williamford-17805 Reviews

Shōgun: A Stick of Time (2024) Season 1, Episode 7

Pathetic, cliched, hack writing

[1/10 · 12 June 2024]

There is no cliché in the world of media more egregious and stupid than when yet another hack writer is too stupid and lazy to think of a single way to generate confrontation or motivate a character into action that makes sense... And so has the nerve to insult the audience's intelligence by having two characters have a completely contrived confrontation, at which point one of them invariably **slips, hits their head, and instantly dies.**

This cliché is popping up in every single series being made today. I must have seen it 50 times this year alone. This ridiculous trope does not happen. If reality worked the way these useless writers pretended it did, there would be no humans left, because the last one would have joined the rest by slipping and cracking his skull on a conveniently placed rock for no reason thousands of years ago.

It's garbage. I can't watch another series that does this, because it immediately, without excpetion conveys to me that the writers are braindead amateurs who aren't up to the job. What a joke.

Syria: The World's War (2018)

Disappointing

[4/10 · 1 April 2024]

Historically the BBC has done a tremendous job with conflict documentaries, clearly and grippingly covering the causes, preogression, and dynamic of major contemporary wars. Their docs on the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War, the Gulf War and the Iraq War are exemplary, so I went in to this expecting more of the same. What a shame.

Unfortunately, the team that was placed in charge of making this documentary was either not up to the job, leant upon by the government for political considerations, or most likely both. Many of the most important events and dynamics of the war are not even touched upon. Unbelievably, there is not a single word spoken about the Kurds of Rojava or the KRG, Kobani, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the events in Iraq that boosted and degraded ISIS and brought Western powers to intervene in Syria, nor about Turkey's campaign against the Kurds, its confrontations with Russia, or other operations.

Meanwhile, some of the most poisonous and blatant propagandists from the Syrian, Russian and Saudi regimes are given cosy interviews in which their ridiculous lies go uncontested. Lyse Doucet can be commended for her work reporting from the frontlines, but she is simply too weak, too deferent, and too spineless for the task of holding the spokespeople of these regimes to acccount. It is excruciating to watch, muddles the documentary's presentation of the facts, and makes it complicit in their propaganda by allowing them to delude the viewers with their lies, unchallenged. What an insult to the victims of these regimes. Pathetic.

A massive missed opportunity to make a comprehensive documentary that explained this conflict to viewers with clarity.

Castlevania: Nocturne (2023– )

Absolute Car Crash

[2/10 · 25 February 2024]

The original Castlevania series was one the fantasy series ever made. Among its considerable achievements was a great storyline, compelling characters, and tremendous voice acting. With the loss of its original creator and writer, the show has shed all of these to become an empty, childish imitation of the original.

Storyline: Mediocre, by the numbers plot, which attempts to tie the French Revolution into the vampire-human conflict, but completely fails to form any thematic connection between the two, and breaks the world in the process. Why are these vampires, already established as bent on subjugating all humans, so concerned about which human faction triumphs in the French Revolution, or whether the Transatlantic slave trade is upheld? The strength of each character has no consistency and plot armour is overused and grating. The dialogue is often hammy, stilted and puerile.

Characters: Compelling characters are nowhere to be found. This title's Belmont is a dweeby charisma-vacuum who displays almost no personality whatsoever, and even his role is frequently supplanted by a tedious Mary Sue. The supporting cast is an interchangeable and forgettable jumble, featuring the usual inauthentic attempt at diversity from Netflix: Renaissance European aristocrats, all conspicuously black for no reason or explanation, which completely backfires by serving to undermine the points they were trying to make about class and racial oppression. Do they include any other minorities? Of course not.

Voice acting: This was the greatest let-down of all. Instead of the talent-rich luminary cast of the original, all of whom were perfect for their roles, we have an incoherently-cast array of talentless, wooden miscasts. The protagonist is voiced by someone that sounds no more than twelve years old. The Aztec "villain" speaks in a modern American drawl. Aforementioned tedious Mary-Sue (whose character is Caribbean) is voiced by a truly dreadful VA, who for some godforsaken reason performs this role in her own South African accent, which did not exist until over a century after the setting of the story. This is as amateurish as it comes. The accents and vernaculars of the supporting cast are similarly all over the place. In one family of 3 French characters who all live in France, all three have accents from three opposite ends of the world. It's is an insult both to the peoples the characters are supposed to represent and to the intelligence of the viewer.

