Short answer: yes!

The Pros

The Fighting System

For once a game takes seriously who Batman is supposed to be: a martial arts master. From the very first minutes of of the story line, you’ll see Batman demolish two or three Joker goons with an array of punches, kicks, and take downs. Throughout the whole game in fact, Batman will have no trouble handling individual thugs. It’s easy to execute flashy slow-motion “finishing moves” on bad guys, and to do so it’s not really a matter of button mashing, but more an issue of timing. This lets experienced and newbies feel satisfied without seeming as if the game controls were dummed down.

But since Batman can polish off a thug or two without breaking a sweat, the real awesomeness comes when you have to fight, 6, 7, 10  guys at one time. You can execute a series of bone-crushing combos with what the game calls it’s free flow combat system. It basically let’s you chain together unlimited combos, seamlessly. The most awesome parts of which get close-up cinematic slow motion shots. Let me tell you, no matter how many times you unleash the Bat-fury, it never gets old.  Eventually you’ll have to fight groups of baddies who have knives, can pick up metal bars to hit you with, and carry electrical shock poles; for them you’ll have to use more advanced fighting techniques.

The Predator System

Part of what makes Batman so awesome is that he’s just a man. No special super powers, no alien heritage. He’s just a regular dude. Well, a regular dude who’s trained his body to unholy perfection and carries a bunch of high tech gadgetry to challenge the lowliest low-lifes of the criminal underworld. Ahem. But besides that, he’s just a dude.

The bad part of being just a dude is that bullets can hurt you. Many times you’ll come across a room full of thugs and they are all armed with machine guns. If you try to take one of them down directly, the other thugs will hear you and gun you down in short order. Enter the Invisible Predator. This is where the game really shines. You must instill fear and act unseen in order to beat the bad guys. You must become the night.

This is also where we see the AI in the game really step it up a notch. In the scenario we mentioned before, a room full of goons with machine guns, you’ll need to take each guard out silently so as not to alert the other guards. At first they’ll brag and yell insults at you into the air about how they’ll take you down and make short work of you. But then you start silently taking them down, one by one, picking them off. Should you glide kick a foe from a high ledge? Perform a silent take down after sneaking up from behind? Throw a batarang to incapacitate them and then finish them up? Use explosive gel to blow the floor out from under them? You’re starting to get my drift.

As you methodically eliminate them the guards will get nervous, yelling that they know you’re out there, sometimes frightened enough to start shooting into the air at nothing. They start to stick together in groups knowing that you’re coming for them. But it won’t matter. You’re the Batman.

The Storyline & Graphics

The story line and voice acting by any account receive an A+ in this game. The same guy who wrote for Batman the Animated Series writes here – in fact, many of the voice actors from the series reprise their roles (Mark Hamill as the Joker is pitch perfect). After Joker takes control of the island he’ll appear on the closed-circuit TV’s and intercom systems. He’ll verbally spar with Batman and taunt the guards with witty and often hilarious dialogue. In addition to that, while the combat portion of the game will get a lot of attention, players will spend a big chunk of their time in “detective mode” using Batman’s sleuthing skills to track down baddies or rescue hostages. In this aspect, you really get the all around Batman experience, using not only his extensive gadget and martial arts  arsenal, but the detective and problem solving skills that make Batman such a force to be reckoned with.

Of course, with a video game you have to talk about the graphics. They’re stinking beautiful. The game really sets the mood with a dark and gritty atmosphere. So much attention was spent to detail, often with the video sequences you’ll just  be sitting there dumb-founded about how realistic everything seems. I mean, just check out the opening video sequence:

The Cons

Well…there aren’t any glaring errors or problems with the game really. But if I had to choose some…

You face a lot of A-list Batman foes in the game, but there are some pretty big hitters you don’t get to fight. There are a lot of nameles, hapless thugs though that you do have to face.  It would have been nice to face some more B-list enemies instead of so many goons.

After you beat the game, you really have beat it. You can still explore the map and do some things but you don’t get to fight any one. I mean, you can definitely do that starting a new game, so not a real big complaint.

The final boss showdown was a bit of a let down. I expected more of a fight. I found the fight right before the final boss to be harder than fighting the final boss! But the final video sequence afterward was so sweet it quickly distracted me from any unsatisfaction.

