Omaha and I recently watch Godzilla: King of the Monsters. We were disappointed. I'm a big fan of Godzilla (2014); I think it did a good job of introducing Godzilla and showcasing what Godzilla was all about. I was a little disappointed that Byran Cranston's role was cut short, but the overall objective of the film was well-satisfied by the content and the visuals. Screenwriter Max Borenstein did a masterful job of understanding what a Godzilla movie should be about.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters screenwriter and director Michael Dougherty is made of different stuff. His Godzilla is the campy latter-day monster which gave us such ridiculous lines as "Gamera is friend to all children!"

In the first film, we were introduced to a relatively small but well-funded group known as Operation Monarch, a joint US-Japanese program in the wake of World War 2 to understand this thing that had been awakened in the aftermath of the Bikini Atoll experiments, this creature known as Gojira. Monarch knows of only two: a dead one whose radioactive remains have been stored away, and Gojira. The film opens with a third one attacking the nuclear power plant where Bryan Cranston and his wife work, and set up an epic battle between it and Godzilla. The movie follows a cinematographically coherent and competent course as the beast leads Godzilla on a chase from Japan's eastern coast to Hawaii, Las Vegas and ultimately San Francisco for the final battle. The capabilities of the human beings are fairly mundane and ordinary; we have jets and airplanes and we even try to nuke the bastards. Godzilla 2014 was not a science-fiction film.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters is an over-the-top Avengers wannabe. This is a science-fiction universe. Operation Monarch has super-bases hidden all around the world, they have their own military force, and to top it all off they have the USS Argo, which is basically a SHEILD Helicarrier. It's a ridiculous piece of kit that the movie should never have imagined.

Not only do our heroes have absurd tech (did I mention the underwater drones they use to chase Godzilla around are rated for 2000 meters, but they can also fly?), but it's proposed that Ghidora, the three-headed super-beast that rivals Godzilla for strength and toughness, isn't even a part of the Titan ecosystem, but an alien who crash-landed on Earth before the advent of humankind and who has been battling with Godzilla ever since for dominance over the planet.

To add insult to injury, Godzilla's nest is in the heart of the sunken city of Atlantis.

There is one deliberately funny line in the whole movie.

The camera work is fair-to-average in this movie. Zack Snyder, for all his faults and they are legendary, is a master at communicating highly kinetic action. Director Dougherty is not. He does an okay job; it's definitely not the visual mess of a late Michael Bay film, but it's not really that grabbing. Speaking of Michael Bay, this movie is very, very teal-and-orange, giving Transformers 2 a run for its money. The movie is almost entirely shade-of-teal until Rodan, a lava-based monster, shows up, at which point it vacillates between the two colors, almost without rhyme or reason.

At one point, while watching the movie, I said, "So, we're gonna steal the 'open the bay doors' scene from 2012, huh? And we're really gonna steal the 'save the surviving child' scene from San Andreas, huh? And now we've stolen the 'fall-from-orbit' scene from Pacific Rim, too!" It was that kind of film, a sort of stew made from other, fresher movies.

Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins are trying hard to reprise their roles, but they could clearly see the writing on the wall as neither of their characters makes it out of movie alive. Kyle Chandler was so obviously chosen because he comes across as Bryan Cranston Lite™ that it's a little sad to see him trying so hard. Aisha Hinds kicks ass as the Colonel in charge of the Argo, and Millie Brown does a very good job as a stressed-out teenager being torn apart by her parents' personal battles and the end of the world. Brad Whitford plays a hapless and somewhat useless scientist on board the Argo whose only job seems to be to say "What?" and give other people a chance to say, "Well, as you clearly may not have grasped, Bob..." It's a fine writing trick, but to heap it all on one dude is a bit unfair.

Godzilla was a good entry into the Godzilla pantheon. Godzilla: King of the Monsters should be allowed to sink beneath the waves, never to be heard from again.

I finally sat down and watched the latest Gerard Butler vehicle, Geostorm, a film nobody seemed to love. It was written and directed by Dean Devlin, known mostly for Stargate, Universal Soldier, and Independence Day, as well as the less-popular Indpendence Day 2: Resurgence and a lot of the Stargate TV show, so this is a guy with a better-than-average track record, although his more recent work hasn't been stellar.

