Top 5 Worst Movies of 2015

This is approximately a year late, but this at least means I've had the time to think my choices over, eh? Sorry that this has taken so long, I've been trying to find time between all my other writing and plenty of other things I've been working on over the course of the year, but generally speaking I've just been some combination of busy or tired over the course of the year and never got around to it. With record-breaking lateness, here are my top five worst movies of 2015.

Dishonorable mentions: Super Hero Taisen: Kamen Rider 3. This movie had a damn interesting premise and would have worked well as a mini-series centered more around the characters from the last Kamen Rider movie rather than introducing a whole new cast of supporting characters from previous Rider series instead of utilizing the Riders we know work well with Shinnosuke. Instead, we got a movie that goes by way too quickly, as previous Kamen Riders fight as part of an incredibly weak premise that sounded strong at the get-go. The sequel mini-series, Kamen Rider 4 was far more interesting, yet it still had its own issues as well. If they took the two premises and combined them, then lengthened the whole thing to about twelve episodes worth of content it would have probably worked out fairly well. As it is, we got a rather interesting movie and sequel series, both of which rushed to a rather anti-climactic conclusion.
Another honorable mention would be Kung Fury. This short-film could have been something great, but it squandered its potential in the ending and the last half of the first act. Generally speaking, it's a damn fun movie, but it could do with a bit better pacing. It's not bad enough to work its way onto the worst list but not good enough to make it onto the best.
Finally, we have The Avengers: Age of Ultron. While not a bad movie by any means, it deserves a mention due to how badly they squandered most of the concepts they had. The fight-scenes were cool, and I didn't even dislike the rather strange social-interactions the team had, but it wasn't paced particularly well, it was way too short, and worst of all it squandered all of the development between Cap and Widow in The Winter Soldier and all of the development between Bruce and Betty in The Incredible Hulk. Whedon also seemed like he was sleepwalking through the direction in this film, because all of the funny writing is still here, but the comedic timing is all off from his previous works. I especially noticed this when I re-watched Firefly immediately afterward. Now let's dig right into the actual list!

#5: Selma
I'll be honest, Selma wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the fact that it flies in the face of actual history that actual people who are still alive remember. I soured on this film over time even more than I was when I originally saw it. A movie about the civil-rights movement is a bad idea anyways, because it's a concept more fit for a miniseries than it is for a single two-hour movie. Also, don't make a movie about a great orator if you don't have the rights to their speeches. That'd be like making a movie about a musician without the rights to their songs. Not to mention the rather bizarre soundtrack choice with the references that make no sense. The cast is good, the pacing sucks and this film is just generally over-rated. There are worse movies, worse movies that were released in 2015 no less, but the history buff in me demanded that I put it somewhere on this list.

#4: Fant4stic
I saw this on Blu-ray before the official home-media release, and let me just say that this film was a fairly massive trainwreck for a number of reasons I went over in my review. Quick rundown; Complete and utter ignorance of modern science. Ignorance of how the world would react to the events of this movie. Ignorance of the procedures required for space-travel. General ignorance of basic things. You get my drift. This movie had potential, but between Fox's meddling and the fact that Josh Trank was trying to make Chronicle 2 originally, the final product was a boring, uninteresting mess.

#3: Smosh: The Movie
You know you're scraping the bottom of the barrel when you rip off Fred: The Movie. You know the mighty have fallen when the movie they make isn't as entertaining as watching 90 minutes of their videos would be. Smosh, I hope y'all took a step back after this and tried to do better. You guys used to be funny, you could even be considered some of the funniest people on the web, but you fell hard within the course of a few years. Don't feel like saying much else about this movie, I've talked about it at length in my review. Suffice to say that it's a piece of crap not worth spending your time on.

#2: The Ridiculous 6
For everything one might have hoped this film would be from the opening sequence, it certainly didn't live up to any of it. It's an Adam Sandler movie, as one would expect. Amazing to see that they somehow managed to make it all the way through production without anyone raising a hand and saying "This is stupid, get out of here Adam and let a good writer handle this." They never once flagged that Taylor Lautner would have been a better lead than Sandler, they never once figured it'd be a good idea to cut the cast down to him, Luke Wilson and Terry Crews. Netflix, I hope you learned your lesson, because Adam Sandler certainly won't.

#1: Jupiter Ascending
If there was a bigger, more derivative piece of crap in 2015, I don't know about it. The Wachowski's failed harder than they ever did before when they made this movie. I don't think there was a single other movie in 2015 that made me quite as angry as this film. To put it bluntly, this film rips off everything under the sun and does it all badly. If you can think of anything, Jupiter Ascending ripped it off. From Twlight to Power Rangers, from Cinderella to The Matrix, from Pacific Rim to Soylent Green. This thing steals it all and does it horribly. The best part of this film is Sean Bean and Channing Tatum, but that's not saying much. If you want to know more about this horrible movie, just read my review. I've said plenty about this film already, and I can't list off everything that was wrong with it again.

That's it for now, I'll see you later with the "Best" list from 2015.
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The Angry Birds Movie

