[SamandMax]

Sunshine: I love Danny Boyle, I think he's one of the best directors working right now, but I was a bit skeptical going into this one. When you take a very visual and creative director and let him loose in space there's a good chance you'll end up with a 180 minutes pretentious Kubrick tribute full of nothing but bizarre imagery and pretention. Luckily though, Danny just made a nice little thriller instead. It's shot beautifully, it's got some really tense set pieces and, most importantly, it's just very entertaining. It gets a bit goofy in the last 30 minutes or so but it's really not that big of a deal, especially when the first hour is so good.


I Am Legend: I wanted to love this movie, I really really did. Will Smith is fantastic in it and all the pieces were there to create a really great film but...it just never comes completely together. The main problem is the pacing and the structure of the film because it just doesn't make any sense. This movie is about 86 minutes long without the end credits which doesn't sound like too big a problem but it is when absolutely nothing happens in the first 60 minutes. Sure, it's really entertaining. The empty city is haunting, Will Smith's pitch perfect as Robert Neville, and there are some really tense set pieces, esepcially when he has to chase his dog into an abandoned building which is really well done. The problem is spend all this time just building the atmosphere so that once the time for actual story comes along they only have about 25 minutes to cram it all in and just feels so rushed. This movie only has two acts and the first act is 75% of the movie,. I've got to mention the mutants too which just didn't work at all for me. They never across as human, they never cross as a living thing, they always come across as lifeless CGI creations. Would it have been so hard to just use practical effects and makeup to make them? This movie could've been great, Will Smith is fantastic and there's some amazing moments, but there's just too many flaws in the design of it that just keep it from realizing it's potential. That's not to say it's bad, I'd still give it a solid 6 or 7 out of 10, but I could've easily given it an 8 or 9 if they had just taken the time to get the problems ironed out.