Category: Reviews

Why You Didn’t Like … Archive

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Gavin Rothery’s Archive had everything needed for sci-fi greatness: stunning cinematography, brilliant performances from Theo James and Stacy Martin, and profound questions about AI consciousness that feel eerily relevant today. George’s obsessive quest to resurrect his dead wife Jules through increasingly sophisticated AI iterations creates genuine emotional investment and explores the ethics of creating synthetic life.
But then comes the ending, a devastating “it was all a dream” twist that obliterates 90 minutes of masterful storytelling. This isn’t just a weak conclusion; it’s a complete betrayal of audience trust that transforms a potential classic into a cautionary tale about narrative promises. Archive proves that even the most compelling premise can’t survive cinema’s most insulting trope. Read More …

Why You Liked … The Gorge

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The Gorge: More Than Meets the IMDb Score? Why do some “average” movies resonate so deeply? My latest Scene & Unseen tackles “The Gorge.” Despite a modest IMDb rating, this Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy sci-fi thriller is a cult classic in the making. It’s not just guns and monsters; it’s an unexpected US/Russian armistice and a powerful story of connection. I explore how two opposing operatives forge a bond, challenging indoctrination and making us question who the real monsters are. Discover the surprising depth and genre twists that make “The Gorge” hit different. Read/watch the full analysis now! Read More …

Why You (Might) Like … Disciples: Liberation

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Disciples: Liberation – It’s Me, Not You (Probably!)

It’s 2025, the Pope’s from Chicago, and I’m recommending a game I uninstalled: Disciples: Liberation. After 14 hours, I see its brilliance – a gritty story, fantastic characters (Avyanna & Orion!), and deep tactical combat. Yet, its army-building focus and specific challenge scaling weren’t my personal fit. This well-made tactical RPG deserves an audience, even if it’s not me. Hear my full “it’s me, not you” breakdown for why you might love what I couldn’t. Read More …

Why You Were Mildly Entertained by… Mission: Mehpossible — The Reckoning of Exposition

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Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning isn’t a bad film. It’s just a painfully average one that forgets what makes this franchise tick. With a slow start, undercooked villain, and action scenes that trade ingenuity for spectacle, it struggles to stand alone or satisfy as a sequel. Tom Cruise still delivers, and Hayley Atwell shines, but the magic of masks, heists, and clever cons is sorely missed. It’s decent popcorn fare, but as a Mission: Impossible entry? This one never quite detonates. Read More …

Why You Liked … May the Fourth

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2025 Edition. Despite Disney’s best efforts, there is Star Wars gold at the end of the rainbow. If you like reckoning with legacy, moral ambiguity, sacrifice, and found family, I’m here to make your Star Wars Day just as rosy as when A New Hope dropped way back in 1977… minus the bell bottoms we all pretend we never owned. Introduction People talk about Star Wars fatigue the same way they talk about superhero fatigue, as if it’s part of life now. Disney strip-mined Star Wars for all its joy in a relentless sequel churn. I’m positive one of the Bobs was to blame; they wanted shareholder value, but we wanted Star Wars. It doesn’t mean there aren’t chunks of good Star Wars left, though. To celebrate 2025’s Star Wars Day, I’m going to give you the best movie, series, video game, and book Read More …

Why You Didn’t Like … Plane

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Plane: the movie where the idea of “authenticity” is about as convincing as a safety briefing from a clown. You shouldn’t waste time on this movie, but you might be tempted to! It stars Gerard Butler, who won hearts and minds as Leonidas in 300, and Mike Coulter, who won hearts and minds as Luke Cage and Spartan Locke. I wanted to like this one. I hoped it might have the folksy charm of Butler’s outings like Gamer, but there’s no charm here. It all starts fairly badly; it’s clear the scriptwriters googled, “How do planes work?” and then used the top hit from a conspiracy site where the Earth is flat. Then they stacked on the usual Trifecta of Impossibility™—the plane without enough fuel, the convict transport, the storm of ages—and hoped we wouldn’t look too hard when our first double fatality happened Read More …

Why You Liked … Service Model

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The Future is Now, and It’s Not Great. Hello, valued consumer. I see you are engaging in anxiety brought on by literally everything. Would you like a soothing cup of tea? Good. Because today we’re panning for five golden things: Let’s begin. Sci-Fi, AKA the Original Horrible Prophecy Machine I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, a book too close to prophecy to not be unsettling. There’s a lot this book made me think of, not least of which is that no one should ever call a robot Uncharles. Despite that, you should read Service Model. It’s charming, despite the doom. It’s funny, despite us all being dead. It’s prophetic, but the prophecy brings hope with it, and we all need some of that. Let’s begin. Science fiction has been a really good barometer of our future, and I’m not talking about flying cars or Read More …

Why You Liked … Avowed

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Exploration, Companionship, and the Game That Deserved Better Reviews. What if the world doesn’t need saving? Well, tough rocks, the Living Lands of Avowed still need you to rescue them, but they’re at their best when you’re exploring, meeting dudes, and lighting the occasional villain on fire with a flaming sword. And honestly, that’s kind of beautiful. Introduction You start your epic quest in Avowed as the Envoy, one of the Emperor’s chosen from the land of Aedyr. There’s a plague called the Dreamscourge, and it is wreaking havoc on the empire’s citizens, and, more importantly for the Emperor, his throbbing desire to colonise and subjugate the free peoples of the Living Lands. Of course, it sounds nicer when he says it. As far as setups go, it reminds me more of Tyranny, arguably Obsidian’s finest effort, but it doesn’t deliver the same feels or Read More …

Why You Liked … LitRPG Before It Was Cool

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Think LitRPG started with Ready Player One? Think again. Long before you could grind levels in a LitRPG novel, Dream Park and Guardians of the Flame showed us what it meant to truly play the game. Modern LitRPGs let you exploit the system, but these classics forced you to survive it. This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on LitRPG: its roots, how to write it, and why it keeps us hooked. Before LitRPG was a genre, books like Dream Park and Guardians of the Flame set the foundations for game-inspired storytelling. This is where it all began—long before stat sheets took over. Introduction LitRPG (short for Literary Role-Playing Game) is what happens when storytelling hooks up with game mechanics and produces a deeply nerdy lovechild. At its core, it’s about characters progressing through a structured game-like system, often complete with XP, stats, and level-ups. While it’s Read More …

Why You Liked … Argo

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Man, seventies fashion didn’t treat us kindly, did it? Fashion isn’t the only thing that’s best left in the seventies, but we’ll get to governmental foreign policy in just a moment. Argo is an absolutely superb movie based on the true story of one of the most sublime counterespionage events in history. Or, I guess, known history, because they’re going to save some good shit out the back. Historical Context We follow Ben Affleck’s Tony Mendez, a CIA exfil expert set on the mission of extracting six US Embassy workers during the Iran Hostage Crisis that kicked off November 4, 1979. It follows the real-life Canadian Caper, and on the morning of Sunday, January 27, 1980, the full eight-person party passed through passport control at the Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, boarded a Swissair flight to Zürich, and escaped. The great prestige was that Mendez Read More …