The Final Score

So there you have it folks. Let’s take a look at the score board:

Story Line: 9.5/10
Gameplay: 9.5/10
Graphics: 10/10

See more info at the URL below that explains just what the shuttle is doing:
http://www.universetoday.com/2009/11/19/spectacular-shuttle-belly-flip-as-atlantis-docks-to-iss-video/

Season 8 was the first season without the shows creators, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. It was also the first season without tw key characters that had been around since the first season – Michael Rosenbaum as Lex Luther and Kristin Kreuk as Lana Lang. In Season 8, we saw the introduction of Doomsday, or at least Smallville’s interpretation of Doomsday. In the comics, Doomsday is mindless raging beast that does what noone has ever been able to do – kill Superman. In Smallville, Doomsday is a raging beast, capable of really beating the crap out of Clark…but then again, lots of other people have done that too. Clark ends up destroying Doomsday without killing Davis Bloom in the season finale, but – SPOILER ALERT! – Davis ends up killing Jimmy. Doh!

Perhaps one of the better parts of Season 8 are the interaction between Lois and Clark. They finally start to have a lot of screen time together and the two actors really pull it off great. Lois Lane’s character up until now, for me at least, was more of a nuisance than anything else. Honestly, she was just kind of annoying. But the new writing for Season 8 put Lois right where she’s her best; quickfire witty dialogue between her go-get-em reporter spunk and Clark’s subdued alter-ego, and Lois being in danger and Clark managing a way to save them all without being discovered. There are many ways to do that wrong (and in fact that was done a few times), but overall I think the writers nailed it last season.

And now on to Season 9! To sum up my thoughts, I would use one sentence: “cautiously optimistic”. Of course, now would be a good time to say, SPOILERS AHEAD, so if you don’t want to here specifics of the episode, don’t read any further!

So now it appears that Clark must finally listen to Jor-El and embrace his “destiny” and forsake humanity (whom Jor-El sent him to in the first place, go figure) so that he can complete his training. Which I assume, the completion of which will leave him being that red-and-blue clad boyscout we all know and love.  Part of that training includes *gasp* learning to fly! The shows creators originally had a mantra of “no tights no flight”. But those creators are now gone. And after all this time…if the show is going to end this season or next, it would be really unsatisfying to see neither flight nor tights at some point. But anyway we see Clark doing mental training on figuring out how to fly. But wait! Something, or someone, is holding him back. His attachment to Lois!

Of course. I can see where this is heading. The same thing that happened a season or two ago – Clark and Lois were hitting it off real nice and all of a sudden BAM Lana shows up and blows the whole thing to smithereens. Bleh. I’m hoping it’s not going to be that whole soap opera all over again except that its Jor-El being the interrupter. But we’ll see what happens.

Also, Clark has started to actively use his powers to help people. Which is awesome. He catches a train in the beginning of the episode – very reminiscent of Superman catching the airliner in Superman Returns. He’s also wearing his House of El symbol, showing he’s finally excepting his destiny and his Kryptonian heritage.

The suit looks eerily similar to Superman’s black suit that he wore in the comics right after he was resurrected (after Doomsday killed him). I’m not opposed to this new look, but when they did a cityscape shot of Clark standing over Metropolis waiting to nab bad guys trench coat fluttering in the wind, it looked like a shot stolen straight from Batman. Couldn’t they have been a bit more original than that?

We also see the introduction of Zod again – except this time he is in flesh, here on Earth. Only this time he is not there de-facto leader. Only the commander of a small band of troops who must convince into following him. We all know of General Zod, so this version must be some sort of earlier incarnation. Where the writers are going with this I have no idea, but the field is wide open. I’m excited to see where this could take us, and an eventual Superman / Zod battle. I loved that they paid homage to the fanboys by having Zod yell at his subordinates, “Kneel before Zod!” Which as we all know was the highlight of the movie Superman II.

One silly part is the interaction between Chloe and Clark when she asks him to use the time-traveling-ring-to-rule-them-all to go back and save Jimmy. I assume this was a lapse in her judgement brought on because of the turmoil and grief of loosing Jimmy. After all, she’s usually a level-headed character. Clark denies her yelling “I’m not a god!”, and it’s not his place to change time. The last time he did that his own father died. Chloe, of course, says that “It’s a good thing you’re embracing your Kryptonian-side. There’s not much left about you that’s human.” And walks away in tears. This all happens in the span of a minute or so. I didn’t think that much about it, but my wife pointed out how silly it was. The exchange between Clark and Chloe boiled down:

Chloe : “Go back and change time and save Jimmy!”

