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Date: 8/3/2018
What I’m watching: a silly science fiction adventure and an inaccurate biopic.
At the Red Box: Rampage
I like Dwayne Johnson. I think he more than capable as an action hero and has a pretty canny touch for comedy. His script selection abilities are a little weaker though.
“Rampage,” based on a video game, is a film a 12-year-old might like. Essentially an American take on the traditional Japanese monster movie or “kaiju,” such as “Godzilla.”
In this film Johnson plays Primatologist Davis Okoye, a former US Army Special Forces soldier and member of an anti-poaching unit. Got that? He had rescued years ago an albino gorilla named George whom he has taught sign language.
George is one of three animals who is exposed to a pathogen developed by a high tech company that will instantly mutate him into a giant version himself, a new creature that is extremely violent. The others are a timber wolf and an alligator. The company that developed the pathogen is hoping to sell it to the highest bidder to use as weapon.
Naturally, Okoye wants to save his friend and with the help of a geneticist, Kate Caldwell, (played by Naomie Harris), who had worked for the company, he attempts to do so.
The three mutated animals are being lured to Chicago by radio waves as the head of the company (played by Malin Ackerman with Cruela De Ville subtlety) so the military can kill them and the mutated DNA can be harvested.
Okoye and Caldwell manage to stop the violent behavior in George in the most outrageous moment in the film and then Okoye and George attempt to stop the others before the Air Force levels Chicago with bombs.
This film is a mutation, going from a lesson on primates to a kaiju to “Mighty Joe Young.” It isn’t boring and is in many ways a 2018 version of a wacky low budget drive-in film.
This film would have benefitted if I were sitting in the back seat of my parents’ 1955 Buick.
Johnson takes the material seriously and the CGI is impressive. As a character George is very appealing and is well realized.
The story is just silly at times and if you’re willing to allow the 12 year-old in you return for 90 minutes you may have a good time.
Hulu Exclusive: Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
This art house film received marginal theatrical release and is presented as the true story about how psychologist William Moulton Marston created Wonder Woman.
Few films that purport to tell a true story seem to get the story correct as the inclination of most filmmakers is to condense or expand details that they find interesting or non-essential. Such is the case with this film.
As a comic book geek, the subject matter intrigued me. Even without my doing any research, though, I knew that writer and director Angela Robinson was playing fast and loose with the truth.
At the core of the film is the concept that Marston – who invented the lie detector – developed Wonder Woman as a way to introduce his ideas of psychology to the masses and to provide a feminist hero to comic books.
Part of what is presented is true, but much of it is an invention. It’s too bad that Robinson couldn’t have stuck with the truth. It’s pretty damn interesting.
What she did focus mainly on is the relationship he had with his wife and another woman, which members of the family have contested as inaccurate.
All in all, this film is a disappointment. It reduced a fascinating story to essentially a drama about three people and their relationship, which in this case was fictionalized.