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The Phoenix Project

Four scientists in a garage try to revive dead animals

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
08-03-2015
4.5

Experiment failed

This could and should have been a geeky mind bending gem like Primer. But it is achingly slow at times, the science is underpowered and the scientists behave unnatural. Especially that Carter guy, who single-handedly wrecks this movie with really painful, unwatchable and ridiculous overacting.
4.5

Geostorm

Mankind built a space system to keep the extreme climate in control, but then it starts to make things worse instead of better

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
23-02-2018
4.5

All things wrong with big Hollywood productions

A terrible film that checks all the boxes of overblown Hollywood-Michael-Bay like hysteria, stupidity and shallowness.
4.5

The Call-Up

Some gamers are invited to play a game in a lifesize simulated environment. It's all fun and games, until people actually die.

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
07-01-2018
4.5

No twist?

I liked how it was all set up and some of the music in the beginning. But soon enough it is evident that the actors or screenplay are below par. But what bugged me the most is that they missed the opportunity to add some double layers and twists into the story, of which I can easily think of some.
4.5

Ahsoka

Ahsoka and apprentice must stop evil warlord from returning from exhile

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
08-10-2023
4.5

Pretty bad

I liked some of the spaceships, and some characters I like too. But unfortunately, the main characters, Ahsoka (with her unbearable smirk) and Sabine (look at me I am a rebel), were unbearable. Also, poor combat, poor plotline, slow pacing, and even more useless stormtroopers abound.
4.5

IO

Woman is trying to find cures for a dying world, but an uninvited stranger urges her to join him and catch the last rescue ship into space

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
19-01-2019
4.5

Sympathetic but very boring

I really tried to get into the flow of this slow-burn movie, as a small, delicate an intimate story about big issues. But boring is boring, and the quasi-meaningful dialogue and cascade of pointless scenes made me yell COME ON too many times.
4.5

Occupation Rainfall

On an alien invaded earth, humans and some alied aliens set out find a mysterious rainfall that can save humanity

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
03-07-2022
4.5

Tiresome scifi bonanza

There's actually some okay stuff here and there: some effects, some scenes, some concepts, some designs. But it's just so bloated and hysteric, like they wanted to include everything they could think of and barf it onto you in an endless stream. Very tiresome.
4.5

The Black Demon

A family vacation winds up on a decommissioned oilrig with a huge shark patroling the waters

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
01-01-2024
4.5

Lacklustre, even for a a shark movie

For some reason big shark movies get a pass for not being of much quality, but even so this one is a bit problematic. There was a lack of inspiration to do actual sharks scenes, so there's a lot of chatty fillers about the environment and vague folklore. Some subplots even seemed abandoned.
4.5

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It

The paranormal detectives try to trace the orgins of a boy's evil curse, apperantly to use as defense in a court case

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
11-07-2023
4.5

A lacklustre horror/thriller/detective story

While it may be original, I did not find the detective/court story very appealing. A bigger problem is that it doesn't really get scary or under your skin. It's a bit nasty and loud, and left me way more indifferent than a horror movie ought to.
4.5

Orphan: First Kill

The woman who looks like a child infiltrates the first home to go for the kill

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
28-12-2022
4.5

Pointless and boring prequel

Many people were impressed bu apparent plot twist, but I was very bored with this empty shell, and found the acting was quite problematic. Adults acting like children is always so over the top, like they act like a caricature of a generic child. Weird and cringy.
4.5

Cryo

People wake up - prematurely? - from their cryo tubes and need to find out who's who and what's happening

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
21-04-2024
4.5

Nice story. Now what we need is a good script.

The premise, including the twist at the end, is decent enough. It's just so dull, long and low budget that I was struggling to stay awake.
4.5

Away

Mum goes to Mars. Away from her family.

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
08-11-2020
4.5

Soggy family drama with occasional space things

Don't get tricked into thinking this is a scifi adventure. This is a soap opera, featuring an insanely uncooperative and unprofessional crew, bitching and moaning and solving tedious problems like the water supply and the flue. Back on earth, there is slow nagging family drama and diseases. Ugh!
4.5

Manifest

A plane disappears and reappears, to find that the world has progressed five years and the passengers have not

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
06-08-2022
4.5

Afwul soap barely kept afloat by a vaguely interesting story

The mysterious event was enticing enough to drag me through the first season, but barely so. The problem is the incredibly soapy style of the actors, cinematography and pacing. Cheesy perfect persons constantly walking into the scene at the right moment to seamlessly join the conversation. Ugh.
4.5

Capsule

Astronaut depens heavily on radiohelp from earth to get his faulty capsule to return home