Clark : “No!”

Chloe : “You’re not human!”

…

So, overall impression?

The seaon looks like it’ll be pretty good. Clark will be saving the day in more spectacular ways and being more Superman-like, which makes me excited. Since the whole premise of the series is to see Clark go from farmboy to super hero, as the series winds down let’s see him become the superhero. There was an episode last season, don’t remember which, but afterward I turned to my wife and said, “You know, he really seemed like Superman there.” And it was awesome. That’s what we want to see now! Enough of the melodrama and the soap opera of “who’s dating who”. Bring on the action, the epic-ness! Bring us Superman!!

Stan Lee why?? I, like many others, remain very skeptical about what the future may hold for this Marvel/Disney mutant offspring. But I think this youtube video sums things up pretty good.

I guess we’ll wait and see.

These are all questions that a modern-day Christian who believes in both the validity of the Bible and the trustworthiness of science must wrestle with. An indeed many have. There are whole websites, such as Answers in Genesis which are dedicated to this very question.

There are 2 main viewpoints in Christianity concerning the age of the universe:

1. The universe is and everything in it is about 10,000 years old
2. The universe is the scientifically accepted age, about 14 billion years old

There are some variations and details on each position, but when you boil down each argument, the essentials come to these two positions.

For Christians who believe in the former position, position #1, why the 10,000 year number?

Young Universe Creationism

The line of thinking was formalized by a biblical scholar name Ussher, who created the Ussher chronology. His line of reasoning was that since the Bible presents a chronology of from Adam, the first man, all the way to Jesus Christ, we should be able to estimate how long each generation lived (using biblical data and estimates i would assume), and make a fairly accurate guess as to how much time passed between the birth of Jesus Christ and the creation of the world.

When you add all those numbers up, and add 2000 years (it’s been about 2000 years since the birth of Christ), you can an earth that’s around 6000 years old. Different theologians, arguing on different chronologies came up with different numbers. Even the man himself, Sir Isaac Newton, tried to calculate the number using biblical chronologies.

Factoring in these differences, it is safe to say that scholars who to calculate the age of the univese using biblical chronology will come up with a number that is at least less than 10,000 years old.

Current Cosmology Theory

So how what does current cosmological theory say about the age of the universe?

The “age” of the universe according to scientists would be the amount of time between present day and the Big Bang. The current estimate for the age of the universe is about 14 billion years. There are a number of ways that comsologists can arrive at that answer. One is based off of a cosmological model based off of a property called Hubble’s constant. The second method is looking at the oldest stars astronomers can find; after all, the universe must be at least as old as matter that is in it.

Briefly, let’s talk about what Hubble’s constant is: Hubble’s constant is essentially the expansion rate of the entire universe.

Hubble was the scientist credited with making the discovery that the whole universe is in a state of expansion. In general, everywhere we look in the sky, stellar objects are moving away from us, and moving away from each other.

It can be imagined this way: picture for a moment, a loaf of raisin bread. The raisins represent galaxies. When you stick that bread in the oven, and the yeast begins to rise, that loaf of bread begins to expand. It doesn’t just grow in one direction – the whole loaf expands in width, height and depth. Pick any raisin in that expanding loaf; from it’s point of view, all the raisins in the loaf seem to be moving away from it. In a very similar fashion, when we look into the sky, most objects are moving away from us.

The age of the universe can be calculated by measuring Hubble’s constant today, and extrapolating it backwards in time. When scientists do this and extrapolate backwards to the point where the universe wasn’t expanding (that is, the Big Bang), they number that comes out of the equation is about 14 billions years.

Why so old?

Tens of thousands of years is a number hard for the human mind to grasp. But millions? Billions? Where do scientists get such a large number?

The answer boils down to two main points really: the universe is massive, and things take a really long time.

Let’s expound on that for a minute.

