In June 2023, I started watching a lot of movies. As it turns out, I have a lot of thoughts on movies, but not enough to write proper review. Thus "Movie Thoughts".

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March 2025

Solo: A Star Wars Story - I actually tried to watch this one a couple of years ago and couldn't get past the first ten minutes. Something about it just wasn't clicking with me back then. I wasn't too thrilled about a Han Solo origin movie to begin with (I'm not particularly a fan of origin stories), so my thoughts back then (and now) were, basically, "why does this even need to exist?"

I can't say it clicked with me in 2025. This may sound strange, but I don't think it felt like a Star Wars movie. It wasn't because of the lack of Jedi or anything like that, but something about the movie just didn’t feel right.

Ringu (1998) – After hearing memes about this movie and the American remake since grade school ("seven days" was a popular thing to say at my school when I was eight years old), it was pretty interesting to finally watch it. I had all these thoughts in my head of what this movie was and basically none of them were right. I thought it was going to be a typical horror movie with jumpscares, I guess, when most of the movie is about investigating where the videotape came from and who's in it. I didn't realize that the whole "Sadako coming out of the TV" scene only happened once, at it was the end of the movie.

February 2025

American Psycho - This one took multiple days due to how completely over-the-top it was. It wasn't the violence or gore that got to me, but the self-absorbed superficiality of just about all the characters was too much to handle for more than about half an hour at a time. Also, I now understand the comparisons people make between Patrick Bateman and Tom Cruise.

Kill Bill Vol 1 & 2 - These are (somehow) the first Tarantino movies I've ever seen. I'd heard that his movies were incredibly referential to other movies, but I didn't realize just how many references there would be. There's a lot that anyone who's watched older Japanese and Hong Kong films would recognize.

January 2025

Sailor Moon Cosmos – I finally got around to watching both parts of Sailor Moon Cosmos, which ends the animated reboot that started in 2014 with Sailor Moon Crystal. The plot definitely felt rushed when compared to the 90s anime, though that's the result of having two movies vs. an entire season of episodes cover the same content. I actually don't remember the pacing of the manga, but I'm going to say it's more similar to these movies than the 90s anime.

I do wish the transformations and attacks hadn't been largely identical to the ones in the 90s anime. They had the opportunity to make new ones and just...didn't, probably due to the reaction to the first two seasons of Crystal.

June 2024

Cube (1997) – I was deliberating on whether or not I wanted to watch this one because I thought I’d seen it before. As it turns out, I had not. I guess what I saw before was one of the other Cube movies, or maybe even an entirely unrelated movie. I think the production team did pretty well with what they had (zero budget). The ending felt like a cop-out, like the writers had the need to kill all but one of the characters and couldn’t figure out a good way to do it.

July 2023

Originally posted on Wordpress on 31 August 2023

Alien (1979) - I really thought I'd seen this one before. As it turns out, I had not. Upon watching the beginning, I was struck with how similar it was to the beginning of The Expanse. In fact, it wasn't until I watched Alien that I realized just how much The Expanse was inspired by it, despite listening to a podcast where one of the authors discussed this.

Aliens (1986) - This one has all the meme lines I've seen on the Internet for years and never knew what they were references to. It ended up being more similar to Alien at the end of the film, except there were more survivors.

Alien³ (1992) - I don't care that it's supposed to be "Alien Three", I am only ever going to pronounce this one as "Alien Cubed". I don't know why anyone would make the decision to title a movie this way when it doesn't need it, but that's really the beginning of its problems. It was definitely not as good as the first two, made some incredibly questionable plot choices right at the very beginning, and I was absolutely not interested in the setting or any of the new characters. Somehow, I'd already seen the ending, but the entire rest of the movie was new to me.