Let's be perfectly honest, was anyone expecting this movie to even exist? Angry Birds doesn't exactly have enough plot to reasonably fill an hour and a half film. A bunch of pigs stole eggs from a bunch of flightless birds, and you have to bludgeon the pigs to death with the birds to get the eggs back. It's not that hard to understand, but that also makes it hard to tell a story about.
I had forgotten that this movie was even in development by the time the cast was announced, and by the time the trailer dropped I'd forgotten it even existed.
For those who haven't been paying attention to the mobile and casual market for the last seven years (And I applaud you if you've managed that) Angry Birds is a physics puzzle-game developed by Rovio Entertainment. It saw initial release in 2009, and since then has had at least one sequel, port, or spinoff since then. Including the original game, Rovio have put out seventeen entries to the Angry Bird IP in seven years. Not to mention the thirteen other games they put out that were unrelated. In total, that's thirty games in seven years. Ubisoft looks at Rovio and says "Whoa, slow down!"
One rather logical question you might be asking now is "Why now?" And you would be correct in asking that. I haven't played Angry Birds in at least four years, and I haven't been keeping track of the new releases since Angry Birds: Transformers came out. I had to look the studio up on Wikipedia to find out how many games had been put out, and I was surprised to see they were still around. I could have sworn they were in some serious trouble financially, but that was the last I'd heard.
This movie starts out with, no joke, a beat-for-beat ripoff of the scene from The Incredibles where Dash falls through the jungle, with a few things taken from the Skrat scenes in the Ice Age movies. Red, the red bird from Angry Birds (Jason Sudeikis) is trying to deliver a cake to a birthday party, but he's late and clumsy and angry about it and gets taken to Bird Court about it. The hypocritically angry judge (Keegan-Michael Key) sends Red to anger-management classes where he meets Chuck, (Josh Gad) who is in anger-management classes for speeding and messing up the police-station and acting like he's Sonic the freaking Hedgehog, Bomb (Danny Mcbride) who explodes when feeling strong emotions, Terence (Sean Penn) who doesn't talk and is apparently some kind of horrible criminal, and their instructor, Matilda (Maya Rudoplh). Red's level of irritation with these characters rather neatly mimics my own, as does his level of irritation with how the society on his island works. On his way home from the course one day, he's stopped by a crossing-guard that keeps him from crossing the road. The first two times is alright, but the third time around an old bird is taking forever to cross the road, and it becomes nobodies fault but his own for waiting and not just walking around the crossing-guard, or walking over to the sidewalks to his left or right.
Eventually, after plenty of annoying antics and one funny line, the green pigs show up, flaunting their technology and advancements to the rather primitive birds. Red, Bomb, and Chuck sneak onto the pigs ship and find a lot of crap and more pigs there. Red confronts the head pig, King Leonard Mudbeard (Bill Hader) and he tells the others that they were going to put on a cowboy show.
More pigs show up, and stuff happens in a montage set to "Friends" by Black Shelton. A song actually sung by a character played by Blake Shelton. I'll admit, I'm not much of a fan of modern country, but if I had to listen to a country song, I'd listen to this one. It's actually not bad, but it'd be better with cleaner vocals. IE, not auto-tuned and country-nasal.
This montage also includes a Chippendale's reference, with the cowboy pigs ripping off their chaps on-stage. That doesn't even require comment, I'm just gonna let that sink in. What the hell?
Red becomes more suspicious as time goes on, and decides to go on a quest to find the legendary hero of the birds, the last of the birds that can fly, Mighty Eagle (Peter freaking Dinklage for crying out loud) and ask his advice. After a massive journey up to and across the tops of mountains, they find The Lake of Wisdom, ripped straight from The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Then Mighty Eagle shows up, and they find out that he's a fat old retired son of a bitch who thinks he's Mister Miyagi. They leave, and find out that while the pigs are throwing a party for the birds, they're stealing the birds eggs and leaving.
This is almost an hour into the film. It takes us up to exactly the hour mark before the birds build their boat to go off to Pig Island to get the eggs back. This is an hour into a ninety-seven minute film. This leaves a little over thirty minutes for them to finally adapt the game and wrap the plot up.
The birds sail to the island and take one of the slingshots the pigs left behind. They then launch themselves bodily at the pigs buildings. This is where the mechanics of the game come into play. It doesn't make a lick of sense, and it comes straight outta nowhere, as you'd expect, but they put it in there because god-damn did we have to try and pay all this off!
They siege the castle, Red, Bomb and Chuck save the eggs, and Mighty Eagle steps in to help them escape. Terence then drives them all back to the boat in one of the pigs vehicles. Mighty Eagle's return is praised, and Red is no longer seen as an outcast in the village. They then play the entirety of that Blake Shelton song in the ending credits, and they set up a sequel mid-credits. Yeah, like that's gonna happen.
All in all, I think we're looking at this years Jupiter Ascending, but on a different end of the spectrum. While Jupiter Ascending moved too quickly, The Angry Birds Movie moves too slowly. Like I said before, there's a solid hour before they get to the actual plot of the game. Then they spend like fifteen minutes on adapting the game mechanic for mechanic, with about two or three minutes spent setting up the actual plot of the game (Which took like ten seconds in the game) and another sixty-five minutes or so on weird antics, with the remainder spent on the end-credits.
Speaking of the credits, the audio for this film was apparently produced by Skywalker Sound, AKA the best-damn sound guys in the business. So why, with that in mind, is the mixing and editing in this movie so noticeably bad? There are numerous times when it's obvious that they strung sentences together from multiple takes. Some points in the movie when multiple sound-effects play, or when an effect is playing on top of voices, it comes out sounding incredibly unnatural the way it's mixed. Just think, if Skywalker Sound can't make the audio sound good, how bad must it have been before they got to it?
Another technical issue with the movie is that the animation looks incredibly choppy, almost like they were trying to emulate stop-motion animation for some parts of the movie, but failed. It would be an interesting animation technique if not for the fact that it keeps going back and forth between being smoothly animated to being choppy as all hell. Part of the appeal of computer animation is how smooth you can make your animation look for crying out loud!
Now we come to the characters. I can't really bring myself to hate Red and Bomb, because they're not annoying, and they both seem like actual characters, save for one scene where Bomb is really freaking weird. Then there's Chuck, who's basically Sonic The Hedgehog if he were a metrosexual horn-dog, and Terence. Chuck is annoying as all hell, but Terence doesn't speak at all. They got Sean Penn to voice a character and he just grunts throughout the film!
The other characters are either tolerable or annoying, or in the case of Mighty Eagle, freaking cool because he's voiced by Peter freaking Dinklage! Yeah the character is an egotistical douche, but him just saying his name sounds epic because he's voiced by Peter freaking Dinklage!
Now we come to the performances. Jason Sudekis seems like he really doesn't want to be in this movie, but that translated well into a character I could relate to, since I quickly found that I didn't want to be watching the movie. Due to this, he's not exactly funny, but he's still pretty interesting to watch over the course of the film.
Josh Gadd considered turning this film down, since he thought Chuck was too similar to Olaf from Frozen. I've never seen Frozen, but from what I've heard, Olaf was pretty funny. Gadd need not concern himself with getting typecast, since Chuck is freaking annoying. Like I said before, he's a bad knockoff of Sonic without the understanding of any of what makes the character good.
Danny Mcbride as Bomb actually got a few laughs out of me, so there's that. The character would have been pretty good in something else, but in this, he's the highlight.
Funnily enough, despite getting billed towards the top of the card, Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla's characters are barely in the movie. You read that right. They got Smosh to be in the film and they were barely in it! Maybe they finally got the message that they're past their prime, or maybe they just had cameos. Either way, they were billed way too high for characters that were barely in the film.Now that we've gotten through the technical aspects and whatnot, let's talk about all the references in the film!
There are a few posters in the movie for Kevin Bacon in Hamlet. It's in the very center of the frame, and it's shown like three times.
Then there's the "Obey"-style posters in Mighty Eagle's cave with "Ohey" written on them. They're in the background for the most-part, but when they're introduced, the camera pans right over it, and it fills most of the screen.
During the pig-party, the deejays are both dressed like Daft Punk for some reason. Daft Punk haven't released an album or had a Hot 100 hit in three years, so this dates the movie significantly. Namely it dates it as having been written between 2012 and 2013.
There's a photobombing joke in the movie where the bird that carves pictures is trying to carve a selfie of him with the pigs boat in the background. This makes no sense, since he's just carving from what he's seen, and he didn't see Bomb walking across the background when he started!
During the siege of Pig Island, one of the birds runs into a "Calvin Swine" ad, with a pig that looks like Mark Whalberg did in the early '90s, backwards cap and everything. It could be intended to be Justin Bieber, but call me a product of the '90s, this looks like Marky Mark.
Inside of the pigs-castle, Red looks down a corridor while he and Chuck are looking for the eggs, and no joke, pig-versions of the twins from The Shining show up. I. Am. Not. Kidding. Thirty-six year-old Stanley Kubrick/Stephen King references in a kids movie! Are you guys trying to be Epic Movie? Because you're succeeding!
Then there's a scene when one of the pigs (the pigs who have tons of plungers for some reason) has a pair of plungers attached to its chest, and starts doing some kind of stripper/sexy dance. I don't get what the point of that was supposed to be.
The second most egregious moment in the film is when time slows down as the trio tries to figure out how to get past the guards. Time slows to a crawl, and the movie re-creates basically beat for beat the Quicksilver scene from Days of Future Past. Problem. Chuck is not as likable as Peter is by a wide margin, and this movie isn't nearly good enough to pull off something like that credibly.
There are other miscellaneous memes and pop-culture phenomena referenced or outright quoted throughout the film, but this one really takes the cake. Prepare yourself, this one's gonna be one hell of a doozy.
Towards the climax, Mighty Eagle puts on a record to psych himself up to help the other birds out. It being a record is bad enough, but guess what song is playing on it?
Pick a song that got popular via the internet, now find one that you'd think of that's not American. I'll give you a hint, Mike, Matthew, and Peter. No? Still nothing? This joke was ripped almost point for point from an abridged anime. Got a clue? Well, it was on Doctor Who at one point. Still nothing? Well, maybe you should check your privilege. Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Rick Astley. Never Gonna Give You Up.
Yeah, that. This movie Rick-rolls the audience. Not like the intended audience for this film would know that, they're probably not old enough to have ever been Rick-Rolled, much less to have actually heard the song when it was new.
Speaking of weird music in this film, it starts out with Paranoid by Black Sabbath! Probably best-known by the audience of the game this is based on as that song that sometimes plays on the Guitar Hero: World Tour title-screen.
When Red is feeling sad, Behind Blue Eyes starts playing, but not the version by The Who from 1977, but the 2003 version by Limp Bizkit! A cover of an almost forty year-old song that is itself thirteen years-old by one of the progenitors of the filthier side of Nu Metal. A band that hasn't been relevant in over ten years, and that I've actively tried to forget exists. That's not to say this cover is bad, but I'd rather listen to The Who's original version, because Fred Durst is no Roger Daltrey.
Then, during the end-credits montage and mid-credits scene, an over-produced rendition of I Will Survive starts playing, with Selena Gomez on vocals. This wouldn't be too bad if they'd bothered going back and either re-tuning Gomez's voice more subtly, or just re-took the vocal-track until it was on-pitch. She's no Gloria Gaynor, but she never will be, so they could have at least gone back to the studio for a couple more takes.
Apparently Rock You Like a Hurricane by The Scorpions and Wild Thing by Tone Lōc were also in the movie, but I didn't notice them. Amazing how they could have one of my favorite songs in this film and not have me notice. Rock You Like a Hurricane is iconic for crying out loud! Did they not use the riff or something?
Oh, and for those of you wondering, since the song was featured in one of the trailers, Michael Jackson's Bad is not in the film in any capacity. I can give this film a bit of credit though, the orchestral arrangement of the Angry Birds theme-song was pretty cool.
Soooo... What the fuck did this movie accomplish? Well, it made quite a bit of money at the box-office, so I wouldn't be surprised if it gets a sequel. I seriously hope that this movie didn't make enough money to dig Rovio out of their hole, but considering it's also backed by Sony, they'll probably get bought up by them and we'll see more Angry Birds movies and games, but they'll be PlayStation-exclusive from here on out.
In the end, fuck this movie. There are a few good lines scattered around the run-time, but nothing that justifies this films existence. If you've been on the internet in the last five years, and seen a kids movie in the past decade or so, you've already seem everything this movie has to offer and better. One of the jokes in this movie had the piss taken out of it in Hellsing Ultimate Abridged three freaking years ago!
Yet again, this is a movie without a single original idea to its name. Take your 0.3* rating and fuck right off. As far as directorial debuts go, this is one shit-show of a movie, and while it's similar to Jupiter Ascending, it's more like a kid-friendly version of Epic Movie than anything else.

