SS: 6/10 Unlike other horror films, Crawl‘s way to express the horror element is more like a lucky draw.

After a long period of silence, the horror film finally returned to the cinema. However, audiences are getting pickier than before after recent horror films’ training, the audience began to get tired of the traditional jump scared. Crawl provides a form of horror that is not new but is rare in recent years.

Let the characters aside, ’cause people always act stupid in horror film. The way that Crawl control the atmosphere is other horror films don’t have. Unlike ghost haunting, you may don’t know what is next shock for you, Crawl told you from the very beginning of the film, gators, they hid in the water, in the dark, in the corner of your eyesight. And you always know what they capable and what way they are going to jump out. Because the audience knows, it makes the film even more horrifying than others. Just like Jaws, you know what they can do, so you know the shock is anytime now, which makes the atmosphere tenser and really bring the audience into the scene.

However, this film does have a weird character building. The daughter and his father’s background story did not help the film show the beauty of humanity, compared to the cold-blooded crocodiles. There is no effective emotional interaction between the father and daughter. The film is too focused on giving the daughter a reason to save her and explain why she can swim so fast.

Overall, Crawl is a horror film with a relatively novel theme in recent years. It is especially brilliant in a pile of ghost films. It is worth two hours of the weekend to experience the nightmare from the deepwater crocodiles.

The Lion King film with it’s “luxurious cast” and advanced CGI technology will definitely become the new hit in the box office. However, what behind the remake films need us to pay more attention.

With technology developing, there are many new technologies helping filmmakers to better tell their stories. With the motion capture, people making apes talking on the screen. With robot double, human actors don’t need to risk their life to do a dangerous scene. With 3D, 4DX, IMAX…, audience sinking into the scenario, having a great adventure with characters from the core of the earth to the deep space.

As the giant film production company, Disney with its top-class studios are the leader in so many ways in the industry. Such as Pixar’ 3D animation technology and the great CGI tech from StarWars. Not only has massive technology, but Disney also has various IPs (intellectual property), aka high-value stories. Seeing Disney combining IPs with high-tech would not be surprised to me. But apart from earning massive profits from remaking classic story, can Disney benefit more from it? I would say no.

After watching The Lion King, whenever I recall the scenario from the film, the picture in my head is from the original The Lion King movie, yes, that cartoon. At first, I didn’t pay attention to this, but after a few times later, I tried to ask my self why the cartoon one is the first picture appear in my head even though the CGI one I just watched days ago, which I should freshly remember and should be the first picture in my head whenever I recall the scenario. And then, I tried The Beauty and The Beast, Cinderella and include the latest one, Mulan, I watched the trailer several times. The remake films are hard to be the first picture in my head, but the classic one did.

The problem for now should be clear. Remake films may hard to beat the classic one, making the remake film nothing but a fast-food film. With the spirit of remake everything, for an industry which needs to be creative every day is very dangerous. Technology development fast than ever, 10 years later, VR, AR, or even MR movies will come to our daily life. Till then, remake everything and earn some fast money then wait for the next ten years? I highly doubt this “remake” stuff will bring the industry to higher development. Instead of not helping the industry, I would say in some way is damage the industry.

If I only accusing Disney of having no progress, it would not be fair. Like Disney, many production companies in the industry also remaking, rebooting or restoring their films. And if they really did a good job, they won’t on my accusing list.

The good news is that there still are some filmmakers who devote themselves to the industry and try to produce high-value films. But those giant production companies doing nothing but refresh their former works, the damage to the industry is unpredictable.

SS: 5.5/10 If watching life-like animals singing in English is not the count as creepy, what else would?

The fans give a lot of expectations when Disney first announced the plan of The Lion King’s remake, and with time goes by, these expectations growth more. But to me, the expectation cut to 70% when the second trailer came ou, in which the clips contain animals’ talking. The story is still the old story, even some scene exactly looks like in the cartoon version. As the directing skills and the story itself, I don’t think there is any serious problem. However, as the decision to make a talking animal, could be the topic what I am gonna talk about.

Watching Jerry beat Tom into different shapes, Bugs Bunny use TNT to blow the hunter into the sky, the cartoon has its very own advantage, which is no matter how exaggerated, it will never excessive. You might say that Peter the Rabbit or Paddington Bear movies also can talk, why they are not creepy? Because they are set in human society and in those films you know they are fake, especially when you see a talking bear and rabbits have unbelievable high IQ.