• The Milky Way, the galaxy that we live in, is estimated to be about 100,000 ligh- years across. What that means is, it takes light 100,000 years to travel from one side of the galaxy to the other.
• Andromeda, the nearest spiral galaxy to our own, is 2.5 million light-years away from us. That means light emitted from the Andromeda galaxy would take 2.5 million years just to reach our eyes.
• The sun is 4 to 5 billion years old. Scientists determine the age of the sun by looking at the oldest meteorites we can find (which would have formed in the early solar system, which would have been when the sun was born) and dating them with radiometric dating.This is close agreement with current models of stellar evolution.
• As large as our Milky Way is, a galaxy is not the largest structure in the universe. Our galaxy is gravitationally bound to a handful of other nearby galaxies. This group is so brilliantly named, The Local Group. The farthest galaxy from us in our Local Group is 7.9 million light-years away.
• There are sedimentary rock formations on Mars that are over 4 kilometers thick. Such layers would require tens to hundreds of millions of years of running water to form. In addition there must have been millions of years for all the water to have disappeared, since Mars is now extremely dry. (thanks to godandscience.org for the link)
• In the constellation Ursa Major (aka, the Big Dipper) there is a prominent spiral galaxy named M81. It has near perfect spiral arms, and an active galaactic nucleas (harboring a supermassive black hole). It is 12 million light years away. OK, enough with the piddly millions of years, let’s get big.
• “3C 272″ was the name of the first quasar ever discovered. A quasar is a small and distant but very powerful and energetic galaxy that has an active galactic nucleus. A galactic nucleas powered by a central supermassive black hole. 3C 272 is the brighest quasar in the sky. It is 2 billion light years away. A typical quasar is 4.5 billion light years away.
• The age of the Milky Way is calculated to be about 13.7 billion years old. It is almost as old as the universe itself.

What does this mean?

What’s the significance of all of these large amounts of time and distance?

The significance is that the universe is vast, covering colossal distances and it will take light (which is the fastest thing in the universe) a very long time to traverse that distance. Even baring our dating techniques, just the amount of time it would take for light to travel these amazing distances gives us time estimates in the millions and billions of years. Let me state that again – the amount of time it takes for light to reach us from these distant objects can be in the billions of years.

Given such astounding data, how to do young universe creationists respond?

The Freeze Frame

Perhaps the most common argument among young-universers is the “In Transit” model. It’s what I like to call the “Freeze Frame”. Image it this way.

Say you were to take a snapshot of your living room. A 3D freeze frame, like if you were in the Matrix and suddenly the motion froze, and you were able to rotate and look about in all directions and see things frozen in time. Now expand that freeze frame to the entire universe – planets, stars, and galaxies are all frozen, BAM!, right as you see them.

The Freeze Frame theory basically says that God, conceived of the entire universe as a shot in the freeze frame. There was nothing and then He spoke everything into being and essentially said, “Go!”, unfreezing the freeze frame.

What does this outlook on creation give you? What is its advantage?

It’s advantage is that it can give you a young universe. God could have only created everything about 10,000 years ago. He would have just created the initial beginning, the “freeze frame”, in such a way that everything looked like it was very old, but actually wasn’t. The light that seemed to be emitted from distant stars would have been created “in-transit”. In the initial “freeze frame” God created included not just the object themselves (starts, planets, galaxies, etc), but all the light, gravity,and  particles that exist between them.

A young-universe creationist, when looking into the sky is claiming that we are not seeing actual star light from distant objects, but an image that God created in transit.

Problems with the Freeze Frame

Perhaps one of the biggest problems with the freeze frame is this: how do we know that anything we see in the sky really existed? How do we know if these stars are really there? We’re seeing an image, light created in transit by God, of events that never actually happened.

Christian apologist Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason explains it like this:

If all we’re seeing is an image that God created in transit, then the only way we’re going to see the actual thing that exists is if we wait around another billion years for the light of the actual star to reach us. Who of us believes the Lord will tarry that long? Not a billion years. Which means we’ll never see it, will we? We’ll never see what God actually created, not the thing itself.

Doesn’t that throw into question the existence of anything in outer space at all? Because, in fact, since we’ll never see the thing itself– and what we see is not the thing, but an image God created in transit– well then, why would God ever need to create the thing in the first place? The image would be fully adequate for God’s purpose. The only thing God would have to create is the light image, because we’d never see the thing itself anyway. But doesn’t the Scripture seem to indicate that what we see are the very things that God created?

