Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Not Every Film Can Grab My Attention

My coworkers wanted to go to a double feature at a nearby drive-in, which is the only way I found out there was a Ratchet and Clank movie.

Ratchet dreams of being a Galactic Ranger, but is rejected as too small and weak. Clank crash lands with a warning that Chairman Dreckt is going to wipe the Rangers out with killbots, he and Ratchet save the Rangers, get onto the team, a rift forms between the people on the team who like to plan, and those who like to just shoot things, the team fails at the worst time, they regroup, they beat the bad guys.

If that seems an unenthusiastic plot summary, well, I wasn't exactly engaged. My description after the film was 'thoroughly mediocre', and I stand by it. But the movie's not for me, I know.

Dreckt was blasting planets to pieces and then using the pieces to try and form some dream world. His execution didn't quite match his imagination, but that was the goal. The Rangers ultimately blew the patchwork planet up, which seems like kind of a waste. All those planets blown up, almost all of them uninhabited, sure, but someone could have lived on the new one.

I think I did chuckle a few times at Captain Quark, who is a self-serving buffoon of sorts, but outside of that, I was mostly waiting for it to end. I did keep thinking Dreckt made the same mistake as the mobsters in The Dark Knight, turning to someone they didn't understand to help further their goals, only to find he beyond their control. It probably undersells the evil of corporations, who can trash things but sell people on how it's good to do that, but it's also easier to defeat a single, crazed individual than a monolithic entity with a crack p.r. team.

I will mention all four of my coworkers preferred Ratchet and Clank to the other half of the double feature, Captain America: Civil War. I don't agree, but we'll get to that on Thursday.

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