Monthly Archives: November 2013

Thor: The Dark World (2013) Review: MCU Misstep Let's face it, sequels by and large are a gamble. More often than not they struggle to find the balance between continuing the development of the characters from the original while constructing a story worthy of a minimum 90 minutes. Characters usually are left stagnant re-hashing the same old dance that made audiences love them the last go round (Ian Malcolm in 'The Lost World') or the story itself seems to be a beat for beat remake of the original except this time instead of a baby in the closet it's a monkey on the shower curtain.This is not to say that the sequel is a gamble to the studio, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. A sequel to an established property is almost always guaranteed to make more money than it's predecessor. The risk is considerably less when producing a sequel because by virtue of being a profitable established property it can be assumed that the audience is not only familiar with the premise and characters of a universe but also yearns to experience more. Admittedly, the sequel doesn't have to work as hard as the original, which is tasked with the burden of familiarizing the audience. Lifting this burden, however, can lead to some sloppy storytelling and leaves you wishing you could get your money backThor: The Dark World, however, miraculously avoids the sophomore slump and instead uses its…

Elysium (2013) Review One of the most important rules of story telling is "show, don't tell". Essentially, what it means is that, instead of explaining the importance of something to the viewer, the story teller needs to simply show it as it is and trust that the viewer is invested enough in the story to pick up on the pertinence of that story element. The technique can either be used to further the story or bring across a particular metaphor within the story. With film being a visual medium it is perhaps the easiest and most important medium to apply this technique, and of all the genres of film, Science Fiction is perhaps the hardest and most difficult. Science Fiction is a genre which applies this technique through allegory. Taking real world ideologies and masking them in a quasi realistic universe. It's the perfect genre to be done in as the whole basis for science fiction is taking familiar science fact and proposing it's exaggeration into science fiction. It's because of that initial familiar basis that we are able to connect to our favourite science fiction stories, and a continuation of that connection rests in the allegory proposed by the films elements.Star Trek is an allegory for the U.N, Godzilla is an allegory for the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and more recently, District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp, is an allegory for the Apartheid system. The key in what made those films…