Geostorm has a very silly plot. The United States has taken the lead, and gotten the world on board, with a world-encompassing grid of satellites that control the weather, moderating it so that most places where humans live never suffers from excessive heat waves, floods, or killer ice storms. The International Space Station Mark IV floats above it all, a maintenance and management hub. Suddenly things start to go haywire, satellites triggering killer heat waves and killer ice storms, and our hero, the very heroic-looking but politically disgraced Jake Lawson is called out of forced retirement to go back to the space station and figure out what's going wrong. The US is days away from turning their control of the whole system over to an internationally sanction multilateral body. From there, it turns into an even sillier geopolitical thriller.

Here's the deal: Geostorm is a wildly entertaining movie because it knows exactly what it is. It's a space-based CGI B-movie thriller with a straightforward plot designed to keep the audience entertained for its 109-minute running time. It doesn't push the state of the art and it doesn't want to; instead, the cinematographer knows exactly how to get what he wants out of every shot, and all of the various wire-work, green-room, and so forth work because everyone involved kept the CGI well within the boundaries of current techonology. It's a pretty good lesson in how to do CGI when you have a middling budget. (It's alarming that $120 million is a "middling budget" these days; remember when True Lies cost over $100 million and everyone sucked in a deep breath?)

It's twin plotlines, one ground-based concerning the President of the United States, one on the space station concerning shutting down the coming apocalypse and surviving the destruction of the station, mesh well once you're willing to buy the absurd premise. There's the usual "physics, do you speak it?" moments in a B-movie, but they're tolerable. There's no burgeoning romance in the film; the biggest relationship is between the hero and his brother, the latter a "good weasel" caught in the Washington machinery, and it's actually handled pretty well.

Geostorm is also an apology, and apparently a very sincere one, for the utter garbage of London Has Fallen, a film with eight (!) writers ("Passed from writer to writer in a desperate effort to save it!") that nonetheless ended up both complete narrative failure as well as utter racist garbage. The crew on board ISS IV is fully internationalized and even makes fun of the "American cowboy sent to save us"– even if that's exactly what ends up happening, with moments of critical help from everyone else. Saving the world here is a team effort.

As always, it's one of those "if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like" films. It's not a "Die Hard on the International Space Station," and that's kinda what saves it from being completely ridiculous. I liked it a lot. It had my favorite tropes, it had lots of space porn, and it has a classic celebratory ending.

Raen, Omaha and I went out to see The Hitman's Bodyguard. I have no idea what the critics are whining about.

It would seem that the critics, with whom Rotten Tomatoes are tracking about 39% approval for this movie, don't like it very much. They don't like that it's an action/comedy full of comic banter while the villain is a mass-murdering genocidal monster, or that the plot is a thin buddy/roadtrip between Samuel L. Jackson (the hitman) and Ryan Reynolds (the bodyguard).

The plot is basically this: Jackson has to get from London to the Hague to testify against a genocidal dictator, and Interpol has to get him there. The dictator (played by Gary Oldman in high form) has the most elite assassins in the world, and they have to stop Jackson from testifying. Interpol is compromised, and one intrepid and honest agent pulls in a wildcard: her ex-boyfriend, a down-and-out bodyguard "who's a complete idiot at just about everything except keeping people alive."

It's a banter movie. It's a hangout film. One critic complained that "This is a generic action thriller. Only fans of Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds will be interested." Well, duh. Who doesn't love Samuel L. Jackson, a man who, as Reynolds says in one monologue, "Singlehandledly ruined the word 'motherfucker?'"

There's also a common complaint that the "chemistry" between Jackson and Reynolds is weak. Maybe so if you were hoping for the kind of cryptohomoerotic mannerbund bullshit that passes for male-male bonding in some movies these days. Instead we get two guys trying very hard to keep each other alive and do the right thing; their focus is not on each other but on the task at hand, a task which involves dodging lots of sinister villains crashing cars and firing guns.

It's a fun movie. All three of us agreed it was great. Not fantastic, not a masterpiece, but definitely worth the two hours and ten bucks-a-ticket price tag. We won't have these actors forever, especially not in their current form. Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds both have character and public persona, and fans who love them for those qualities, and letting those two loose on a sound stage was a brilliant idea.

I finally watched Independence Day 2: Resurgence, and my initial hopes that it would be a fine movie were dashed by about the halfway point. Just a warning: this rant contains spoilers.

TL;DR: Independence Day 2: Resurgence draws you in with impressive and promising world-building in the first half hour, which it then completely discards and even contradicts in order to deliver an idiotic action-movie set-piece finale.

