You get the feeling of the movie right from the opening title. It comes as a complete surprise, filling the whole screen and dripping blood. That’s when you realize you’re up for a treat.

The movie is a weird mix of The Hunger Games and The Shining. Quite a few times during the movie I caught myself expecting something conventional to happen: “Oh, I know that! A wolf is gonna turn alive and bit her face off!”, “That girl is about to chop off his head”, “That dude is dead”, etc. Yet, most of the time it wasn’t the case. It felt as if the directors and screenwriters were playing tricks with me, as if wanting to prove that the Hollywood is still capable of producing good horror movies. “You think you know the story”, just as the small letters on the poster say.

Watching the scientists cold-heartedly luring poor fellows into traps and then cheering to their deaths, casually making bets as to the way they are going to die and so on, adds some sick flavor to the movie, showing the darkest sides of human nature in the most despicable way.

My favorite part was when the cellar door violently bursts open, followed by a casual remark from one of the guys: “The wind must’ve blown it open”, to which another one says: “And that makes what kind of sense?” Pure brilliant.

The culmination of the movie happens at the very end, when the luck finally decides to turn its sides, bringing in lots of violent cinematic fights, mixed with the blackest humor I’ve seen lately.

And when you think that nothing is going to surprise you anymore, you’re being hit again, and this time it’s no one else but Sigourney Weaver herself! Achievement unlocked.

All-in-all, it is an incredibly entertaining, smart and even sometimes scary movie. I’m 100% certain I am going to buy a DVD or a BluRay disk just to have it available. And so should you!

Let’s start with expectations. When I heard that we were going to see The Avengers I must admit I had mixed feelings. I mean those comic book superhero movies can be very entertaining and they offer plenty of action but I feel that there has been a bit of an overkill of them in the last decade or so. But I guess as long as they’re making a gazillion dollars Hollywood will keep spitting them out. And when you think about it, The Avengers is just a logical step in the process. I imagine some Hollywood suits sitting around a table struggling for new ideas for movies realizing that they are running out of superheroes to use. In the end they just decide on the most Hollywood solution: bigger is better, more is more! Let’s put a bunchl of them together in one mega movie, we’ll call it The Avengers!

On to the movie. This week we had the big movie dome which made last week’s room look like a mere hallway closet. It was huge. Now I can’t be sure of this since I didn’t have time to double-check before I sat down, but I’m pretty sure I counted a million (that’s right, a million!) people in that room watching the same movie. In 3D! Great start.
What I loved about the movie is its simplicity. It starts off with a good dose of action and after a good 5 minutes the general outline has already emerged: bad guy steals something from good guy, wants to use it to destroy planet, good guy can’t get it back by himself, gets together team of superheroes who can. It’s simple, no sense in wasting time telling complicated stories when you have all of these superheroes lined up right?
Now I only saw the Iron Man movies so I knew him and Black Widow. The rest of the heroes (Captain America, The Hulk, and Thor) were introduced proficient enough for me to get to know them without wasting too much time on their stories.
Then there’s the action. The action’s good. The only thing I did not like about the action was that whole bad guy invasion at the end which kind of comes out of nowhere: you haven’t seen those guys before so you don’t really know them, you don’t know what they want or what they can do, they just start tearing shit up. And why was The Hulk suddenly with the good guys at the end when 10 minutes earlier he was trying to kill those same guys? Ah I guess I should just stop whining about those small points and think about the entertainment it has brought me.

Conclusion: Great visuals + (surprisingly)good humor + 3D action + medium story + Great venue = 8

Adam tried to assure me that this film would be better than Skyline. Adam doesn’t (knowingly) lie about such important things and it turns out his wily instincts were on form.

The film opened with a man beating the daylight out of a woman for no apparent reason. The rest of the movie we’re slowly fed parts of the story that have led up to bringing about this situation. The leading lady Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) is a government security contractor tasked with a hostage extraction of a Chinese journalist. Mission completed, becomes clear that her superiors are driven by money and greed rather than by any moral or ethical sense of duty to their country. Mallory has unwittingly landed in the middle of a scheme to sell the hostage to the highest bidder and when she discovers this the group becomes intent on cleaning up the evidence of its involvement in the hostage extraction making Mallory a prime target in their retribution.

