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Cosmic Sin (2021) Movie Review

Cosmic Sin might be the worst movie I have ever watched. It borrows a lot from Halo and Starcraft 2 but is as boring a static loading screen.

The movie stars Bruce Willis as a forcibly retired space soldier named James Ford who killed 70 million people occupying a rebellious space colony using something called a Q-Bomb. Willis, as Ford, is brought back into service to deal with a hostile first contact situation.

Ford’s got a boring sidekick played by Corey Large. Frank Grillo’s character, General Eron Ryle, has a mildly interesting role to help end the movie, which everyone who watches Cosmic Sin should be grateful for. There is a soldier who is reminiscent of the Terran Ghost unit from Starcraft played by C. J. Perry (WWE’s Lana). The only scientist in the movie is Perrey Reeves playing Dr. Lea Goss. Reeve’s persona is the only one interested in peaceful communication with the vicious aliens and she also turns out to have left Ford, but not because he slaughtered 70 million people. Perhaps she isn’t a good judge of character but you won’t care about her or anyone else in this film because all of the acting is cold and boring.

The titular Cosmic Sin is that the team goes off without authorization to Q-Bomb and genocide the aliens before they can push their invasion force through some kind of quantum wormhole.

Cosmic Sin as a whole looks like a cheap movie and an excuse to act alongside Bruce Willis who did not seem to want to be in the film. The most interesting thing about the movie is a space bar with a robot bartender who is a knockoff of every robot design with a digital smiley face.

The short hour and a half running time is the only redeeming quality here. Do not watch Cosmic Sin. It isn’t the “fun” kind of bad sci-fi, it is just bad.

Rating: 0 out of 5.
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film

Good Time (2017)

Good Time movie poster

Watching their movies out of order, Good Time was the previous Safdie Brothers film, another criminal thrill feature released years before Uncut Gems.

Good Time features two brothers, Connie (Robert Pattinson) and Nick (Benny Safdie). Nick’s brain is non-typical and his brother Connie manipulates him into a bank heist that leaves Nick locked up for the crime while Connie spends the rest of the film trying to free his brother.

Unlike Uncut Gems‘ Howard (Adam Sandler), Connie seems to actually care about someone besides himself, and there are few enough side characters that everyone gets to have a moment. Connie’s girlfriend Loren, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, does a terrific job depicting someone who is trapped in a bad relationship with both Connie and her familial relationship with her mother.

Ultimately, this film is better for the space it gives those side characters, their realistic portrayal helps the world of Good Time feels more real than Uncut Gems. The spaces the characters visit and inhabit are also true to real city spaces. A Dominos to hide inside with a pissed off manager, a shitty local bank to rob, the home of some nice people Connie takes advantage of will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever struggled to pay for food and find the energy to clean, even the amusement park doesn’t feel fake.

Good Time also comments on stereotypes. Dash (Barkhad Abdi) is a Black security guard that Connie beats into unconsciousness, and doses with enough acid to make The Undertaker hallucinate for a year. Connie races to Dash’s home to conduct business in order to get money for bailing out Nick, but audibly remarks that the apartment is actually well furnished, and it is. This is an apartment that Dash cared about, and he is added to the list of people that Connie undeservedly steps on in order to help Nick.

There is no existence under capitalism that doesn’t involve stepping on other people, and that is true in the fiction of Good Time as well. In the opening, the brother’s bank heist was going well, but the bank teller hides an explosive dye pack in the money bag. Both risking her life, if the brothers-as-robbers were armed during the heist and they realized what was in the money bag, and when the dye pack goes off it caused an unintended car crash that could have been fatal for any pedestrians caught in the way. Just to protect the bottom-line of a bank whose money is insured to begin with.

The characters of Good Time are interesting, the world feels more realistic than other thrillers including the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, and the movie has an important message behind the thrills about capitalism even if most people will miss it. I like a lot about this movie, but I will note there is a particularly disturbing scene where Connie attempts to sleep with a sixteen-year-old girl in order to distract her before the local TV news program gives a report on the bank robbery. Fortunately, no clothes come off before they are interrupted, but it is another incident where Connie feels he has to do something in order to not create another witness to his flight from “justice.”

