Wow, among the marvel movies this one is up there, I really liked how they wrote the characters, how complex they are, how thin is the line between the good and the bad... it was well written, well acted, well done. It’s good fun like marvel movies must be, but it’s also heartbreaking and touching. The scenes with Erik and Charles together were lovely, making it harder when they separate, even if we knew it would happen.
Details:
It shows the main characters as children: Erik Lensherr is a child in Poland in 1944 and when the nazis separate him from his parents he almost breaks the gate and pulls four men with him before being hit on the head. After that, a doctor wants him to show him what he can do, but he can’t even move a coin, so he orders for her mother to be brought in. He tells Erik to move the coin or he’ll shoot her, and he does. Such is the pain and the anger that Erik kills the two soldiers wearing helmets and messes up everything made of metal in two rooms. The doctor understands that they can unlock his powers with anger and pain... poor kid.
Charles Xavier is in New York in 1944, living in a big house when one night finds his mother in the kitchen who offers to make him a hot chocolate, but apparently she’s the kind of rich woman that never steps foot in the kitchen and never prepares anything for her son, so he understands that’s not his mother and communicates telepathically with her. She reveals her true self: a little girl, all blue with red hair named Raven: “you’re not scared of me?” and Charles smiles: “I always believed I couldn’t be the only one in the world” and tells her that she can take all the food she wants without stealing, and she smiles so prettily :-) - there was a picture of his mom there for her to copy.
We move to 1962. In England Charles studies genetics and uses the phrase “mutant and proud” as a sort of chat-up line, introducing Raven as his sister. He doesn’t understand how this hurts her, ‘mutant and proud’ when she can’t go out of the house without hiding herself - she shows her blonde persona, not her true self. She tries to talk to him about it, but he can’t understand her feelings because, let’s face it, it’s much easier for him, nobody would suspect a thing about his powers unless he chooses to tell them.
Erik is in Switzerland and still has that coin. He threatens a bank director to get the location of doctor Klaus Schmidt, and he’s told he’s in Argentina. Erik goes there, and kills three Germans after saying “I’m Frankenstein’s monster”.
We meet the villain: in Nevada, we see Emma Frost and ‘her associate’ Sebastian Shaw. There’s two more with them, a guy who can create tornados, I’d say, and Azazel, red and with a tail, he can teleport. Emma Frost is a telepath and also can turn her body into diamond. Shaw is planning to start World War Three.
Moira, the agent who saw Emma Frost and the other mutants with her (without Emma detecting her, maybe she was too busy?), asks Xavier’s help, now a professor of genetics after passing his final exams.
Charles reads in her mind about Emma and the others.
In Nevada, we see that Shaw himself has powers when a grenade explodes in his hands and he easily contains the fire with no trouble, saying also “I’ve got the power to absorb energy, keeps me young” - thank you, so that’s why he looks exactly like he did when he met Erik.
The Russians made the protective helmet for Shaw.
Charles and Raven go to Virginia to talk about genetics, and since they don’t believe a word of his theories on mutation, he proves that he can read their minds. When he mentions a secret business regarding nuclear missiles, they start yelling that he’s a spy, so Raven stands up and assumes a man’s form in front of them. Maybe she wanted to get it over with or something, but I felt she wanted to protect Charles.
The people there want them out but a man in black says “I’ll take them”. Charles is interested in Shaw and calls Moira too. They find Shaw’s location, as did Erik: he’s on a ship. Erik is alone, Charles has the coast guard with him. Erik attacks Shaw but Emma protects him. Things don’t look too well for Charles’ allies because he can’t help much and tornado guy messes with their ships. Erik helps them when he tries again to kill Shaw, breaking up his ship with its anchor. Shaw escapes on a submarine. Erik keeps trying, even if he risks drowning, but Charles dives in and stops him, saves him.
They go together to the “Covert Cia Research Base”, where they meet Hank, another mutant; he had kept it a secret until Charles said it out loud. Hank and Raven’s powers are both physical, so they kind of connect. He asks her to take her blood because he wants to create a serum that will give him a normal appearance. She’d like that too, so she agrees. Erik takes Shaw’s file and starts to leave but stays after talking to Charles. While talking to the man in black, Erik states that it should be only them to go out and find other mutants, and I’m happy to say that Charles sides with him. Hank built Cerebro and Charles uses it to find others. Charles and Erik go out recruiting, a girl working at a night club, a taxi driver, a kid in solitary confinement, another kid trying to pick up a girl.. they even introduce themselves to Wolverine, but he sends them away bluntly. It was very nice to see Erik and Charles together :-D The kids talk about their powers, and choose their nicknames. Raven chooses Mystique, the driver is called Darwin and sticks with that because he can adapt, Cassidy chooses Banshee because his power is a sort of supersonic scream. The girl has wings and can fly so she’s Angel. Alex Summers liked to be alone because his power is destructive, and Raven calls him Havoc. She also gives Charles and Xavier their future names :-) Xavier is disappointed when he sees that they were partying, but come on, Charles can’t be more than thirty, he was a little boy in 1944, and I suppose Moira is too. Erik can be a few years older but not much, and yet they all act like they’re adults and the others are children. He was partying too when he met Moira..
Moira’s team plus Erik and Charles go to Russia but Shaw is not there. Erik attacks alone and Xavier goes too because “I can’t leave him alone”. Erik traps Emma to the iron bed and almost kills her but listens to Charles and stops. The reason Shaw is not there is that he’s attacking the Cia facility: Shaw is bulletproof and very strong, he kills many agents helped by Azazel. The kids are terrified then Shaw makes a speech on how they should join him, and Angel does. Darwin tries to get her back and Shaw kills him. Erik will tell them “we can avenge him”. Charles takes them to his house (that will later become his school, so rather big, ‘house’ is not really appropriate) and Erik: “honestly Charles I don’t know how you survived living in such hardship” :-p Xavier helps them control their powers and Hank makes them things that help. Hank says that Raven is forty (?) but her powers keep her young.
Erik trains too, trying to control it. Charles access a lost happy memory in his mind, he says “there is so much more to you than you know, not just pain and anger”.
Erik kind of bonds with Raven, telling her to stop hiding herself, so when Hank comes to her with his serum, she doesn’t want it anymore. She tells him that they are beautiful as they are and that “society should aspire to more like us” and turns blue, but Hank tells her that nobody will think their mutant form beautiful, and when she turn back blonde, he says “you’re beautiful now”, which makes her sad and is a real blow, she seemed to think that they liked each other but, you know, it’s hard to know if someone likes the real you if you never show your real self.
Erik and Charles play chess, Erik says “we are the next stage of human evolution” and talk about the fact that he will kill Shaw when they find him; Charles:”killing Shaw will not bring you peace” - “peace was never an option”.
Hank, who told Raven that “we need this cure”, tries the serum on his feet and at first they turn normal but then the mutation takes over and he becomes the blue Beast we know.
Raven shows up in Erik’s bed but he tells her to go; she’s also looking like her blonde self, and he encourages her to show the real Raven and calls her blue form “perfection”, and tells her “have you ever looked at a tiger and thought you ought to cover it up?” and “you’re an exquisite creature Raven” and gives her a kiss. Then she goes in the kitchen to talk to Charles, and his reaction is not the same, he doesn’t like to see her blue and calls it her “cosmetic problem”... I wanted to shout at him, insensitive rich boy, who doesn’t see that he hurts her. She says that she always thought it would forever be the two of them against the world but “you want to be part of it”.
Hank gives them suits and appears in front of them all blue and hairy, saying “it didn’t attack the cells, it enhanced them”, and Alex names him Beast.
Out there the war is about to start, if a Russian ship will cross the border line they will all start shooting, the sea is full of American and Soviet ships. Shaw’s men killed the crew of one ship so that it wouldn’t stop and cross it, so Charles uses his power to have another Russian ship destroy it in order to stop the war.
Shaw is in a submarine nearby and Banshee becomes their sonar to find it, and then Erik uses his powers to lift the entire submarine out of the water and make it fly; tornado-guy intervenes and he drops it on an island beach. They crash too, and we see Charles saving her by helping enter the plane again and then Erik saving him by covering him and keeping him attached to the plane. Lovely.
Shaw tries to turn himself into a nuclear bomb or something. The mutants fight while Erik goes after Shaw. He disables the nuclear reactor first, then confronts Shaw.
Shaw seems to be winning, but then Erik manages to take the helmet off his head so that Charles can freeze him. Erik wears the helmet instead so that he can’t stop him. Erik kills Shaw with the coin, which enters Shaw’s forehead and exits the back of his head making Charles scream (but I guess Erik can’t hear him now).