This designed-by-committee, Netflix corporate offering attempts to make up for these weaknesses by substituting in vague, completely empty political gesturing. This comes at the complete expense of any entertainment value. It's a slap in the face to the viewers and fans of the series. Don't bother wasting your time.

Secrets of Great British Castles (2015–2016)

Disappointing

[6/10 · 30 September 2023]

I was eager to watch this as I've always been a castle and history enthusiast. And it has introduced me to some interesting castles that I knew little about. But frankly I was left quite disappointed by most of the episodes.

The main problem with the series is the presenter. Dan Jones is probably a perfectly good historian, but he is absolutely laughable as a tv presenter. His presentation style is so awkward and uncharismatic that you often wonder if you're watching an episode of Alan Partridge. It's genuinely quite cringe-inducing to watch him saunter about in this leather jacket he never seems to take off, standing in awkwardly staged poses with endless closeups of his gormless face staring "dramatically" at walls while he tries very hard (and again, awkwardly fails) to deliver his script in an engaging fashion. Needless to say, whatever the quality of the documentary content, this constant distraction subtracts quite a lot.

And sadly, the documenary side of things is quite lacking as well. For a show called Secrets of British Castles, the episodes often say remarkably little about the actual castles themselves. Instead what you mostly get is a very surface-level introduction to a few disconnected kings or nobles that lived in them and a few key events in their history. Nothing wrong with that per se but it just doesn't go far enough to get a real sense of the places.

The Last of Us (2023– )

Could have been great

[6/10 · 6 June 2023]

Let's start with the good. Compelling source material. Classic zombie apocalypse setting. Superb production values. Pedro Pascal, who delivers a compelling and believable performance.

Now the bad. The writing, the writing, and the writing. By far the most tearing-my-own-hair out catastrophe in this whole production is Ellie's dialogue. No teenage girl talks or acts like this. She speaks with the words and cadence of a middle-aged smartass American writer during a cocaine binge, which is of course the person who wrote her lines. But part of basic writing is to write lines that a character would actually say. Her persona is essentially RDJ'd Tony Stark in a teenage girl's body. It's a pathetic, hackneyed, and transparent attempt to give us an uBeR cOoL gIrLbOsS character that we're supposed to love. I doubt many did. Even if the writing was remotely plausible, Bella Ramsay just does not have that sort of charisma.

I'm certain that most people are as bored as I am of this cliche, where they make a child character who is supposed to be precocious or wise beyond her years, but people like that do exist and none of them would ever talk or act like this. It's such a failure on the part of the writer because it breaks your suspended disbelief every time, which could have been avoided.

Unfortunately that's not the only braindead Hollywood cliche that stains this production. We also have the classic 'characters sacrificing themselves for no logical reason whatsoever for a cheap emotional bit', characters who are supposedly survivors but stop and gawp without reacting at all whenever lethal danger comes right at them (so that they can be conveniently saved at the last moment by a cheap plot connivance) and characters running into gunfire to "save" other characters who aren't injured and can walk or run perfectly fine.

Overall the plot spends way too much time going nowhere for poor returns in entertainment value.

So yeah. Could have been excellent. Instead is distinctly average.

The Last Kingdom: Seven Kings Must Die (2023)

What a stupid mess

[4/10 · 26 April 2023]

Having eagerly anticipated this feature, I was bitterly disappointed by this mockery of a conclusion to a series I had enjoyed very much (at times, anyway). The quality of the brilliant first season, which declined over each sequel, is long gone here.

Obviously the pacing is way off. There are at least a season's worth of twists and turns, and when they all come at you so fast it stretches belief well past breaking point.

This is exacerbated by a completely ridiculous plot in which virtually no character has consistent motivations and nothing they do is believable. One minute a character has his son taken hostage and is being executed by a king because he's so committed to his own independence by another, two scenes later when nothing has changed he is swearing his undying loyalty and putting all his faith in the king that was about to kill him.

The politics make no sense at all. The kings of independent Shetland, Orkney and Man are leading armies against England because... its king pillaged a few villages on the Scottish border? The absurdly complex villainous plot that unravels is all reliant upon the king happening to die exactly when he dies, among a long series of other narrative conveniences.

