Praise4Media #60 - Rampage

Video Game Adaptations are rarely good. You can get films which are super unfaithful and stupid as hell, like the Super Mario Bros. Movie or you could get ones that are faithful, but are equally as underwhelming, like the Ratchet and Clank movie turned out to be. And most of them are financial failures. One that broke that mould, before Detective Pikachu came along was Rampage

Yes, we’re back with The Rock on a video game movie… I’ve never played Rampage… Sorry? But a quick Wikipedia summary tells me you play as a monster and your objective is to destroy the city. OK, a movie would never play out like that, but that’s a fun enough premise to run with, basically a monster movie.

The film made $430m on its $120m budget, although with an additional $140m spent on marketing, it’s unclear whether this actually broke a profit or not. Directing this is Brad Peyton, who’s worked with The Rock before on San Andreas and Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. On the writing team we have Ryan Engle, who’s helped write Non-Stop, Carlton Cuse who co-wrote San Andreas, Adam Sztykial, who co-wrote Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, poor guy and Ryan J Condal, who co-wrote Hercules, another film featuring the Rock.

The film had a mixed critical reception, it has a 51% Rotten Tomatoes rating, with an average 5.27/10, but audiences seemed kinder, giving it a 73% rating with an average 4.05/5. So, who’s right in this non-debate? Let’s take a look.

Harry Potter Month - Mini Review: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Political changes are a particularly difficult thing to write about when writing a children’s story. All too often it’s the case of portraying one side as the heroes whilst the others the villains, like Amon and Kuvira in Korra. Suffice it to say this is my least favourite of the Harry Potter books, not to say it was bad, but I’ll explain what I mean in the review.

David Yates steps into the director’s chair for this film, he’ll be the director of all the remaining Harry Potter movies. And the daunting trial for this movie is that it’s the longest book of the series, ironically converted into the shortest movie (counting the 2 deathly hallows movies as one anyway)

Movie made $939.9m on a $150m budget, but appraisal was a tad more mixed with a 71% on rotten tomatoes.

Star Wars Month - Mini review: Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope

Guess what, it's Star Wars Month

And we start where it all began (production-wise anyway) with Star Wars, later re-branded Episode IV: A new hope

Before we begin, let's tackle spoilers, for the purposes of the mini-reviews, I may draw reference to the continuity of all star wars films, so episodes I-III and V and VI may also be referred to in this review.