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
06-11-2016
4.5

A lot more was required to make it this bold idea work

A bold mov(i)e which almost exclusively shows the astronaut strapped in his seat. But the amateuristic, jumpy astronaut, the repetitious dialogues and unconvincing procedures are way insufficient to make it work. There's a twist at the end, but if you made it that far you'll probably no longer care.
4.5

Riddick

After being left for dead on a hostile planet, a ship full of mercenaries is Riddicks's only way off the planet

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
15-02-2014
4.5

A B-movie in disguise

Non-stop pretty, but also painfully slow, tedious and full of uninspired really poor dialogue. They are too eager to portray Riddick as a mysterious, ubercool, enigmatic hero, instead turning him into an unsympathetic showoff.
4.5

Warning

A bunch of (related?) stories, with perhaps future technology and mankind as a central theme

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
28-11-2021
4.5

Vague unrewarding stories

Incomprehensible at first, I got some ease of mind when I realized it's just some vague ideas and separate stories glued together in a movie. In itself still a feasible concept, but in here it was just a bit pointless and directionless, without any payoff.
4.5

Fifty Shades of Grey

Woman falls in love with mysterious and wealthy man, but he has sadomasochistic desires

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
17-07-2016
4.5

What a turnoff

Mostly a boring soap opera where they speak in Hollywood cliches. Their relationship is ice cold and unconvincing. The woman is confusingly flip flop towards the SM, and the corresponding scenes are bullshit as they kept it 'romantic' and pretty to look at. A feather? Really!?
4.5

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

Man - who is also a burning skeleton motor cyclist - must rescue boy who... ah whatever

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
24-02-2013
4.5

Burning boredom

If looking at a burning skeleton hero obliterating devil scum is still boring and liveless... something must be wrong.
4.5

Magellan

Astronaut on a lone mission to investigate signals suddenly coming from various locations in our solar system

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
23-09-2021
4.5

Unable to compensate for the little resources it had

An irresistible story and some of the space graphics are not too bad. But they contrast starkly with the amateuristic 'interior' of the spaceship, and the bizarre procedures of the space flight and handling of possible alien artifacts (plastic bag?). I also missed a point or clue to any of it.
4.5

Infini

Rescue squad gets transported to a distant space base to save the last survivor

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
26-02-2017
4.5

Looong everyting

Occasionally it strikes a chord, but EVERYTHING - be it people talking, staring, chasing, monologuing, contemplating, fighting, briefing or debriefing - takes so freaking long it starts to mess with your mind.
4.5

The Exorcist: believer

After a midnigth visit to the woods, two girls need exorcism

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
13-01-2024
4.5

Boring, messy, silly and not scary

I was already getting bored with exorcism movies, and this is one certainly isn't turning the tables. The only novelty is that there are two victims at once, and three people doing different kinds of exorcisms at once, which turns into a mess, looks ridiculous and none of it seems to do anything.
4.5

Insurgent

In a future where people are living in factions based to their personalities, a group of rebels aim to break these boundaries

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
14-02-2016
4.5

Can you make it till the end

I am afraid I loathe these 'young adult' future novels as of late. I can't stand these plastic, one dimensional people living in these ridiculous worlds doing unlikely stuff, always looking oh so pretty as they go along. The only savior are the imaginative and classy 'sim' scenes near the end.
4.5

Cocaine Bear

Various people in the woods have to deal with a bear addicted to cocaine

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
16-04-2023
4.5

Cult is hard

It is going for a cult status with an over the top story, a bit of gore, humor and loads of colorful, quotable characters. But I found none of these components particularly successful, and the pacing seems off as frankly I got quite bored with it.
4.5

The Mummy

Modernday thief digs up a mummy that wasn't supposed to be found, for good reason

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
27-12-2017
4.5

Underperforms in many fields

A surprisingly boring flick that feels like it was made ten years too late and does a lot of things wrong. I was especially annoyed by the humorless role of the female interest, it never got scary or tense and it severely lacked some good music.
4.5

Ender's Game

A youngster is the chosen one to be trained as spacefleet admiral and repell alien threat

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
24-07-2014
4.5

Kids in space

These kids are trained for space command by having them play a pointless Harry Potter floating game! This unwatchable movie is full of such nasty face palm moments, burying the sharp looking visuals deep beneath the surface. "He has a complicated response to authority" - who talks like that?
4.5

A walk among the tombstones

Private detective searching for a bunch of sickos mutilating and killing the loved ones of drug dealers

RockmeNow
RockmeNow
24-07-2015
5

Another movie with Liam Neeson, definitely not one of his best

I am still wondering what the writers were thinking, as well as Liam Neeson reading the script. Watching a goldfish in a fish tank for 114 minutes must be more exciting than this...
5

The 5th Wave

Girl tries to rescue her little brother amidst an alien invasion in 5 waves

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
21-08-2016
5

Derailed

After a reasonable start, it derails in cheesy teenage love stories, unexciting screenplay, annoying army-squads comprising of teenagers and emo's, and sloppy movie making with aliens that conveniently look just like humans.
5

Pacific Rim: Uprising

The monsters have been defeated, but not for long

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
03-01-2019
5

Do you like robot fights?