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Image from Impawards.com

Warcraft

To say video-game films have a bad-rap would be a major understatement. Ever since The Wizard and Super Mario Bros: The Movie, they have had a terrible track-record. The early-00's was an especially bad time, because Uwe Boll sunk his hooks into making game-movies for a while, and made things worse. Things got better, but then Adam Sandler made Pixels and brought things down again. The best game movies have probably been Sonic The Hedgehog: The Movie, the Tomb Raider films, and Wreck-It Ralph, and that last movie wasn't wholly-based on an existing game. Rather unfortunately, despite being brilliantly made, having a damn good story, and despite raising the bar for direct game adaptations, Warcraft still falls somewhat short of being great.
Let's get this out of the way straight off the bat. This is a gorgeous movie, and part of the reason I like it is because it's just so god-damn cool-looking!
I've never understood the idea of liking something based mainly on aesthetics until I saw this movie. Everything is just so freaking pretty. The costumes, the environments, the swords, the shields, the armor, the gear, the books, the sets, the fights, the effects, the makeup, the cinematography, the direction, the music. My god I just love to watch this film. Where some movies have unimpressive weapons, this film makes literally every single weapon look awesome, like you'd want to have it hanging on your wall. Even the Orc weapons that look like they were cobbled together from random crap are cool. The Horde armor and clothing looks really cool too, but the Alliance armor is freaking sweet, from the king, all the way down to the lowliest foot-soldier. If you want to watch something that will make you want to buy toys and/or props, this is the movie for you.
It's just a shame that the story isn't structured better. And it's a shame there are hardly any British accents in the movie. For as cool as The Alliance's gear and locations are, The Alliance characters are the weakest part of the movie. Part of that has to do with the fact that most of them just have American accents, and part of it has to do with the fact that we start about a movie too far into the story for any of the characters to be really compelling, which is a shame, because I want to care about them, since they've got the coolest gear and some awesome fights. They're not exactly the good guys in the story, but they're definitely the best-dressed.
The orcs side of the story is much more interesting, but unfortunately we're only privy to a very small portion of it. We're in yet another position where the lead-up to the story is more interesting than the story itself. Not that the story is bad, but it would benefit from being a sequel, not the first movie in the series. The orcs are fleeing their home planet to Azeroth. The portal is opened up with evil green magic powered by draining the life from living beings. Rather than being shown the origin of this magic and how the magician, Gul'dan became as he is, we are told later on in the movie. Rule #1 of storytelling: Show, don't tell. I suppose they must have cut the story down in all of the years of production, which I'll get to later on.
The Orc Horde spills over into Azeroth, and our Orc lead, Durotan's (Toby Kebbell) wife has a miscarriage, but Gul'dan brings the baby back to life at the expense of the life of a deer. I don't quite know what emotion this was supposed to elicit from us, but given the chance to sacrifice the life of a deer for a 100% chance to bring someone back to life, I'd take that chance. Anyone would. Snap decision. Unless it was someones pet, in which case no, but just a deer? In exchange for a child? I can't be expected to see that as some horrible act, any more than killing and eating the deer would be a horrible act in something like The Walking Dead. It's necessary for them to survive. For some reason though, the movies soundtrack expects me to see this as something horrible.
The orcs begin their raids, and the military of Stormwind Kingdom is taken by storm, and slaughtered. As they regroup, the commander, Anduin Lothar (Travis Femmel) finds an errant mage looking over the bodies of the fallen. The mage, Khadgar, (Ben Schnetzer) explains that he found traces of the evil Fel magic on the bodies. The mage persuades the king, Llane Wrynn to seek the help of the guardian of Tirisfal, Medvih (Ben Foster).
Lothar and Khadgar go see Medvih, who accompanies them and a scouting team tracing the remnants of Fel magic, and along the way they get ambushed by an orc party. They manage to fight them off and take a half-orc named Garona, who can speak both Human and Orc. Neither of which are English, btw.
They find out that the Orcs are planning to use all the people they've captured to bring The Horde into Azeroth at the expense of their lives.
Durotan deduces that Fel magic was responsible for the death of his world, and begins plotting against Gul'dan. He invites King Llane to a meeting to negotiate a truce, but Blackhand's Orcs ambush them, and Lothar's son is killed by the sheer incompetence of Medvih.
King Llane leads an attack on the Orc encampment, while Lothar and Khadgar deduce that Medvih must be aiding The Horde. Sure enough, he's possessed by a demon using Fel magic to aid The Horde. Lothar and Khadgar fight him and a clay golem to victory, and with the last of his life, Medvih closes the portal to Draenor and opens one to Stormwind, allowing Llane's men to retreat through with the prisoners, but not Llane himself and some of his soldiers. Lothar arrives too late to save anyone, but Llane orders Garona to kill him so she can try and take command of The Orcs herself with the honor his death would bring him. Lothar faces off with a Fel-roided Blackhand, and kills him with Llane's sword, leaving with the kings body on his griffin.
The races and governments of Azeroth form together to create The Alliance to combat The Horde, and Durotan's son is found by humans.
All in all, god-damn I wish this movie was better. I want to like this movie. I really freaking do. It doesn't exactly fall apart, more like it never really came together in the first place, and I can totally pinpoint why. This should have been Warcraft II, and there should have been another Warcraft movie ahead of it. Probably sometime last year, or two years ago. Hell, I'd say it should have been released back in 2012, it would have been amazing to see the start of this whole Warcraft story back in 2012. Then this movie could have been released in 2014 and a third Warcraft movie could have been out this year instead.
However, it's a god-damn pretty movie. I can't even get over that for a second no matter how much I try and focus on the issues with the story. I just love the swords so much. I love the armor, the environments, the effects, everything. This is such a polarizing movie for me, since on the one hand I love it for the aesthetics, and I love it for some parts of the story, but on the other hand I wish they'd bothered covering all of the lead-up to the events in this film. Plus, there are way too many American accents in this cast. King Llane is freaking British, and European accents are standards for fantasy settings. I'm not saying they should have put on bad accents if they couldn't put on good ones, I'm just saying they should have at least tried.
Then there's the fact that hardly anyone in this movie speaks with any kind of pomp and circumstance. The orcs do, Llane does, but Medvih, Lothar and Khadgar don't.
As far as accuracy to the games goes, I wouldn't really know beyond the fact that Gul'dan looks like something out of WoW. I've never beaten Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and I don't own any of the other games. I played quite a bit of World of Warcraft right after it went Free To Play, but I wasn't particularly impressed by it. Best I can tell you is that everything looks about right, and if it's not, who cares? It's a freaking gorgeous movie.
The worst I can say about the effects is that in the very first scene in the movie, the orcs look like they were stripped out of WoW and given a bunch of extra polygons and points of articulation in their skeletons. In fact, the first few minutes of the film have a generally strange air to them, as if they were using incomplete, under-polished animation and CGI. Thankfully it's solved immediately afterwards, but it's still off-putting.
In the end... I can't decide, really. I know I'm going to get it on Blu-Ray as soon as I possibly can, because I really want to see another Warcraft movie. Hell, I might even wind up re-installing Warcraft and playing it. I do love me some old-school RTS.
I guess I'm going to have to abstain from giving this film a score since I'm so conflicted about it. I'll be back again next week, hopefully I can give a more definitive review then. Probably either gonna be Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows or Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson.

