Jack Ryan Season 2 Has Dropped

I did a Cataline Recommends when season one came out. Minor problem. It was brief and part of a Blogs and Ends post. I looked it over and decided that with Blizzcon being held this weekend the content was all reasonably relevant.

I’ll do a proper and likely scathing review of Jack Ryan season 2 when I finish the season. Quick preview of two things that bugged the crap out of my about it. One, in the opening credits there is shot of Jack Ryan’s Marine Corps dog tags. On the tags it says, “NO PREF”. That means atheist. Good Catholic Altar Boy Jack Ryan is now a de-hristianized atheist.

Two, this season’s show takes place in Venezuela.

And Venezuela has been ruined by…wait for it…NATIONALISM. I shit you not.

Venezuela, the poster child for the 21st century failure of socialism was ruined in the Ryanverse by Nationalism.

REPOST

Just watched Warcraft for the first time and I thought it was a pretty good action/fantasy movie.  It delivered everything it was supposed to.  Pacing was good. Action was pretty tight.  The game centric easter-eggs didn’t bury the story.

I was a little curious as to why it failed at the boxoffice so I checked Rottentomatoes

• All Critics
• Top Critics

TOMATOMETER 

28%

Average Rating: 4.3/10

Reviews Counted: 214

Fresh: 59

Rotten: 155

Critics Consensus: Warcrafthas visual thrills to spare, but they — and director Duncan Jones’ distinctive gifts — are wasted on a sluggish and derivative adaptation of a bestselling game with little evident cinematic value.

AUDIENCE SCORE 

77%

liked it

Average Rating: 4.1/5

User Ratings: 62,964

Of course.

I was wondering briefly if it had suffered the fate of Gods of Egypt and undergone an SJW spasm attack on Twitter and then the critics were too frightened to give it the middling 75% possitive it deserved.  I mean shit, it way the fuck better than The Last Jedi.

I held my nose and checked LolKotaku as that is pretty reliable indicator of these things.

From the very beginning, the film throws the viewer into the action without properly explaining who any of these characters are or why we should care.

This is especially apparent on the Alliance side. Lines like: “Your majesty, we must summon the Guardian at haste!” serve as character introductions. This is just poor storytelling.

The first act is literally “humans react to orc attack”. We don’t get to know these guys before the action starts, which is very problematic: everything from their personalities to their actual role in the kingdom feels rushed and improvised.

This is something Lord Of The Rings did well – we spent a good twenty minutes hanging in Hobbiton with Frodo and the gang before the shit hits the fan. In Warcraft, there are no quiet moments before the storm.

Okay, so let’s treat it as a straight war film with no room for character development. Even then, it fails pretty badly. We’re never shown the orcs attacking villages in detail, so the stakes feel incredibly low.

Again, this is something Lord Of The Rings did well: by briefly focusing on a few fleeing peasants and their weepy, armour-clad sprogs, you really felt engaged in the fates of the humans. Warcraft has none of that. It’s just a bunch of lords in castles arguing about the need to respond to the invasion. Ho-hum.

As you can tell the critic is a stuffed shirt and a Gamma Jackwagon. But some of this is fair.  And I wasn’t seeing any of the code words that would indicate they had run afoul of the Ministry of Truth.  So in this case I’m assigning it to the category of Critics only liking what their cast likes.  By cast I mean lower-middle class Brooklyn liberals.

Always beware the lower-middle class, they are the most insecure and status conscience people on Earth.

I know it did well over seas and in theory a film that cost a 150 million to make and grossed north of four hundred million world wide would be viewed as having done okay and probably merited a sequel but most of that FBO was in China. 

Money that gets made in China…Stays in China.  I suspect it lost something on the order of 30 million or so, when all was said and done. 

Pity.  I rather liked it.

Recommended with Confidence.

NEXT

Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan

We’ll start with the obvious, this is not Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan.  This is somebody else’s Jack Ryan.  They didn’t mess around with Jack’s background too much.  Former Marine Corps officer, had his back torn up in a helicopter crash.   Had a doctorate and made a small fortune on Wall street before joining the CIA. They got all that stuff right.  What they got completely wrong is the character, this guy as presented is simply not the guy from the Tom Clancy novels.

And Greer they got completely wrong.  Instead of an Admiral he’s now just senior field officcer and a Muslim convert.

Cathy they messed around with a little too, she is now an epidemiologist instead of an ophthalmic surgeon.  But that is actually okay, since it gives her something to do when the bad guys are messing around with Ebola.

Favorite character was Matice.  A tough as nails field officer.  John Hoogenakker gets a big thumbs up for his performance here.  Within a minute of meeting Matice you know perfectly well you could see him eating a sandwich and joking while sitting right next to the body of a guy he’d just killed.  I’ve known guys like Matice.

The episodes tend to run eighty percent boredom and twenty percent action.  They did sweat the details, I can’t fault them for that.  It just doesn’t feel like something Tom Clancy wrote.

Recommended with Reservations.

LAST

I just saw film from my very distant childhood. A Rankin Bass stopmotion Halloween movie called Mad Monster Party? No, idea why they threw in the question mark. There was scene early in the film that nearly made me weep.

The clumsy but presumably lovable protagonist is getting chewed out by his boss. “What are doing in the pharmacy?! This is a drug store!! There are customers waiting at the lunch counter! And people browsing the paperbacks.

I had an instant flashback to my very early grade school life, when going to the drugstore was a major treat. My allowance/paper boy money would allow me to buy both Spiderman comics (that would allow me to buy a car, if I had preserved them properly). A fried egg sandwich and what was probably the last Ice Cream Phosphate on Earth.

sniff sniff

Okay, I’m done here.