Forests, Friends and Foes

In this faithful-to-Kipling adaptation, The Jungle Book shows the true color (in the anthropomorphic animals) of the denizens of the forest. The friendly and collaborative bears and panthers, need to face up to the manipulative monkeys and the power-hungry tiger. Highest grossing movie (and that includes Hindi movies) for the year till date

16/20

Hopping victory

It is a time when all animals – predator and prey – have learnt to live in perfect harmony. Or have they? Rabbit Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) passes up a carrot farming future for her true calling – being in the Zootopia police force. What begins as a less-than-promising career punching parking tickets soon takes an interesting turn as Judy Hopps’ relentless burrowing unearths more than what Zootopia has bargained for. Even if animals find peace among themselves, I guess they are not discarding human nature anytime soon

15.5/20

Pacific Threats

Gigantic sea creatures called the Kaiju come through the Breach – a portal at the bottom of the Pacific – and start devastating cities along the Pacific Rim. Manking designs the Jaeger (robot) program to take on the Kaiju – and succeeds. Till the Jaeger program finds itself questioned, and competing with the Wall, and failures of the Jaegers to take on the particularly larger and more difficult of the Kaiju. However, when the Wall shows the proverbial cracks, and it is again the Jaegers that hold back the Kaiju in Sydney, it is back to the remnants of the Jaeger Program, led by a marginalized Pentecost (Idris Elba), and a notable robot – Gipsy Danger – driven by Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako (Rinko Kikuchi), to save the day and the world. In the words of Del Toro himself, this is no "super-brooding, super-dark, cynical summer movie", and the focus is purely on "big, beautiful, sophisticated visuals". In that he succeeds, but one cannot help feeling that the execution could have been just a little bit better with a little more development of the human characters, especially given the backdrop of shared adversity

13.5/20

Lease of Life

In the year 2093, seventeen men and women set off on spacecraft Prometheus to the one planetary system that science as well as historical evidence suggests was the origin of mankind. In the meantime, Earth gets struck by a veritable array of natural calamities, which changes the mission of Prometheus to that of finding a new home for mankind. The craft makes a safe landing at the destination planet – but, somehow, the exploratory mission gets struck by tragedy. Not least of all owing to the undercurrents of the real motives of the Weyland Corporation represented by the mission chief Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) and by the actions of cyborg David (Michael Fassbender) that suggest a certain lack of alignment. Will the mission eventually be successful? Or will it get mired in in-fighting and external attack-induced tragedy? Prometheus is well-produced and well-directed, but as far as the genre goes, utterly lacks originality (think Sphere, The Deep, and many many more). A man no less than Ridley Scott should have done a lot more

11/20