Listen, I just came here for giant robots smashing huge monsters, and got what I wanted. Never mind that every person in this movie is a ridiculous Hollywood abomination and everything they say and do is stupid as can be, making this essentially a horrible Power Rangers movie with no soul.
5

Synchronicity

Small teams get a timemachine to run work, one of them gets caught up in paradoxes

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
17-06-2018
5

The story is there. Execution is not.

There's probably a really clever, if not somewhat difficult to follow, story in here. But the really lackluster execution, dull performances, suspiciously limited locations and depressing dark colors made me struggle to care... no matter how much bladerunner music they throw in!
5

Flatliners (2019)

Med students have themselves killed and take a peak at the afterlife before they are reanimated. But all is not fun and games.

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
24-08-2019
5

Same problem as the original, executed worse

Like the original, the concept is awesome but I still find the clue rather dull and unsatisfying. Worse, in this version some of characters are quite annoying, some of their lines rather cheesy and the scares copied and uninspired. I was waiting for everyone to just say sorry and get this over with.
5

Captain Marvel

A woman with superpowers and generic green aliens and avengers and tessaracts and whfff

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
27-09-2020
5

I felt nothing

A cheerful, colorful, slick looking action superhero movie that went straight through me.
5

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

With inside help, Alice gets a change to destroy the T-virus once and for all

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
18-06-2017
5

Looks alright, feels numb

Much like the previous parts, this looks good and has some creative, vicious beasts on offer. But it also features the same hollow, boring screenplay and empty characters. It feels like a bunch of monster challenges glued together.
5

Silent Hill Revelation

Girl must save her father, who is trapped in a place full of demons

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
08-09-2013
5

Not as scary as it looks

This contains some very moody scenery and genuinely nightmarish footage. But the girl's plan is basically walking from one demon challenge to the next, and the rest of the story is either boring or incomprehensible.
5

Battle Royal

A class of students are placed on an island, and the game is that only one survives

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
12-05-2022
5

A bloodfest turned into snoozefest

I was curious because it was listed somewhere as a real shocker, but the gore is not that bad - less so than many splatter horrors around. Furthermore I don't think I will ever get used to Japanese overacting and drama. The scholars are boring, annoying and their contemplations uninteresting.
5

Rape Zombie: Lust of the Dead

A few girls try to survive when all men turn into those

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
14-08-2023
5

Not the killer pulp I hoped for

A film with a good chance of being so outrageously bad and incorrect that it becomes secretly enjoyable, but alas it had too little good ideas or energy for that. It's all quite lifeless. All the zombies walking around with their pants on their ankles earned it a bonus point though.
5

Slenderman

Some kids summon slenderman

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
17-08-2019
5

Slenderman deserves better

I really like the slenderman figure and wanted to like this, but the lead actresses don't really convince, and everything is just moving very slowly from one scare to the next, filling up time in a story that feels a bit loose and lacking ideas, and ultimately, never gets really scary.
5

Prisoners of the Ghostland

A convict is chartered to rescue a woman from a mysterious group that is held captive by ghosts. If not he explodes.

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
16-12-2021
5

Weird is not always good

Some pretty colors and scenes aside, this is mostly uncomfortably odd and confusing. You could argue that is to be commended for being different and broken free from the mainstream, but not in a way that I found pleasing.
5

Monster Hunter

Army ranger accidently winds up in another dimension where she must fight monsters

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
21-03-2021
5

Awesomeness that left me cold

Such a potential premise, such a big budget, yet still so uninteresting and shallow. I thought only the finale back on earth was somewhat badass. The movie seems to look a lot like the game it was based upon, so perhaps fans will get more out of it.
5

Nightflyers

The crew on a spaceship, on it's way to make contact with alien lifeforms, finds itself in more and more peril as they come closer

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
18-03-2019
5

These poor series still contain enough mystery to make it worthwhile

So for this monumentally important mission, they assembled the most insecure, insubordinate, fashion-conscious and unstable crew they could find and make them improvise the entire mission in an insanely incoherent way. But apparently I love space mystery so much that I still watched it. All of it.
5

The Last Full Measure

Pentagon hotshot reluctantly investigates a request for a posthumous medal of honor, and gets more and more involved as he talks to the veterans

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
07-09-2020
5

Overdone

They managed to get a whole bunch a A-list actors giving all they got. But it feels overacted, over dramatized and forced down your throat. The clips during the end scroll demonstrate how veterans ACTUALLY talk. A noble cause for sure, but unnecessarily heavy-handed. Boring, even.
5

Immanence

Scientists go on a boat to sea to investigate possible extraterrestial phenomena.. or is it divine phenomena?