All the mutants are considered dangerous so the governments together plan to destroy the island and kill them all, sacrificing Moira. Erik comes out of the submarine flying, apparently now much more confident in his powers, and tells them all how society will never accept them, and that right now all American and Soviet ships are about to attack them. When they do, he stops all the missiles in midair and then turns them around; Charles tries to stop him saying they’re just following orders but “I’ve been at the mercy of men just following orders, never again!” so they fight but Erik keeps sending the missiles towards the ships. Moira starts shooting at him who deflects all the bullets until one of them hits Charles in the back, my face like Raven’s at this point, so Erik stops thinking about the missiles which explode in midair, and the soldiers are safe. Erik hurries to Charles side, takes the bullet out, holds him in his arms and tells him “I want you by my side” and “we’re brothers, you and I; all of us together, protecting each other, we want the same thing” but Charles tells him “I’m sorry but we do not” so Erik motions to Moira to take care of him while he tells the other that “the society won’t accept us” and “who’s with me” and Raven goes. She approaches Charles first, and he tells her to go with Erik, that that’s what she wants.. :-/
The three mutants who were on Shaw’s side join him too, of course, what can they do (three= tornado guy, Angel and Azazel).
Charles can’t feel his legs of course, it’s shocking news to him but we knew that.
We see Charles and Moira at his place, he plans to open an Academy there, and Moira promises she’ll never tell where they are - really? I mean, he’s home, certainly they must have his address somewhere......
Charles wipes the part of her memory that concerns them.
Erik attacks the Cia facility where Emma is still prisoners and encourages her to join them. He seems to have a different helmet, and the last lines are: “Erik, I believe” - “I prefer Magneto”.
Erik - Michael Fassbender (I mean, wow)
Charles - James McAvoy
Raven - Jennifer Lawrence
Shaw - Kevin Bacon
Moira - Rose Byrne
Young Raven - Morgan Lily
Man in black - Oliver Platt
Hank - Nicholas Hoult
Emma - January Jones
ITA X-men l’inizio
I like this movie, I think it’s very much underrated. It’s a complex and psychological drama about love and relationship-issues. Basically a man uses sex and gentleness to gain power over the woman he learns to love, but is incapable of a real relationship. He’s not a really bad person and he does love her, but doesn’t know how to, he has a pathological need to control and assert his power over her. He’s very manipulative and demands to be obeyed.
She’s a good girl, a grown woman who keeps excusing and forgiving his odd behaviour because of how he’s sweet and lovable when all is good and because of how he makes her feel passionate and desired when they have sex. She does everything he tells her/orders her to do, charmed by him and addicted to the way he makes her feel desired and trasgressive.
First time I saw it years ago I was simply curious but knew nothing about it really, only that Kim Basinger danced a striptease on the ‘you can leave your hat on’ song, as if that was what the movie was about. It isn’t. And it’s not a porn movie, at all. There is a little nudity, a couple of shots at her breasts and bum, but for once I can accept that, it was kind of pertinent to the story and was never vulgar.
Details:
Elizabeth (Basinger) meets John (Mickey Rourke) for the first time while out shopping for a party her gallery is planning. He’s very cute and stares at her in a kind but provocative way, and then later they see each other again at the market and he approaches her smiling. They eat something together, laugh, and then he gives her the 300dollars shawl she liked, that he had seen her looking at at the market but that she couldn’t afford to buy; he puts it on her shoulders embracing her in his arms.
He tells her: “don’t say I didn’t warn you, okay?” and that’s the only thing I don’t understand of this movie: what warning? when? about what? Anyone can explain that?
They walk and have a good time, then he takes her to a friend’s place, where he starts making the bed in front of her. This annoys her: “you’re taking a hell of a lot for granted. Either that or you’re practicing to be a maid.” He stops, they talk a bit about his job “I buy and sell money”, and when she calls it a risky business he says “not riskier than you coming here. Out here where there’s no neighbours around, we hardly know each other” - he’s very good here, looking and sounding sexy and frightening at the same time - “I mean I don’t know you, you really don’t know me” and even “there’s no-one to hear you if you called out” and she’s suddenly like “I don’t like this anymore, I want to go home”. Of course she does, I mean, there’s the smile and the deep eyes and the soft voice but it’s true, they don’t know each other and this is getting a bit weird..
The next day he sends her flowers and when they meet again he buys her balloons, has her go alone on the wheel and tells the guy who operates it to stop it when she’s right at the top and leaves her there the time of a coffee at a bar. She’s angry of course, she hits him with the balloons and he lets her, calming her down and winning her over again, and they soon make peace because we see them walking and kissing with the balloons in her hand - and if you pause that moment, it is a Beautiful picture, like a painting, really.
When they go to her place, suddenly he says “take off your dress” - “what?” and his voice becomes sweeter “will you take off your dress?” and she does, keeping a shirt on; “may I blindfold you?” and he says that if she doesn’t want to she only has to ask him to leave, but she says “I don’t want you to leave” so he smiles because he won again, and slowly blindfolds her and then he asks if it frightens and excites her and she says yes both times. He moves an ice cube over her face, her breast, her body.. and we see no more. This is what I was on about talking about power. He got her to do what he wanted even if at first she wasn’t keen on the idea at all, basically it was ‘do as I want or you’ll never see me again’, which is not a nice thing to say. It is what you say to children: be quiet or we leave and go home right now, stop running in the street or you’ll be grounded for a week, that sort of thing, only children need to learn many things for their own good, adults should not treat each other like that.
We have a small scene of Elizabeth at work to show that she has a day life, and then she goes to his place. He says that he loves to cook and that he bought something for her and places it next to him, away from where she’s sitting, and looks at her waiting for her to get up and come and get it. Power again, having her go to him instead of handing it to her like any normal person would do.
It’s a gold watch: “Elizabeth, each day at 12 o’clock, would you look at that watch and think of me touching you? Would you do that for me?” - “yes”. Power again, to sort of control her mind when he’s not around.
She keeps thinking of him and at work she tells her friend that she’s been hypnotized because she can’t concentrate anymore, and later she touches herself thinking of him.
Next they go to the apartment she shares with her friend from work Molly: he chops red peppers without any shirt on, which is worth a mention, then he tells her to sit down and close her eyes; she does so and he feeds her different things - omg I felt so strongly this scene, I could never do that, I feel sick only thinking about it; anyway, they start with fruit and stuff, then cough syrup and green peppers, then he pours stuff all over her, and all the time she keeps her eyes closed as he wants, as if not daring to disobey or she might lose him.
She’s not upset when she hears that Molly slept with her ex Bruce - she herself told her to go out and have dinner with him in her place because she was busy.
Liz asks John to come to a party to meet her friends, but he says that he doesn’t want to meet anybody, he only wants to be with her, and he tells her that she’ll never have to do the dishes again, he says that he’ll cook, he’ll shop, he’ll dress her, feed her, undress her, bathe her.. “and I’ll take care of you” which is all very seductive but also kinda wrong because she’s not a pet or a baby.
He tells her to see her friends during the day because he wants the nights to be for the two of them. When he receives a call and has to go out, he tells her to stay and wait for him, and he stays out a long time. She looks around, and his closet looks like Monk’s closet, everything’s perfect, tidy, and then he calls her saying he’d been wondering if she had looked around at his things, closet, drawers, but also that he thought she’s not that kind of person, that she’s a good girl, and he asks her to tell him the truth, that she can trust him and it’ll be their secret, and he’s frightening again, and also making her feel bad about what she did without ever apologizing for leaving her alone for so long, demanding she wait for him instead of go home and do what she wants.
She admits “yes, I’ve been a nosy parker” - “shame on you” and he hangs up. When he gets back he says “I didn’t think you’d be here”, and he tells her that she’s been bad, and to face the wall because he has to spank her, that he’s not kidding. This is unacceptable, she gets angry and moves to leave, then tells him instead “who the fuck do you think you are?” and she tries to hit him but he grabs her, carries her on a table and penetrates her after ripping her underwear off.
She’s very shaken. Next we see her waking up on the bed, he made her breakfast already. He buys her new clothes, his style, without asking if she likes them or not and not caring. We see a few mixed images of them together, laughing or fighting; he buys her sexy underwear, takes her to a clock tower and have sex there. He cooks and feeds her soup, again saying that he’ll take care of her, and now she asks “how did you know I’d respond to you the way I have?” and he says “I saw myself in you” which is not clear to me what he means exactly, but I know that dangerous people know how to treat people to get them to do what they want, just like conmen learn how to get people to trust them.
Liz tells Molly “I can’t figure this guy out” which is part of the reason she’s so taken, and she agrees that it Might be true love...
Elizabeth follows John at work and brings him lunch, admires his office, but he says nothing after the first “what are you doing here?” so she gives up and leaves, but he phones his secretary “don’t let her leave” and she hurries! Everybody must obey him...
Liz tells him that sometimes she wonders how it’d be like to be one of the boys so he leaves her a note next to some boxes: “open them, get dressed, meet me in the lobby at eight. John”. It’s a man’s suit, with a bowtie a hat and fake moustache. They go to dinner and he talk to her as if she was a man, talking about how life is hard and saying “only thing that keeps me going is this chick. I got this chick” using words like unbelievable and ‘so hot’ and “I can hardly believe it” and then he kisses her.
On the street, people on a car call them faggots; she screams angrily at them but when they stop the car and chase them they run. When cornered, she kicks one in the groin while he fights the other one, until she picks up the knife they lost; one of them runs away and she cuts the other’s ass so he runs too. She feels inebriated from the experience, tells him “God I love you” and he undress her there under the water pouring down, rips off her top and they have wild sex.