Who are we supposed to be rooting for here? Surely not Aethelstan, who is more villain than hero throughout: killing his brother for no reason, executing one of the series most beloved characters for no reason, ordering the massacres of civilians over and over again? All that is forgiven because his lover told him he should do it? Towards the end, the peril we are presented with is that Aethelstan might die - oh no! Not the guy who caused every problem in the whole story by being such a gullible and pompous buffoon!

And the villains? Well we have a completely implausible incognito viking warlord who has somehow become the leader of an influential saxon christian cult, as well as another viking warlord with the character of a shoe who might as well be anyone.

The battle at the end is dull, predictable, and packed with grey-washout visuals where every soldier is interchangeable. Somehow people are having conversations amid the chaos. The genius tactical innovations of our veteran-of-a-hundred-battles hero? Leaving little bits of metal on the ground for the enemy to walk on (owie!), and hiding a battalion behind trees (no one could see that coming!) Capped up with a completely emotionless and contrived death.

The film has no themes. No character or character development. No tension. No creativity of any kind. The characters end up exactly where they began. It's almost amusingly similar to a play by school children.

The Mandalorian: Chapter 23: The Spies (2023) Season 3, Episode 7

Why oh why!?!?

[2/10 · 21 April 2023]

The only question I have to ask is why?

Why, after such a strong string of fantastic episodes this season, did the writers suddenly have to jump the shark so badly on this one?

When the heroes are on the piratey ship and sight a threatening monster in the distance, why instead of slowing down or turning away do they head straight for it and even turn into its path?

Why do the heroes, (one of whom we know is carrying a blade that cuts through anything) act like they're trapped with no way out or help the protagonist because of *a metal door?*

Why does the villain know she is the one with this blade, and given that he does, why does he *also* act as though it provides no way out when he knows full well what it does? Why, when she finally uses it, does she (oh-so conveniently for the villain) instead use it on the rear door and retreat?

And then to cap it all off, the whole, ultra-clichéd scene where a named non-protagonist does a pointless, "I'll sacrifice myself for absolutely no reason when it only makes sense to retreat" routine. Saw that coming a mile off and couldn't stop groaning when it happened. What is it with Hollywood and these braindead faux-dramatic scenes? We've all seen it a billion times, it's childish and only takes away from the show.

A very disappointing episode all round.

WWII in Color: Road to Victory (2021– )

Car Crash

[2/10 · 13 April 2023]

I've watched many World War Two docs in my time (including the well-made predecessors to this one) and almost all of them do a great job of explaining the history in a way which is gripping, insightful and informative. This is not one of those.

Not only is the series patronisingly shallow and basic, it is infuriatingly repetitive. In the first couple of episodes, I lost count of the amount of times the exact same three or four pieces of basic, "well-duh" information would be repeated ad nauseam.

Among the contributions provided by the talking heads: "at Dunkirk, people were being people" "after rationing was brought in, people weren't able to just go to the supermarket to buy whatever they need as we do now" Gee thanks for the insights guys. Talk about infantilising.

The narrator is a poor fit for the role, as many other reviewers have noted. She does not narrate with the necessary gravitas or reverence that this subject demands.

The wider production values also fail to impress. Is there any real soundtrack? Or new colourised footage that brings the conflict to life in a way which justifies the series being made? Not as far as I could tell.

Overall, one is left to wonder what the point of this series is. Essentially it is just a cheap, uninspired, by-the-numbers addition to the Netflix catalogue hoping to capitalise on the success of better work that came before.

Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Tedious Rehash

[5/10 · 9 October 2022]

This sequel is seriously overrated. It is truly remarkable how little effort was put in and yet the creators seem to have got away with it as far as audiences are concerned.

The writing isn't just poor - it's mind-numbingly stupid. Stupid enough to be written by Biff, the insipid caricature villain from the first film that the creators saw fit to reuse, despite his complete lack of appeal. What happens to him, like every character in this tedious mess, is more or less exactly the same as in the first movie, but minus the charm or surprise.

The performances are dreadful. Michael J Fox is remembered fondly, which in retrospect is quite amazing given this second absurdly childish run as McFly, who proves to be one of the most empty and feckless protagonists in all cinema.

