Robert Lynch

This is part 6 of my review series of Star Wars. If you want to go back to the start you can head back to my review of The Phantom Menace, or catch up with last week’s review, Empire Strikes Back, or just stay right here. The final episode of the original trilogy wraps up the story so far. Luke, Leia, and Han reach their most powerful, the battle for Anakin’s soul is concluded, and the Emperor is defeated. On the watch throughs of the previous five episodes I wrote about a pa

This is part five of my review series of each episode of Star Wars. If you’ve missed the start you can go here, or if you missed last week you can go here, and if you don’t care, you can stay right here. Empire Strikes Back was the first add on to the franchise, it is an interesting structure because technically Empire and Return of the Jedi are a single story, which makes the end of Empire really the middle of the story. The middle of the story is the ‘all is lost’ moment –

This is part four of my review series of each episode of Star Wars, if you’ve missed the start you can go here, or if you missed last week you can go here, and if you don’t care, you can stay right here. Originally just “Star Wars” this is the movie that started the franchise and launched a billion toys into the world, and it’s easy to see why. I’m often negative in my reviews, but I don’t get the chance often enough to say: Damn, this is a good movie (my highest praise, I su

This is the third review in my series of Star Wars reviews; if you want to catch up you can go back to Episode 1 or Episode 2. The basic idea for this series is to review Star Wars in episode order, as though I had never seen Star Wars before and know nothing of the story. It has been very challenging because a lot of the content doesn’t make sense in this order. There are callbacks to movies that haven’t happened yet, which considering the order should be setups, but instead

This is the second review of all nine episodes; as I explained in the first review I am looking at the movies as if they were released in episode order, trying to forget any other episodes or expanded universe information. My reviews are focused on how well the story was put together; special effects might make a film a better spectacle, but not a better story. Full disclosure, of the prequel films, this is my favourite. Obi-Wan is a boss, Yoda is a boss, Padme is a boss, and

In the countdown for Episode 9, every week I’m reviewing an episode of Star Wars, this week Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. It’s quite hard to review a Star Wars movie from a story perspective without inadvertently getting pulled into the original trilogy and the expanded universe, but I will do my best to forget everything I know and try to view these movies as if I was watching them for the first time, in episode order. So the harshest part first, if The Phantom Menace was t

In the Outer Worlds you are awoken from cryogenic sleep 70 years late, to find a star system gripped in the decaying tremors of late-stage capitalism. The corporations rule everything and deviation from their mandates is met with the harshest of treatment; fines of 100,000 bits, extreme disapproval from management, even forced organ removal to pay for debts. People are the property of the corporations, and they are treated like the machine cogs they are. Most people are resig

Joker is an anti-plot story with an unreliable narrator. Arthur Fleck, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is the main character and devious narrator that makes this story move. Arthur is a kind man who has a condition which causes him to laugh when he is anxious or nervous. Phoenix does an excellent job of this laugh, he chokes and coughs, he shows desperation in his eyes to try to stop when he can’t. This isn’t the maniacal laugh of the Joker we know from other Batman incarnations a

The Rookie is TV show produced for ABC in America. It stars Nathan Fillion, playing John Nolan, who at 45 years old has decided to ‘sea change’ his life and become a policeman in the LAPD. Nolan and two other rookies, played by Titus Makin Jr and Melissa O’Neil, struggle to earn their place amongst the LAPD. I will admit to having a fascination with police procedurals and detective stories at the moment, as I’m preparing to lay down the season arc for Frank Mason, but The Roo

I was going to review Back to the Future this week, but that franchise can keep. I watched In the Shadow of the Moon this morning starring Boyd Holbrook and Cleopatra Coleman. A detective confronts a murderer in 1988, who then returns and kills again in 1997, 2006, and 2015. The murderer is killed in 1988, making her return seem very unlikely. It turns out that she is moving backwards in time, jumping back 9 years each time, while everyone else is moving forward. Each jump th

