Netflix Retrospective - Voltron: Legendary Defender Season 2 episodes 7-9

We continue our look at Voltron: Legendary Defender

#64 - Jupiter Ascending

Oh boy, we’re in for a fun one today. Anyone remember the Wachowskis? They made the Matrix, and I’ll be honest, it’s on my list of movies I’ve never seen, in fact this is my only exposure to their work and boy is it bad.

The Wachowskis haven’t had much luck capturing the critical success of the Matrix, they had somewhat of a success with the divisive V for Vendetta, but Speed Racer, Ninja Assassin and Cloud Atlas were all box office failures, even if Cloud Atlas managed a bit of critical acclaim. Who better then to give $170m for a sci-fi epic.

The movie was not well received, holding a 26% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with an average review score of 4.4/10 although audiences were kinder, awarding on average 2.9/5 on Rotten Tomatoes and 5.3/10 on IMDb. The movie made $184m on it’s $176m budget, which is well below what would be required of it to be a successful. So, where does this movie fail? Let’s take a look.

Netflix Retrospective: Voltron: Legendary Defender Season 2 Episodes 4-6

We continue our retrospective on Voltron: Legendary Defender

Guilty Pleasures #42 - Taking Earth

It’s been 9 months now, time for a Guilty Pleasures reviews review. I’m sorry it’s taken this long to back to it, but I’ve been busy with my other review types and haven’t managed to schedule one in. The good news is I have a decent backlog that goes well into 2019, with a lot of current movies likely to fall under the banner. So, let’s start with a movie you’ve likely never heard of, Taking Earth

Released in 2017, this movie had a budget of $250,000, this is about 1000^th of the budget for a Hollywood movie, and puts it within the budget of something like… Interstellar Wars. If you’ve followed my review you know I absolutely detest that piece of sh*t, so can something salvageable be made is this genre with that kind of budget, well, I did just review the Australiens, which had even less of a budget but here’s something a little more serious.

It does appear to be a passion project, one of Grant Humphries, who co-wrote, produced and edited this movie.

The critical reception to this one is pretty negative, so do I see some saving graces or is this is going to turn into Rage review on my second watch and completely ruin the comeback? Only way to find out, but beware, spoilers will follow.

Netflix Retrospective: Voltron: Legendary Defender Season 2 episodes 1-3

We continue our retrospective on Voltron: Legendary defender with season 2, which would be the last for a while to be a full 13 episodes, seasons 3-6 would be 6-7 episodes each (without about half the originally planned season in each new season) with the recently teased season 7 going back to 13 episodes again. But to the content of season 2 itself.

Sequel Baiting #9 - How to Train Your Dragon 1 & 2

We’re going to end sequel baiting with something a little different. Sequel baiting is a massive time drain, which is why I’ve ultimately decided to cancel it. But I love this franchise and I want to look into their library of TV series at some point, so where better to start than with the 2 movies that have come out. I am aware there’s a third due out next year, which is why this would not normally qualify for the sequel baiting treatment. So, think of it is me combining 2 mini reviews together, patching together my thoughts, with a little compare and contrast. There won’t be categories or scoring on this one, but I hope it’s still relatively clear

Netflix Retrospective: Voltron: Legendary Defender season 1 episodes 8-11

Let’s finish off season 1, shall we

Mini Review - Australiens

I haven’t done a low-budget sci-fi movie in a while. Let’s tackle on from the other side of the world, this is the Australiens

This appears to the passion project of ArtSpear entertainment, a reasonably successful YouTube channel that does animated trailer parodies and other sketches. The brains behind it are Rita Artman and Joe Bauer, who also star in it. The budget is estimated to be around $20000 Australian, and whilst not a smash hit, it did get some nominations and awards at film festivals.

So, why am I bothering to even touch a movie like this? Well we’ve had a run of really bad, crass, offensive pieces of sh*t created by popular YouTubers, and this is something a bit different. This is an attempt at a sci-fi comedy.

Netflix Retrospective: Voltron Legendary Defender Season 1 Episodes 5-7