It is a shame given the possibilities the universe of the first film presents. The Back to the Future Virtual Reality ride at Universal Studios had infinitely more creative merit and imagination than this film.

At no point are there any stakes. The film gives you no reason to care about anything that happens, as everything amounts to basically several hours slapstick farce without being funny.

What a shame.

The Martian (2015)

A shallow Hollywood adaptation

[6/10 · 29 September 2022]

Having much enjoyed the novel, I was eager to see how the film would handle it. Sadly this is at best a decent children's movie. The only real positive is its high production values.

The tone is compltely off. Important swathes of the story feel completely rushed, with the result that the events of the story have limited or no emotional impact. Any suspense is lost as Mark immediately solves every problem the moment it is presented. This is cemented by the choice to replace all the scientific work Mark does (the bread and butter of the novel) with goofily upbeat montages set to cheesy songs. Important scientific elements of the story are left unexplained in an apparent effort to appeal to a wider audience by dumbing it down further.

This is only reinforced by the decision to strip the story of profanity, leaving an over-sanitised, superficial, jarringly unrealistic tone. This is not how adults speak in crisis situations.

Matt Damon's performance was mediocre - the novel's Watney is a very sympathetic, charming character because he is humble and both vulnerable and positive in the face of extreme adversity. By contrast Damon's Watney is cocky and superhumanly unfazed or shocked by his circumstances, in other words a generic Hollywood protagonist. And far from being charming his delivery of gag lines is unfunny enough to make him slightly annoying.

Most of the supporting cast is also wooden and uninteresting. Rich Purnell is supposed to be a highly intelligent if antisocial, difficult person. Instead he is a clownish goofball played by a comedian.

Overall the film isn't *bad* but is a missed opportunity for a sober, thoughtful space adventure and is instead mostly just another shallow, by-the-numbers Hollywood thriller.

Loki (2021–2023)

Silly concept, terrible writing

[3/10 · 18 September 2022]

I don't understand what anyone enjoys about this show. It suffers from the same issues as all post-Endgame MCU: There is absolutely nothing at stake in its absurd multiple-timelines plot, which we are given no reason to care about. The characters are equally two-dimensional and boring. Why would we care what happens to any of them? Very rarely do any of them act like real people. Every interaction has a goofy, sitcom vibe yet is rarely funny, and this makes it especially jarring when the show pivots into "sincere" scenes which suddenly expect the viewer to take the plot seriously. Don't bother with it unless you're deeply smitten with Tom Hiddleston or have an MCU obsession because I honestly can't imagine any other way you might enjoy it.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)

Laughably bad

[1/10 · 18 September 2022]

It is quite difficult to understand how a high budget franchise like Star Wars not only commissioned but released such a bad film. The script is like something written by a toddler: the characters behave like stupid, annoying children throughout, the voice acting is extraordinarily hammy (what on earth are those accents!?), the plot is never once engaging or exciting. And even by 2008 standards, the animation is of staggeringly low, janky quality. The few positive reviews that have been left here seem to have this confused with the clone wars series that follows but is a different project. One has to assume the idea was to entice children into the franchise but I doubt it managed to do so.

Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022)

Huge potential spoiled by atrocious writing

[5/10 · 20 July 2022]

With a legendary protagonist, high production values and large budget, this series had the potential to be the next Mandalorian. Instead what we got was more like a bad fanfiction, riddled with absurd clichés and a plot with more holes than a sieve.

We had hammy, clownish villains, in particular Reva whose motivations make no sense at all. (scarred by the mass murder of her innocent Jedi friends and seeking revenge, she... joins the perpetrator and spends ten years murdering Jedi and torturing innocent civilians? All on the dubious basis that this will give her a chance to make an ineffectual attempt to stab him with her lightsaber? And when this inevitably fails she sets off to murder an innocent child? But she changes her mind at the last moment so all is forgiven?? None of this is enhanced by Moses Ingram's incongruent shouty-then-whispery performance.

We had a powerful protagonist who suddenly loses all his powers for no plausible reason (Because he is old? This doesn't hinder Force users: Yoda, Palpatine and Dooku were all ancient. Out of practice? We were told he was spending his time in the desert attuning with the Force) and then regains them all in one moment, after thinking about Leia. Right.

Other plot holes included: >Why doesn't Reva use her mindreading powers when interrogating Owen, or Leia?

