badoli

The plot has been done so many times before: Two very different characters have to hook up due to some circumstances. So it doesn't earn points for creativity there, but hey, it's a solid concept that can produce great movies.

The setting, the atmosphere, the special effects and the acting are all pretty good. It just doesn't add up for me. There is no reason this needed to be set in future on a foreign planet. The plot points are lifted straight out of a western with indians and bandit camps, even the dialogs are in typical western slang. Not necessarily Pedro Pascal's strongest suit, yet he still does a decent job. This movie tries so hard to be a western in space, why not just produce a western?

The scifi setting even worsens the experience, as everyone is wearing helmets, which makes the dialogs impossible to understand at times.

Add to that some story decisions which are just stupid (like losing a close person in once scene and being all chipper in the next, grown men being easily disarmed by little girls, and so on) and it simply just presents a very average viewing experience. Which is sad, because it's obviously done with passion and had potential.

This is a run-of-the-mill action flick, which would have been fine as an 80ies b-movie, but with such a budget i would have expected a better story with some more respect for the military. Which says something, as i'm not even from the United States and have hardly any military experience.

The way the characters are presented awkwardly artificial. There is no sophistication whatsoever in the writing, it's all just bland and blunt. I can't fault the actors, they are doing the best they can with that script.

What's even worse is, the bad guys don't even have any real character at all, almost all their interactions with the good guys is shoot at them (hardly more effective than the average Storm Trooper) or being shot at. Or simply do something evil. Every Rambo-movie had more complex bad guys than this, which is an embarrassment. Only in the end one baddie is allowed to speak, but it's just more evil gibberish.

So we're purely left with the drama of the good guys and their suffering at the hand of the baddies and their almost comical cruelty. That is contrasted with the mundane reality of the drone pilots, one of which is portrait by Russel Crow. At times this makes the movie a little entertaining, too little to save the movie.

The rest is rather uninformed military porn. Attack planes shooting rockets in twins, drone rockets being only deadly to bad guys, US soldiers shoot more precise with a handgun than 10 bad guys with automatic rifles and heavy machine guns.

So yea, watch this with your brains off and you'll have a good time.

If you're expecting a John Wick kind of movie, you will be horribly disappointed. This is a slow cooking portrayal of a hitman and just like that very hitman, the film is extremely considerate and meticulous in the way it presents a more authentic image of how a successful world class hitman might operate: Almost like a bureaucrat. There's even humor to be found, but it's so subtle, most people will not even recognize it's there.

Michael Fassbender does a great job as a philosophising killer for hire, who is decidedly precise in his thoughts aswell his actions. David Fincher understands very well on how to shoot this without becoming overly narcissistic. His focus on details is almost obsessive, because that's what the character is. And while the movie is slow, the tension is always palpable.

As such it's not a movie for everybody. If movies like "Once upon a time in the west" is too challenging for your attention span, this will just bore you to death. But if you can appreciate silence and a keen eye for subtlety and detail, then you're in for a treat. This is a great thriller.