All User Reviews

Woke, SJW agenda.

Forced woke agenda. Don't need to be explained what is wrong with me. Get back to providing entertainment, Disney.

Good action / comedy movie, no wokeness spotted.

No SJW agenda or wokeness, just another enjoyable Tom Cruise action movie with good measure of comedy.

No woke.

A surprisingly intriguing story about alternate reality and time travel. No woke. No racism, no lectures, no feminazis, no LGBTPedo, no politics.

DeNiro Will Do Anything These Days

Full disclosure, I only suffered through about 30 min of this nonsense. Pro immigration, rich white people bad and entitled, slaves built everything, one scene with a gay couple early on. The woke is definitely there. Other than that this is a terrible, painfully unfunny movie with bad acting and really just a ripoff of much better films with the same plot.

Buenos Aires was a false flag!

The director, Verhoeven, was trying to make an anti-fascism statement. However, he winds up painting a picture of a clean, functional, and patriotic society. That world contrasts sharply with our 2020's Dystopian reality where we have witnessed "the failure of Democracy" and seen "our social scientists [bring] our world to the brink of chaos" and WWIII. As a result, the society in the film resonates with many today, but again, this was not the Leftist director's intent.

[Edit: Verhoeven said, "It is really quite a bad book... All the way through [the film] I wanted the audience to be asking, 'Are these people crazy?"]

Spoilers follow.

I'm sure Buenos Aires was a false flag. Here is why:

1. Motive: Fascism requires an enemy to unite the people behind the government, plus the film's director clearly had an anti-military-industrial-complex message.

2. Geography: "You are here." A newsreel diagram shows that the bugs are on the far side of our galaxy. (That is far!) There are hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy. And yet the conflict starts when colonists from Earth land on a bug-inhabited world on the other side of the galaxy.

3. Physics: Bugs supposedly shoot asteroids at Earth almost 100,000 light-years away. (Light would take 100,000 years to travel that far.) The asteroids would have to somehow travel faster-than-light and then decelerate - all the way to a leisurely velocity that won't vaporize the Earth - and at a distance that allows plenty of time to react. (Granted, humans do have FTL drives here and in the book the bugs do too.)

4. Skill: This is the clincher. Remember how Carmen pulled the spaceship out of space dock with just inches to spare and a look of confident glee on her face? And then she lets an asteroid clip the spaceship she is piloting later, sheering off the communications array? Riiiight. The asteroid hits Buenos Aires weeks or months later, suggesting it is the very same asteroid. If you exert a small amount of force at a large distance (like the distance to Jupiter) on an asteroid, it would dramatically change the trajectory. This means the asteroid would not have hit Buenos Aires were it not for super-pilot Carmen's implausible "mistake".

5. "Doogie": Sweet Carmen wouldn't do that? She is kind of a bitch, actually, but maybe more of a heartbreaker than city smasher. However, "Doogie Howser" (Carl) has telepathy, with the ability to influence a ferret's actions, plus a particular telepathic connection with Carmen shown later in the film. He's marching around in a Nazi trenchcoat and torturing enemy prisoners while working for military intelligence, so something like the CIA. Doogie did it.

[Edit: on rewatch, I see that after Carl mind-controls the ferret, Rico says he hopes Carl can't do that to him, and Carl jokingly replies, "I can't do that to a human... yet." And the scene cuts to... Carmen. Also, Carl is later able to control Rico, who at first wanted to give up Carmen for dead but then somehow has a feeling that she is certainly alive. Later, Rico even asks Carl if he did that, and he replies, "That's classified." Remember, when Carl was testing Rico's ESP, he said they statistically should have had a random success, but they didn't, because Carl was planting the WRONG image in Rico's brain, I infer.]

6. Defenses: Earth has anti-meteor defenses shown in a newsreel. I think they mention detection systems too. So either these defenses were a fraud or they intentionally let the meteor crash into Earth.

[Edit:
7. Timing: There is just a couple of minutes between Rico being on the phone with his parents when they are cut off by the meteor and Rico walking outside to watch the news report about the devastation. In that time, their version of CNN already has infographics and a reporter allegedly on the scene interviewing a victim.
]

Decent despite the woke casting.

Lots of diversity in the casting. Only 2 male characters in the whole film and both are overly emotional, irrational and ineffectual while the females are strong, rational and capable. This is a decent PG-13 horror movie with everything you would expect. No blood or gore with the scares being about atmosphere and movement in the shadows with minimal jump scares. Pretty good acting and writing make this one worth a watch despite the wokeness.

DIE casting choice

Not woke other than the forced token character.

Under the Dome vibes

Jud = Junior, Norma = Angie, Kathy = Alice
No woke other than Pam Grier is a pure DIE casting hire. Real native casting for Donna and Manny and actually pertaining to the story.

Just the facts

Mayday, also called Air Crash Investigation, is a very long running (21 years!) series that sticks to the facts, albeit with some overdramatization of the investigation process. When black or Muslim pilots crash the plane due to suspected incompetence or suicide, the show doesn't do Leftist backflips to avoid pointing the finger. And of course, there are incompetent or suicidal white male pilots, which the show doesn't excuse either. Also, women don't get a crash-the-plane pass. Overall, I get the impression the show's producers advocate a merit-based system for pilots (novel idea!) and believe Affirmative Action is compromising the safety of flights in the US.

The age of the show probably has a lot to do with it being based. If the showrunners are the same as when it started, then they just haven't changed, while the rest of the world went woke and reckless but not wreck-less.

Typical Expendables

Overall, a typical Expendables movie. Still the same, yet different enough to keep your attention. Shuffling of old and new characters. The 2 female characters were obviously forced but don't come across as "strong independent woman" but no woke themes or elements.

Man on Fire 20 years later

No woke. All Italian cast.

A black guy in that time-period, well dressed in clean clothes, highly educated, friendly, compassionate, hardworking, heroic, intelligent deep thinker etc... Totally superhuman in every way compared to any white character. Second place is obviously for the superhuman smart female with more courage than the rest of the hardened male crew combined.
The story itself is bearable but ruined by the lead characters.