Later on, in a shop, she likes a necklace and he says “then take it” and walks away, and she steals it. He can manipulate her to do anything.
He buys a bed and tells her to lie down and spread her legs in front of the lady seller. He buys a whip and tries it on her leg while in the shop.
The strip scene starts with a close up shot on the button “power”: it’s to start the music of course, but it’s also very representative of what is going on. She’s wearing the clothes he chose for her, and jokingly she plays sexy dancing around, undressing for him while he watches her. She goes out on the balcony and takes it all off and they kiss.
There’s a small scene with a painter, her day life going on.
John wants to play a game, he throws some money on the floor and tells her to crawl towards him. She doesn’t like it, she tries to please him but then stops saying that it’s stupid. His only reply is “crawl”, said twice. “I don’t want to” - “get on all fours and crawl. I don’t want to argue with you, now crawl” and he takes off his belt. She looks scared, he insists, she says no, he beats the floor with the belt, she screams, he tells her to pick up the money, she yells that she doesn’t want to, he insists, she cries then picks up the money and throws it at him. Now he smiles, he tells her that she loves that game, she screams that she hates it, but then he kisses her.
At work she walks like a zombie; Bruce comes to take Molly out, she’s surprised and looks at them go out. It’s not that she’s jealous or anything, it felt more like she was looking at her past life ending, or at the memory of how she once was.
John leaves a message for her to meet him in a hotel room; she goes, finds the room empty, he phones to say “Elizabeth I love you, I have something I want you to do for me”, and there’s a blindfold in a drawer, but she doesn’t like the idea. She undresses and waits for him looking all sexy in her underwear, but when he arrives he only says “it was a simple thing I asked you to do, now do it!” so she puts it on, and again he says that he loves her. A woman comes in and starts touching her, ultimately taking off her blindfold. During all this Elizabeth looks very uncomfortable. When John starts touching that woman, looking at Elizabeth to make sure she’s watching him, she can’t bear it anymore, she gets up, fights and runs out. He runs after her, asks her how it felt to be out of control. She runs into a nightclub where lots of men are looking at a man and a woman having sex, and they look at her, she’s crying, she starts kissing a man under John’s eyes until he comes closer and kiss each other.
At the party for the gallery that they’ve been talking about throughout the whole movie, she looks like she feels out of place, like she lacks air. The old painter is probably the only one who notices her crying in a corner. She runs to the bathroom, feels sick. Later, in bed with John, she cries while he sleeps, then she starts taking her things. He wakes up and sighs, watching her pack a bag.
He says “you leaving? You won’t stay?” - she looks at him with tears in her eyes, he sighs and turns his back, then he tells her something about him, youngest of six brothers, with parents who retired and now he supports them. She says “It’s too late”. He tells her that there’s been a lot of other women “but I’ve never felt anything like this before” and “I never counted on loving you so much” - which may be part of why he pushed it so far, as if he wanted to push her away maybe.
She says “you knew it would be over when one of us said stop” and “you wouldn’t say it. I almost waited too long” - she knew it too, very well, which is why she never said no to anything he told her/ordered to do.
Liz tells him that she’ll send someone to get her stuff, and he can only call her name before she goes out the door. He doesn’t move, stares at the door and then says “I love you”. She’s out already, walking away. He keeps looking at the door: “would you please come back... by the time I count to fifty?” and he starts counting, pacing the room, while she walks away crying, he counts and looks at the door, and they both look sad.
The last image shows her walking outside, while he moves back into his bedroom.
ITA nove settimane e mezzo
I don’t like this movie. Cruise plays his usual hero characters, Cameron Diaz is ok, I like her, and it’s an action movie and that’s ok, but the June character is so absurd the whole thing is really unbearable. They’ve achieved a new peak on the whole ‘normal person who turns out better than Rambo’ theme.
Also, it upset me all the good agents who thought they were on the right side and got killed by Roy. I know this shouldn’t be an issue, but in this movie it is, a big one.
Details:
Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) bumps into June Havens (Cameron Diaz) twice at the airport. At first they tell her the plane’s completely booked, but then they call her to go in and it’s half-empty. The Cia was monitoring and thought she might be an accomplice so they decided to let her go in.
They’re on the same flight of course and they talk a bit. She’s restoring her late dad’s old car, and says she wishes “someday” to get in the car and just keep driving until she reaches Cape Horn. Roy says “yeah someday. That’s a dangerous word” and “It’s really just code for ‘never’” which is the only thing I liked.
There’s a bit of turbulence, she goes to the restroom and he starts fighting the other passengers, really agents I guess, and kills them all, even the pilots. When she’s out it’s all over, she goes straight to him and kisses him, and then he tells her “no need to panic, I’ve contained the situation” and “we’ve lost the pilots”; he tells her that he shot them dead, and then lands the plane on a field. He drugs her to make her sleep and instructs her that ‘bad people’, meaning the Cia, will ask her about him. She’s to say she doesn’t know him and she’s to stay away from them. She wakes up at home, goes meeting her sister, and she gets surrounded by agents and can’t avoid getting in a car with them. Suddenly they start getting shot one by one and Roy lands on the car she’s in, which is out of control since the driver is dead, and she keeps screaming :-/ (which is understandable but it was annnoying nonetheless). Roy keeps shooting people then gets in the car and manages to stop it. She says “please stop shooting people”. She runs away, goes to a diner with her friend Rodney the firefighter, looking like she’s got stuff to explain but can’t find the words. She finally tells him everything but of course he doesn’t believe her. Roy shows up saying they must stick together, then he cuffs her to him and takes her away, shooting Rodney in the leg when he tries to stop him, but without lasting damage. Roy tells June that he’ll look like a hero, it’ll be good for him: “yeah we should all get shot now and then” she says, and then he says that he warned her not to get on the plane when he said that things happen for a reason: “next time try: June, if you get on this plane you will fucking die” and then he stops the car letting her go, and he makes a scene about her being safer with him and about wasting time with her when someone else needs him, you know, he makes her feel bad because she’s not grateful that after killing people and crashing the plane she was in, he drugged her, killed more people, shot her friend, abducted her... how very ungrateful of her.
Anyway, this is a movie so she sticks with him which makes no sense at all.
He explains that they are after a battery called Zephyr that never runs out, and that Fitz was his partner but intended to sell the battery after killing the kid who invented it, Simon Feck, so Roy escaped taking Simon to safety (Paul Dano). I think Roy said Simon was very young, still in high school, but he didn’t look so young at all, maybe I misheard?
Fitz declared him a traitor. When bad guys attack them, she almost kills him “you keep saying my name, it’s freaking me out”. He drugs her again, she passes out, they get captured and she sees bits here and there: Roy saying he’s got it under control, then them on a plane parachuting her down, then on a boat... she wakes up on a tropical island wearing a bikini. He teaches her how to free herself when someone’s holding her (... :-/ seriously?).
She takes her sister’s call and the bad guys trace it and attack. She’s too scared to go into an unsafe-looking-helicopter, so he uses the Vulcan nerve pinch on her and she’s out again. She wakes up on a train, Roy with Simon. She finally starts getting that she’d better not answer the phone, then an assassin attack them, he’s come to take Simon and kill Roy. He’s a professional assassin that Roy knows well, and she’s able to free herself by doing what Roy told her... seriously? And she hurts him with a knife to his chest... and Roy finishes him off.
At a hotel in Austria, Roy goes out and she secretly follows him: he meets a woman and says about her, about June “she’s nobody, just someone I picked up along the way” and then they talk about prices, looking like he wants to sell the battery. She’s picked up by Cia, and talks to director Isabel George (director of counter espionage) and Isabel tells her that Roy used her from the start. June agrees to help them, and from her hotel room she sends a signal when Roy and the battery are both there. He says “that hurt more than I thought it would”. The Cia bursts in, takes Simon and her away. Roy tries to escape, and it looks like he was shot and fell in the water, with the battery. June goes home, attends her sister’s wedding, then she takes her dad’s old GTO that looks pretty much restored to me, although she was supposed to do it but didn’t have time because of Roy, and she goes to the Amapola address she had seen on Roy’s phone, thinking it might be a safe house since he was monitoring the place. It turns out it’s actually Roy’s parents’ house. They think they won the “publishers clearing house” twice, whatever that is, and the wife says that Frank doesn’t even remember buying the tickets, and he knows he didn’t. June finds pictures of Roy, and the woman, Molly Knight, says that’s her son Matthew who died in Kuwait. Knight, very appropriate. Too bad she’s called June Havens which has nothing to do with ‘day’.
June leaves a message on her phone for whoever might be listening to it, and they get her. She finds herself in Spain, drugged by the bad guy Antonio Quintana with some kind of truth serum.
She starts talking about Miller, saying how he knew that she was following him and he did it to sent her home to her sister’s wedding, to protect her. The body was never found so she’s sure that he’s still alive even when Antonio says he’s dead.
