Awake not Woke!

Good movie! Almost zero woke BS!

(No spoilers.) If you're a fan of horror or the FD movies you'll love this one! It's genuinely a good movie, and it pays homage to the FD universe! Last movie for the actor Tony Todd (He died of cancer in 2024.) and it was great to see him as an addition. I'm very sensitive to the woke BS and there is almost nothing woke in this movie except maybe the obvious female lead characters as usual. (BUT, it doesn't feel woke... they don't have super human strength or anything ridiculous like in other movies.) For a horror movie, it was top tier! Overall movie rating: 6.5 out of 10. Wokeness: 2/10. (barely anything woke!)

A woke series made to provoke. Why?

Everyone knows it’s woke, they don’t even try to hide it. In fact, when the showrunner was asked “...what are you excited to share the fans?”, she literally said: “I am excited for the fans to dissect absolutely everything that they hate.” So here we have a new step in the evolution of woke culture. Nothing that should really surprise anyone, considering everything that’s been going on lately. The point is that this show is deliberately and maliciously made to destroy an already existing universe that used to be narratively solid (and, to be fair, it’s been getting wrecked for several series now). This isn’t just woke or even super woke → this is direct, in-your-face provocation. It’s the evolution of a movement that refuses to die. The real question is: Why are they doing this? And the answer is simple, though not very transparent. They want to distract. They want to signal that they still exist. They’re dying, and just like the desperate shouting they do at street protests to get attention, they’re now doing the same thing with every series they put out. The good news is that the numbers are not on their side. it’s been reported all over the world that a toy sitting on a chair (a Spock action figure), put there by the YouTuber Nerdrotic, got more views and more success than one of their episodes [ you can see a news report about it here → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkqTF0wz1Ag ]. And sooner or later, this is going to have to be investigated as money laundering.

Very enjoyable movie with a strong, history-revision, agenda

Atrocities were committed by Whites. Atrocities were committed by Indians Yes, I mean North American Indigenous people. My brother-in-law and good friend is full-blooded Indian. He actually gets upset when people use terms like Native-Americans, etc. This movie strongly emphasizes one side, while ignoring or justifying the other. When one tribe fought another, the narration described it as a noble battle for survival. Before the European migration, this was an extremely violent and dangerous land. War between tribes was constant. Women and children were often targeted while the men were on hunting or raiding parties. Torture was used to intimidate and destroy morale. The early settlers found that out the hard way. We cannot fully understand the brutality they lived with in those days. It was a lawless existence. History is fascinating to study. Historical drama can be good and educational. It can also push an agenda. As enjoyable as this movie is, it has a very strong, biased agenda. It should be recognized as such.

I have a weak spot for shark based movies and this was still a big disappointment. For fans of action war movies there is virtually none of that so despite the setting you will be let down. As a horror/shark movie however, well also a letdown. The movie starts with a group of recruits in boot camp and these scenes for some reason they had them all acting like immature children. Actually the entire movie has them acting unrealistically and a lot of it is so silly it almost wants to be a comedy half the time. It's clear this was made on a very small budget, as all the night scenes are shot very dark and then the day scene conveniently has a thick dense fog bank roll in so you can't see anything. The shark while visually looking very well done they chose to do it with animatronics instead of CG. Normally I'm a fan of minimizing CG, however when doing something like a shark it just doesn't look good. It's painfully obvious it's not real in every shot as the shark is so slow and barely moves at all. There is a big over use of slow motion throughout the entire movie in general. Pretty much all the shark attack scenes are either done in slow motion or are plainly telegraphed and you can see them coming far before it happens thereby nullifying any sort of scares or tension. They also decided to have the ships faulty air raid siren get stuck in the shark fin giving off a weird sort of screaming sound. This clearly supposed to be terrifying but just comes off as gimmicky and dumb. Now for the woke. The cast consists of a whole bunch of white male's and 1 aboriginal. You know where this is headed. Naturally the DEI is the main character and focus and the only one with any sort of backstory. He is smart, capable, good and all the white females love him. Race is naturally a part of the story with one of the white characters being a huge racist and hating him, and of course all the white characters seem to act like idiots or stupid children. There is another strange thing here that I wasn't going to mention under woke but it seems to be done on purpose so I think it might actually be. The very first scene of the shark the DEI genius instantly says that it's a female because of it's size and the males don't get as big. This is based on him seeing only the head for about a second in the dark during an attack. All of them then always refer to the shark as 'she'. I may be wrong but it seemed like an odd unrealistic thing that nobody would care about in the moment and forced in just for some kind of gender nonsense.