Oblivion

Oblivion (2013)
 Starring: Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko.
Director: Joseph Kosinski

 

If you're not a fan of Tom Cruise, then I suggest you stop reading and don't bother hiring/watching this movie. This movie is pretty much 95% Tom Cruise, with very few other actors even in the film.

Jack (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) live on a suspended platform high above what was once earth. Set in the future, earth has been devastated by an alien species and Jack and Victorias job is to maintain the droids that patrol the ruins seeking out any alien stragglers and repairing broken robots.

Everyday is the same, until one day, Jack discovers that they are not alone and that the truth has been withheld from them for a very long time.

I found this movie gripping and very well told. I think being a scifi fan is an absolute necessity with a movie like this, otherwise it will just bore you to tears.

Visually stunning, but paints a very bleak picture of our beautiful planet.

Tom Cruise is brilliant as Jack and really throws himself into the role. I really wish people would stop judging him by his personal life and start seeing him for what he can be, a fantastic actor.
Smaller but no less important roles from Morgan Freeman and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jamie Lannister from Game of Thrones) make this an entertaining piece from the scifi genre.

Definitely worth a look.

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013)

Starring: Jamie Campbell Bower, Lily Collins, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Lena Headey, Aidan Turner.
Director: Harald Zwart

                        

I love reading.

Reading, like watching movies, takes you away to another world. Sometimes it's a world that challenges you, or makes you cry, but usually, it's a world that you can escape to and believe in vampires, werewolves, faeries and really good looking guys that fall for the plain girl on a regular basis, or even put you in the thick of history itself. The printed world, is one that is rich in potential movie scripts. However, taking a book and bringing your favourite characters to life can be tricky. Some books, especially successful series like Harry Potter and the Vampire Academy series, have a very loyal fan base, and when you mess with what their pre-conceived ideas of how a character should look, or how a film adaptation should go ahead, you're dicing with death, something the Marvel and DC comic people know all too well. Regardless, you're always going to have a larger market of non-readers that only see the movies, and in most cases, this is the audience they pander to and hope will bring in the big bucks.

The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare is a series that I started reading about 2 years ago and have recently finished the latest book, City of Lost Souls, which was another great story in the world of the Shadowhunters.

The casting for this had to be pretty spot on and when I saw that Jamie Campbell Bower was playing one of the main characters, Jace Wayland, I was pretty disappointed. Jace is meant to be angelic, drop dead gorgeous, the kind of guy you just can't resist, and Bower just doesn't do it for me. Clary, played by Lily Collins, is meant to be a fierce red head whose life changes irrevocably when Jace comes into her life.

        
Clary lives with her artist mother, Jocelyn (Lena Headey) in an upstairs apartment in New York City. When she begins to draw strange symbols and starts seeing things that other people can't see, the truth of her past and her family begins to unravel before her.

When she goes to a night club with her best friend Simon and witnesses what she thinks is a murder, the life that her mother had tried to hide from her, comes crashing in.

Clary is approached by Jace, who tells her that because she was the only one that could see him and his friends in the night club, that she is not a mundane (a human), that she must be a shadowhunter, a race of beings who hunt demons and live by the Angel Raziels word. Clary starts to investigate more, but her mother is taken and the hunt is on to find her and save her before it's too late.

Aided by Jace and his friends Alec, Isabella and a Warlock by the name of Magnus Bane, Clary delves deeper into the world of the Shadowhunters, dragging her best friend in with her on a journey that will change her life forever.

After walking into the theatre with very low expectations, I am happy to say that I walked out wanting to see it again. It was one of the better book to movie adaptations that I have seen in recent months, (the other being Warm Bodies), and I am also happy to say that Jamie Campbell Bower worked very well as Jace.

I was also incredibly happy to see Aidan Turner as Luke Garroway, Clary's mothers boyfriend. His part isn't huge in the first book and he wasn't overly present in the movie, but his story gets better as it goes along.

Best piece of casting goes to Jonathan Rhys Myers as Valentine, the bad guy in the picture. He was brilliant and I can't wait to see more of him.

I am really looking forward to the next movie now, and hope they continue to be true to the books, only making small changes. If they do, they will have won me over.