>Why does Obi Wan only destroy that drone *after* letting it scan his face?

>Why does Vader let Obi Wan escape, when the fire between them was already there shown to be no obstacle to him?

>Why do both the Grand Inquisitor and Reva survive lightsabers to the heart?

Why does Vader assume Obi Wan is dead after burying him when he has the ability to easily sense that he isn't?

And why did we need yet another pointless lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan and Vader? There is no suspense knowing that both characters will survive unharmed. All so that Obi-Wan can yet again realise that "his friend is gone" and yet again leave him for dead rather than finish him off, despite witnessing the terrible consequences of the last time he did that.

All in all, if there was a story worth telling here, these writers did not have the ability to find it. A shame, really.

Arcane (2021–2024)

Cliché-ridden dreck

[1/10 · 2 July 2022]

This series is so poorly written and put together that I am left bewildered as to how it has gained such a high IMDB rating. Every character and piece of dialogue is ridden with cliché, made worse by video game-tier voice acting. I can only imagine the scales have been massively tipped by the LoL fanbase, because this truly is mediocre at best.

The Last Kingdom (2015–2022)

Spoiled by the Writing

[7/10 · 14 April 2022]

This show is a lot of fun and gives a steady feed of Viking / Saxon swordy action, with a compelling historical backdrop rarely explored in the past. However, the later seasons are fairly aimless and many episodes are packed with drawn-out filler. There are many anachronisms, particularly in the costume and set designs. It must be said that the writing is awful at times, with hammy dialogue and heroes constantly making ridiculous decisions which have no purpose, and are just a cheap way of acheiving the writers' ends. Countless times Uhtred (because he is completely invincible in combat) will quickly have the villain he is determined to kill at his mercy, but after treating us to a long and drawn out conversation with them about who was right, destiny, etc, will let them go for no reason, simply so that the villain can go and enact another scheme for Uhtred to foil. The last episode was a particular mess, with a master plan that was quickly forgotten about, cringey speeches, a battle in which more men died than had ever been visible on the field, victory by army of Danes-ex-machina conjured from nowhere, and the victors allowing the defeated Scots king (who seemed contractually obliged to be proven a perfect Braveheart-esque badass in every scene) safe passage home, even after he explicitly vows to come back and destroy them. Still, it had enough to keep me watching so I'll give it credit for being a reasonably entertaining romp otherwise.

The Deer Hunter (1978)

Overrated

[6/10 · 18 March 2022]

This film is a decent slow-burn but does not really fulfil its potential. It has a meandering plot that ultimately has little to say about most of its subject matter. The first act is needlessly slow (a full hour of the runtime), doing nothing other to than introduce a cast of mundane and not very likable average joes. The second act sees caricatured, ahistorical, pointlessly evil Viet Cong villains forcing our protagonists to play Russian roulette for little reason other than as a plot device to set up a dubious enthusiasm for the game among them. The third act consists of some rather shallow portrayals of PTSD, especially the one involving an acquired addiction to Vietnamnese Russian routlette that stretches belief. Characters fequently say and do things that make little sense, especially this bizarre eagerness to point guns at their heads and pull the trigger to make vague points to one another. It is strange that this film is so highly-regarded but that is likely owed mostly to the film's main redeeming qualities. De Niro's intense performance carries a lot of the film and its high production values do appear to have helped to provoke thought and reflection among audiences. But what a film it could have been, if the writing had actually gone somewhere or had something to say beyond a played out "war is crazy" message that has been delivered much more successfully in other classic Vietnam war films.

His Dark Materials (2019–2022)

Shoddy, Incompetent Adaptation

[1/10 · 15 February 2022]

The writing and artistic decisions taken in this show were a disgrace. The apparent contempt the producers showed for the source material is bad enough, but worse when it becomes clear they didn't have a single decent writer or director on the payroll. I can understand that His Dark Materials is a lot to take on, but if the producers of this show didn't have the budget or talent capable of delivering a watchable adapatation, then they shouldn't have taken it on.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)

A Blatant Cash Grab

[4/10 · 21 November 2021]

The fight scenes were passable but the plot was incoherent nonsense. The dialogue was hammy and clichéd throughout. The whole thing was a naked, cynical cash grab pandering to the Chinese market and nothing more than that.