With seemingly everyone now trying to kill her, she sets out to take down everyone involved in the scandal. The action is fast at times. We were treated to a rather cold-blooded killing from the heroine of the movie which caught everyone (me?) by surprise and the movie keeps you guessing the whole way through. Mostly you’re just trying to keep up with what’s going on most of the time as you enter the brutal, paranoid world of covert operations.

The film really is what you would expect from a Steven Soderbergh production really: a clever, fast-paced storyline with good action scenes and a good cast of characters. The stand-out of the movie was Gina Carano and we should probably be expecting good things from her in the future. Haywire was an enjoyable 1 1/2 hours at the movies to wind down the weekend. The psychological cinema-going scars created by Skyline may finally be on the mend.

I have to say I was really looking forward to this movie. The trailer just looked ridiculous, and then someone told me that the movie was based on the board game of Battleship! Then to top it off the trailer says “From The Makers of Transformers, Hasbro”, I mean seriously how could this movie be bad?

Now usually with something like this you would expect a whole lot of nobodies in the movie, but wait Hasbro has shitloads of cash! For the money we get  Liam Neeson as Admiral Shane, Brooklyn Decker as his daughter Samantha (looking very hot I might add), mix in the dude who was John Carter,  and round it out with Rihanna for some star power, then place your ships and let the game movie begin.

The opening scene was just hilarious for me. They introduce some NASA geeks, a SETI programme they are running, and a satellite they are using called Landsat 7. This may mean nothing to most of you, but I spent my university days studying Land Information, and they introduced us to a satellite called Landsat 5, which was used to collect earth imagery. I was shocked to learn that by the time they launched Landsat 7, it had been re-tasked in such a radical manner.

Can you guess what the climax of the movie is? Have you ever played Battleship? Ever wondered how you can weave a board game into a movie? I don’t want to give anything away but… J10, hit hit hit! I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by how much plot they managed to get out of a simple board game, and how they work in the main aspects of the board game, just brilliant. This is one movie you just have to see it in a cinema, the special effects, the explosions, the everything is just crazy, and so over the top. This is one of those movies I like to say has gone full circle. It’s so ridiculous, so over the top, so bad, that it has become good again, and by good I mean fan-f$#ken-tastic. This has to be one of the most enjoyable movies I have seen in a while. It went at 100 miles an hour, and I had a smile on my face the whole way though. Well done Hasbro! Oh and even Casey Ryback would approve of this movie, even though he’s just a cook

One last thing, Hasbro has just released Classic Battleship Movie Edition, to commemorate the release of the movie, just genius, pure genius. Now how do I get my hands on one in Norway!

And thank you to George Lucas and THX, my ears are still ringing.

” You sank my Battleship”, or did you?

Our mid-week SMEX marked a return to Isabella’s, where even the President (Adam 2.0) joined in on a beer. Attendance was high, since nothing makes people go see a movie about Nazis like guilt, and I used it on everyone (Hi Manuela!).

The real reason this review is 4 weeks late is that I wanted to see in again, since it turns out that even space Nazis speak —you’re not to believe this— german. No worries though, since it had subtitles… in norwegian.

However, while the language barrier made me miss some jokes, the premise is simple enough: It’s 2018 and Nazi’s that have been hiding on the moon are coming back to attack earth.

Making fun of Nazis is always great, but interestingly, the movie also takes a lot of shots at us earthlings. Although mainly the US gets ridiculed, most stereotypes get their fair share of shots and laughs.

I was also surprised by the special effects, which managed to get an ohhh out of some of us during the space battle scenes. Overall the production and acting felt very strong given the spoof genre the movie belongs to.

Iron Sky does get a bit preachy towards the end, with some political message wrapped in comedy, which in my opinion failed at both.

Still, this was the perfect movie for a visiting SMEX’er to go see with his friends. Probably not worth a trip to the Kino, but fun to watch at home and make fun of with a big TV (like Christian’s).

There are a good, easy read, the kind that you can do on the park, when the sun shines here in Oslo.  Y even loan them to a friend, so they even traveled to the beaches of Tailand, now I wanted to lend them to Alex, but he is too cool to read book No.2

We had some wine and beers at the gamle mayor, enjoying the summery feeling in the air, and then gazed at the sky to watch a rare aligment of Venus, Jupiter and the crescent moon.