Roy is there to save Simon who is in Fitz’s hands, then he sees that she’s there too and goes to save her first. He moves around fighting and shooting, but she’s still under the drug’s effect so she starts talking, saying life with him is exciting and that she wants to have sex, and then “you don’t seem very happy to see me Roy” only because he’s busy preventing them from getting shot, so to prove her she’s wrong he simply walks straight to her to kiss her - saved only by the usual hero-luck.
They escape on a motorbike, and since they are in Spain there’s the inevitable running of the bulls and the corrida, and then she turns around in the bike and takes his weapons and shoots at the bad guys, taking down a car, while the whole lot of them hasn’t been able to make a single scratch on their bike *rollingeyes*
Roy goes to save Simon and to do so he gives Fitz the battery, which is unstable and explodes killing him. Roy has been shot to protect Simon, so they call for help. He’s taken care of in a hospital, the Cia thank him and Isabel says she trusted the wrong man and that Simon is happy now because he’s got a new lab, and also that they sent June home saying that as an asset he gave up all that: a personal life with friends and family.
When he’s alone, June shows up dressed as a nurse, she drugs him with Brotine Zero - the same thing he had given her - and takes him away: “don’t worry Roy, I got his, it’s time for a vacation”.
He wakes up in the car, on a beach, wearing shorts. “what day is it?” - “someday” and then they go to Cape Horn.
In the last scene we hear Molly’s voice saying they just received tickets to Cape Horn: “did you order tickets to South America?” and “you don’t know what you’re typing on that computer Frank” and “we must have won them!” and “well, we’re going aren’t we?”
ITA Knight and day innocenti bugie
In the order they aired on tv.
1 - Love never dies
It’s Andrea’s funeral. A man says “I’ll have her”. Melinda wants to see her and help her. She goes to an ‘expert’ to learn about dark spirits; he does a research for her, this professor. He finds that in 1939 this man Romano turned lots of people to the dark side, and with all them he committed suicide. Now he’s still recruiting souls. He never killed, himself, he convinced them, they were all acting of their own free will, 100 or more people. Andrea died in the accident, her brother Mitch is alive, and she can’t forgive herself because when she realized this, she wished, she prayed for things to be the other way around. For a moment she wished he was dead :( Melinda tells Mitch, and they talk to each other through her and make peace and forgive themselves and Andrea’s safe now and Romano can’t have her now.
2 - Love still won’t die
Melinda sees a boy shoplifting and calls his mom, and she meets Delia. The guy who was researching her name during the last episode, is hit by a car and dies. He haunts her now. It turns out he was an ex-boyfriend, they went out in college for a year, then he left her when she told him her secret. He married but was always obsessed with her. He’s not willing to let her go, he wants to be together again. He messes with her house, throwing Jim’s stuff around, but that’s it. It kind of ended too easily, she tells him she’ll never forget how he hurt her, that his is not love, and he calms down and says sorry (...) both to her and to his ex-wife. Just like that.
3 - Drowned lives
A couple bought a house in town, and there’s the ghost of a little girl causing trouble. She drowned in the pool, and her brother tried to help her but couldn’t. The mother was locked in her room and dad was away. Melinda brings them together to talk to her and make peace.
4 - The ghost within
Melinda and Delia buy some stuff for Melinda’s shop and there’s a ghost that can’t see her, and is troubled, and breaks lots of stuff in her shop. How can she keep it open with her hours and her troubles....
The ghost wants her to destroy those wood images, she burns them but they come back so she goes again to that professor for help. It’s an autistic man who died leaving his autistic girlfriend behind, and wants her to be ok and meet her mother again.
5 - Giving up the ghost
A dead baseball player now haunts the body of a young player. He’s full of anger, he was high when he played and when he died while driving. She makes him realize the coach did not kill him but tried to help him and in doing so got hurt ending his career. He understands and leaves the kid alone
6 - A grave matter
A ghost, Adam Godfrey, tells Melinda that he’s been buried under the wrong name: Steven Burris, and there’s a ghost woman following Delia because of a bag Delia bought recently. Melinda finds the note she was looking for in the bag.
Steve never actually died, only Adam. Steven fakes his death but now tells the truth to his grieving wife who’s happy to have him back.
In the last scene, a creepy, bleeding ghost comes to her with obscure words.
7 - The woman of his dreams
Melinda goes away to her mom who is about to have a knee-surgery or something. Jim’s alone at home and strange things happen: lights going off, beetles everywhere, a naked woman in his dreams, surgeons, and the beetles even follow him outside, on him, which freaked Delia out. Jim: “I should go. Look you have my cell right? You call me in case anything goes wrong?” Delia: “yeah. Just as long as the beetles don’t form a gang and come after me I think I’ll be fine” and Jim “ok” and adds seriously “if they do, call me” :lol:
Jim tells Melinda and she tells him to go see professor Payne. Jim finds out who is the girl in his dreams, a model who died recently, and also a girl that Jim knew as a kid. A girl who tried to change herself to please people, to be as pretty as people wanted her, and had plastic surgery and died during the operation. She was worried for her sister about to follow her career.
For once it was an episode with a ghost haunting Jim :-)
Him’s friend takes a fancy on Delia.
8 - A vicious cycle
Jim took Melinda camping, and they stumble on a ghost, Anna, a woman who died twenty years or thirty years before. Her husband used to beat her so she took her three-year-old daughter and ran away but died. Anne’s husband told Lanie that she had left her because she was crazy because he didn’t want her to know the truth and hate him. Now he has to confess, to make Lanie understand and stop her from marrying Todd, who abuses her.
9 - The night we met
Melinda gets scared seeing Jim at work during a big fire; the anniversary of when they met is near, she thinks he forgot and we see how they met on the job - his job, he was there for a fire. Is he a firefighter or a paramedic?
Professor Payne goes to her shop “do you claim to have supernatural powers?” “it sometimes seems so” which doesn’t sound like the truth to me. She asks him “if somebody said to you that there would be five signs and then death would come, what would you think?”, he jokes and she “I’m being serious!” - “that’s what scares me”, but still doesn’t answer.
Melinda investigates a fire because she saw a ghost on fire. The ghost, Warren Chen (Tim Kang), everybody thinks he set the fire the first time and died in it, but he didn’t, his partner did and he just happened to be there. He couldn’t let it go because now his partner was living with his wife.
Delia shares a memory of her husband Charlie: he always forgot their anniversary, and when one day she confronted him on that he said “it’s just one day, what’s one day confronted to being married to you every single day” ... But of course Jim did not forget their anniversary!
10 - The curse of the ninth
Jared, the singer of the band Crimson Doves, died and the others could never play again, it was like a curse... Brandon has two ghosts around! His father, stopping him from playing what he likes because he wants him to finish his symphony, and Jared trying to stop his dad from sabotaging him.
Brandon’s dad is proud of him and tells Melinda that Jared is the one sabotaging him. Jared doesn’t want to cross over. He was full of envy for his music. Dad helps him playing the piano and Brandon plays again - it’s much much easier to believe in ghosts when, like in this show, they actually DO stuff that you can see, in the real world...
Brandon’s dad crosses over, but Jared refuses her help and tells her there are others who want him and that they’ll see each other again.
Ned, Delia’s son, finds out that she sees ghosts and wants her help, but Melinda never saw Charlie. They were together twelve years. Jim talks to Ned.
11 - Cat’s claw
Melinda sees the ghost of an adventurer who never came back from his expedition through the jungle. Melinda goes to professor Payne, and strange things happen to him, things moving and such.
Payne goes to her drunk and the ghost enters him to tell her to go save the woman who went to the jungle with him, and they go and save her. She took too many pills. She’s safe and the ghost can cross over now. Melinda told Rick Payne her secret and he promised to keep it.
Melinda has us notice that Payne has a wedding ring on, but looks sad when she mentions it. When he gets home he shouts I’m home, like somebody’s there, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anybody around. He gets drunk before going to Melinda’s house, and at the end when he goes back home we see a woman closing a window.
12 - Dead to rights
A man’s in a coma. His parents won’t accept it, won’t let him go. His wife wants to pull the plug but they say she wants to kill him for his money. Melinda talks to the parents and wife together telling them what Hugh wants, to let him go and stop fighting each other.
Ned tries to give away his father’s stuff because watching it makes Delia sad, but she doesn’t want, at first, then they talk it over and reach a compromise, giving part of it away.
Melinda sees two latin words on Jim’s back and Rick Payne tells her it means : death of a loved one
13 - Deja boo
Melinda and Jim have a couple for dinner. She’s pregnant, and there’s a ghost attached to her. Holly and Scott.