The film opens with an amazing bit of world-building. It's been twenty years since the first movie, and twenty years in the movie's universe. Humanity has taken apart much of the aliens' techonology and learned reliably from it. All the tech the aliens had, we now have. Plasma cannons, anti-grav, man-portable cannons, tractor beams, force shields, battery-sized fusion-based power plants, the whole kit the aliens brought with them in the first movie are now ours. We have bases on the moon, Mars, and even one of Saturn's moons. The alien tech is mostly hidden, incorporated into what we already do, so everything looks familiar; Marine One still looks like Marine One, it just doesn't use rotors anymore.

Even better, a few of the alien ships didn't crash; they managed to land, and humanity spent the next decade after the defeat of the mothership fighting wars with the aliens. Conveniently, this mostly happened in Africa and Southeast Asia. The result is that we have a lot of highly experienced alien hunters, in both high- and low-tech varieties, as well as a massive prison population of aliens. Up until this point, the world-building has been fairly well-handled.

The film goes off the rails when it's revealed that the alien ships are hiver ships; every ship has an alien queen, and when the queen is killed the rest of the aliens become comatose. Wait, what? Didn't the film also tell us that recently unqueened aliens become aggressive and continued fighting?

We're introduced to a new player, a refugee from another world and a previous alien attack. Her (voice is definitively female) species is completely digital and uploaded, yet for some reason needs an eight-foot-wide sphere to house its consciousness, has no ability to von-neumann up an entire starsystem in its defense, and lacks even rudimentary defenses.

It's also the biggest threat the aliens face, their boogieman in the silicon. So when the refugee reveals itself to humanity, the aliens respond with a devastating plasma weapons attack on the site from orbit, followed by high-yield fusion nukes, just to make sure, right?

Just kidding. In one of the most idiot plot moments in SF history, the alien queen leaves her vessel to take out the defenseless refugee on her own. We see her in one scene communing with advisors. Her advisors know that outside of her ship's powerful shields, the lesser shields of her shuttlecraft can be taken down by the humans' new weapons. Her advisors know that outside of her ship, she'll be vunerable. Her advisors know they have armed and armored personnel carriers that could invade and destroy the Cheyenne Mountain redoubt, because they already did so earlier in the film! But no, she has to handle this herself, and so chooses to take her personal Queen's "yacht" out.

There are a lot of other problems with the film. Apparently, despite all the tech they have, the aliens require fissionables to power their starships, and the bulk of Earth's trans-uranics are in its core, so Humanity's deadline is set by the mothership's massive drill operation. But that doesn't make sense; with their tech, there are lots of other ways to harvest fissionable material from the universe. When the refugee's ship is initially destroyed, no one from the moonbase goes out to look at the remains (WTF‽‽‽); David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum's character) has to have his hot-shot pilot friend steal a shuttlecraft to go check it out. And the movie is by Roland Emmerich; his penchant for crushing, burning, and mangling bystanders is only slightly restrained from the grotesqueries of 2012, but not by much.

Can we stop with the whole "alien queen" trope? Queens are not the brains of the hive: the hive is the brains of the hive. Queens are at best the uterus of the hive. Aliens, Independence Day, even Star Trek: First Contact have run out this idea. In any case, if you're injured neither your brain or your reproductive organs have evolved to leap out and avenge you.

Someone should make a Hellstrom's Hive movie and give us an alternative idea of what an SFnal "hive" would look like.

While the world-building, visuals, and science-fictional aspects are actually less insulting than those of Armageddon, The Transformers, or Battleship, the result is significantly less entertaining. Even the nostalgia-inducing aspects of seeing Jeff Goldblum, Vivaca Fox, Brent Spiner, Judd Hirsch and Bill Pullman doing their thing lack the emotional resonance needed to sustain it.

Omaha and the kid and I went out to see Zootopia. No spoilers for the movie; let's just say that it's a rather astonishing piece of animated art which tells a story, has a plot, has a theme, has a meaning, and manages not to be preachy at all about it. It opens with a friggin' children's pageant (which is just about the preachiest thing you can imagine outside of a church), states two different themes before the main plot begins, takes a left turn and delivers a third theme, all the while being entertaining and touching as hell, with wonderful, quirky characters and a rather interesting plotline all the same. At the end of the movie, one of the main characters delivers a short exegesis of second theme, the one fit for kids, which fits perfectly with her character arc, leaving adults to ponder the third theme.

It's almost like the writers were working at four different things at once: a plot for kids, a plot for adults, a theme for kids, and a theme for adults. Oh, that first theme? Not relevant: if anything, the movie is an argument about civilization doesn't make for miracles.

What did we get before Zootopia? Four trailers for four different animated films: Ratchet & Clank, The Secret Life of Pets, Angry Birds: The Movie, and Ice Age 5.

