The Last Duel (2021) - Movie Review

I haven’t really gotten into this in past reviews of his work, but I have a serious admiration for the work of Ridley Scott. When he’s on point, he is capable of some of the greatest works that the medium has to offer, whether it’s Alien, Blade Runner, or (personal pick here) Hannibal. But even in his lesser films, there is always something in his productions that I just have to point to as being objectively brilliant.

Exodus: Gods and Kings? Yeah, that wasn’t great, but the casting for God was ingenious. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant? Michael Fassbender’s David is one of the most fascinating cinematic characters of the entire 2010s, even if those films didn’t make full use of him. Even All In The Money In The World, which I seem to be in the minority on as I found it quite inconsistent, has Christopher Plummer giving the performance of a lifetime that held everything together. The man’s talent shines through no matter what he’s working on, so regardless of how this turns out, I’ve been looking forward to it all the same.

Chaos Walking (2021) - Movie Review

I love Patrick Ness’ writing. While I freely admit that I haven’t read his novels, I still have a great affection for the man’s art based purely on his work for the big and small screen. I mentioned in my review for it how much I dug his approach to storytelling with A Monster Calls, and for as little attention as it got, his work on the Doctor Who spin-off Class had quite a few moments of true inspiration within its stunted 8-episode run. At a time when young-adult storytelling has gone from strength to strength in the mainstream, the way Ness approaches incredibly morbid topics like grief, trauma, and loss, has already revealed him to be in the upper echelon of that grouping. So, when news hit that his Chaos Walking trilogy of books were going to get the cinematic treatment, with Ness himself co-writing the script, I was ready for him to impress yet again. What I actually got, though, is… not that.