ice, and when attempting to get his acorn back in space, he accidentally launches a destructive meteor toward Earth, which will collide in a few days time and cause all the animals to die and go extinct (kind of like how dinosaurs went extinct in real life), so the main group goes on a journey to avert the potential collision.

Again, animation is really good here. It’s very good once again and the best looking in the franchise so far, and there are some parts that look very fun with the animation. I think the animation shines the most during Scrat’s segments in space. The space environments look beautiful, and we’re done very well. There was this part where his UFO keeps bumping into planets, which light up when he collided with them, resembling pinball, which looked really fun. Another one being the part where Buck rescues a dino egg; that was very energetic, zany, and animated really well.

It’s the best Ice Age sequel in terms of animation, but, kind of ironically, the sequel with the worst writing and plot. The plot is cliche once more, and it’s with Manny and Peaches AGAIN. This time, she’s getting married to a kinda annoying and unfunny mammoth, and she’s drifting away from him and Ellie and getting closer to her fiancé, not to mention Manny personally dislikes Peaches’ soon-to-be-husband for no reason. This is another cliche plot and I just WISH they’d stop with these dad and daughter cliches since they’ve been done a million times before, not to mention the previous film did a similar plot like this before. There is also these small subplots where Sid gets dumped by his girlfriend and feels lonely (especially since Manny is married and Diego got together with Shira), and Diego and Shira unintentionally scare off some children and don’t want to be seen as scary, but this is random and kind of go nowhere at all, kind of similar to how The Meltdown also had extremely random subplots that had no bearing on the plot.

And another criticism, the main cast is bloated at this point. The films each introduce a lot of characters into the main group (usually 1 or 2) but it’s gotten too big to the point the cast is unfocused they don’t get enough screen time, and it seems like they don’t really do anything. Any character that aren’t the mammoths, Sid, maybe Diego, and Buck are just there and have little presence in the film, which I felt was especially the case with Shira, Sid’s granny, Crash and Eddie. I feel like the films should have stopped adding characters after introducing Ellie, Crash, and Eddie, because the cast felt balanced in The Meltdown and Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

The film introduces new characters who live inside of a gigantic anti-aging geode, but they don’t even really do anything besides providing a ton of unfunny jokes, and the anti-aging thing also does nothing with the plot; I bet you that they were only put in there for comedy and wacky hijinks…which aren’t funny at all. One of those new anti-aging characters is a sloth named Brooke, but she’s introduced too late into the film and rarely gets any screentime, so it makes Sid’s proposal to become her boyfriend rushed (though funnily enough the film actually acknowledges that, meaning the writers were fully aware the proposal happened too fast).

Also, the UFO is unfitting, far more unfitting than the pirates in Continental Drift. I don’t know why they introduced technology and UFOs into Ice Age, I assumed to fuel the conflict and make Scrat’s segments funnier, but I read they were inspired to use the UFO in this because of a scene from one of the previous films, which I don’t even remember. I know it’s fiction, but I still think the UFOs and space were an unnecessary addition to the world and don’t suit the icy setting or the films being centered on extinction and natural disasters.

Was very disappointed with this one, and it’s not good compared to some of the previous films. I have The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild after this…I’m expecting that to be bad unfortunately.

They are making a 6th film releasing late next year, and although I think the movies have gotten too cliched and unfunny, I am curious to see how they’ll do 6, especially since it’s being done by Fox’s animated film studio and not Blue Sky (since they closed back in 2021), so I’d assume a mostly different team and director are attached to it. Hopefully they’ll attempt to make that less cliche…

@Pastellioli You plan on watching The Adventures of Buck Wild? If so… 🫡

I think I'm gonna hold off on buying Godzilla vs Biollante from Criterion. Not much of a priority any ways...

@StewdaMegaManNerd probably. It’s the last Ice Age movie I have to watch so far before 6 releases, just been watching them for fun…sucks that one was bad, because I like Buck a lot.

watching the last 20 minutes of old 1980s movie Tank on Netflix.

I sort of remember that movie when it was on HBO a few times back in the day. That and the old sci fi drama movie Iceman.

Netflix had Iceman like last year or so but they took it off of Netflix. i was hoping to watch that movie. Been a long long time since i saw that old Iceman movie

Saw The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, to finish off my binge-watch of the Ice Age movies…this was really, really bad. Maybe the worst out of all the Ice Age movies.

In this spin-off, Crash and Eddie attempt to become more independent, but accidentally fall back into the dino land but are saved by Buck, who has been trying to protect the lost world from a super smart dinosaur wanting to rule the place.

