Movie Review: God’s Not Dead (marked minor spoiler)

Bleaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrgh!

Kevin Sorbo (yep, Hercules) plays a smug, evil, atheistic college professor who belittles and antagonizes Josh Wheaton and anyone else who dares stand up for the idea that God exists. As a result, the young student Wheaton’s duty–which is literally forced on him by Professor Radisson–is to defend the existence of God or risk failing a philosophy class that rarely if ever discusses much philosophy.

God’s Not Dead has a few isolated but truly precious successes that keep the film from being a total waste, but they don’t outweigh the vicious and cliched writing, the mediocre acting (except from Sorbo, of course, and a few others), or the excessive running time of a story that ends well before its movie does.

Movie Review: Aero-Troopers

How obscure can a film be, when I can’t find a thing about it on Wikipedia or TV Tropes?

Aero-Troopers falls short in more ways at once than I’ve ever seen a computer-generated movie fail. The character models and their animations, nearly a decade after the release of Toy Story, look so wooden as to insult the uncanny valley, as can be seen in the DVD cover above (thanks, Amazon). The characters themselves are uninteresting, the plot goes from being trite yet acceptable to completely nonsensical, and the dialogue manages to combine laziness, self-indulgence, and massive amounts of cheese all at once. Even the marketing slogans on the movie’s box feel wordy–“The survival of their airborne world lies in the hands of this one small boy?” Really?

Sometimes a bad film serves as a reminder of why other films succeed, and Aero-Troopers is a reminder of why good presentation can’t be taken for granted.