Tim, Jim’s friend, comes to the shop to see Delia, with an excuse :-) - he can’t work out a matrioska? Seriously?- He buys a candle and then he leaves it on Delia’s car with a note “turns out I don’t have a sister. Hope to see you again. Tim” Nice :)
Melinda’s ghost is a mystery. The same face, but he appears to her in different ways, different clothes, different names, like he’s all those four men. Melinda asks again Payne’s help - they are kind of funny: Payne “I’m a little tired of you using me just for my brain” - “if only that was possible, but so much of your mouth comes with it” :-p
This Eric ghost was using the identities of three dead man for fraud, and then also collecting stuff about them. “I died four times” he says. He’s Eric but he remembers dying as Richard, Oscar and Johnny. He says he saw the light, went into it, and came back. She considers reincarnation, it’s like the soul comes back until he gets it right, and now maybe he’s about to be born again, as Holly’s child, and he doesn’t want that. Melinda thinks that Eric will kill Holly’s baby to avoid coming back, but the baby’s fine, and she’s a girl! They call her Erika, but Erik’s still here, not inside her. Melinda keeps feeling sick and thinks she’s pregnant and Erik’s soul will reincarnate in her baby. At the end Erik crosses over and Melinda’s pregnancy test comes out negative. It’s lovely how much Jim loves her, so so much it’s touching, it’s not a thing that really exists.
Melinda and Jim give Delia and Tim Broadway ticket to help them. She shows up at the date but he doesn’t.
14 - Speed demon
Melinda sees a ghost saying that someone is gonna die. She calls a skeleton but it looked to me like someone with a bad mask.
When Melinda asks, Delia tells her that Tim didn’t show up.
Ned is hanging out with older guys. They do illegal car races. A racer, Gordon Pike, died a year ago when his car blew up during a race. His girlfriend Cindy was faster than him and that caused trouble. Melinda has them make peace.
Melinda goes to Payne and meets his wife, and she tells him that “if he ever want to talk..”
15 - Mean ghost
Cheerleaders are being hurt. One of them died last year. Tais died, Maddie quit and adopted a goth look, and Rana is going out with her boyfriend. They were once good friends, but then Rana and Tais turned on Maddy calling her a liar because they found out that she wasn’t rich, she didn’t live in that big house, her dad worked there. Now of course Rana says it has nothing to do with the money, it’s because she lied: yeah sure :-/ Ties tried to make peace but Maddy didn’t show up and Tais died in that place where they were supposed to meet. Rana was there too but left in anger, closing the door. Tais wanted Maddy back in the team but Rana didn’t. Tais liked Maddy because she was different , unique. Rana was maybe kind of jealous because she wanted to be her only best friend. It was an accident of course, Rana had no idea she was locking her in the room. Melinda has the girls confront each other and make peace. The ending: Maddy now does the cheerleaders’ choreography for the competition.
Melinda remembers when she was bullied in high school, called ‘freak’ (but ponytails can’t make her look like a young teenager, sorry - weirdly she looks younger in her normal look).
16 - The cradle will rock
Melinda is not even thirty yet???
Melinda and Delia are at a jewellery store when there’s a robbery and the guy takes all the jewels including Delia’s engagement ring. Randy of the shop dies and it turns out his sister has Delia’s ring, and her husband robbed the store. Randy was in on it, desperate for money. That was obvious.
Melinda is in his basement and she just gets out opening the door! She locks Wyatt in and now he has to shoot the lock to come out! Randy is doing a lot, though, now, so maybe he did it, he opened and closed the doors. Finally Randy’s sister calls the police on Wyatt. Randy doesn’t go into the light, he “got another offer” and tells her “the dead will walk”.
The wife finds the money and goes away with their baby girl.
17 - The walk-in
A corpse walks out of the morgue and his spirit Brian comes to Melinda for an explanation. She goes to Payne. There’s another soul into the body, the ghost of a kid. This zombie keeps walking; he was a disabled kid who died ten years before and he took the body of an old classmate, homecoming king, to go to the class reunion and kiss the homecoming queen. Now, if Melinda has to ask professor Payne “how to preserve the body”, how can a 16-y-o kid know? Jim cuffs the corpse, so Melinda can have a chat with Brian and Jason at the same time, and finds out that Brian committed suicide, never able to face a difficult life. Melinda and Jim free the corpse and apply make-up on him to have him go to the reunion with Melinda and Brian’s ghost too. Brian gets to tell the truth confronting his regrets and Jason gets to get his message over to his best friend Alyssa through Melinda, to never give up on her dreams. Now Jason is a kid, but kissing the queen was such a lame wish, it had to be Alyssa.. Both ghosts cross over at the end.
Tim tries to make amends and say sorry to Delia. He keeps trying, and at the end she sits with him for a coffee outside Melinda’s shop :-) This was nice :-)
For once Melissa didn’t reveal her ‘secret’ to anyone :-p
18 - Delia’s first ghost.
A ghost scares Ned and sabotages Delia’s first date with a colleague. He won’t show himself to Melinda, but a naked ghost appears to her :-p
Finally Melinda sees Charlie, and she tells Delia her ‘secret’, and Delia’s upset with her “you need help, you are nuts” and “I quit”, then strange things happen and she goes back to Melinda. Charlie finally talks to Melinda and it turns out he’s been there for a while. He wants Delia and Tim together because he saved his life once. Charlie managed to bring Delia to Melinda and by doing that to Tim as well. Charlie wants them to be happy, Delia and Ned. He doesn’t want Ned to get in trouble, and then he crosses over. Delia still thinks Melinda’s nuts but she also doesn’t want to lose their friendship :-) and she goes out with Tim :-)
19 - Children of ghosts
Melinda and Delia are out buying stuff at an estate sale, it seems like they buy more than they sell sometimes :-p Delia’s dog is acting strange because there’s a dog-ghost around (and because of this of course Delia’s character is suddenly provided with a dog). It was funny when Melinda told the dog-ghost “do you see a light?” :lol: well, she tried... that dog-ghost provided a few funny scenes - the dog therapist is Cesar, the one from tv :-p
Melinda is interested in Julie, a girl abandoned by her mother and in need of a foster home. Melinda wants to help her and convinces Jim to become foster parents for her. Melinda asks Payne’s help regarding the haunted-kid :-p He suggests poltergeist, then he tells her what she’s doing is pretty great and Melinda: “are you getting soft on me?” - “are you kidding? I am schmetterling, hear me roar” :lol:
Melinda tries to talk to Julie, calm her, get her to continue her piano lessons, and also investigates what happened to her mother. A woman tells her that the child died... Payne brings in machines to monitor Julie’s brain activity. It turns out her mom Valerie’s ghost is there, it’s no poltergeist after all. Valerie stole her when she was a baby, she didn’t adopt her, she stole her, kidnapped her, and now she wants to take her back to her real mother. Valerie knew that she was sick so she wanted to get her back to her real mom but died first. Melinda tells Julie everything. It turns out her real mom is her piano teacher. Melinda brings them together, and Valerie crosses over. The dog doesn’t, and stays out her door. A ghost watchdog, it’s a pity we hear nothing more about him in future episodes.
20 - The collector
Melinda wears quite a sexy dress for a funeral :-/ At the funeral home she sees another ghost-whisperer, a man talking to a ghost. Melinda wants to meet him and goes to talk to the funeral home’s usual ghost :-p That man talked to him too but he wants to stay right there :-p The man’s called Gabriel. Melinda meets him, takes him home to talk, and Jim looks kinda jealous.
Both Melinda and Gabriel noticed the shift in the spirit world, they’re getting stronger, can affect us more than they could before...
Gabriel didn’t live with his uncle, he was a patient in a psychiatric hospital, and we finally have proof that Payne’s wife is a ghost. She tells Rick to read her journal as she wants.
Melinda follows Gabriel to a house full of ghosts, and she meets again those ghosts that refused the light. Gabriel says “we’re getting ready, we’re blocking the light soon no-one’s gonna get through”.
Four of the five signs have happened, not yet the ‘death of a loved one’.
What Rick’s wife wanted him to know is that she was having an affair and wanted to leave him...
Gabriel had been watching her for some time; Rick’s wife tells Melinda that Gabriel wanted her to hurt Rick, that he wants to hurt everybody who helps Melinda, to make her weak. They want the dead to be stronger than the living. Gabriel tries to keep the dead here.
Rick refuses to forgive his wife, keeps saying “no”, he says “there’s too much pain” and she changes and says “he doesn’t know what pain is, none of you do but you all will”. I understand the pain but Rick was so lame: “she was with another man Melissa!” :-/ She’s dead, she’s sorry, and he contributed to help the bad guy, I’d say it was time to let it go.
21 - The prophet
The floor is full of water and she plans to use a towel?? For real??
Melinda dreams of Delia dead. A ghost tells her “it all started with Mary O’Connell”, which turns out to be a British ship that sank two years before.
We see that Melinda has got a shirt and pants, which is rather shocking news to the season.
This ghost is showing her pieces she doesn’t understand. Payne wants to go on a sabbatical. A man (Julian Sands) meets children (one in London and one in Moscow) that keep doing the same strange drawing because “it’s in their head, they have to get it out”. One is in Rome, but it sounds like they couldn’t get an Italian person for the scene.. his Italian is rather... .
it’s always the same drawing. This kid speaks Italian well, he might be Italian, not sure. He draws Melinda holding a lamp (one like the one I have ). Melinda sees cars falling down a bridge on her and she keeps screaming and nobody says anything??
