Film Reviews: Zootopia, Woodlawn, Batman v Superman

I watched a few films over spring break and thought I would state my thoughts on them. So here we go:

Zootopia was a fun movie that had cool characters and good attention to detail. With a few small exceptions, everything in the movie had a purpose which allowed the story to flow seamlessly. Pretty much all the characters were very enjoyable, having great personalities and good motivations. Although the whole animals-being-like-humans premise may not be as original as the film’s trailers acted like it was, the film still did some really creative things with it and created an impressive animal world. Overall, a very good movie.

Woodlawn was a movie that had some potential but wasted most of it. This film just didn’t seem sure about the story it wanted to tell for most of the movie. It had lot of trouble making its characters interesting. Now the film is apparently based on a true story and I don’t know how much of what happens in the movie is what really happened, but there were some things that happened in the movie that weren’t very realistic to me. It’s not that I don’t think those things couldn’t have happened in real life, but with the way things are presented and the fact that you never get know most of the characters well enough to understand their actions, causes the most of the events to not feel very real. I had a feeling of indifference for most of the movie until around the last twenty minutes where it actually gets really interesting, but by then it’s too late. And that frustrates me because it shows that this film did have potential. There could have been a good movie here if the script had been given a few rewrites and/or the direction had been changed up a bit.

Batman v Superman was an awful film. Going into it, I wasn’t expecting anything all that great, but I never could have imagined that it would be this bad. There doesn’t even seem to be a real story in it. It’s just a bunch of events jammed together like puzzle pieces that don’t fit. None of the characters have any depth to them. Neither Batman nor Superman act very much like heroes, and they both have really dumb motivations for fighting each other. This seems to be because the filmmakers are so concerned about playing catch up with Marvel Studios by trying to build an expansive superhero universe as fast as they can that they don’t care if the building blocks for that universe make any sense within the context of the story. So as a result there are a bunch of scenes and characters that have no actual purpose being in the film. But hey, it’s a superhero movie, so it at least has good action, right? Nope! Well… maybe the actual action itself was good, but because of the awful camera-work and editing, I couldn’t tell what was going on in the action scenes most of the time. So ya, this film was terrible and I couldn’t even recommend it to the most hardcore superhero fan.