Image from Impawards.com

Death Note II: The Last Name

In November of 2006, six months after the release of the first film, Warner Bros released the second film in the live-action Death Note trilogy. Considering these movies were released in the same year, the fact that this film picks up immediately after the first one ended, and the last movie had a promo for this film at the end, I feel like it's a safe bet to say these movies were shot back-to-back.
Spoiler warning for the movie, the comics, the last movie, the animated movies, and the animated series. Gonna be covering a lot here.
Light leverages the death of his girlfriend, Shiori, in order to join the Kira task-force.
Rather than having some kind of gap between Misa being saved by Gelus and her getting the Death Note, they just show Gelus saving her life and then Rem dropping the Death Note in front of her.
Logically speaking, there should have been some kind of delay, since the Death Note was in Gelus's hands when he died. If it'd fallen through the portal to the human-realm it would have made a bit more sense, but then why would Rem be hanging around?
Like Visions of a God, all of the emotion has been taken out of Gelus's death. For some strange reason, Rem doesn't even converse with Gelus in this film, and she's doesn't even show up in his death-scene, even though she was there in the comics.
At least I presume Rem is a she, I know she's female in the comics and animated series, but here she's voiced by Ikehata Shinnosuke, AKA "Peter", who's rather obviously male. His Wikipedia page says he has an androgynous appearance, but his voice is plenty masculine. He could have played Ryuk, easily.
From here on out, there's not much that's different from the comics or the animated series. The Second Kira arc begins with Sakura TV getting two, not four tapes. Rather than being a trash TV tabloid, Sakura TV is a serious network with serious news for some reason.

Take a look at the guy in the screenshot on the left. That's Demegawa. Yes, he's incredibly skinny in this movie.
Staff researcher, Kiyomi Takada wants to take the lead on the Kira story, but Demegawa gives it to his mistress, the current anchor.
They begin the broadcast, and Misa kills an anti-Kira news-anchor from another channel to prove she's got the power to kill. In order to cut down the runtime and some of the more long-winded gambits, all of the succeeding Kira tapes have been compressed into one. Unfortunately, that takes away from the mystery of the situation, since Misa basically just dumps a bunch of relevant information into the lap of the public without much in the way of build-up. She straight-up says she's the second Kira rather than sorta pretending to be the original Kira before the task-force sends her a message from the real Kira.
For some reason, Mogi goes out (And I only know he was Mogi because they said his name.) and attempts to stop the broadcast. Rather than driving his car up to the doors of the building and trying to get in that way, he shows up at the festival several yards away from the door, and in front of the cameras filming the impromptu pro-Kira demonstration outside. Naturally, this gets him killed, along with a bunch of other police-officers. This leads the task-force to the conclusion that it probably is a second Kira and not just the first Kira throwing up a smokescreen, since the killings don't match the original Kira's method of operation. Plus, the original Kira wouldn't have been nearly so sloppy.

Since nobody can approach the scene without getting killed (And because Sayu was at the Sakura TV festival for some reason and decides to dis Kira on live TV) Kamen Rider Dad shows up, busts the TV wall outside of Sakura TV for no reason, destroys their cameras and shoots the feed cables. Then, Soichiro takes off his helmet for some reason, apparently not realizing that Misa could be watching from binoculars (You know, like she was in the comics and animated series) and could then kill him without his helmet on. Fortunately for him, Misa was watching from the television in her dressing-room, and is unable to continue active killings when the feed goes down.

Unlike the comics and the animated series, the police aren't using opaque riot-shields or darkened riot-helmets. Considering nothing happened to Soichiro, that's not as stupid as it seems on the surface, but it's still pretty stupid.
While this whole sequence is pretty bad-ass, it's not nearly as bad-ass as it was in the comics and the animated series, since Soichiro's heart-attack has been written out of this version of the story as well. Overall, I'd say this could have been improved by not having Mogi run into the crowd for no reason, not having Soichiro remove his helmet, and by having the police wearing darkened gear. And if this was all taking place at night, but that's a bit of a minor quibble.

Light goes to the television station to get Sayu home, and Misa notices that she can see his name, but not his life-span. This tips her off to him being Kira, so she decides to look him up.
Here's where the film gets much stupider than it should be. Rather than having Light impersonate Kira to tell Misa to stop what she's doing, they have Light addressing Misa directly, as himself, with his name and face fully on display for some stupid reason. Telling her what she's doing is wrong. After the real Kira killed Lind L. Taylor for doing the exact same thing! At this point, Light doesn't even know about the thing where Death Note users with the Shinigami eyes can recognize other Death Note users by the fact that they can't see their lifespan, so why would he agree to put his life in danger like this? Just sending out a message as Kira would be so much smarter!

Later on, Misa shows up at Light's house to profess her love for him, since he killed the guy who murdered her family in one of his many epic-writing rampages. Using the knowledge that she has the shinigami eyes, Light sets up a meeting between her and L. Considering Light is already enrolled in To-Oh at this point, L can't enroll with him to keep tabs, so L just shows up in the middle of one of the lectures Light's attending wearing a stupid mask for some reason. Then, for some stupider reason, L lets Misa take off his mask when they meet. I know he's supposedly a huge fan of hers, but I don't know if that was a lie or the truth, considering L's character.
Immediately afterwards, L has Misa abducted under suspicion of being the second Kira and held in custody.

For some stupid reason, Misa doesn't have a blindfold on during most of her confinement, despite the fact that they don't know how Kira kills except that he needs a name and a face, but since they suspect the second Kira of only needing a face to kill, they should logically have a blindfold on her at all times, so she can't see anything.
Because Misa isn't exactly as mentally sturdy as Light is, Rem is afraid Misa will crack, so she tasks Light with freeing her. Thus Light puts into place one of his most famous gambits, getting himself locked up and creating a new Kira to cover his tracks. Except in this case, the third Kira is Kiyomi Takada, and not Higuchi. Yes, you heard me right.
Something I want to go back to before moving ahead is that Rem explains to Light directly how Misa got her Death Note as opposed to telling it to Misa and Misa telling Light how to kill a Shinigami in an attempt to give him enough information to make her valuable to him.

Light instructs Rem to drop off Misa's Death Note with someone who will use it, and buries his in the forest. As Takada is burning her rival's ID badge (Seriously, who lights one candle instead of just using a metal or ceramic container if they wanna burn something?) Rem drops off Misa's Death Note. This seems a little strange, since Light's whole gambit towards the end of this arc was to be able to keep his Death Note close to him after the plot came to fruition so he could have Rem bonded to him for his final plot against L. Plus, his Death Note was the one with all the rules written in it, so it was easy to add in the two fake rules he needed to clear himself and Misa of suspicion, as well as keep the Kira task-force from destroying the Death Note.
After a while, Light submits himself to being locked up under the guise of thinking he might have some sort of black-suited Spider-Man relationship with Kira, with Kira killing people while Light was asleep. Thus, Light is locked up with Misa for less time than they were in the comics, under a month for both of them. One week into Light's confinement, Takada kills Demegawa's mistress and begins killing criminals. Eventually, Light gives up his memories of being Kira so he can more convincingly work with L to capture whoever the third Kira is.