Another Christian aplogist site, godandscience.org, explains it similarly:

The alternative young earth explanation is that God created the light in transit. However, we know that quasars existed only during the beginning of the universe, since none are seen closer to us than billions of light years. If God created light in transit, He would have created the light in transit from a quasar that does not now exist. Likewise, we have observed supernova explosions in galaxies millions of light years away. If God created light in transit from these objects, He would have made the light from an object that does not now exist, since it appeared to have blown up millions of years before the universe was actually created. How can the universe declare the glory and righteousness of God if it declares a lie?

As we can see, taking this stance presents us with a very strange dilemma. The real heavenly bodies that do exist will never be seen. That is, the light from the original objects will take billions of years to reach us. While the stellar objects that we think we see now don’t actually exist.

Biblical Problems and Truth

Scripure clearly refers to objects in the sky as real objects and not just images.

“Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He said to him, “So shall your descendants be.”
Genesis 15:5

God tells Abraham to count the stars – not their light images.

It is I who made the earth and created mankind upon it. My own hands stretched out the heavens; I marshaled their starry hosts.
Isaiah 45:12

God marshaled the starry hosts – not their light images.

Taking the “Freeze Frame” view undermines all observational sciences. How do we know what is real and what isn’t? What do we think exists but really doesn’t? What else is an illusion created by God?

When looking deeper, perhaps the biggest problem with this stance is that is undermines our trust in the truth of the Bible. If the Bible undeniably states that we see stars in the sky (see Deut. 4:19, Neh. 4:21, Job 22:12, and Psalm 8:3), but in actuality we don’t, then the Bible does not give us an accurate description of reality. That is, truth. In other words, the Bible has deceived us – what the Bible describes is not what is actually there.

Conclusion

We can see how holding the view of a young universe is untenable. We can see that clearly the universe appears to be very old, and we can measure that in a number of ways. The only way to have universe that is young, is to explain away that apparent age as a Godly sleight-of-hand.

We would then have a universe where not much outside our solar system (where light has had time to reach us within 10,000 years or so) is known to actually exist. Yet when we do so, we run into biblical descriptions of stars and the outside universe that indicate the existence of those actual objects and events – not just the light images in transit we would be receiving from God.

Resources

1. Starlight and the Age of the Universe, http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5639
2. Scientific Evidence for the Age of the Universe, http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth/ageofuniverse.html
3. Age of the Universe, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe

I ran into one problem though using it when I was creating my art site. I had a bunch of pictures, and though Wordpress has an import function, it doesn’t support YAPB natively. That was a big problem for me – I could import all my posts, but then I’d have to go back and manually add pictures to each of my posts (around 100 of them). Um, I don’t think so.

So I set my mind to it – I was going to write myself a Wordpress plugin to make it much easier for me to be lazy! So it was written. So let it be done.

How I made it

What I basically did is rip out the exporting code (literally…like copy and paste) for Wordpress and added one extra field for the YAPB image. Then ripped out the importing code for Wordpress (literally, another copy and paste) and added functionality to read that extra field and save the image along with the post. Then wrapped up both of those in a nice little plugin.

So the importing/exporting works exactly as Wordpress does now in 2.7. The only difference is your images come along with the import/export.

This is the very first beta version of the plugin (my first plugin actually), so sorry if there isn’t any fancy image stuff. But it works! I used it for my own site.

Instructions for Use

The export function is just like Wordpress and is located under Tools -> Export YAPB. The import function is located the same place the other import functions are, Tools -> Import -> YAPB Importer. Use it exactly like you would use the default Wordpress importer.

(Disclaimer: Of course, in the interest of you-can’t-blame-me-ism, always backup your DB before doing significant changes like imports!)

Level 1 Review

Overall this was a fun movie! There’s no doubting that, it’s  the sort of movie that will keep you entertained forn hour or two. A popcorn summer flick, really. It’s pretty much there where you want set your expectations. The movie starts off in the ancient human past, where – who knew! – Transformers had come to Earth for the actual first time. What were they doing here? Were they good, were they bad?

Fast forward to present. Sam Witwicky is off to college, with his girlfriend, scantily clad Megan Fox. He finds a sliver of the cube from movie 1, and it encodes all sorts of stuff into his brain. To make a long story short, the Decepticons want the info Sam has to destroy the world. They get it and try to destroy the world. The Autobots and Sam and company try to stop them while running away from huge explosions in slow-mo. The good guys win. Hurray!

