Leery's Self-Torture Liveblog

this blog was created by tumblr user theleeryone for liveblogging poorly written content in 2014, when leery was 17 years old. the opinions and the language used to express them may not necessarily hold up to leery's current standards. leery still thinks this blog's icon is cool, though.

[theleeryone]

movie’s over at basically the halfway point of the book. steve downes got, like, two lines. that’s easily this film’s worst offense.

[theleeryone]

see, now they’re trying to make sam out to be this symbol for the rest of the conscripts. but their relationship with same hasn’t actually been shown beyond maybe three lines prior to his death. in the book you see them grow up together and all that good shit, but here you’re being told that he’s essentially the most important of the Spartan II’s even though you barely even got to know him.

[theleeryone]

one thing that the movie hasn’t bothered to keep track of is he characters’ ages. they’re only fourteen at this point, but they sound like they’re in their twenties. it’s justified in the book as a side-effect of their augmentations but the movie never bothered to go into detail to describe the effects so it’s not clear why.

[theleeryone]

the whole movie we’ve been told that these people have been trained their entire lives for this shit and now they give us a fight scene and what are they doing? just charging at each other firing wildly. 

it results in a streamlined version of samuel’s death which doesn’t really have the same effect as it did in the book, because we haven’t really gotten to know samuel at all.

[theleeryone]

also i am more than two-thirds of the way through the movie and i don’t believe that at this point i would have even been so much as half of the way through the book so i guess they just cut a lot of post-harvest content.

[theleeryone]

the covenant appear and another action sequence breaks out. this time it’s not that bad, because it doesn’t have to try to imitate human movement, but the ships’ movement still looks clunky and artificial

[theleeryone]

it’s weird because no still frame of this movie looks that bad. sometimes it’s quite pretty. but when things start moving it just looks terrible.

[theleeryone]

like right here we’ve got a couple of stills that look rather pretty. like some nice concept art or something. but the problem is, this isn’t intended to be viewed as a still image, but as the background for a piece of animation, and it’s really jarring and awkward and doesn’t work very well.

[theleeryone]

for the most part thus far all the characters have just stood around and talked at each other, and that looked bad enough

but now we get our first real action sequence and it looks exactly as awful as the rest of the movie would have you expect. character animations are stiff and jarring and unrealistic

[theleeryone]

and then an entirely unconvincing fight sequence, which when i think about it was originally just a repeat of the fight between ender and bonzo

eric nylund really liked ender’s game, didn’t he

[theleeryone]

we get a short first-person sequence that just does not look good

i guess because they just want to tie it into the video game origins but it just doesn’t work

[theleeryone]

halsey has become Dr. Exposition here as well

[theleeryone]

i really don’t get what they’re going for with halsey here.

halsey is a really shitty person who viewed her child subjects as nothing more than tools. she had an affinity for a few of them but she didn’t really give a shit about them. they try to make her look even more cartoonishly awful in the beginning and then they try to backtrack and make her look sympathetic

[theleeryone]

how do we make halsey look smart? make her play classical music. make her act all pretentious and be like “i think it’ll be Rachmaninoff today” 

[theleeryone]

you know there’s a pretty good reason why stuff like ender’s game (or fall of reach aka ender’s game jr.) work much better as books than they could as movies

children are terrible actors

[theleeryone]

looking back the fall of reach really does seem like just a lazier version of ender’s game

[theleeryone]

they didn’t just fucking grab the kids out of the street and force them into a fucking van they tricked them into coming with them peacefully so that they could make sure that they wouldn’t fucking terrified of them the instant they needed to use them like you’re really just trying to make halsey look like a shittier person when she’s already shitty enough

[theleeryone]

fuck you zach this movie is totally based on the book i fucking told you so you fuck