Curious tale about two warring races (the “seals” and the “polar bears”), and the homosexual, cross-species relationship between two youngsters from each race. The narrative follows Lars (a bear) and Robbie (a seal) as they struggle for acceptance amongst their own people. Through their love they manage to forge a fragile truce between the two races, but it is doomed from the start. At the height of tension, when both tribes find themselves under assault from a robotic alien berserker creature, Lars is cast adrift on an ice floe. Delirious from exhaustion and thirst, he embarks on a spirit quest to a far-off tropical land, where his concepts of friendship and power are turned upside down by a succession of strange creatures. Robbie eventually finds and rescues him. Lars returns to his people in proper Messianic fashion to lead them in a bloody battle to defeat the alien invader.

How this managed to get billed as a children’s film, I’ll never know.

Take my rating here with a grain of salt, because I’m not the target audience for this film. But that in itself is disappointing, because the original Disney Winnie The Pooh animations are sweet interpretations of A.A. Milne’s books, and hold just as much charm for grown-ups as they do for young kids.

Piglet’s Big Movie consists of a series of little adventures told in flashback, held together by the main storyline, in which Piglet runs away because he feels that his friends don’t really need him. It is clearly designed to drive home a “friends do need each other” message. But much of the beauty of the original Disney treatment lies in its unstructured rambling, and the joy of just “doing nothing” (as Christopher Robin and Pooh discuss at the end). This new film has a purpose. It tries to lead your imagination down a particular path, rather than letting your own mind do the wandering. Having Carly Simon sing a series of bland A-A-B-A songs rather than letting the characters use their own voices for their own little ditties doesn’t help, either. And why on earth did they have to stick a music video of one of the songs between the end of animation and the credits? Alex had a good time because he got to see Pooh and the gang having new adventures, but I didn’t like it very much.

Everything that has a beginning has an end. Just not always a terribly good one. The middle of the film, the assault of Zion and the flight of the Hammer, is amazing; the rest is pants. The final fight between Neo and Smith is dull. The final reversal of fortune is unexplained and therefore unsatisfying. I suppose the ending was meant to leave me with a sense of awe and mystical wonder; instead, it came across as naive and deflating. It ends, yes, but it resolves nothing. It leaves the door open for the follow-up novels, graphic novels, games, anime series, etc. Reloaded improved upon a second viewing, because I didn’t understand what was really going on, and I wanted to. I understand what they’re trying to do with Revolutions, and I wish I didn’t.

Vampires and werewolves fight each other a centuries-old battle to the death, with guns and lots of slo-mo, post-Matrix pseudo-goth pseudo-cool. There’s nothing wrong with doing a new take on old legends, but unfortunately nothing here is new. There are too many sub-rivalries and sub-enmities going on, with no strong central antagonistic relationship. The screenplay makes a molehill out of the primary plot twist, and it doesn’t even have any decent existential angst going for it. It does have Kate Beckinsale in a black PVC catsuit (mmm…worth a bonus star), but even that’s not enough to save Underworld from the scrapheap.

Aaron Hallam (Benicio Del Toro) is a “killing machine”, shaped by the military, and traumatized by Kosovo. L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones) is the man who trained him, a legendary tracker and military adviser who “doesn’t do that thing any more”. Hallam, apparently driven insane by the ghosts that haunt him, kills some hunters in the Oregon forest. The FBI bring in Bonham to hunt him down. Capture, escape, capture, escape, near miss, final resolution. Yawn. There are occasional hints that these characters are more than just cinematic stereotypes: Hallam was involved with a woman and her daughter before he went AWOL; there’s the suggestion that his killing spree was actually a covert government/military mission; and was there a reason that LT never answered his letters? But the film never properly asks these questions, let alone answers them. As a result, it’s impossible to care about the characters and what happens to them. The film is tense and action-packed, but ultimately completely soulless.

Hmm. This started off quite well, with a nice title sequence. It was interesting to see Bond out on his ear and left to his own devices. Unfortunately it gets worse from there. Too much reliance on ridiculous gadgets, rather than on Bond’s wits and a half-decent plot. Even the set pieces and stunts use more CGI (and bad CGI, at that) than one has come to expect from the franchise. A disappointment, overall.