The special effects in the movie were great. The transformations looks really nice, and they did a really good job of making it seem as the robots had real presence and weight, which is not always easy in special effects. There was more actual robot-on-robot fighting, which the first movie needed more of. This time there are plenty of scenes where we get to see full metal throwdown.

There was a decent amount of comedy in the film, and some genuiely funny parts. Definitely enough to show that the movie didn’t take itself too seriously. Sure a lot of the comedy was amatuerish is nature, but hey, what were you expecting?

So overall, decent, watchable summar action movie.

Level 2 Review

For those of you who are incapable of turning off your analytic nature, who love to introspect, who look for meaning, for a message…or perhaps you’re the kind of person who just wants a movie to make sense; you will hate this movie.

Seriously, there were so many plot holes, ridiculous, irrelevant, impossible, improbable, cheesy scenes you’ll really start to lose count after the first 10 minutes. What were my specific beefs?

**** SPOILER ALERT ****

For those who don’t want any spoilers do not read any further!!

These aren’t in any particular order, but here you are:

• Almost all of the comedic moments went for the cheap laughs. I mean, the movie is about giant transforming robots, so take everything with a grain of salt but still. But still. For instance, Sam’s mom insists on eating a brownie made with marijuana and goes crazy. Two of Sam’s parent’s dogs are always humping each other. One decepticon starts humping Megan Fox’s leg. Two autobots are continuously acting like little kids an name-calling Sam and his roommate – stuff you’d hear in junior high. Which is pretty much who all the comedy is aimed at!
• The Transformers are stupid. I mean literally stupid. Most of them are idiots. They either talk like idiots, or act like idiots.
• Megan Fox’s makeup was flawless at all times.
  All of her lines were breathy and ridiculous. Literally ANYONE who’s taken one acting class could have filled her role, with respect to her dialogue and acting. Clearly, and unabashedly, she is used just as eye candy to get little boys in the door to see the movie.
• The military action was so over the top it was comical. At one point, a general says “Call in everybody!”. We get a bunch of US troops landing on beaches and tanks rolling off with soldiers running with guns. The only problem is that Sam is in the middle of Egyptian desert. I assume those tanks would take a couple hours of rumbling through the desert sands to get to where Sam is. Perhaps they got some audio books to listen to on the way? Why did it take Sam 10 hours to get from where they were to Optimus? What were all the ruins that the Transformers kept breaking through and rumbling through? How could an entire section of the American military highjack a military cargo plane, carrying a high-profile alien robot, fly it half way around the world (without refueling I assume) and land it without orders? When the C-17 cargo transport plane is carrying the soldiers and the high-raking administration official, it’s banking like crazy from side-to-side. Yet when they cut back to the soldiers in side, they’re all just standing around like gravity doesn’t exist. The county of Jordan would let us land US troops and tanks, fly F-16’s, B-1 bombers, Helicopter gunships, reconnaisance drones, and have a navy battleship off it’s shores without so much as an afterthought? And within the window of a few hours? The sliver of cube that was in the highest security military installation we had turned out to be a joke. Oceans’ 12 could have broken in there. Icould go on and on and on and on…but I won’t.
• The cursing in the dialogue. I know a lot of people don’t really care about that very much, and I understand when movies put it in for dramatic tension or to talk like real-world people. I really do understand it. But this movie was silly – they put in curse words for no reason other than so that they had them.  In fact, it seemed really awkward most of the time – I felt bad for the writers when I was watching the movie.
• The Decepticon-Autobot fighting was impossible to follow. They just look too similar! I admit, it was better than the first movie, where it was all Borne-Identity-closeups. But still, it was hard to distinguish who was who during the fights.
• Scenes that were supposed to be moving turned out to be funny. Like where Sam is about to die and sees the ancient Primes. “Robot Gods” is how my wife put it – she was trying not to laugh during this supposed serious scene. The scene where Sam’s parents reappear and he has to leave them and Sam says “you have to let me go.” It seesm so forced…the scene really had no emotional impact at all. Everyone in the audience is saying, “sure, the father loves his kid, we get it, move on.”
• Every other scene was a slow-mo shot. Seriously. If Sam was brushing his teeth, the second half of the shot would be in slow mo.

The list is getting so long…it’s just not worth it to make it any longer.

So was this movie a bad movie?