Ratchet & Clank was unimaginably dull and uninspired; if that's the best they can put into the trailer, they have a problem. Ice Age 5 was stupid and unempathetic, focusing on body humor and embarrassment. The Secret Life of Pets had some potential, but still left me doubtful. Angry Birds: The Movie was a befouled hideous exercise in milking a franchise: bathroom humor of the worst sort combined with a thin tissue of unreasonable plot, combined with humiliation for the characters that encourages you to laugh at them, not with them.

Every couple of years, John Lasseter gets a couple of writers into a room with pens and notepads and a whiteboard and a set of rules and says, "Here's the idea. Make me a story." And he wrings everything out of them. They don't go by the beatsheet, they go by The 22 Pixar Rules of Storytelling.

But here's the thing: I don't think this is that hard. It takes discipline, time, and effort. All things I like to think writers pride themselves on. The evidence that any of the other films tried even remotely to do what Lasseter does shows that other animation franchises, when it comes to writing, just don't care all that much. They don't have any respect for their audiences (see rule number 2), and it shows.

Last night I bought the second (or third) Blake Snyder book on plot and genre, Save The Cat Strikes Back, and in chapter one, while he's describing his "one line" plot descriptions, we come across this gem:

On the verge of returning to Earth after another routine mission, a rules-obsessed warrant officer lets an unknown alien species onto the ship; but when the creature kills one member of the crew and begins to grow in power, she must do what is right rather than what she's been told or else all on board will meet the same deadly fate. (Alien)

I read that and was flabbergasted: Dude, did you even watch the movie?

It isn't Ripley who lets the alien into the ship. Ash lets the alien into the ship. The whole idea of the "rules-obsessed officer" breaking quarantine is anathema to an essential tension within the plot. The entire point of the film is that Ripley was right to begin with. Ripley foreshadows the doom that comes to the Nostromo. Her words have weight. That's why she survives. That was a standard trope at the time, the girl who adheres to the rules is the survivor, and Ripley always followed the rules, down to her last log entry.

The best thing James Cameron ever did with Ripley's character in the sequel is make her a risk-taking rule-breaker. Because the moral values conflict between "saving Kane when you have everything to lose" and "saving Newt when you have nothing else to lose" is incredibly powerful and valuable and instructive, and this facile plot description completely takes away that sharpness of that contrast.

Child 44 stars Tom Hardy as Leo, a Stalin-era soldier of the KGB (at the time, the MGB) working in Moscow. He's blind to the way his wife doesn't really love him and he's loyal to The State to that degree that starts to twist men's souls. After a conflict with a fellow officer, he finds himself exiled as a member of the "people's militia" to a distant coal town. He discovers that a serial killer is working the train lines, but Soviet policy is that "serial killers" are a phenomenon of the West that does not happen in Russia. His insistence that the problem is real brings him into conflict with his former MGB masters, and the two plotlines converge predictably toward the end.

Child 44 is trying to be two things at once: an investigative thriller about a cop fighting the system to track down a serial killer, and a grim reminder of the vicious stress that was Stalin-era Russia, with its denouncements and betrayals, with the common people just trying to keep their head down and survive the human grinding machine that was Stalin's Moscow.

Its sets are beautiful and many of the settings are magnificent in their ghastly grey vision of 1953 Russia. The costumes and automobiles are carefully appropriate.

Narratively, Child 44 is straightforward. But in terms of direction and editing, it's a mess; it tells too much of Leo's backstory too early and proceeds with far too easy a linear structure. Vasili's character is too easy as a backstabbing, ladder-climbing villain. The killer's speech is predictable and maudlin. Liberal use of handheld cameras during the action sequences is highly instrusive and disorienting, making you wonder "Who is holding the camera? Out of whom's eyes are we seeing?" effectively reminding you that you are watching a film, that there is someone else there holding the camera.

I don't know that I can recommend it. It's a good movie, and not a waste of your time, but you will leave the theater with a vague sense that there was much missing, and much could have been done, but wasn't, with the material on hand.

There's a new Terminator movie coming out, Terminator: Genisys, and if the trailer is anything to go by, I'm actually eager to see it, because it actually succeeds at something that I didn't see in the last Terminator film, nor did I see in Aliens vs. Predator, nor did I have any glint of in the trailer for the next Jurassic Park film, Jurassic World. Andrew Swann successfully identified the critical element to any reboot or continuation of a long-lived and fraying franchise: nostalgia is a critically important special effect.