Eventually, Light are Misa get released (Minus the fight between L and Light, minus them being handcuffed together, and minus Soichiro putting on that show of trying to kill them to prove neither of them are Kira, which actually made L trusting Light make more sense) and Light rejoins the task-force. (With a scene of them getting IV's for mostly unknown reasons. At least this time around it makes more sense than it did in the first movie)
Thankfully, since Higuchi and Yotsuba have been written out of the movie, they no longer need a world-class burglar or con-artist, so Aiber and Wedy just never show up for one scene and then are never mentioned again, unlike in Visions of a God. If you've absolutely got to cut things to make the movie work, that's how you do it. You don't just slap the first half of the plot together into a two and a half hour film.
The Kira task-force starts cross-referencing victims from the current wave of heart-attacks, and find that while they're similar to the original Kira's victims, they focus more so on crimes against women, especially those reported on Sakura TV. Looking for women who have recently had their careers advance due to the death of a co-worker, they narrow their suspects down to Kiyomi Takada.
The Kira task-force plants a bunch of surveillance equipment in Takada's house in an attempt to figure out how she kills, and they're naturally perplexed when they see her writing names down in a black notebook. So they plant some equipment that's easier to find, and set a trap for her, with Matsuda approaching her as Taro Mastui, and demanding payment to keep quiet about her being Kira.

They set the trap for Takada, with Matsuda being interviewed at Sakura TV. They have Demegawa phone Takada to tell her about it, and she tries to write down "Taro Matsui" in her Death Note, but when it doesn't stick, she makes a deal with Rem for the Shinigami eyes and makes her way to the studio, speeding and getting pulled-over by a cop on the way there. She writes his name down in the Death Note and speeds off, leaving him to die of a heart-attack in the middle of the road. They almost did the thing of him crashing into the back of the semi-truck, but they just have him fall off his motorcycle.
She gets to the studio, and finds they've evacuated the entire studio and replaced Matsuda and the host with dummies.

The Kira task-force ambush her, handcuff her, and blindfold her. Soichiro picks up the Death Note she dropped and sees Rem hovering above. Naturally, this freaks him out. Some other members of the task-force pick it up and freak out about the Shinigami. L grabs it, and then Light takes it, his memories flooding back to him.
L and the rest of the task-force begin questioning Kiyomi Takada, and Rem about the Death Note, and how it works.

I'd like you to take a hard look at this screenshot. This is before the camera pans over to the remaining members of the Kira task-force touching the Death Note Light is holding so they can see the Shinigami Rem. Notice how the light is affected by her body being in front of it. Notice how it would obviously be casting a shadow if you were to pan around to look at the members of the task-force. Remember that, because that's important. There's a general issue with the Shinigami in these films, that they seem to affect light sometimes and not others.

Okay, now that I've driven my point home, look at this screenshot. There's no shadow being cast on Sanami, Light and the other two members of the Kira task-force from Rem. The only shadow  being cast on them in this scene is coming from Light. Logically speaking, the light in this scene should be casting a silhouette of Rem on them. The closest thing they got to that might be Rem's shadow is that thing at the very back of the shot which might be her arms and legs. The problem with that is that the shadows cut off prematurely, almost digitally towards the bottom of the wall. Based on the fact that Rem appears to be blocking light in the first screenshot, she should be casting a shadow in the second one. But she's not. See, this is why you don't use CGI for an entire character if you don't have the ability to matte in every single thing you'd need to make it look good. While they messed up big-time on the shadows in this scene, the CGI on Rem is at its best in this scene. It actually looks otherworldly, and not like it was just ripped from a PS2 FMV. They apparently had motion-capture for all three of the Shinigami in this film (Except for one bit with Gelus at the beginning of the film that's clearly a badly animated puppet.) and I'm glad they did, because manually animating this CGI would have likely turned out terribly. The shading and collision are bad enough on these models, all they've got going for them is the somewhat smooth animation. I think I actually saw part of Ryuk's body clip through itself in the first film.

Back to the plot. When the task-force finds out that the notebook is the tool of murder, the team is naturally suspicious. Rem tells them to test the Death Note out on Takada, but Light has already popped-open his watch (That's a kick-ass watch by the way) and surreptitiously written her name down on the piece of the Death Note he'd hidden there months ago. She dies, and the task-force regroups to headquarters to analyze the Death Note. There, they find the rules Light has added. For some reason they only included the first of the two rules, the thirteen-day rule, with the destruction rule being left out for some reason, just like it was in the animated movies. Even though that rule was critical to them not outright destroying the Death Note after the NPA got their hands on it. Yeah, Light might have been counting on L's scientific curiosity to keep them from outright burning it, but Light Yagami doesn't take those kinds of chances. He doesn't take any chances. If he hadn't been forced to rely on Misa Amane, Kyosuke Higuchi, Kiyomi Takeda, and Teru Mikami, he never would have been caught. That's the problem with these compressed adaptations, they don't include all of the nuance of Light's actions, and sometimes outright eliminate some of the things that made his actions so genius.
Light has Misa go to where he buried his Death Note in the woods so she can get her memories back and continue the Kira work while he works with the task-force full-time. In reality, this is a gambit to put Misa in L's crosshairs so he can get Rem to kill L, lengthening Misa's lifespan with her own and getting out of his hair.

L decides it's time to test out the Death Note on a pair of death-row criminals set to be executed to see if the thirteen-day rule is true. Have one write down the others name, and then in thirteen days, if the writer is still alive, he gets a stay of execution. In direct opposition to the other versions of the story (Not counting the musical or the live-actions series since I haven't seen them), they actually put this plan into motion, with Soichiro and the rest of the task-force take the Death Note to the airport in an armored convoy. L also wants to do a different test on the same day, to see if Misa Amane is actually the second Kira. He's got a heart-monitor hooked up which will send a signal to the task-force if he dies. The plan is to catch Misa in the act and prevent her from killing him. He appears to trust Light enough to have him help with this test as well. Light, under orders from L invites Misa to headquarters.
As Watari is bringing Misa in to see Light, Rem kills him and L. Light taunts L as he dies, since the rest of the task-force is gone. L survives long enough to grab Light's ankle and say a few things, and then nothing.
Light goes to meet Misa at the elevator, and borrow her Death Note to kill the rest of the task-force, including his father, much to Misa's horror. He writes specifically that Soichiro will turn the Death Note over before dying, and goes to meet him in the lobby.

Light, assured of his victory, tells his father to hand over the notebook, as his time is coming to an end.
I almost thought this was going to end with Light winning. Think about it, what's a great twist you could add to an adaptation like this? Light lost in the comics, so naturally him winning would be utterly unexpected.
His father opens the case and...
It's empty. Nothing but foam padding inside. Soichiro, distraught, tells Light about what he's heard, about how he never really left, and the rest of the task-force surrounds them. Light figures he's still got it all in the bag, however, since he wrote their names in the Death Note.
Light is taken aback, however, when he sees L, alive on the balcony above.
See, the only twist better than Light winning would be L himself defeating Light, and that's what happened. L suspected that he was going to be killed soon, so he wrote his name in the Death Note, utilizing the twenty-three-day rule (that you can schedule a death up to twenty-three days in advance) to keep himself alive long enough to catch Light in the act. Soichiro was reluctant to cooperate, but when shown that L had already written his own name in the Death Note, he complied. Thus the plan was set in motion to fake his death and catch Light in a confession. Secretly, after her release, the task-force monitored Misa Amane, finding out that she was in fact the second Kira, so they switched her Death Note with a copy they made, and had the media report deaths when there were none.
Cornered, Light begins talking about how he wanted to bring justice to the world while popping open his watch to write down the names of the task-force on the scrap of paper inside. Matsuda blasts the watch off his wrist with a shot from his gun. As Light attempts to reach for it, Matsuda shoots him once again in the leg. We all know how the rest of this goes down. Light begs Ryuk to use his Death Note to kill the task-force, but Ryuk instead writes just one name down. Light Yagami.
Light tries to tackle Ryuk, but since Ryuk can make himself incorporeal, Light doesn't have any luck. Bleeding out, heart failing, Light dies in his fathers arms, pleading with him to understand that he acted as Kira to defend the concept of justice.
Twenty days later, L has gotten his affairs in order, destroyed the Death Notes, and meets with Soichiro one last time, saying that although he never knew his parents, he still knew Soichiro was a good father. After that, the worlds greatest detective dies peacefully, eating a bar of chocolate and playing chess.
The Death Note has been omitted from all official records, and the identity of Kira withheld, with the official story being that Kira killed Light, and was then killed himself. I believe that rings true to a certain extent. You see, the moment Light gave up his memories of being Kira, he basically became a completely different person. Then, the moment Light picked up the Death Note again, Kira took over, and whatever was left of Light Yagami was erased. It's not so much "true from a certain point of view" as it might be literally true, considering the nature of the memory-gambit.