Rick stays to help her and they hug. She looks up bridge incidents in Italy and sees a page written in Italian, with only a few mistakes here and there... “Bergamo. La struttura viene a mancare. 111 vittima sul ponticello, dado 2 qui sotto (???) catastrofe del ponticello de Bergamo”.
Melinda finds on May 11th a bridge accident in Rome, a ship sank in Britain, a tunnel collapsed in Russia, plane crash in Grandview in four years. In one week it’ll be May 11 2007. A call tells her to go to a house where she meets the three children and Julian Sands saying “you have something I want”
22 - The gathering
Julian Sands plays Ethan Clark, British millionaire. Those children are the only survivors. He’s here to locate the little girl who survived the plane crash. Stefano speaks not only good Italian, but perfect English too, must be Italian-American.
Melinda tells everything to Delia. The little girl wrote at school “I hate knowing what I know”.
Payne speaks of little things that may have big repercussions on the world, the future.
Grandma comes to Melinda in a dream: “the only way I can come to you now” and “they’re gonna come for you honey, just don’t be afraid, you must protect the balance”.
She tells Ethan her ‘secret’, and he says his wife was a psychic but he laughed at her for believing it. She had a bad feeling about the ferry but he didn’t cancel, then was late and she got on without him and died. Melinda and Payne figure out something will happen at the crash-memorial.
Melinda is all “not a good time” to a poor spirit who needs help.. it also seems like she could even listen for a moment, it might very well be a quick thing, and the more she crosses over the better right?
Melinda thinks Gabriel is following Delia, then tries to follow him but loses him. Maybe if she wore more comfortable shoes instead of heels from time to time she’d be quicker...
Kristen, the little girl, goes to Melinda, she wants to meet the other children.
It turns out that Ethan’s wife is the ghost that’s been giving signs to Melinda, the red-hooded woman. Melinda sees Gabriel talking to Ethan and doesn’t even try to stop them, she goes to Payne! Come on, she should have thought of the kids :-/
Ethan believed Gabriel’s lies and gave him the kids. Silly man. Well, pain clouds judgement, I know.
The kids are at the memorial. The dark spirits come and the four kids are in danger. Everyone runs away but Melinda runs towards them and saves them. She remains on the floor and sees everything as a spirit. She comes back, thanks to the ‘yellow crayon’ Stefano gave her.
“It wasn’t about me protecting them, it was about them protecting me”. The spirit of her father told her she has a brother. It ends without saying who that is, but it doesn’t need saying..
Melinda Gordon - Jennifer Love Hewitt
Jim Clancy - David Conrad
Delia Banks - Camryn Manheim
Professor Payne - Jay Mohr
It took a while for me to get into it, but then I liked it. There should be a sequel, absolutely. This was a good film, but it’s not finished. Basically it says: this is how it all started, the war and the new world. Now there should be a sequel showing how the war went and how the world adapted to the new situation.
I mean, it’ll never reach the levels of the Lotr or Hobbit movies, but it is a good one nonetheless. The effects were good (there were a few moments where scenes looked rather fake, but all in all it was good enough). The costumes were good. The acting was sufficient, but it’s one of the reasons that keep it behind the lotr movies: sufficient but not great. This is where it lacked something. You get no hero-aura from Lothar, no greatness emanates from the king, specially at first, and no power from the young magician. The queen was sweet and good-hearted, but didn’t emanate any wisdom or greatness, and this was a shame.
I’m not sure now what could have been done differently, if it was the choice of actors or if there was something lacking in the direction or in the lights or in the music, I can’t point it out but there was no wow effect when we meet them. That’s mostly what keeps this movie below the others. The story too, of course, but they are totally different kinds of stories, it’s not really fair to compare them only because they’re both fantasy; if someone dares to say that ‘there are the same races and rules’ so it’s nothing new, instead of yell in their faces I could simply point out that action movies are all identical, indeed they are, and nobody complains. A fantasy movie must have different races and costumes and horses and swords, but that doesn’t mean that they are the same thing. They aren’t.
For someone like me who has never played the game and didn’t know the story at all, the beginning with the orcs was very bizarre and not much involving. I think it should have started differently, Lothar should have narrated the “this is how it all began” part, specially since he’ll be there to see how it goes while the one who narrated it will not.
I think we should have heard Lothar’s voice while watching casual images of the Azeroth world, the life and the different species inhabiting it. I know that in a way the orcs are more protagonists than the humans, but the audience is human and would have been able to relate more, this way.
The narrating voice over images of the world, describing what kind of a world it was before the orcs came, showing the elves and the dwarves and the humans, the people briefly and close up shots of the ones in power, without dialogue. Then he should have started to talk about the orcs that changed that world, describing a species of terrible strength, fierce fighters who came here to kill and destroy... and then we should have seen Durotan and Draka joking and talking about the baby coming, making a strong contrast with the ‘fierce’ part and capturing the viewer’s attention!
Also, work out a way, with lights or close-ups or music or whatever, to make us ‘feel’ the greatness of certain characters. I appreciated the idea of making it look like a normal thing, I mean, a normal world with normal people, in the character’s point of view that’s how it is, but the audience must ‘feel’ more.
Since the names are all difficult and strange, they should have been spoken more. The characteristics of the characters should have been explained sooner - I admit it took a while for me to understand that the green came from the magic, and that not all the orcs were under its effect.
It might seem now that I didn’t like it, but I did, I kept watching and it grew on me, and I liked the guardian’s outfit and the magic special effects, and yes, the story too, I liked it, it was good. A sequel would probably be better because the audience now knows everything already about the species and the types of magic and everything.
The movie in details now:
We see two orcs, Durotan and Draka, and they talk and joke and they’re going to have a baby. He tells her that she must hide her pregnancy (or she won’t be allowed to join the horde). Their world is dying so they must search for a new home for their people. We see their leader Guldan, he uses the lives of prisoners to feed his magic and use it to open a portal to another world. They plan to invade Azeroth, attack and kill, and keep prisoners to feed the magic (and themselves, I think).
We move to Azeroth, where a leader, Lothar, is informed that villages have been attacked my a mysterious force. A young mage named Khadgar (I looked it up on the internet because I didn’t understand it watching the movie) examines the body and understands there’s a dark magic at work, and insists on speaking to the king about summoning the Guardian. They speak to the king and he agrees and gives Lothar his ring and Lothar and Khadgar go to the guardian’s tower to explain. He can’t refuse if the king summons him, so he joins them (not that it looked like he wanted to refuse, but anyway, he had no choice). With magic he teleports to talk to the king. Later, while on the road they are attacked. Khadgar creates a blue magic shield to protect the guardian while he works his magic and he kills all the orcs under the effect of the fel magic (fel is another word I found on the internet, watching the movie I understood ‘vil’, or ‘veel’ for the English pronunciation), which means only the green ones. Durotan escapes, finds and frees the half-orc Garona that was kept as a slave by the green orcs. Garona stumbles or our group and Khadgar imprisons her with his magic, so they take her prisoner.
Durotan talks to his friend and tells him to look around, everywhere their chief uses his magic, the earth dies, and he thinks that it was Guldan’s magic that killed their world, and the same thing could happen again. Guldan is too strong to be defeated though.
The king talks to Garona, who learned their language from the people the orcs kept as prisoners. Garona tells them why they have so many prisoners, and the king promises her her freedom if she helps them save their people. She takes them to see where they are, and tells them that they’ll be used to open the portal and let in the other orcs: ‘there are others?’ - ‘many more, this is just a small group’ .... Durotan sees her and tells her to inform the king that he wants a secret meeting, that this magic will kill everything and must be stopped. The king can’t refuse such an opportunity. A group of men meets Durotan’s group of orcs and they talk, but then a group of green orcs hiding comes out and starts fighting them all. Both men and Durotan’s orcs fight them, and finally the guardian comes to help, creating some kind of lighting barrier that separates orcs from humans. This would be great, if only a group of humans hadn’t remained on the other side. Among them, Lothar’s son. Lothar starts shouting for the guardian to let them through but there is no reply. The young man fights bravely but there is no hope. He is killed in front of Lothar’s eyes. When they go away, Garona finds the guardian, who has fainted, and brings him back to his Essence Font (again, internet) where he regains his strength. She stays with him to make sure he’s alright, and when he wakes up they talk and it is clear that she’s in love with Lothar (this romance was totally unnecessary, respect and admiration and desire to gain his good will would have been more appropriate; this is a war story, not the place for romance), and Medivh tells her of a woman who had loved him but he had to leave her because of his guardian role, then she goes to Lothar who is completely destroyed after his son’s death, but does not blame her.
Guldan orders that all traitors be killed, so Durotan’s clan fights with the green orcs: most of the clan is killed, but Draka escapes with her son.