But The Lion King is exactly the opposite. The production team is from The Jungle Book, they have the most advanced technology to build a very realistic life-like nature world. They are doing their best to create the natural world by CGI, every detail is specially designed. So when you see the film, when they are not talking, you might think this is an Africa documentary. All these are worthy of praise, and the production team has put a lot of effort behind this. But when they start talking, ugh, a very strong sense of stripping, stripped the audience from the plot of the movie.

Apart from this, the remake version The Lion King reproduces a generation of classics, in which the new cover of classic songs is a recollection of a generation. This film is totally worth your precious time of two hours to watch and sing along.

SS: 1/10 Guess we have the “winner” of Golden Raspberry Awards this year.

Using music to lead the story is not new these days, somehow using music leads the story can have a very good result. However, this film will be the example of “how music can ruin a film”. The whole story over-used Bruce Springsteen and his song. Two long music videos in the middle of the movie, expressing nothing but a boring atmosphere. Hearing Bruce’s name or songs every five seconds, literally drove me crazy.

If you wanna make a song and dance film, then go on that path. If you just want to use music lead the story, then just use it at an important point. The whole film stuck in the between of those two different kinds of film style.

The lead character, the boy, his whole behaviour is unbelievable. What an idiot.

Really not recommend this movie.

SS: 6/10 When the whole KGB is speaking English, that’s how the Soviet Union failed.

This summer, Luc with his new movie ANNA back to the cinema. After the failure of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which has massive investment and a not optimistic return, this movie will decide Luc’s next few years fate of creating.

According to various reviewers’ review, apparently that Anna won’t be their match. The worst thing is that only 3 shows a day in the cinema where I lived nearby. And that cinema has 15 screens.

Low score and low showing rate are enough to kill a movie. But how is this movie? Really that bad? Actually the whole story is quite fascinating. If you familiar any other Luc’s works, you will know his films usually be underestimated. His special French style narrative skills does not very feed the American reviewers’ taste, but that can’t he is bad at directing or writing.

Anna, this movie with a great story and marvellous camera, every second is beautiful, superb. The nasty thing is the time-shifting structure. Luc used time-shifting to set twists and surprise the audience, makes the audience could not guess what is the next in the film. However, when the whole movie is based on the time-shifting to narrate the story, making unpredictable into predictable. On the one hand, the audience waiting for the next twist, on the other hand, the audience tired of the twist and wish it stop.

Overview of the whole movie, the first half hour of this film is could be too slow, comparing what will happen next, the first three chapters really not fit in this film. Twice in that half hour makes me want to press the forward button. But once you calm down and keep watching it, the next few chapters will WOW you.

SS: 4/10 You know what else is burning? Me.

When you heard the name James Gunn, yes, his marvellous Guardians of The Galaxy franchise earned a good reputation for him. So when you saw his name on the producer list, you might think this movie gonna be super good. However, always remember, the producer is not equal to the director. Just like Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Alita, or The Girl in the Spider’s Web, these films may be produced by those talent directors but not directed by them. Even those talent genius’ names on the cast list, you cannot fully trust the quality of the film. What should you trust? Login www.surftechy.com, see if I update the latest review, of course.

OK, let’s gets to the point. “What if Superman is bad” is the main topic if this film. A boy in a spacecraft fell off the sky, took in by a lovely couple. After 10 years, his evil power was wakened by his spacecraft. Since then a demon from space brought death and horror to this small town. The movie has three phases, discover the power, start killing, and unstoppable. Every phase has an event to push the story forward. But those events are too obvious on purpose, once happened one thing and you know what will happen next. Combine this with the horror atmosphere, audiences are more like waiting for the scare instead of they should be scared unexpectedly. When you know what will happen, you want to push the fast forward button, sadly you can’t, you are in a cinema.

SS: 5/10 Another disappointing ending of a film franchise.

2019, what a year. The original six Avengers finished, the Game of Throne ended, the long-life comedy The Big Bang Theory finished as well. After a long time waiting, the last FOX’s X-MEN movie, X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX finally in theatre today.

Fox’s X-MEN movies’ quality steep down so fast after the X-Men: Days of Future Past. The X-Men: Apocalypse is a total disaster. Lots of fans gave their hope on this one, the dark phoenix, however, it fails again.

Consider the title is “Dark Phoenix”, this film should be talking about how is Jean Grey turn into the dark side, and what will the rest of X-Men handling this situation, taking account of that Jean was their friend. While this film only achieved part of these. The director gave Jean reasons to trigger her to turn bad: embrace cosmic power, father abandoned her, and prof. X lied to her. Then should be how powerful she could be, the fight in the community shows her power. So, how dark could she be? This film did not answer this question. Powerful is not equal to dark. The movie is Dark Phoenix, you have to make her dark enough. In the fight scene in New York, the Brotherhood and the X-Men are much darker than Jean! Their fight definitely will hurt or kill those civilians. Jean only killed Raven(Mystique), oh and cops. But which number is doubtlessly lower than the people in the subway or the bus in New York!

