Been catching up on recently released movies and series again. I can't recall which of these I've mentioned on social media and which I haven't, so up goes the whole shebang.
Beekeeper. You already know whether you're going to enjoy this or not based on the description: Jason Statham kills cryptocoin dudes and scammers. I feel like "Jason Statham kills stand-ins for known dude archetypes from tech" could be a lucrative franchise, tbh.
Alien: Romulus. Possibly the most competently executed Alien movie since Aliens. Also everything about it is completely unnecessary. Being a prequel, it's already committed not doing anything that fucking matters.
Furiosa: Probably the second-best Mad Max movie after Fury Road, but still completely unnecessary and adds nothing. Heavy prequelitis.
Dune parts one and two: well-executed if quite tedious. Each movie should have been 30 minutes shorter. Mostly understands the brief and makes the changes necessary to attempt to preserve said brief. Although, like the original novel, this does not need the inevitable sequel. And I say that as somebody who read all of Frank Herbert's original Dune sequence. (I have a love-hate relationship with Frank Herbert's misanthropic, pessimistic, and queerphobic stories.)
Agatha All Along: somebody described it as "the whole is lesser than the sum of the parts" which pretty much nails it. I know many people liked it but I felt the ending was a genuinely off-putting piece of sequel-bait and the series would have been much improved had it just finished the story for these characters and given them a proper ending.
Cross: watching this was a mistake. Great leads but I'd forgotten just how distasteful I find James Patterson's stories to be
Every Marvel show is half a miniseries, half a season of a much bigger show. And the two halfs don't always fit.
I see Agatha as the second part of a trilogy (I made up), but time will tell.
Anyway, my view of Agatha changed a lot after I rewatched the first chapters after watching the whole show. Suddenly, the show made so much sense that I'm still in awe of what they did. They were telling you the ending all the time in a thousand ways, without you knowing it. A real masterpiece of misdirection. And really fitting of a show about witches.
