Just Plane Movies

So, over the holidays, I stayed at my sister's and saw some stupid (and one good) movies. That's the end of it, right? Oh, no, there' still the flight home. For an airplane movie, I want something that I don't plan to watch on the big (TV) screen, but not something so bad I'll turn it off. On the way over, I watched The Bruce Springsteen No Nukes Concert film. Seeing thge Big Man with Bruce again sort of made me tear up. So that was fine. On the way back:

Knights of the Zodiac (2023) is a dumb SF fantasy martial arts movie. You see, Athena, goddess of war, is coming back to free mankind or destroy the earth, something. Mackenyu is a young cage fighter who discovers that he has some kind of powers, which makes a bunch of guys in mech suits start chasing him. He is rescued by Mark Dacascos, who flies him to the secret island lair of the good guys. Their leader is Sean Bean, and his daughter, Madison Iseman (from the Jumanji movies) is the incarnation of Athena. The bad guys are lead by Bean's ex, Famke Janssen. 

There you have it, the reason I watched was Dacascos, Bean and Janssen. They were all great, although Dacascos was underused with only one or two fights. Janssen looks great - where have they been hiding her? This movie is based on the Saint Seiyu series, but I haven't read any, so that didn't mean much to me. There were some nice visuals, I guess. 

The Creator (2023) is.a much less dumb movie. It is set in the near future. AI and humanoid robots are perfected, but they go wild and nuke LA. America goes to war with the AIs, but the rest of the world, New Asia in particular, lives with them in peace. John David Washington is sent by the US Army to New Asia to go undercover and find the Creator, the guy who created the AIs. But he falls in love with, and marries a New Asian woman, Gemma Chan, who becomes pregnant. Then there's a premature raid, and his wife is killed. So he retires.

But the Army pulls him back in when they learn of a new weapon that will neutralize their mega-weapon, an immense flying bombing platform. Also, maybe his wife isn't dead. So he goes back to New Asia. It turns out that the weapon is a cute little kid who can control machines with his mind. And guess who her parents are?

Again, this has some great visuals, lots of future Asian peasant villages with ox-drawn levitating carts, robot Buddhists, simulants who look human but have holes through their heads, etc. The plot may have a ton of holes, but the action was mostly cool. I wonder if I would have loved this movie if I didn't see it on a plane, or have been more critical.

That's it for the plane. We got home and decided to watch Meg 2: The Trench (2023) that night. Since we got up at 3:00 AM Eastern, and started watching around 5:00 PM Pacific, I fell asleep pretty hard. Can't tell you much about this. I think it had big sharks in.