The last Terminator film, the latest Jurassic Park film, and the Star Wars "prequel trilogy" (the Anakin Skywalker series) all lacked that critical ingredient, and lacked a meaningful storyline the audience could latch onto. I have no idea if the latest Terminator film has the latter; it's hard to say from a trailer. But it will surely push its aging audience's buttons hard about important scenes in the original, hopefully morphed into something that has depth and impact in our CGI-enhanced world, and given new life by having the context in which those lines are delivered changed to serve a new and interesting plot.

This editor of this trailer surely understood the maxim: "Give the audience exactly what they know they want, only different." Jurassic World looks like its struggling with that. Let's hope the rest of Terminator: Genisys has it nailed.

I didn't enjoy Guardians of the Galaxy all that much.

There, I said it. In fact, I know exactly why I didn't like it all that much. There were characters with problems. And how the characters overcome their problems, scene by scene, is the plot.

And when the characters themselves change dramatically, such that major values they held at the beginning of the film no longer apply to them at the end of the film, and the changing of these values comes about as they encounter and overcome the various obstacles that stand between them and their goal, then you have a story.

Guardians of the Galaxy didn't have a story.

I can't quite put my finger on why I feel that way. It just seems that Rocket's attachment to Groot way to readily heralded his change. Gamora's change was completely unexplained. Drax didn't change. Groot didn't change. Quill didn't change. Ronan didn't change. Yondu didn't change. During Drax's big fistfight with Ronan halfway through the film, I realized I didn't really care what happened next. The big showdown at the end was beautifully filmed and even well-acted, and it was clearly the inevitable conclusion to the plot.

On the other hand, star power matters. Nobody went to see the Transformers movie for Shia LeBeouf, but a lot of people went to see Rocket Raccoon.

A lot of the complaints have to do with the Marvel milieu, about how an audience not steeped in the Guardians and the Starjammers, Thanos and Galactus, the Shiar and the Skrull, and all the terminology of the various space-faring contemporary Marvel universe, would be terribly lost and would lose all concern. Maybe. But I found I didn't care that much even knowing all that stuff.

Omaha and I went to see Pacific Rim, the "giant robots beating up giant invading aliens" movie by Guillermo del Toro. I wasn't expecting that much, but there was a lot of money thrown at the screen so it should be a pretty good beat-em-up.

As it turned out, it was a way better beat-em-up than I'd expected. In case you're not familiar with the film, it's "giant monsters (called Kaiju) start attacking cities along the Pacific Rim, and humans build giant robots (called Jaegers) to destroy them."

It had a lot of the del Toro tropes-- lots of underground basements, falling angels, clockwork, Ron Perlman. But he managed to avoid most of his usual suspects and concentrate on making a movie about powers much larger than humanity, creatures capable of wiping us out without even thinking about it, and humanity fighting back by becoming as gigantic and monstrous as necessary in order to fight back, in a way that actually makes the audience feel the gargantuan nature unleashed in the film. You have to see this in IMAX, I think; even that screen doesn't quite seem big enough to hold everything going on.

Omaha spotted the best thing about the film. The main character... isn't. The camera focuses on him, and tells the stories going on through him, and yes, it's his crisis at the beginning that describes the film's premise, and yes, since he's the hero he delivers the final blow... but his crisis doesn't need a resolution. He's simply the hero. It's everyone else who needs prodding. The father/son team that mans a different giant robot; the father/daughter team in conflict because he doesn't want her driving a giant robot and maybe getting killed; the two geeks, one intellectually messy, the other brilliant with Germanic precision, who have to put aside their differences in order to solve the puzzle of the giant monsters. Their stories are told in the hero's wake through the movie.

You can see Hollywood's Save the Cat Rule at work in this film. At almost exactly 12 minutes, the hero, who is now working at a lowly job, gets a visit from his mentor who tells him, "Do you want be here when the world ends, or do you want to be fighting it from the cockpit of a Jaeger?" It's the pure Hollywood "State the theme so the audience knows what's going on within 15 minutes of opening" formula. The beat sheet is slightly re-arranged, but otherwise indistinguishable from that of any other "male protagonist saves the day" movie. But del Toro understands this, and knows it's a problem. Which is why the other personal conflicts, in the B/C/D plots, are so much more interesting.

Ramin Djiwadi-- one of the least inspired composers working in Hollywood today-- did the soundtrack, and it does its job and gets out of the way, but I wouldn't pay money for the album.

All in all, a good, well-made movie, with a well-written script, solid acting, and phenemonally good direction, cinematography, and animation.