Monday, July 18, 2011

Super 8

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After witnessing a mysterious train crash, a group of friends in the summer of 1979 begin noticing strange happenings going around in their small town, and begin to investigate into the creepy phenomenon.



The movie is about the strange encounter that Joe Lamb, a 14-year-old boy living in the fictional town of Lillian, and his group of friends when they are filming low budget zombie movie on Super 8 film. It all begins when Joe's best friend Charles Kaznyk wants to make a film to enter a film competition. Charles manages to convince Aliceto be the protagonist's wife in his low budget zombie movie. Joe is the make-up and special effects specialist for the movie, while his other three friends (Preston, Martin and Cary) are the actors, and lighting specialist.

Alice steals her father's car and takes the group to an old train depot where Charles want to film a scene. During the shoot, Joe witnesses a pick-up truck driving onto the tracks, placing itself in the path of an oncoming train. This causes a massive derailment with explosions and flying debris from the train.

In the aftermath of the accident, the group find the area littered with strange white cubes. When they approach the truck, they discover that the driver is Dr. Woodward, their biology teacher. He warns them to never talk about what they saw; otherwise, they and their family will be silence, he yells at them to run. Soon after, the U.S. Air Force, led by Colonel Nelec, arrives to secure the crash site as the kids make their escape.

Over the next couple of days, strange phenomena occur: numerous town dogs have run away, kitchen appliances, car engines, and power lines vanish, and people start to disappear. Dr Woodward, survived the accident, however he is poisoned by Nelec's man when he refuses to answer Nelec's question. The Air Force deliberately starts a wildfire (Operation Walking Distance) outside of town, to evacuate the entire town to a nearby base.

Upon arriving at the base, Joe finds Alice's father, who tells him that a creature had abducted Alice. Hence, Joe, and company sneak back into town and head to their school, where they break into Woodward's stash of confiscated items, thinking he may have hidden documentation about the creature which might help them save Alice. They soon discover papers, film, and audio recordings, revealing that the government had imprisoned an extraterrestrial who crashed on Earth in 1958. The alien only wished to rebuild its ship and return home using the shape-shifting white cubes. However, instead of helping it, the government allowed it to be imprisoned and tortured by the Air Force, who sought to seize its technology. The boys watch a film in which Woodward, a researcher at the time, is being attacked by the alien. This physical contact caused him to form a telepathic bond with the alien, learning that it only wanted to go home. Since then Woodward was sympathize to its plight and wanted to help it. He derailed the train to free it from captivity.

At this juncture, Colonel Nelec and his men storm the school and capture the boys. They place the children on a security bus and head back to the Air Force base. But the alien attacks the bus on the way bak. This results in Nelec and his men being killed, while Joe and his friends manaage to escape. The kids dash through the town, which by now is under heavy fire from malfunctioning military equipment; the military attempts to battle the alien with their malfunctioning equipment.

The boys find the alien's subterranean lair near the cemetery, along with several missing people who have been trapped there by the alien, apparently keeping them as food. They also discover that the town's missing electronics are there too, fused together to create a machine underneath the base of the water tower. Joe manages to rescue Alice, but as they escape, the alien grabs Joe, enabling him to telepathically understand the creature. He tells the creature that it can still live on even after painful events. The alien understands Joe's meaning through their tactile telepathic connection and lets go of him, allowing him and his friends to escape.

All the cubes which have broken free from Air Force transport trucks, as well as loose metal from around the town are attracted to the town's water tower. The cubes begin to align and a ship begins to take form around the water tower, which the alien then enters. Joe's metal locket, which contains a picture of him as a baby with his mother, is also drawn towards the tower. He decides to let it go. With that final piece, the ship materializes and the alien leaves. Everyone watches as the ship takes off toward space.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Shia LaBeouf returns as Sam Witwicky in Transformers: Dark of the Moon. When a mysterious event from Earth's past erupts into the present day, it threatens to bring a war to Earth so big that the Transformers alone will not be able to save us.



The plot of the movie goes back all the way to 1961, depicting the final war between the Autobots and Decepticons, and how the Ark, a Cybertronian spacecraft carrying an invention capable of ending the war crash lands on the far side of Earth's moon. When the crash is detected by NASA, President John F. Kennedy authorizes a mission to travel to the moon explore the craft.

Now, in the present, the Autobots assist the United States military in preventing conflicts around the globe. During investigating suspected alien technology on a mission in Chernobyl, Optimus Prime finds a fuel cell from the Ark. It is then discovered that the spacecraft had had survived its journey from Cybertron. Not long after the discovery, the Autobots are attacked by Shockwave who manages to escape. The Autobots soon learn of the top-secret mission to the moon by President John F. Kennedy, so the Autobots travel there to explore the Ark. They discover a comatose Sentinel Prime, the former Autobot leader. After returning to Earth, Optimus uses the energy of his Matrix of Leadership to revive Sentinel Prime....

And that is about the only thing that was gong for the plot, o that and Bay's action scenes in this movie here are bigger, better and more brutal than any in the first two films. However, it's still tough at times to tell the robots apart in battle. It was no surprise that Sentinel Prime turned out to be the bad guy.

Although Shia is the main character that's supposed to weave and connect the plot together, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley presence in the movie just make you go ?? I mean sure, she makes you forget all about Megan Fox within moments of seeing her onscreen, but its only lasts for a few seconds. Megan Fox's character had a little more dimension to it. When the story goes on, I kind of get the feeling that her character was was there for the sake of giving Shia's character some motivation to storm into the war-zone area to risk his life to save her and at the same time foil the Decepticons plan to overtake the world (enslaving the human population into doing their bidding to repair their home planet, which was destroyed in the end). Other than that, her character was a little redundant, or it could have been written in much better.

Overall, the movie was ok. It had it's funny moments, but other times it was a little too draggy and the scenes with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley's character was just a bore. Maybe it would have been better if there was more of a backstory on her character or just something for her to do rather than just well.. stand there. Her character could have had so much potential to make the storyline more enjoyable. I still like the robots better.... lol