Anyway, to the movie.

If you have not read the books, the movie is missing in a lot of the background story (maybe its saved for movies 2 and 3) which means that the whole introduction to the games, which is maybe half the book, is literally compressed in 3 text screens at the beginning.

There are some other subtleties that you will be missing too, but they need to get the story to fit a movie, and its already a long one.

I personally had the idea of Katniss being somewhat more slender and fragile than  Jennifer Lawrence, but I think she does a good job at this.

There are a couple of things that are very well, some of the forrest footage looks like I imagined, same with the river shots and the people of the Capital.

For all the violent descriptions on the book were translated to rapidly flashing images and unfocused shots on the movie, my guess is to keep it kid friendly, which surely helped it to have the 3rd biggest grossing opening in US history, demolishing spiderman 3, and the other teenage drama, the twilight saga, that is sooo 2000 and late.

Some people were more disappointed about it though http://bit.ly/GO1eUh

I will rate this a 7, as I think it falls a bit short of what they could have done with it.

First of all, the movie was at least 30 minutes too long, with a slow, action-less gap in the middle, and yet they gave no explanation of what exactly happened on Mars and where did all the people and technology come from, leave alone the shiva-looking aliens. Even though the visuals were mostly stunning, I was constantly getting a feeling that I’m being fooled and it’s all a lie. Not sure if it’s a fault of Edgar Rice Burroughs living in 1917 or Disney’s visual artists being overly creative, or both, but it didn’t really work for me at the end (for example, what did all those huge numerous alien animals eat there? Red dust?) It all felt like a crazy mix of scenes from Avatar, StarWars and 300.

On the other side, the movie had a great sense of humor, classic Disney humor. Take, for example, a scene where Carter is trying to escape from the Union custody. It’s so nicely played that it almost feels cartoonish. Or the cute, super fast alien dog? Or the alien leader, Tars Tarkas? Yes, some of the jokes (“Vur-gih-nya” anyone?) are very cheesy, but the overall atmosphere was incredibly positive.

Not sure if anyone has noticed the sound, but I thought it was rather great, making some of the scenes really pop-up.

When it comes to the villains of the movie, they were pretty dull and boring, quite the opposite to the main characters. I’m very grateful that there were not so many scenes they appeared in.

To wrap up, I certainly think it was a time and money well spent and would recommend it to everyone looking for something entertaining.

Most of the empty dialogue was provided to fill the back-story, giving space for long drawn out action scenes. Which could be wonderful to watch, if you were given a moment to view the interesting locations. The direction follows this modern style film-making where it feels like the camera man is always standing on a trampoline. I can’t understand how a cinematographer could be talked into shooting in such a way while having such wonderful landscapes in South Africa to work with.

While I didn’t really enjoy the movie all together, I respect the fact that it was constructed well. But that’s like admiring someones perfectly constructed shit-house.

And on a more personal note: I hated that one characters American accent kept randomly changing. It doesn’t really affect my score, but It did get annoying.

Where do I start, really? That movie is a fail on so many levels, that even 3D wasn’t able to save it. Shall I complain once again about Jar Jar Binks, who now reminds me of one of our canteen staff members, except that he’s asian and is relatively shorter. Or shall it be the stupid, emotionless Queen Amidala, who was so retarded that even her maid could send her to clean dirt off R2D2. Or two Jedis, who wander around on some silly, but super urgent and potentially deadly mission with a whining maid, a little kido, a disastrous poo-squashing alien and a slow robot.

The list goes on and on, but I think this guy did it best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI

What makes me smile though, is our SMEx dedication: It is amazing what we are willingly spending our time, money and brain cells on. One could think it’s pointless and silly, but I say it’s a lot of fun sitting in a dark cinema with our little team, wearing stupid plastic glasses and watching Jar Jar Binks desperately trying to be funny. Would I go for Episode II? Absolutely!

When I found out the movie was 2 and a half hour, I have to admit I was skeptisk. I had serious doubts if the (what I learned to be) fourth movie in the series could keep it entertaining for that long.

It turned out that it could, I was able to get into the movie and there was enough hotness and action for me to happily not notice how fast time was flying by. It follows the same recipe as previous movies, or so I am told. I have only seen the first one and can agree that it is the case for that. Fancy things, some comedy, action and fast moving plot.