This movie’s animation is such a gigantic downgrade from the mainline movies. It looks cheap and less detailed and smooth. Usually the Ice Age movies get better animation-wise, but this one does not look good, but there is a reason for that. The film was not animated by Blue Sky, and instead by another studio, and while a change in studio can sometimes improve a film, it didn’t this time. The details are gone, the lighting is terrible, and the character designs and models are butchered from the downgraded animation, while the environments and landscapes in the film are way less visually stunning and flatter.

The characters are not good either. Although it’s supposed to be centered on Buck, most of the film is centered on Crash and Eddie, who come of as super annoying in this one compared to how they were in the main films, so Buck gets less screentime than the two, which sucks because I liked Buck a lot in the movies. Zee was kind of a flat character, and Orson was an extremely unfunny and awful villain; he’s bossy but comes off as super childish, lame, not intimidating, and badly written, and whatever comes out of his mouth is so cringeworthy and cliche. The original main group is in the film for some parts, and while it was cool that they brought back the mother dino from Dawn of the Dinosaurs to help them, she doesn’t really do anything until the final battle and is kind of missing in action for a lot of the film, mainly because when she’s first introduced, she has a toothache that Buck fixes and then she literally gets knocked out with this explosive gas berry they throw into her mouth a few seconds later.

The jokes are bad too. Compared to all the Ice Age movies, this one is the most unfunny. Usually, I find a few of the Ice Age movies have maybe one or two funny jokes, but this had none. A lot of overdone jokes…there was this scene early in the film with Crash and Eddie imagining themselves as independent and wearing golden chains and caps, set to this lyrically awful song that made me cringe, and I especially hated the fart humor with Zee’s skunk gas, though most of the unfunny jokes also come from Orson. The film is also cliched too, and has a ton of overdone tropes and twists and no memorability or character arcs for its characters.

Just a bad and disappointing spin-off film. A fun fact, but this was originally being developed as a TV series animated by Blue Sky, and if I’m being honest, that probably would have turned out better and been more fitting than this. Yeah, they stopped caring about the writing in the main Ice Age films starting with the fourth one and exchanged it for wacky hijinks and cliches, but they could have actually put in some more real effort into a Buck spin-off than the studio they got for this one. Just wasted potential for an extremely enjoyable and entertaining character…

@Pastellioli Give a round for this guy, he suffered through that abomination 👏👏

@Bigmanfan I saw Mickey 17 at the weekend and really enjoyed it - The screening was pretty busy compared to recent stuff I've been to as well. Novocaine isn't out here in the UK for another week or so I think, but it seems to be getting pushed pretty hard in terms of how many times I've seen the trailer now. Black Bag is the opposite - I haven't seen a single trailer, so I'm not surprised nobody is going to see it. I'll likely go see Novocaine when it comes out here, but I suspect Black Bag isn't going to be around when I actually have time to go see it.

@dmcc0 Nice. Glad you enjoyed it! My screening was not as busy for sure. I think there were only 2 other people in the theater lol. Pretty similar story for Novocaine unfortunately. But yeah, neither movie is doing very well financially sadly. Mickey 17 had an over 100 million dollar production budget, which once you factor in marketing and theater cuts it has basically zero chance to make back. But yeah, great movie for sure. And you should definitely give Novocaine a watch, it's super fun.

Did anyone else see that Avengers Doomsday cast announcement? Cause man, that's four hours of my life I'm not getting back lol.

@Bigmanfan yup, i saw read it after the video was done. im not sure how this is gonna go, especially with downey jr as doom. havent been a fan in recent years except for agatha all along. guess im a picky comics fan aha 😹 at least they are finally introducing the xmen

@OctolingKing13 I know I'm in the minority here, but I am 100% sold on the idea of RDJ as Dr. Doom. He's a fantastic actor, and always puts in a ton of effort. What concerns me is the number of characters. It feels like it could be hard to tell a coherent story with this many characters, but we shall see. Also, there's no way this is everybody. There's no way Spiderman isn't in this movie.

@Bigmanfan ill deffo agree he is a fantastic actor. yeah thats really odd, especially since SM4 is in between the avengers movies 😥

I chose to rewatch the first Ice Age after seeing all of its sequels, and I agree with people that the first film is maybe the best out of the following films.

I’ll keep it short, but it’s way funnier than it’s sequels, I liked the dynamic and interactions between the main trio and the human baby, and the film actually felt way more emotional and better written than the dozens of sequels that followed. While not an extremely deep or thought-provoking film I’d say, I do like how the writers tried to give the characters depth and development (especially with Manny and Diego) throughout the film, especially since the later films kind of don’t do that again for any of their characters and make almost all of them cliched or flat. Pretty decent, and loads better than the following sequels.