2018 Rental Roundup 2: Incredibles 2, Suicide Squad, Cloverfield Paradox

Incredibles 2

It was good storytelling. It had higher stakes. It built the world out more. But it was the same basic plot, just with different details.

I’m glad the creators had a lot of new ideas to show. I like putting the focus on Elastigirl so we can see what she can really do, and her superpower is much more interesting to animate and to use than Mr. Incredible’s.

I like that the character arcs for the family all got to move forward. I like that we got to learn about how the world built in Incredibles affected the other people in it.

I don’t like that every twist and turn could be seen from a mile away and that they recycled the villain’s means if not the motive from the first movie.

Verdict: Go for it (4/5). Not even Pixar can escape the fate that awaits most sequels, but I still enjoyed it.

---

Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay

Alright, let’s see if the DC Animated Movie Universe can do a good Suicide Squad. This one does deliberately aim for the Tarantino twist of ultraviolence and dark humor, but ends up showing the violence was easier.

The editing for dialog scenes is off, with a lot of dead air around most of the lines. The “tell” jokes come off as flat, but the “show” jokes work. That or Copperhead is the only funny thing in the movie.

Speaking of supervillains, the movie assumes you know the stories of the characters from the movie movie. There’s no pleasantries for Harley Quinn, Deadshot and Captain Boomerang, but they do provide backstories for Killer Frost, Copperhead and Bronze Tiger.

But even off the Squad, Hell to Pay is a cavalcade of DC villains. No fewer than 17 baddies get involved in the plot by the time it’s all said and done (plus a few cameos), with a body count to match. The kicker to the action is that for the first time (if I remember correctly) in the DC Animated Movie Universe, the gore is played up.

Verdict: Rental (3/5). It’s not bad, but the other DCAMU works set a high bar. I do give it credit for branching out in terms of style and content, but it could have used more work.

---

The Cloverfield Paradox

The opening scene in the movie says that the world has 5 years of energy resources left, and everybody is queued up in their cars to get gas… while letting them idle for hours. Also, apparently there are no more dams, windmills or solar panels. Somehow. But we have particle accelerators. You know, those miles-long loops for smashing atoms together? Well, we had enough energy to put one of those up in space. With enough power on board to run it 60+ times.

And that’s the first 5 minutes. …We’re in for a REAL sci-fi treat, here.

But first we have to set up some space horror. Small station with nowhere else to go, systems malfunction, weird sounds, sudden-onset space madness, trans-dimensional shenanigans, you know the drill.

While they could have just stuck to the space station the whole movie and called it good, the plot hops back and forth between a main character in the final frontier and another back on Earth, as things aren’t all they seem there, either. It helps keep things from getting too samey, but the payoff at the end was, well, lame.

In the end, the whole movie is just about a bunch for random stuff happening for reasons. The script said somebody had to die at this point, so just make something weird happen to them and blame science gone to far… though we don’t know what that science is, so it is indistinguishable from bullshit.

It’s also unclear where this movie fits in the overall Cloverfield narrative. There was no energy crisis in the first two movies, but it seems like this is supposed be a prequel? In general, I’m not a fan of slap a twist ending on a random, unrelated movie to connect it to Cloverfield strategy.

Verdict: Flat (2/5). Bonus points for opening credits, but man, trying to pass itself off as hard sci-fi was a fool’s errand.