A year later, what's left of the Yagami family is mourning Light's death on his birthday. Sayu, who hated Kira for killing innocent police-officers has seen her hatred of Kira intensify with the death of her beloved brother.
Misa has once again lost her memories with the loss of her Death Note. She laments the loss of Light, with an obvious gap as to how he died in her memories.
I'll admit, this movie actually made me cry. All of the deaths in the comics and the animated series, L's death, Soichiro's death, Sayu's abduction and subsequent catatonic state, they were all incredibly sad, but somehow this was even worse. Soichiro having to watch his son die in his arms, having to live with the fact that his son was the worlds most prolific serial-killer, L deliberately sacrificing his life to catch Kira, Sayu and Sachiko mourning Light while loathing Kira, that just broke my heart. In the end, crime might have been reduced, but that's not worth the lives of two of the worlds greatest detectives. The way this movie ends is very reminiscent of how the comics ended, with the futility of the entire struggle laid bare for all to see. In the end, nothing was gained, and much was lost.
All in all, while The Last Name had its issues, it had enough of the Death Note spirit to it to make it worthwhile, and enough moments of deep emotion and bad-ass to live up to what came before.
The few issues I have are mostly minor ones, and the one major issue I have was already brought up in the previous review, namely a criminally sparse soundtrack despite having a talented composer on-board. They re-used Dani California, the ED from the last movie as the OP of this one, with Snow, Hey Oh (Another Chili Peppers song) used as part of the end-credits music.

One thing that really irked me, however, that I forgot to bring up in my last review is this. They have this really weird 3D interface for their mugshots and criminal records. As a computer person, I can tell you that this would be a waste of GPU and processing power when an image-gallery or a PDF would have sufficed. I'm almost certain that nothing like this exists, and I'm sick and tired of seeing these stupidly impractical science-fiction interfaces used instead of, you know, standard windows applications. Even mockups would be more logical than this!
In the end, I think this was a really good movie despite the flaws, and for that reason I give it an 8.9* rating. In two movies, Kaneko Shusuke covered the same ground Visions of a God did in one, but he did it in such a way that it basically worked. Plus, he ended it on a twist instead of just remaking the ending from the comics verbatim. Even though these two movies don't cover the entire series by any means, they still capture more of the Death Note spirit than the animated movies did.
And finally, just for laughs, I leave you with this screenshot I couldn't find a place for in the review.

There's only one more live-action Death Note film left, and I'll be getting to that one next week!
(By the way, if anyone can tell me where to find the Death Note musical with English subtitles, that'd be great)

Cover image from Amazon.com, screenshots taken by me.

Death Note Relight: Visions of a God

It's been a while since my review of the Death Note animated series, and I know I've been trying to cover as many games, series and movies from 2015 as possible before the end of January, but I seem to have failed in that regard. Since I still plan to review the live-action Death Note series, I figured I should go back and tackle the two animated television movies first. Maybe I'll be done with 2015 by June of this year, who knows?
Anyways, for the uninitiated Death Note Relight is a two-part series of animated movies put out on Nippon Television in Japan, in 2007 and 2008 respectively. They present an abridged look at the plot of the animated series, utilizing stock footage and dialogue in conjunction with new dialogue and original footage to bridge the gaps. The immediate reaction one would likely have to this is "Whaa? Death Note was perfect as it is, you can't cut anything out and have it work as well as it did!" possibly followed by "Well, they might surprise me, let's give it a shot!" Unfortunately, for those of us who've seen the films, we know that our first instincts were correct. Let's dig into the first of the two movies, Visions of a God. Spoiler warning for the special and for Death Note as a whole, so go watch the show if you haven't. It's on Netflix. Just be sure to choose the English audio track, the voice-direction in the Japanese version is terrible.