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
06-03-2022
5

The story was there, the rest was not

I usually dig science babble, but coming out of the mouths of these guys it sounded ridiculous. And while the story had potential, I am afraid the execution fell short in many other fields as well. Confusing and weird, in a bad way. Clearly not filmed on sea, disguised by pitch black surroundings.
5

Moon 44

Pilot/cop goes undercover to a mining planet to oversee the convict pilots fighting of an alien invasion

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
13-08-2023
5

A disappointing story in a cool scifi environment

The scenery, with it's dark and steamy hallways and spaceships, is remarkably like an Aliens, so that's good! The story though, is mostly convicts and and their navigators fighting, while the hero smokes cigarettes and tries to look cool - not really interesting.
5

Forbidden World

Astronout lands on a base where an alien experiment get out of hand

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
17-10-2021
5

Didn't turn out to be a classic

I watched this old nugget for some nostalgic quirks and perhaps hidden gems, but I am not sure I found them. Sure it has some remarkable nonsense and campy effects, but it's mostly just a bit crappy.
5

The Phoenix incident

You know those 4 skatedude guys who went missing in Arizona? It was aliens man!

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
23-12-2015
5

Too shaky

Hurah! It's not just found footage; it's loud, noisy and restless shaky footage too. Which makes this mockumentary, shoving a conspiracy down our throat, rather tiresome and lame.
5

jung_e

A team tries to create the ultimate warrior by recycling a brain into new cyborg bodies, but can't figure out why she keeps underperforming

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
27-01-2023
5

Nothing much to make it work

A bit of a Korean take on Ghost in the Shell, this should interesting. But is is not. The action is utterly unconvincing, and I hated some of the characters who either over-acted or were just cringey and one-dimensional. The story attempts some quasi deep theme's but it all falls flat immediately.
5

The Brothers Grimsby

Lowlife british scumbag finds his long lost brother, and gets involved in his MI6 spy job along the way

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
11-12-2016
5

Unprecentented vulgarities are not enough

Some of the scenes are so unbearably low and vulgar that in itself they could have given this movie some sort of cult status. Unfortunately, the lame action and humorless story surrounding is gets rid of that option.
5

Hungerford

Some roomies/friends try to survice, after space visitors turn everyone into zombies. Good thing one of them was just doing a film project.

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
13-11-2020
5

A minimal found-footage flick with annoying protagonist

I should sympathize with what they managed to create using very little resources, but it really was pretty basic zombie stuff. Some acted pretty good, some were ok, but the main character was a really annoying dude, and I started to despise his constant heavy breathing and drama.
5

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Fox and friends engage in a war with local farmers when they steal chickens

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
13-11-2021
5

Did not push my buttons

It looks and feels artistically sound and could please Roald Dahl fans. Personally, I found the puppets not very pleasant to look at and I don't like the storytelling much. It's not outstandingly funny, exciting or clever, I did not know how to process it and even got a bit strangely agitated.
5

Firestarter (2022)

Girl tries to control and live with her ability to set things on fire, but evil people make her loose her cool

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
05-06-2022
5

Left me cold (that punchline is probably taken)

One of those movies that, on the face of it, looks quite solid and adept, and makes you wonder why you're not enjoying it more. I think her parent's additional paranormal abilities get in the way of an already uninspired and even boring story that fails to ignite. (That's probably also taken.)
5

Reminiscence

When the future is bleak, people instead relive past memories with a machine. The operator running that facility gets involved when a femme fatale shows up

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
06-12-2021
5

half decent idea failed

The opportunity to do something cunning with the central idea gets lost in dull, pseudo film-noir kitsch, and the plot twist comes way too late to redeem it. But the real problems are inexcusably crincy Hollywood dialogue, audience pampering, poorly choreographed fights, among others.
5

The Matrix 4: Resurrections

Neo, living in the matrix again as a guy who made a matrix game, goes back into the matrix to save Trinity, who is in the matrix.

Wittenberg
Wittenberg
28-02-2022
5

This time, the mindbender is the movie itself

I am not sure how a 4th sequel could have worked or what I wanted from it, but surely it wasn't this. I hate the lazy self aware 'meta' approach and the revisiting of classic moments. Nothing really works anymore, I cringed multiple times. An odd misfire, which makes you wonder how this came to be.
5

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