Rating: 4 out of 5.
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Uncut Gems (2019)

Uncut Gems’ Poster

Uncut Gems is a very wild thriller. If it were a book, it’d be a “page turner” that has the slightest of statements on how awful it is to step on people who have been stepped on for generations and how bad gambling addiction is.

As with all things that depict some terrible fiction I wonder how many people will watch this and think “gambling is fun” despite the punishment that Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) goes through, and more importantly what his loved ones go through. Sandler’s performance is kind of amazing from someone who is best known for his comedic roles, and those comedy films have been critical failures for years. As Howard Ratner, Sandler is a character that seems to feel no difficulty in putting his family through hell and destroying their lives even if Howard ostensibly loves them and tells them so, it’s clear that this isn’t enough, he isn’t really there for them. The words Howard says when he tells his kids how proud he is are hollow because the film is telling us Howard cares more about gambling than them.

Deriving entertainment from “what will happen next” in Uncut Gems is disturbing. What happens next is always someone getting hurt, terrified, or ruined because of Howard’s gambling addiction and we don’t find out what the consequences are for them, because the film is almost entirely focused on Howard’s perspective.

One of the saddest things about exciting movies like Uncut Gems is the fiction that the protagonist’s behavior is exciting and successful and romanticized. Howard would be very successful at gambling, he doesn’t lose as often as he should even when taking bets that others think are losing bets, if it weren’t for the meddling of another character in the film Howard would succeed, he would be rich. Ultimately, his gambling is a problem only in that the gambling introduces bad people into Howard’s life, but the film says it is those people who cause the worst of the problems, not Howard. I think that is sad, and much like other films about crime it still, pathetically, has a positive outlook on the activities it depicts… if only it weren’t for the violent criminals that get in the way. Much like The Irishman, another recent film that depicts bad people ruining the lives of their families, Uncut Gems makes its protagonist’s life a thrill. The people that suffer along the way? Uncut Gems doesn’t give a shit about them.

As a fiction, Uncut Gems is fine, it is exciting, it is ultimately as meaningless as the latest Marvel film in messaging and challenges practically nothing the viewer already thinks. In the universe of Uncut Gems, women are almost entirely brainless sex objects who only exist in their relation to men, white men are the functional actors but are failures at parenting. Racial minorities in Uncut Gems can only fulfill roles as athletes, sales people, and musicians obsessed with jewelry, money, sex, and success. Few characters besides Howard are anything but obstacles to his obtaining success, or money, or sex, and that’s the only bad thing that we are allowed to see in him.

I like Uncut Gems, but of course I like Uncut Gems. It is a movie built for me, a white male adult.

Rating: 3 out of 5.
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film

Shin Ultraman Trailers

Toho looks to be doing for Ultraman what it did for Godzilla and I could not be more excited. Shin Ultraman is coming out in Japan early this summer.

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film

All Is Lost (2013)

One of my favorite things to watch is other people dealing with problems. They can be out of this world science-fiction problems or they can be terrestrial problems and All is Lost is more of the latter. Robert Redford plays an unnamed (“Our Man” in the credits) sailor on a solo sailing voyage. Unfortunately everything goes wrong. 

The hull gets a big hole. 
Our Man’s patch job kinda works? 
He hits his head.
The supplies are running low.
…and on and on.

This is a beautiful struggle and there isn’t much else to say. Redford does a terrific job in the role, and it is truly painful to watch him struggle to get out of the situation. 

Perhaps then the question is: Who gets to sail? Our Man’s boat isn’t the fanciest ship, but maintenance is clearly expensive, as are other fees, and Redford’s character could easily be a millionaire on his little voyage out of his element, but he clearly seems to know what he is doing.

I’ll never be rich enough to sail like this, unless some stroke of luck changes things, and I’m not sure I’d want to. So maybe this is a kind of voyage-fiction. It is alien to imagine myself on a boat at sea.

If I had to compare All Is Lost, it’d be to The Martian, but without anyone backing the protagonist up, it’s almost more dangerous to be on the open ocean than on Mars.

In that we can thank Redford for pretending to go out to the open sea so we don’t, and I sure wouldn’t want to after watching his struggles.

Rating: 4 out of 5.