Well…yeah.

Was it a decent movie?

Well…I guess, yeah, that too.

Which is a weird contradiction right there. Would I recommend seeing it is theaters? If you’re just out to be entertained and zone out to some cool fights and explosions in slow mo while getting the full theater experience? Yes, go see it! If you’re out to see an awesome, well-done, action flick – heck no, stay way!

Right?

There’s not much to screw up with a dude with huge metal claws slicing the crap out of people. Well. You’d be surprised.

So what did I think? I think it was a decent enough movie. Good enough to see in the theaters? If you’re a comic fan, definitely. If not, well, I’d say, maybe not.

As far as the movie following the comics…let’s be real, if the movie followed the comics, the movie
would be 12 days long and completely incomprehensible. I understand that they need to condense it down to it’s pure elements, get the best stuff that works onscreen and go with that.

This movie didn’t do that! There was a lot of action, which I loved, but the plot was so woefully thin. Some parts didn’t even make sense. Others were silly. Others were against the laws of physics.

I mean, you don’t need to have a Watchmen sort of script to make a good comic movie. Just look at Iron Man. It had a really simple premise – a rich arrogant dude in a metal armored battle suit fights evil. And that movie was AWESOME.

So overall, it wasn’t a bad movie. The action was excellent and Hugh Jackman did a bang up job. But the plot and dialogue weren’t up to par. The essence of Wolverine…was a bit missing. Let me expound.

*************************************************
SPOILER ALRT!!!!
If you don’t want spoilers, don’t read below!
*************************************************

What were my issues?

1. We didn’t REALLY see the animal side of Wolverine.

They kept TALKING about it, but we never really saw it. Sure he got plenty mad sometimes, but he was always in control. In the comics Wolverine is known for his “berserker rage”. That’s where he got so angry, he literally lost his mind, and would become feral, or animal like, and it would take a lot to bring him back to the world of rational humanity.

2. Sabertooth is Wolverine’s brother

What? In the comics they are such mortal enemies, it was strange seeing them be friends and fight side-by-side. Sure, after weapon-x and things, wolverine doesn’t remember much and actually does end up fighting with sabertooth as a comrade. But it’s not like they grew up together as blood brothers or something.

3. Deadpool was ridiclous

He barely resembles the real Deadpool at all! The beginning half of the movie he actually was a pretty cool Deadpool. After that it sucked. He has two katanas in each arm?? How does he bend his arm when they’re not extended?

4. Wolverine seemed weak

I understand this is his origin story. I understand he gets beat a lot by other people. But come on! He’s the quintessential rebel. Show us how much of animal he is, how he can channel that rage and become an unstoppable healing fighting machine. That’s what I wanted.

5. Plot was hard to follow at times

The whole Gambit sub-plot didn’t add to the progression of the movie at all. Sure, I was geeking out like everyone else when Gambit showed up. But really think about it – if he hadn’t been in the movie, and someone else told him where the island was, the plot wouldn’t have changed AT ALL. That’s gotta tell you something,

Why did Stryker send Silver Fox to live with Wolverine? For six years? So that he could trick him to be experimented on? Surely there’s a simpler way that that! Just kidnap him and drug him!

Why did Stryker let Wolverine go after they experimented on him? Why’d he let him go after he found out the truth about Silver Fox?Why did Gambit break up the fight between Wolverine and Sabertooth? Especially when he saw
Wolverine was about to kill Sabertooth? Why’d he even start the fight when Wolverine said he wanted to kill everyone on the island? Wouldn’t Gambit want that to?

Why would an adamantium bullet cause amnesia in Wolverine? What’s special about adamantium that he couldn’t heal back from that?

What exactly is the Blob’s powers?

I could go on…

—

So, overall, I think the biggest problem was the plot. Not only did it have problems, but you didn’t really end up caring about many of the characters. Will.I.Am’s character? The blob? Billy Boyd? There’s no backstory. When those people died, you just ended up not caring that much.

So the best judge of a lot of comic book movies is to compare it to others.

Better than Spiderman? No.
Better than Superman? Maybe.
Better than Batman? No.
Better than Iron Man? Heck no.
Better than Fantastic Four? Yes.
Better than Punisher, Elektra, Daredevil, or Ghost Rider? Heck yes.
Better than X-Men? No.

There ya have it.