The Good Dinosaur Review

          The Good Dinosaur is the latest movie in the PIXAR collection and it is about a dinosaur named Arlo, trying to get back home after he got lost in a flood.
          PIXAR's first film this year, Inside Out was phenomenal.  An animated film only PIXAR could have done. That movie was above average in every way, shape, and form. Inside Out found it's way into my top 5 favorite PIXAR movies. The Good Dinosaur looked like it was going to be a good PIXAR movie. It wasn't going to be better than Inside Out, but it seemed like it was going to be a top tier PIXAR movie. Unfortunately, it wasn't.
          The movie was just an animated film that was below average. It didn't seem like PIXAR made this film. It felt like it was made by an independent studio. It didn't feel like PIXAR for 2 main reasons.
          1.) The story was very rushed. The Good Dinosaur was all over the place. It knew where it started, and knew where it wanted it to go.  It just didn't know how to get there. Every moment in the middle was a very big important part to the overall story arc. There were just too many of the very important parts. They needed to show you all these parts that they only spent a limited amount of time on them. That caused for very fast paced story telling which PIXAR hasn't done before in any of their movies. They could have eliminated 3-5 of those parts and expanded upon the ones that were left over. That would have caused for a better flowing story. With the studios weaker films like Brave, Cars 2, and Monsters University, they still had brilliant story pacing. Even though the story was very rushed, they still delivered the emotion they wanted to deliver, and it still made me cry like basically every PIXAR movie.
          2.) The characters. When this film starts off you see a mom and dad dinosaur waiting for their 3 eggs to hatch. When each egg hatches a dinosaur comes out with a very distinctive personality. Their personalities work for when they are new borns. When they are grown up, it doesn't work so well. The dad dinosaur character doesn't fit in with the story at all. I swear he had some king of bipolar disorder. He was a terrible father. He is trying to encourage his son Arlo to try new things, then the next scene he is basically yelling at Arlo telling him how bad he sucks. Very un-PIXAR to have a sudden change of character with no motive or story behind it. Arlo's siblings and mother are really forgettable. They didn't have good enough traits to remember them.  On Arlo's adventure, you meet other dinosaurs. You never care for any of them because they don't focus on them enough. That goes back to the problem I stated in point number one. You never care for the characters that aren't the focus in the story. In one of my favorite PIXAR movies Cars, the miscellaneous cars that Lighting McQueen meets have distinctive characteristics to them so when the ending of the movie comes around, you care for each and every one of them. The only characters you care about in this movie are of course the main dinosaur Arlo and the little boy that follows him. Again, it is very un-PIXAR like to only give focus on your main characters.
           Overall The Good Dinosaur is a disappointing edition to the PIXAR library. In fact i'm very sad to say that this is my least favorite pixar movie. It gets a 1/5.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 Review

          I like every film in this franchise. I surprisingly liked Mockingjay Pt.1 when a lot of people didn't. Pt.2 just sucks.
         This movie was incredibly boring. It might be the most boring movie I have seen this year. The way the exposition was done was always drab. Now, I get that the world is dull, but you still need some excited moments in there to color it a bit.
          From the trailers it looked like the armies of the united districts are coming together and attacking the capitol. The thing we have been waiting 4 movies for. Do you seen any of that? Do you see anything that has to do with the districts attacking the capitol? Nope. You don't see any of it. There is nothing in this movie that helps move the story forward. It feels like they were making the film and they thought to themselves "We forgot to add something exciting. Let's add it here and have it make no sense."  They threw in nonsense hoping that it would make us appreciate what was going on. It didn't.  Another thing I got from the trailer was when Katniss and her group were marching towards President Snow's mansion, there were traps all over the town and they would have to skillfully plan how to avoid them; and we would see them struggling to survive the traps that they got into. They only focused on one trap. They had a perfect opportunity to have some really interesting conflict. But they didn't.
          Without spoiling anything, there are some pretty key reveals that they just screwed up, that carried no emotional impact what so ever. When a reveal happened they only focused on it for about 2-15 seconds. There was literally nothing there to make me care.
           Just like Lord of the Rings: Return of the King this movie could've literally ended 10 different times. The difference being when it seemed like Mockingjay Pt.2 was going to end, it should have and it shouldn't have kept going. I just wanted this movie to end. And when it didn't and it kept going, I was seriously thinking about leaving the theater. I about had enough with this movie. The whole movie moved along with the same speed as a sloth. The whole movie was just filler scenes with no actual scenes to help the story.
          I was so disappointed by this movie because I really liked the other movies. Especially Pt.1. I knew Pt.1 was the build up to what was going to happen in Pt.2. But Pt.2 ending up being really boring with no payoff in it.
          Harry Potter handled the whole Pt.1 Pt.2 situation really well. What we left wanting in Pt.1 came in Pt.2. When you watch the Deathly Hollows Pt.1 and Pt.2 you realize it needed to be 2 movies. You couldn't put all of the of the things we needed to have in one movie. In Mockingjay you could have easily put everything into one movie. When they split the 2 movies they also split there chances of having both movies be good. Mockingjay Pt.2 could have been Battle of Hogwarts good. It just wasn't. They were lazy with the way the handled the main conflict of this series. I couldn't even tell Pt.2 was about a rebellion. If I went into Pt.2 without watching any other movie in this franchise, I would have thought this movie was about, well, I don't know what I would think this movie was about. It was so diluted down from what it could have been.
         This movie sucks. 1.3/5