Reviews

I had expected "Dawn" to be an epic story featuring the ascension of apes to global dominance. With a name like "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes," you already know that the apes win against humanity in the end. It's just a matter of how. Instead, it's a smaller story about a tribe of newly-intelligent apes near San Francisco whose first contact with humanity is an accidental encounter followed by a failed quest for peace between the two sides.

As it turns out, the future ape leaders of the world are mostly peace-loving and, despite a few bad eggs, want nothing to do with fighting humanity. But through an unlucky turn of events, one of those bad-apes assassinates the ape leader and blames it on humans. Thus, the apes go to war and quickly roll over the human settlement despite the humans' overwhelming military advantage.

The ape war and end of humanity is catalyzed by accidents followed by betrayal, lies, and gross military incompetence. No one can do anything right. It is an unsatisfying story whose main characteristic is its multitude of blunders. I consider the mistake riddled plot to be lazy story-telling. It would have been more challenging to tell a believable story of apes unifying and beating a better human foe, but that story would have been more entertaining.

There is a lot of knife sharpening in Cyborg. It's about a post- apocalyptic world in which the lowly knife has become the weapon of choice. There are a few guns, but I guess everyone ran out of ammo. And that makes Cyborg a pure fantasy because the knife will never be more than a secondary weapon no matter how far we slip as a civilization. Spears, swords, axes, hammers, and bows will all take precedence. Not to mention armor. Those aforementioned weapons do make a few appearances in this movie, but the characters all seem to prefer knives for some reason. Why? Because it makes for some awesome fight scenes.

They really are great. Whoever choreographed the action in Cyborg knew what they were doing. It's rare in an action movie, but you can follow a scene and conclude that, "Yeah, one man really could beat several bad guys like that." Cyborg has several one-vs-many martial arts sequences that are cohesive and make sense. Those intense few scenes set Cyborg apart and make it worth watching.

And do you really want any more in a movie than some of the best knife- fight scenes ever made? Hopefully not, that's all Cyborg has. The script was clearly gutted from its original because the cyborg in Cyborg is treated as an afterthought. It's a woman that decided to have herself "enhanced" with mechanical parts in order to carry information about a plague back to the last scientists who can cure it. Why do you need to be turned into a cyborg to carry info about a disease? I'd love to know. Anyways, for all the back-story on the cyborg, she doesn't do anything for the entire movie. She just sits by while good guys and bad guys have awesome fights all around her. They are fighting over possession of her, yet she does nothing. You'd hope that as a cyborg, she might have some cyborg abilities that help in a fight. And you'd expect that in an action movie named "Cyborg," the one cyborg would participate in the action.

It's no wonder that many people are disappointed with Cyborg. But this low-budget, post-apocalyptic fantasy has some intense martial arts scenes that are both smart and entertaining. Watch it for the knife- fights and you won't be disappointed.

The aliens just showed up in several giant flying saucers that measure 15 miles in diameter. The saucers each positioned themselves over a different major city in the world and simultaneously leveled them. What do you do if you're the president? Will you order a massive nuclear attack to repel the aliens?

Nope, the president in Independence Day thinks that it's premature to use nuclear weapons at this point. He wants to try and take down the 15-mile floating saucers with air-to-air missiles. You try it and it didn't work. Every fighter jet is wiped out in a matter of minutes. Meanwhile the flying saucers are moving on to destroy more large cities. What do you do? You're going to order the massive nuclear attack now…right?

WRONG, but the president thinks that one nuclear weapon may be used on one alien ship as long as not too many people get hurt by it. You fire and detonate a nuclear missile against one of the 15-mile saucers, but the saucer doesn't go down. One nuke didn't work. What do you do? Do you try more? How about 10, 30, or 100 nukes? What do you have to lose?

No, the president thinks that it is now hopeless to use any weapons. He wants other options. At this point, one of the president's aides decides that now is a good time to inform the president that the United States is secretly in possession of alien technology in Area 51. You go to Area 51 and use the alien tech to hatch a one-time plan to disable the shields of the flying saucers. But their shields will only be down for a few minutes if this works. Now, will you please order the massive nuclear assault when the shields go down? It's our last chance. You'll do it, right?

WRONG again, the president would rather try conventional weapons in this one-time effort to save the Earth. You send your last fighter jets to fire air-to-air missiles at the 15-mile flying saucer. The missiles manage to scorch the outside of the saucer, nothing more. All is lost. Hold on, one guy crashed his plane into the middle on the saucer, which caused a chain reaction that destroyed the entire ship.

Wait…are you kidding me? The aliens built their 15-mile wide impenetrable flying saucers with a weak point in the middle that, if touched, destroys the entire ship. That can't be right. Why would they do that? That's worse than the bad decisions the president was making. THE END.

Remember the spoof play in The Producers called "Springtime for Hitler," whose absurd theme was to portray Hitler in an overly gleeful musical. The musical was absurd because most consider its happy-go-lucky subject to be the worst man of the 20th century. Mongol takes on the subject of Genghis Khan, who many consider to be the worst man in all history. He united the tribes of Mongolia and went on a rampage across Asia and Europe that puts Hitler to shame. Yet, Mongol portrays this "worst man ever" as a sensitive people-loving individual who always puts his moral sensibilities ahead of his own self-interests. In short, it's about a guy who is the opposite of Genghis Khan.

Rather than the shrewd and calculating genius that we are led to believe he was in the history books, Mongol shows Genghis Khan (or Temudgin) to be a bit of a chronic loser whose bad luck or bad decisions are constantly putting him at the mercy of others. His moral clarity and lack of tact not only put him at odds with both allies and enemies in this movie, but also with the real Genghis Khan.

The movie supposedly covers the early years of Temudgin up until the time that he united the tribes of Mongolia. However, very little uniting is done and most of the movie is spent with Temudgin simply surviving by himself as best he can. As a viewer, you're always wondering when he's going to turn it around and start winning. But the losing streak continues for the vast majority of this 2 hour movie until Temudgin hits rock bottom, loses everything, and is sold into Chinese slavery. Yes, Chinese slavery. Meanwhile, his wife ends up bearing children to a wealthy Chinese man. I know that there is very little written about this time in history and that the writers had considerable leeway to make up just about anything, but you have to be kidding me. The whole story seems like an elaborate stretch of the imagination designed to appease the Chinese audience by allowing them to claim that the later Mongolian rulers of China were really Chinese after all.

So how does Genghis Khan go from Chinese slavery to leader of the Mongolian people? I still don't know. The movie skips that part. He gets freed by his wife, runs off by himself, and the next scene shows him several years later as leader of a large army ready to fight the final battle. No explanation is given for how this happened. That's a lost opportunity because the story of how Genghis Khan united the tribes hasn't really been told, not even in the history books. The writers had the creative freedom to come up with any engaging story about a very interesting time in history. Instead, they decided to gloss over it and focus on the "sentimental" aspects of Genghis Khan, as if there were any. I have to conclude that Mongol is a nice story about some guy that is not Genghis Khan.

But if you're the type of person that can see past the implausible history and you simply want to watch an epic story with cool action scenes, you must know that the action scenes have some of the most distracting special effects that I have ever seen in a movie. They are riddled with cheesy cartoon blood splatter. Every cut from a weapon results in way too much animated blood spray. It may sound a little immature to complain about the bad special effects of the blood in a movie like this, but it really is so bad that you almost want to fast forward through the action scenes. The rule that, bad special effects are worse than no special effects, was not heeded here and you will be scratching your head thinking, "Why did they do this?" I was thinking that a lot as I watched Mongol.