This particular movie is set after the events of the animated series, and starts out with a few minutes of original animation. An unnamed Shinigami finds Ryuk, and asks him to tell him about his trip to the human world. Ryuk appears to have aged quite a bit since the events of the animated series, and agrees to tell this Shinigami about his adventures.
Right off the bat, we've got an interesting setup for the story to come. Ryuk is telling a story to a fellow Shinigami about his adventures.
Unfortunately, this is when things start to fall apart, since the following scene is a montage of Light writing things down in the Death Note, which isn't supposed to be the first thing you see in Death Note. The first thing you need to see in Death Note is either Ryuk being bored in the Shinigami realm or Light deciding that the world is rotten and needs to change. A montage of violent crime would have worked much better without giving away any massive plot details the way this montage did.
The movie gets better from there, but the montage literally didn't need to be there. The screentime it took up could have been dedicated to a few more seconds of plot. When you're adapting around eighteen and a half twenty minute episodes into a two hour, forty minute film, you can't afford to spend any screentime on something that you're going to reiterate later on in the movie. This is similar to an issue we'll see later on in the second movie, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
So, what's been changed?
First off, as one would naturally presume from the shortened run-time, most of the story has been fast-tracked to the highlights of the first half of the series, cutting down on time for character development, but hitting all the right beats for the most part. At least, until we get to around the midpoint of the film. I'm going to try and cover everything in order as much as possible, without jumping around too much.
The first victim of the cut runtime was the "How to use it" notations between scene transitions. This basically means that if you don't already know what the Death Note can do, the movie isn't going to bother explaining. Most of Light's experimentation with the Death Note has either been cut down, or removed entirely, which all but destroys the few rules-related plot-points they left in the film. All of Light's precautions about protecting the Death Note have been removed as well, at least until L starts his surveillance. They skip Light's first two kills entirely, even though those were part of Light's character development. The second one is flashed back to as part of a montage later on in both this film and the next, but it's not really given any kind of context that would give it any kind of weight. We don't see any of Light's transformation, he just goes from regular schoolboy with a warped sense of justice to mass murderer without any real inquiry into his motivations.
After Kira becomes known to the world, they skip through a lot of the ICPO conference straight to L's first confrontation with Light, which is itself sped through at a breakneck pace. Speaking of which, L reveals himself to the NPA with hardly any build-up. They just cut to the remaining NPA members showing up at the hotel with L.
The FBI sub-plot has been almost entirely excised, except for one scene where Ryuk notices Ray Penber and points him out to Light. The bus gambit was removed, which means Light would have no idea what his name would be to look up him or his commander back in the States. This is one of the only plot-holes I could find in the movie, the rest of the issues were entirely based in the breakneck pacing and the lack of decent character development. You know, all the problems the animated series didn't have.
After that, they run straight into Naomi Misora, kill her off, and then speed straight into L's surveillance of Light. You'll be happy to know that the potato-chip scene has been left mostly intact. They then cut almost immediately to the Sakura TV sequence, having cut out the scenes where Light meets L entirely, and thus erasing Soichiro's heart-attack from existence. I'd also like to point out that the reveal of him being Light's father has also been cut. It doesn't exactly induce any plot-holes, but it certainly makes things a little more puzzling until they drop some hints later on in the movie.
The removal of Soichiro's heart-attack makes his intervention in the Sakura TV incident a lot less bad-ass. Plus, since they had to compress the story, the whole situation is a lot less bad-ass in general.
After that, Light meets L for the first time. This whole sequence is original animation, and it's almost five solid minutes of exposition. They spend five minutes connecting the first half of the movie to the last half of the movie, possibly because they couldn't figure out how to adapt the college sub-plot without it taking up the entire last half of the film. It did, after all, take up at least four episodes, possibly more if you expand your scope to everything the arc affected, which is basically everything that follows it, up to and including the entire last half of the series. This removes some more of Light's brilliant gambits from the movie, since it removes his direct influence from the Second Kira case.
Rem then explains to Misa about how she got the second Death Note that Misa now owns, as well as explaining how she knows how to kill a Shinigami. This scene in the animated series was very touching and very very sad. It actually brought me to tears when I saw it, and I had already read the manga. I knew what was going to happen, and it was still sad. Due to all of the things they cut out of the scene, however, the impact of the scene was reduced significantly. They basically just pared it down to the guy trying to kill Misa and the Shinigami saving her. They also failed to explain the fact that when a Shinigami dies saving a human, that Shinigami gives the human their remaining life-span to extend that of the human. You know, one of the most critical plot-points in the entire show? Not like removing that raises any questions based on how she lived on beyond what was supposed to be her natural life-span. Based on the rules of the Death Note, she should have collapsed from a heart-attack unless she was given some kind of extension to that life-span.
Misa then shows up at Light's house (A flashback shows that Light and Misa crossed paths by complete accident at one time. As opposed to her planning to find out who Kira was through a complex manipulation of the rules of the Death Note and the police.
L then shows up at Light's school for no reason to talk to him and Misa for a bit before arresting Misa under suspicion of being the second Kira. Light then sets a plan into motion, with the movie showing us even less of the gambit than either the comics or the animated series did, with him getting locked up and erasing his memory. The scenes where he told Ryuk what to do under what circumstances are gone, as are the scenes of him burying the Death Note. This was literally one of the most important moments in the series, and it was definitely one they needed to leave uncut. Honestly, at most they would have added five or ten minutes to the film. Then again, they cut out a bunch of other critical plot-points, so who knows what the editor on this project was thinking.
Light gets locked up along with Misa for a while (Soichiro's imprisonment has been edited out), the Kira killings stop for a while, and after a little while (The timespan is cut down by a lot) the Kira killings restart. After an unexplained period of time (the sequel, L's Successors reuses the original line from the show, but based solely on this movie it could have just been two weeks later) Light and Misa are released, but kept under surveillance. There's also no explanation as to why Light and L are handcuffed to each other.
A good question to ask right now would be why L wants Light to help him with the case now? He wasn't helping him with it before in this continuity, and basically all he did was show that he's a viable suspect for the Kira investigation. It's not like he helped L put the reigns on the second Kira in this universe. It's not like they went to school together, or solved puzzles over coffee, or even really spoke to each other much in this version of Death Note.
Light and L have their little fight-scene, Matsuda feels useless, so he breaks into the offices of the Yotsuba group (because they actually bother explaining that they've linked a lot of Kira killings to Yotsuba) gets caught, and the task-force sets up a rescue mission for him. This all takes about three minutes. Since they cut out the breakup of the official task-force, they also removed the explanation as to why L and Light had to be the ambulance attendants when they picked up Aiber in the Matsuda wig from the street.
I'd also like to mention that Aiber and Wedy are introduced without much ceremony. Their names aren't even mentioned initially.
Rem then touches Misa with a piece of the Death Note when she overhears Kyosuke Higuchi, the third Kira talking about how he wants to marry Misa and possibly kill her for life insurance money. Rem then reveals to Misa who the third Kira is.
This is where their usage of stock-footage from the animated series begins breaking down. In the animated series, Misa disguises herself to get away from her police bodyguard so she can nab Higuchi with a confession. To do so, she disguises herself in a nurses outfit she borrowed from a friend of hers. But in this movie, they just cut from Misa's interview to her being in Higuchi's car, and as such, Misa's outfit changes from scene to scene. Why they didn't just use a bit of original footage for Misa's confrontation with Higuchi is beyond me.
In the upcoming scenes we can tell that the scenes where Light and L manipulate the rest of the Yotsuba murder group into cooperating with the Kira investigation have been left on the cutting-room floor. They set up the Sakura TV thing with Matsuda, and Higuchi goes off on his little quest to kill Matsuda. Long story short, they capture him and grab the Death Note, the team sees Rem, Light gets his memories back, and kills Higuchi. The difference between the animated series and this movie, however, is that the Kira task-force was never officially disbanded by the NPA, the members didn't subsequently quit, and Aizawa never left the Task Force, so it turns what was a Big Damn Heroes moment in the animated series into basically a standard police operation.
Misa gets her memories and her notebook back, but not her Shinigami eyes. This wasn't particularly well explained in either the comics or the animated series, it's just sort of assumed that you lose all of your Death Note related powers when you give up the notebook. Honestly, it didn't really have much of a purpose and could have been totally dropped without losing much. I mean, it contributed to Rem wanting to save Misa's life, but there were enough reasons for her to do that anyways that you literally could have removed it entirely without losing anything. This was pretty much the only thing which bugged me about the original Death Note comics and the animated series. Unfortunately, this isn't that kind of movie.
Misa reveals to Light that she can't remember L's real name (You see, this is why you repeat things in your head until you can't forget it.) and Light puts Misa in a position where Rem must kill L for them in order for Misa to not be caught as Kira potentially.
The people constructing this movie completely botched L's death scene, as it doesn't have nearly the same impact as it did in the animated series. It could be that we haven't had enough time to get to know L for his death to have much meaningful impact on us, or it could be how the editors constructed the scenario. For one thing, all of the scenes of L being kind to Light before his death have been completely removed. Not to mention all of the scenes from earlier in the series that were either shortened or skipped entirely of them working together. The consequence of skipping most of the Yotsuba arc is that we missed out on seeing enough of non-Kira Light becoming friends with L. That removes a lot of the shock of L's death, since you almost didn't expect Light to have him killed in both the comics and the animated series. Here, since you don't really get more than a glimpse of the differences between Light without his Kira memories and Light with them, nor do you get to see how Kira-Light and L consider each other worthy opponents, it basically removes all meaning from this scene.
Fortunately, the ending is much better, with them actually covering L's funeral, and Light gloating over L's grave, before they cut to Ryuk, staring at Light's name in his Death Note, with the Shinigami walking off to the Human world. The sound fades out, as (the first ending) begins to play.
For the most part, I'd say that the original animation in this episode was pointless. Aside from the intro and ending, there's nothing new here worth watching. While I liked L's funeral, I think they should have held off on completing the framing narrative until the end of the second movie, especially considering how weak the framing-device for L's Successors is.
In order to patch the gaps between stock footage, new dialogue has been recorded, and the English casts performance is on par with their performances in the animated series. Unfortunately, the quality of the narrative has taken a bit of a nosedive, and sometimes characters are forced to talk in scenes when they didn't talk before. For the most part they do a good job of abridging the stock footage from the animated series into a cohesive whole, but there are enough continuity errors that you wonder why they didn't use a bit more original footage. There are also times when I question why the editors left certain scenes in. For instance, Misa's singing is left pretty much untouched from how it was in the animated series, but they cut out Ryuk explaining certain things about the Death Note to Light. Plus, Light's experimentation with the notebook has been reduced to a footnote basically, which leaves certain questions up in the air which were otherwise answered in the animated series and the comics alike.
The new animation is at least as good quality as that of the original series. I didn't see any massive issues, such as transparent hair or ridiculously off-model animation. Mad House, as always, delivers on precision animation. However, for some strange reason, Misa's cross jewelry has been changed to misshapen fleur de li's. I don't know why, but they did. It's bizarre, and it looks incredibly out of place.
Then we come to the sound-design. In my review of the animated series I praised the care taken with sound cues and music, since it added to the atmosphere of the show. Unfortunately, for the most part, that hasn't carried over into the film. Track placement is haphazard, and there's not silence or light score music to give the audience much breathing-room.
All in all, I wouldn't recommend Visions of a God to a first-time Death Note viewer, or to a fan, for that matter. It's much better to just watch the animated series, as it's actually a complete story as opposed to just a highlights reel. Hell, the animated series had a ten minute recap in the middle of the series right after L died which was more complete than this movie is. The good thing about that was that it actually served a purpose in the plot. What little original animation there is is few and far between. The exposition scene towards the middle just raises a bunch of questions, with the funeral scene at the end of the movie leaving me to wonder why they didn't just include that in the animated series instead of leaving it to languish in this Frankenstein's monster of a film.
In the end, I give this film a 3.7* rating. It's well below par, especially considering how high the bar was set by the animated series and comics alike. You wanna know what the worst part is though? Out of the two Relight films, this is the good one! Tune in around Wednesday, when I'll be reviewing Death Note Relight 2: L's Successors!