The Fifth Element came out in 1997, starring Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich, directed by Luc Besson. Re-watching it this morning, it really struck me how well made this movie is. All of the parts of the climax are set up in advance. The motivations of the characters are straightforward. The beats move the story at a comfortable pace where the audience is not overloaded nor bored. Damn. This is a good movie. One thing that I noticed this time through that I had not noticed be

Ad Astra is a film starring Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones. In the near future, man has built significant infrastructure in space, on the Moon, and Mars. Brad Pitt’s father left on a mission to find signals of intelligent life on other star systems years ago, there were complications on the mission and his mission is presumed lost. Brad Pitt is also an astronaut and when his father’s mission might be recovered he is sent to make contact with it. There were some aspects to like

The Terminator franchise is about to get a new edition: Dark Fate. From what I’ve heard of the new film (aside from that it isn’t going to be very good) is that it retcons the 3rd, 4th, and 5th movies and is essentially new Terminator 3. What a franchise that a new movie would want to rewrite more than half of the films to try and get back to the core of the story. The first Terminator movie is a SciFi horror story. An AI faction sends a cyborg assassin back in time to kill t

When it was announced that Doctor Who was to get a new showrunner and a new lead actor I had high hopes. When I learned that Chris Chibnall had written previous Doctor Who episodes “42” and “Dinosaurs in Space” I was definitely concerned, but I hoped that with the creative control and a new doctor to work with we might get some good Who. I’ve always loved Doctor Who. In the weeks it was released I would get up early and watch the episodes. It felt like Christmas morning. Ofte

Carnival row is a new amazon tv series starring Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne. The story takes place in a fantasy world where fairy creatures and humans live together. The fairies used to live on their homeland, but a war between human superpowers left their home devastated. Now these refugee fairies live in the human city, primarily around a street called Carnival Row. Orlando Bloom plays a police inspector who is trying to solve a string of murders. Cara Delevingne is a

Silence of the Lambs is a Thriller masterwork. The main character, Clarice Starling, is a young FBI officer tasked with interviewing a notorious psychopath to gain insights that might help the FBI with an ongoing investigation. Made into a movie in 1991, with Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, Silence of the Lambs was published in 1988 as a sequel to Red Dragon, the second of 4 books Thomas Harris would write featuring Hannibal Lecter. The draw that the thriller genre has is i

Instead of reviewing all the episodes of Firefly I figure I’ll occasionally pick out some of the exceptional ones and pick them apart, the same way I will for Star Trek, Stargate, or any other long-running series. Even though there were only 14 episodes of Firefly, and a movie eventually, the show is a stand out in Scifi circles. A western set in space, with spaceships, advanced technology and cattle poop. The blend of old and new finds an exciting mix over the season, but th

Another Life is a TV show starring Katee Sackhoff. Wow, this is a terrible show. An Alien artefact lands on Earth. The signal from the artefact is discovered to be directed at a nearby solar system, so a crew is assembled to investigate, led by Niko Breckinridge; played by Katee Sackhoff. Her husband, Erik Wallace, played by Justin Chatwin, is the lead scientist on investigating the artefact and remains on Earth with their daughter. I really struggle to like shows that have n

The Boys TV Show starring Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, and Erin Moriarty is based on a comic book series released in 2006 by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. This dark dystopian look at the superhero genre explores the animalistic nature of man. (Wow, that is a very pretentious sentence) much like in The Watchmen, the story is asking the question of who polices the most powerful in society – Who watches the Watchmen? While it seems like this idea of the antihero and the tainted s

DC finally released a movie from their universe which isn’t terrible. All of the DC movies up until Aquaman have suffered from a terrible third act where they shifted genre and became a horrible homunculus. Aquaman is the first story the actually sticks the landing and remains consistent the entire way through the film. I realise that is a very harsh way to talk about a film that I enjoyed, but DC just hasn’t built a track record that meant I walked into this film with high h