Khadgar goes to the great council of all mages, whatever that’s called, to explain that he thinks Medivh has been poisoned by the fel (he saw the green light in his eyes); a strange portal opens for him, it never opened before, and the shadow that lead him to a book on the portal now tells him that the guardian has betrayed, which more or less is what he said. Basically she tells him that he must be stopped, killed. In favour of this line of action, the next scene shows us Medivh entering the font because completely without energy, and the font’s colour turning from blue to green, and he admits that he doesn’t know what he may have done, that he wanted to protect but instead he destroyed, that he can’t control the fel, nobody can... then his face looks up, with black eyes, and he takes the energy from his faithful servant, like Guldan did. Medivh goes to discuss plans with the king, who is unwilling to leave the lands unprotected - Lothar suggests taking ALL the soldiers to the portal to stop them from calling other orcs, that this should be his priority, but then Medivh comes and sides with the king, saying that his men and his own magic will be sufficient. He isn’t himself anymore, but of course nobody notices it before he looks the same - only acts a bit differently, and they ignore Lothar’s protests because he just lost his son and may not think fairly...
Durotan, who was in a cage, is freed by his ‘friend’ who opposed him before; he apologizes for going against him, saying that he could not understand an alliance with the humans against his own people, and lets him go. Tells him that Draka and the baby escaped; unfortunately we see that she’s found. She entrusts her son to the river in order to save him, and then attacks the orc who found her, to keep him away from the boy I suppose, and she succeeds in that. The orc is killed, but unfortunately she is too.
Durotan wants to show the others what kind of orc Guldan is, so he openly challenges Guldan to the traditional duel, and he doesn’t refuse, thinking it an easy win; Durotan is a better warrior than he thought though, and Guldan uses his magic on him, draining his life strength and defeating him. Before dying, Durotan shouts to his fellow orc that Guldan has no honor and is nothing without his magic. Durotan is killed with magic, and his ‘friend’ shouts that he will not follow this orc, asking the others if they will. Guldan’s magic is too strong though, and they don’t rebel.
Lothar has been locked in a cell, but is freed by Khadgar; the two of them go to the guardian’s tower, and immediately Medivh attacks them, looking like a powerful monster. Medivh is trying to open the portal (as Khadgar had worked out, the orcs couldn’t open it all by themselves; maybe Guldan didn’t know it, that I don’t know, but the portal was opened by Medivh). Khadgar tries to stop the guardian, while Lothar fights against his golem. He manages to get Medivh to behead it. Khadgar tells Lothar to keep Medivh busy and lure him in the Font, while he manages to lure the golem into his magic rune. Finally the golem enters and is transported into the Font, on top of the guardian, stopping his magic.
The king and his men, with Garona, attack the orcs. Guldar opens the portal and more orcs arrive. When Medivh is stopped, the portal closes. Khadgar has fallen into the green Font too, and is now ‘wrapped’ in it, the fel all around and in him, under Lothar’s eyes. Khadgar does a magic to him, but it’s a blue shield, to protect him. Khadgar had read that from light comes darkness, but from darkness comes light, so he works a big magic to get rid of the fel, a big explosion of magic and the Font is dry now. Lothar looks at his eyes to make sure, but they’re normal now (well, Medivh’s eyes looked normal too when he was out of the Font, when they talked to him, but he had to be already under its power if he had already helped open the portal, but Lothar is not a mage so...)
Now Lothar hurries to help his king, using his gryphon to save time.
Medivh is not yet dead, but he’s himself again, and with his last energy he does one final magic: he opens the portal, but to an Azeroth place, so the king can sent all the prisoners through it and towards safety. He keeps it open as long as he can, until the energy abandons him. He tells Khadgar that it’s solitude that makes us weak, and that he only wanted to protect, to save them all. The guardian dies, the portal is definitely closed and now it’s a very shitty situation for the human troops.
The battle is not going well, and the king knows that there is no hope of survival. There are too many enemies, there is no chance for them, so the king tells Garona that it’s no use to die both, and that she could be the hero who killed the king, the one to bring peace between orcs and humans.
She doesn’t want to, it pains her terribly, but at the last moment, when the orc champion is about to kill him, Garona uses the weapon the queen gave her to defend herself, and she kills him! She’s now welcomed among them as a true orc because she killed their leader.
Lothar arrives to see the king already dead. He tries to take his body away with him, but is captured. He fights their champion and easily wins, knowing that you can’t win in a battle of strength but he must use his brain, so he slides down and cuts him from beneath. Guldar yells that he must be killed, but that is against the rules, the duel is sacred among orcs and they don’t obey, not one orc stops him while he walks among them and flies away with the king’s body.
Obviously Lothar thinks she made her choice and willingly killed the king; Khadgar can’t believe it, but they have no other explanation.
At the king’s funeral, the queen makes a good speech on how it is important now to be united to honor the king’s sacrifice, and Lothar will be the leader in the battle that is to come - he’s also the queen’s brother.
We see that Draka’s baby is found by humans.
Now the portal has been closed, but there are a lot of orcs in this world now, and for sure there will be a war between humans and orcs.
I hope we’ll get to see it.
ITA warcraft l’inizio
Of course I liked it! How could I not! I’d watch it again no problem, and again too why not! :-D
I loved how they took it seriously just like the LOTR movies, finally someone who takes fantasy stories seriously, and I liked how many things of the book they managed to get in, and even the things they added in order to link this to the Lotr trilogy, and everything's really good !
It starts with our old Bilbo at his home, writing his story to tell Frodo what really happened during his “adventures”. He writes about the nice, prosperous city of Dale, so near “the greatest kingdom in Middle Earth”, Erebor. “Stronghold of Thror, king under the mountain, mightiest of the dwarf lords”, who had a son and a grandson. The kingdom was build within the mountain, where they kept digging for gold and jewels, until they found “the Arkenstone, the Heart of the Mountain”. Thror called it the King’s jewel, and demanded that they all pay homage to him, even Thranduil “the great Elven King”.
Thror became more and more greedy, becoming crazy with it. (very nice scene when his grandson looks at him and then backs up into the shadow..)
Until they heard a noise “coming down from the North”, like a hurricane. Smaug the dragon had come, a big dragon who attacked Dale but aimed at Erebor “for dragons covet gold with a dark and fierce desire... Erebor was lost for a dragon will guard his plunder as long as he lives”. They had to abandon Erebor, and “Thranduil would not risk the lives of his kin against the wrath of the dragon. No help came from the elves that day, nor any day since”.
The dwarves became now homeless, wanderers. The dwarf prince found work in the cities of men, but never forgot.
Here is where Bilbo comes in, because of fate and the will of a wizard.
- we see Frodo again, smiling and taking the mail to him, and talking about the food and the party and the Sackville-Baggins and Gandalf, and Frodo runs out to surprise him :-)
Bilbo remembers: “in those days I was always on time, I was entirely respectable, and nothing unexpected ever happened”. Now the title “An Unexpected Journey” appears and we see young Bilbo, 60 years earlier, meeting Gandalf outside his gate: “Good morning” - Gandalf says “what do you mean? Do you wish me a good morning or do you mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not? Or perhaps you mean to say that you feel good on this particular morning?” and talks about adventures but Bilbo is not interested, doesn’t like adventures: “nasty disturbing uncomfortable things”. Gandalf knew his mother and Bilbo himself when he was younger, and now wonders how the son of Belladonna Took came to be like that. “Well, that’s decided. It’ll be very good for you and most amusing for me. I shall inform the others”. Bilbo says he wants nothing to do with adventures and locks the house. Gandalf puts a sign on his door with his wooden stick and leaves. That night, dwarves start coming in: Dwalin who starts eating his supper then Balin and Fili and Kili whom he tries to keep out but they come in anyway of course. The other eight come all together, with Gandalf, who very nicely does a dwarf-count “Fili Kili Oin Gloin Dwalin Balin Bifur Bofur Bombur Dori Nori Ori” and says “we appear to be one dwarf short” :-)
They make a big mess, eating and drinking everything he has, but quite polite after all. Finished, they start throwing the plates, you know, just mocking about and having fun, and sing about it, until everything is in order again. There is a knock: “He is here” - “Gandalf, I thought you said this place would be easy to find, I lost my way, twice, I wouldn’t have found it at all had it not been for that mark on the door” at which Gandalf tells Bilbo “there is a mark, I put it there myself”. The leader of the company is Thorin Oakenshield. He met with other dwarves but nobody accepted to come and help, this quest “is ours and ours alone”. Gandalf has the key to the Front Gate, the way into the Mountain, given to him by Thorin’s father Thrain, for safekeeping.
Bilbo protests that he is no burglar and they all agree that he doesn’t seem one, but Gandalf rises and booms “Enough! If I say Bilbo Baggins is a burglar then a burglar he is!” and “hobbits are remarkably light on their feet” and “there’s a lot more to him than appearances suggest” so they give him the contract and he reads it :lol: then faints. Gandalf tells him “I remember a young hobbit who was always running off in search of elves in the woods” and more.. Balin thinks it through when he refuses and says of themselves “hardly the stuff of legend” to which Thorin says “I would take each and every one of these dwarves over an army from the Iron Hills, for when I called upon them they answered. Loyalty, honor, a willing heart. I can ask no more than that” which is not encouraging in my opinion and if you think about it it’s not flattering at all, it’s like saying I marry you because you said yes, it’s not romantic at all. Thorin didn’t make a choice, he tried to call many others but they, only, answered. That’s all. They’ll all follow him, of course, anywhere. Then they sing, I liked that. I never imagined they could make it work, with the songs, you know.