If I am the writer, I would let her kill more X-Men or innocent people in front of the camera. Because of the Alien control her brain, brainwashed her, she killed a lot of people, the rest of the X-Men and Brotherhood divided into two sides, kill and capture. No matter what sides they are on, they have to deal with the alien first and together. The more they after Jean, the more mutants of them died. At last, only Scott and Prof. X still wanna cure Jean, other rest of mutants want her dead. That Alien use Jean to hurt the Brotherhood and then want her to kill Scott(or prof. X) which wake Jean up, then she decided to perish together with the alien.

I am not an expert, but making mutants fighting “Groot” is not a good idea. IMDB gave a 43 score, quite fair.

SS: 6.5/10 As a fandom movie, it achieved the greatest success in history.

After more than ten years planning and 21 movies, Marvel studio finally released their first ten years finale. No doubt it is a great success, or maybe the greatest commercial movie success in the history. From the data of pre-book tickets box office, it is not hard to tell that how successful is this. However, back to the quality of this movie, it is also hard to make me want to rate it a high score.

The biggest problem of this movie but also of the directing skills of Russo brothers is that when narrative multiple characters storylines.

*THIS PART HAVE SPOILED*

*SPOILER ALERT*

In this movie, the avenger is divided into three teams to find infinity stones from the past. Each avengers have their own mission or I should say that each avenger has their own storyline. 8 avengers, nearly equal number of storylines, to tell these story right is a very difficult job. To this whole story, these stories are equal important, which means directors cannot let one or two storylines steal other’s thunder. But equal importance storylines are easy to lose the audience’s attention. The audience will get tired when they finish digested the first two story and found out that other storylines may have the same mode.

To be honest, this movie is made for fans and only fans will like this movie. In the movie, directors nearly brought back all the actors and actress that fans may want to see. Besides the surprising actors and actress, Pepper wears in the iron man suit, Captain America said “Assemble”, finally. These elements only fans will understand. So, here is the million dollars question, fans finally waited to an ending of 10 years long story, will they continue watching Marvel movie after this one? Especially, this movie almost wraps up everything and solve almost all those unsolved things. This is a huge test for Marvel studio. Are fan being loyal to the past 10 years story, actors and actresses, or Marvel Studio’s brand?

Btw Surftechy.com may shut down by the end of this month due to short of money. I will try to keep this on.

SS: 6.5/10 Not scared, not very logical, needs work.

US directed and wrote by Jordan Peele from Get Out, the one almost win the Oscar last year. The score on IMDB is 81, however, surftechy will only give this one a 6.5. As a horror and thriller movie, US build a great atmosphere, the dark night, shouting high pitch voice, the piano bass all those horror elements cooperated so good, all those elements are reminding you to get ready be scared which makes me highly nervous. Well… this highly nervous did not last long. the first 10 or 15 min I got highly nervous and nothing happened, only one cheap jump scared and when the movie keep going every time the atmosphere is ready and I am ready to get scared nothing really scary happened. So after half the movie, I think no  one in the cinema is really scared  by this movie. And I remember that one scene which should be scary, I laughed and other few audience laughed too. That is a big failure.

Just like Get out, Jordan Peele likes to give a dark secret reason behind all the horror story. In get out, the wired family want to steal the body. And in US, Jordan Peele let the government be a scapegoat. Poor U.S. government, always be the scapegoat in the movie. I do believe the director wants a Hugh twist at the end of the movie, so he left the explanation at the end of the movie. But you are a horror movie, a popcorn movie, audiences walk in shit their pants and walk out. They are not ready to walk in and thinking to figure out the reason and walk out. Especially the director left all the explanation and the big twist at the end, so if the audience wants to figure out what happened, they have to rethink the whole movie from the beginning.

Shutter Island has a big twist at the end of the movie but they tell you there will be a twist at the beginning, so will be careful about everything in the movie. However, in US when you walk into the cinema, devote yourself into what will scare you, and then when you the big twist shows up, you won’t feel how great is the big twist, because you lose track and leads at the beginning, you were busy preparing to get scared. And because all the explanation is in the last 20mins, I don’t think Jordan really explain the story well, he doesn’t have enough time to fully explain it. 

But now we know, if Jordan make a new horror movie, I will be really careful from the beginning.

SS: 4.5/10 Disney, please just keep making animation and give your money to other studios like, Star War and Marvel. All those real person movies, not even one succeed.

Oh and something new today, today is video format review. LOL