Image from Walmart.com.

Kung Fury

When I originally heard about Kung Fury, I was completely on-board with it. If I'd had the cash to back it on Kickstarter, I probably would have. I thought the premise was cool, I thought the trailer was cool, and I was freaking stoked for this movie. When the theme-song debuted earlier this year, I was even more on-board. But by the time the movie came out, I was working flat-out on reviewing books and games. I wound up forgetting about Kung Fury for a few months until one of my friends mentioned it a little whole ago.
I tracked the video down on YouTube, saw that it was only thirty minutes long, and decided I'd watch it on the weekend, since Power Rangers: Dino Charge was taking a break that week.
What was my reaction? Weeeeelll.... It's not bad. Not totally great, but I'd rather spend thirty minutes watching this than most of what's on TV these days.
Not to say that it didn't deliver on what it promised, it's a welcome homage to the '80s. It's a good comedy movie that has some damn fine jokes in it. It's not as earnest as I'd like, but that's not really what we're here for, we're here for the comedy.
Before we get into the rest of the review, you should click here and watch the movie. It's only a half-hour long, and it's free to watch. Go ahead, I'll wait. No, I'm not being paid by Laser Unicorns, they're far more popular than I am, and they don't need my help to get traffic.
You done? Good. Let's get to that summary shall we?
Kung Fury is about a cop named.... Kung Fury. Kung Fury (No, we're never told if he's got a regular name) is a detective with the Miami-Dade Police Department. He's a lone-wolf because his partner was killed by a ninja back in the day. Before the ninja could kill Kung Fury, he got struck by lightening and bitten by a cobra, fulfilling the ancient Kung-Fury prophecy.
After beating-up an arcade-machine that came to life, Kung Fury is assigned a new partner, Triceracop. Since he doesn't want to lose another partner, he turns in his badge. But then Adolf Hitler starts shooting up the police-station through the phone, and Kung Fury is back on the job, getting sent back in time by his buddy, Hackerman. Hackerman is a computer-hacker who uses an NES Power Glove and some classic computer-hardware to hack Kung Fury back in time to kill Hitler, known as The Kung Fuherer in this film. The Kung Fuherer is here to kill Kung Fury and take command of the Kung Fury powers.
Unfortunately, Kung Fury overshoots the 1940s by a few thousand years, and he winds up in the Viking-age, where he runs into laser-dinosaurs and machine-gun wielding viking women, who take Kung Fury on a giant wolf to go meet Thor, who sends Kung Fury to where he needs to be by quoting MC Hammer at him, and sends him to the right time-period.
We then cut to Nazi Germany, where the Nazi's are having a Hitler lookalike contest. Kung Fury beats them up, busts into the Nazi base, and starts going all Mortal Kombat on the Nazi's. It's all a very wholesome experience.
Unfortunately, Kung Fury gets shot by Hitler, and dies.
Fortunately, Hackerman hacks himself, Thor, the viking women, some laser-dinosaurs, and Triceracop back into the 1940s, and they kill all the Nazi's, and defeat The Kung Fuherer. Then, after Kung Fury almost arrests the angel of death for obstruction of justice, Hackerman hacks away Kung Fury's wounds, and brings him back to life. They then travel back to the 80's, and live happily ever after.
Except that The Kung Fuherer used his time-travelling golden bird robot to transport himself into the 80s in a fork of the Kung Fury timeline to corrupt the criminals of 1980s Miami into being Nazi's, ending on a cliffhanger.
Now that we've gone over the plot, it's time to start on some analysis.
Personally, I thought that the whole Viking section of the movie was completely unnecessary. Aside from making a couple of decent jokes, it doesn't serve any real purpose. Maybe if the movie was longer, I could possibly excuse its presene. Even then, it's still detrimental to the overall pacing. Maybe if they cut out the vikings, the movie could have had a proper climax, rather than sputtering out and leaving us on a cliffhanger until the theatrical Kung Fury movie comes out.
All of the scenes that take place in Miami are all fine, if I'd been making the movie, I would have left all of those in. For the most part, I also like the Nazi-Germany section of the movie, right up until the anticlimax.
See, I'm the kind of guy who likes to see an awesome action-scene accompanied by a piece of kickass rock and roll. Optimus Prime breaking the Decepticon line accompanied by The Touch, Rocky pulling off an awesome victory while Eye of the Tiger plays, Kurt Sloane knocking out Tong-Po as Never Surrender starts up, Goku going Super Saiyan while Bruce Faulconer's awesome score plays in the background, Sonic standing up to fight after being beaten-down while It Doesn't Matter starts up... You know the drill.
So, if you know anything about any of the stuff I just mentioned, you'll notice most of those examples came from the 1980s. Considering that Kung Fury is inspired by the '80s, and has an '80s star performing the theme-song, you'd think that Kung Fury would embrace the rock-anthem action-scene that you tend to think of when you think of really good '80s movies. Which begs the question, why didn't it do that? It had the awesome music, it had the potential for an amazing climax to accompany that music, but it didn't put those two things together.
If I had been making this movie I would have cut out the stuff about the vikings and put all of the effort that went into that sequence into the climax of the film. Have True Survivor kick in as Kung Fury makes a mad dash towards Hitler's podium. Have Kung Fury and Hitler have a massive climactic showdown with giant robots, some awesome hand-to-hand combat, and the best final showdown that the budget could possibly allow.
I'm not saying cut out the jokes, I'm just saying to relocate the effort that was put into the Viking sequence (And yes, I thought their version of Thor was freaking awesome.) into the climax of the film.
But that's just as a short-film. If you added another thirty minutes to the movie, tighten up the comedy and direction in the viking sequence, and then it'd be fine. But you'd still need to fix the ending. You could even leave the cliffhanger in if you wanted, but I'd still personally prefer a stronger ending.
Now, let's talk visuals. Kung Fury is presented as if it's being played on an old VHS tape, and they manage to make it look pretty convincing. The effects are gloriously archaic, while also looking really good as well. I love the use of the dog as a giant wolf, and I generally love the look and feel of the movie. However, at some points in the movie I wonder if the effects were intended to look as they do. For instance, in Germany, Kung Fury picks up a tank to smash Nazi's with, and the effects of him lifting the tank look slightly janky, and not in an '80s way, in more of a Sci-Fi original movie way. Although that doesn't take away from the humor of that scene in my opinion.
All in all, Kung Fury is a good movie, and I look forward to the upcoming full-length movie that they're working on. Unfortunately, I've got a bad feeling about the theatrical movie, since Kung Fury seems like a concept that should stick to shorts on the internet as opposed to a feature-length film. It's an idea that seems fairly easy to corrupt, and the final product could wind up being about as funny as a Seltzerberg movie.
In the end though, Kung Fury was an awesome little short, and it's definitely worth watching if you've got a half an hour of free-time. It's definitely a step in the right direction if they keep up the momentum they've gained. I give it an 8.7* rating. I'll see you next week with The Consuming Shadow, hopefully!

Image from Kungfury.com