Morning, Bilbo wakes up, the house is empty, and at first he’s relieved but then he changes his mind, takes the contract and runs after them. They put him on a pony and in a moment he said he wanted to go back because he forgot his handkerchief :-p
After he lost Erebor, “King Thror tried to reclaim the Ancient Dwarf Kingdom of Moria” but it was now full of orcs, legions of orcs, lead by Azog the Defiler, a giant white-ish orc who beheaded the king and threw his head at Thorin’s feet. The Pale Orc, they call him. Thror dead, Thrain crazy, but Thorin fought and kept fighting “wielding nothing but an oaken branch as a shield” managed at least to cut off his hand. Many many dwarves died but they won - well, they won outside, but they never got Moria back, did they?
Thorin thinks that Azog died. Gandalf says that there are five wizards: himself, Saruman the white, then two blue and the fifth is Radagast the brown, and we see Radagast, who lives in the woods and finds animals and plants dying, sick, because of witchcraft maybe. He calls all animals by name and talks to them and his sledge is pulled by rabbits.
Gandalf wants the help of the elves or at least to talk to Elrond, but Thorin is still angry at the elves and has no intention to ask their help. So Gandalf goes away. That night, Fili and Kili find out that two horses are missing, taken by trolls, and tell Bilbo that he’s so small they won’t see him because they’re slow and stupid and “we’ll be right behind you” and Fili says “if you run into trouble, hoot twice like a barn howl and one like a brown howl” :lol: and this is why Gandalf didn’t want to stop here, the farmer and his family who lived there were all eaten by the trolls .
Bilbo is doing nicely but then he’s caught. All dwarves charge now, and Bilbo frees the horses but then is taken hostage and they have to surrender their weapons. The trolls start arguing over the best way to cook them, and Bilbo talks to them to buy time till dawn arrives and Gandalf too, he breaks a big rock and the sun turns them into stone.
Thorin: “where did you go if I may ask?” - “to look ahead” - “what brought you back?” - “looking behind”. They were mountain trolls, and they shouldn’t be this far south.
In a troll cavern they find two elven swords, for Gandalf and Thorin, and one for Bilbo, and Gandalf tells him “remember this: true courage is about knowing not when to take a life but when to spare one”. They meet Radagast who was actually looking for Gandalf, and he says that the Greenwood is sick. Dark magic comes from the once-abandoned fortress of Dol Guldur. Radagast was attacked by ghosts there, and there was a necromancer. Now they are attacked by Warg Scouts “which means an orc pack is not far behind”. Radagast offers to help “I’ll draw them off” - “these are Gundabag wargs, they will outrun you” and Radagast, very proudly “these are Rhosgobel Rabbits! I’d like to see them try” *smirk* funny :-D
So, all wargs chase Radagast and the dwarves escape following Gandalf. They run until they are surrounded and prepare to fight thinking he left them, until he shouts “this way you fools” and they all hide until the elves get rid of them all. They get to Rivendell, the Last Homely House East of the Sea, the Valley of Imladris. Elrond comes with his horsemen, and offers them hospitality (green food and music). He tells them their blades are: Orcrist the Goblin-Cleaver is Thorin’s and Glamdring the Foehammer, sword of the king of Gondolin is Gandalf’s.
Balin tells Bilbo that his own sword is more a letter-opener than a sword :-p
They show Elrond their map, because they need an elf to read ancient dwarvish apparently. The moon runes “were written on a midsummer’s eve by the light of a crescent moon nearly 200 years ago” and “fate is with you Thorin Oakenshield. The same moon shines upon us tonight” how lucky! No, it’s not luck, it’s a sign..
They can now see the writings: they have to be at a specific place at a specific place and the door to enter the mountain will appear. Gandalf and Elrond discuss the matter with Galadriel and Saruman.
Saruman says that they’ve had 400 years of peace, that Sauron was defeated for ever, but Gandalf worries he might use Smaug with terrible conseguences. (400 years only? Sauron was much much earlier surely, like 2000?)
Gandalf shows them the “Morgul blade” that Radagast found, “made for the witchking of Angmar, and buried with him”. Saruman would like to stop the dwarves, but they’ve gone already while they were talking. Gandalf talks to Galadriel, admitting he knew they were going, and I love how he seems a boy near Galadriel :-D He says “I have found it is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keeps the darkness at bay” and “simple acts of kindness and love”, and she promises she’ll be there to help him if he needs her.
They go on and stumbles in a stone-giants’ fight. They fought they were climbing a mountain but they were actually on a giant’s legs. Luckily, they’re all safe. Bilbo almost fell but they saved him.
“I thought we’d lost our burglar” and Thorin “he’s been lost ever since he left home, he should never have come, he has no place amongst us” :’(
At night, Bilbo packs his bag and prepares to leave but talks to Bofur and then they all fall down into goblin territory. They are all taken away but Bilbo stays behind until one goblin attacks him and they both fall down. The Goblin King is quite funny: “well well well look who it is, Thorin son of Thrain son of Thror king under the mountain. Oh but I’m forgetting you don’t have a mountain, and you’re not a king, which makes you nobody really” and he tells Thorin that Azog is alive and sends word to him that he’s found Thorin.
Gollum kills the goblin to eat it, and loses the ring. Bilbo finds his sword and the ring too. Gollum talks to himself, Bilbo says what’s his game and Gollum lightens up, he likes games and they play riddles (the mountain to warm up, then the teeth, the wind, eggs, time) Last question, Bilbo puts his hand in his pocket and feels the ring and thinks aloud “what have I got in my pocket?” and Gollum thinks that’s the riddle and of course fails so Bilbo wins, but Gollum wants to know the answer, specially after noticing that his precious ring was lost. “What has it got in its nasty little pocketsies?”
Gollum screams “he stole it” and Bilbo runs with Gollum chasing.
The goblins chant and fight but Gandalf come to the rescue, so they can all take back their weapons and fight back.
Bilbo breaks his buttons but by chance the ring falls on his finger and he becomes invisible. The dwarves keep running and fighting, all very good but Thorin is the king :-)
Gandalf kills the goblin king, they fall down and then they run to reach daylight, and Bilbo had followed Gollum to the exit and now sees them going out but Gollum’s in the way. He could kill him but his lost, sad eyes stop him. He jumps over him and runs out. Thorin wants to know why he came back and he tells him that he misses his home indeed but they don’t have one and he came back to help them get it back, it’s a touching speech.
It’s not over though, because Azog comes, they run but the road ends on a cliff, so all climb the trees. Gandalf sends a butterfly to call for help (we know this trick). They all see Azog alive, the wargs make the trees go down until they are all on the last tree up. Gandalf gives them fire and the beasts stay back but the tree’s falling and Thorin can’t resist anymore and runs to fight Azog - quite the hero scene when he walks off the tree, if it wasn’t also a stupid move...
Thorin is hit twice and is in Azog’s warg’s mouth, all the dwarves scream and Bilbo runs to save him, kills one orc and stands between Azog and Thorin who is down.
All the dwarves now come to fight and Bilbo fights too. Dori and Oin fall but the Eagles come right in time to save them, as Gandalf knew well. The eagles fight the enemies off and take Thorin’s unconscious body and all the others to safety. They are all worried about Thorin but Gandalf whispers words to him and he open his eyes. Thorin admits that he was wrong to doubt Bilbo, and hugs him.
From where they are now they can see Erebor in the distance and Bilbo says “I believe the worst is behind us”, a bad thing to say... the last image shows us Smaug’s eye, growling among his gold.
During the first part of the credits we hear the “song of the lonely mountain” and it’s very cool.
(dwarves: Dwalin the bald one, old Balin his brother, the young Fili the blond and Kili the dark-haired. Bofur is the one with the funny hat and mustache, Bombur is the fat one. Dori has a short beard and braids on top of his head going back. Ori is the ugly one with light hair and goat beard. Oin is the one with the Pippi-en-reverse beard and the hearing aid.
This could be understood in this movie. I found a picture on the internet so I’d say that Nori is the one with piramid hair and a three-braids-beard, Gloin is the tough one with a decorated beard and Bifur... is the one with dark hair and white beard? well, he’s ‘the other one’ anyway. )
Bilbo - Martin Freeman
Gandalf - Ian McKellen
Thorin - Richard Armitage
Dwalin - Graham McTavish
Balin - Ken Stott
Fili - Dean O’Gorman
Kili - Aidan Turner
Ori - Adam Brown
Nori - Jed Brophy
Dori - Mark Hadlow
Bifur - William Kircher
Bofur - James Nesbitt
Bombur - Stephen Hunter
Oin - John Callen
Gloin - Peter Hambleton
Radagast - Sylvester McCoy
Thranduil - Lee Pace
Elrond - Hugo Weaving
Galadriel - Cate Blanchett
Saruman - Christopher Lee
Old Bilbo - Ian Holm
Frodo - Elijah Wood
ITA Lo hobbit - un viaggio inaspettato
