JG Judgementally Comments...

The Gifted

Dreary family drama does not become less dreary simply because your brats have amazing abilities, you know.

What’s The Show? The Gifted

What’s It All About, JG? The Struckers discover that their children have “special powers” of the type that ought to be immediately identifiable to anyone with a passing knowledge of pop culture over at least the last twenty years or so. They’re mutants of the X-Men variety, destined to be hunted by mutant-hating purists who want to “keep the human race from extinction” by persecuting said mutants, which means the family need to go on the run. They’re being hunted by Sentinel Services, a government-sanctioned (sort of) mutant control authority who absolutely totally aren’t just Nazi stand-ins, honest guv. So – family on the run, secret to hide. There’s a line in the last Deadpool movie about how mutants are, “a dated metaphor for racism in the 60’s!” Mmm-hmm.

Lost in “Lost In Space”

Can Netflix manage to do the whole nostalga-meets-new-technology thing?

[NB – This article was written after the first season had been released, but prior to the subsequent ones]

So here we go with another reboot. History (and by history I mean, “the last fifteen or so years” for the most part) is littered with the corpses of failed reboots. For every successful attempt to drag some forgotten franchise into the twenty-first century (Battlestar Galactica, say, or Doctor Who) there’s a dozen more that fell by the wayside, as forgotten as the shows they tried to resurrect. Hokey old 60’s and 70’s sci-fi shows come with a built-in fanbase – not always very large, but often very dedicated – so it’s not exactly difficult to work out why producers might think old franchises might be worth taking a gamble on. Why bet on something new and completely unknown when you can dredge something up from the past which, even if it won’t bring in huge numbers, will at least bring some?

The Spy Who Dumped Me

I’m not sure “ladies can do spy stuff too!” is quite as progressive as the movie thinks its it. Quite fun, though.

What’s The Movie? The Spy Who Dumped Me

What’s It All About, JG? Audrey Stockton (Mila Kunis) get unceremoniously dumped by her boyfriend via text. Classy. Turns out, though, he’s a spy (you might possibly be able to deduce that from the movie’s title) and while returning to pick up his stuff and apologise, he’s killed in a raid and his dying words are to deliver a trophy to Vienna. The trophy hides This Movie’s McGuffin, a USB stick that acts as a backdoor to the entire internet. This sends Audrey and her best friend, Morgan (Kate McKinnon), on a cross-European jaunt to work out what’s going on and, if possible, survive.

Supernatural

Hot boys fight monsters for a decade and a half.

What’s The Show? Supernatural

What’s It All About, JG? Hot boys fighting monsters, which has somehow just begun its fourteenth season (and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down). So yes, monster fighting. Also, demons. Also, angels. Also, the King(s) of Hell. Also… well just about any mythological creature you care to shake a stick at. Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) Winchester are “hunters”, people who track down and kill the monsters that are real in our world. And then they kinda get dragged into the apocalypse and have to stop it. And then fight more monsters. And then battle the denizens of hell. And then fight more monsters. There’s the odd parallel universe to be visited. And then fight more monsters. A visit to hell? Sure! Guess what happens after that?

Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle

Are there fun and games? Eh…

What’s The Movie?Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle

What’s It All About, JG? On one hand it’s about taking even the most slender of brand recognition and seeing just how much blood can be squeezed from the stone of vague 90’s nostalgia. On the other it’s about getting a bunch of well-known actors to ham their way through a few set-pieces tenuously linked together by video-game logic. This version of Jumanji re-imagines the original’s board game as a computer game into which our four heroes get inexplicably sucked, and gives them the task of lifting the curse off the land of Jumanji by returning a jewel to the eye of the statue of a jaguar. Along the way our four disparate individuals will learn to appreciate each other while hacking their way through a bunch of Lara Croft/Indiana Jones clichés. Can they reach the end and lift the curse? What do you think?

Grand Designs

Buying a house not challenging enough? Why not build one!

What’s The Show? Grand Designs

What’s It All About, JG? Middle-class tosspots with too much time and/or cash spend vast sums of money self-building houses, either from scratch or restoring old buildings that have fallen to wrack and ruin, while host Kevin McCloud sneers at their attempts until The Big Reveal, when it turns out he liked it all along. Every. Time. To describe Grand Designs as repetitive would be something of an understatement, but it would also completely miss the point. In a sense the whole purpose is repetition, watching different people and buildings emerge from similar circumstances and assessing the results. This could have been made into some ghastly “reality TV competition” type thing, but instead it’s one man (McCloud) expressing a genuine passion for all things architectural and his absolute love and joy for what he’s doing radiating off the screen all while just letting people who want to undertake these projects get on with it. The show has been running since 1999 and is still going strong – it’s just kicked off its 19th season at time of writing.

Skyscraper

The Rock vs Concrete

What’s The Movie? Skyscraper

What’s It All About, JG? The Rock Punches a Building. Repeatedly. For a couple of hours. He’s playing a security consultant, Will Sawyer, who lost a leg in a mission gone wrong and who’s now hired to check out the security in the world’s tallest building. It all goes wrong, the building ends up on fire, his family are trapped inside and… wait, wasn’t this made in the ’70’s? Repeatedly? Yes, this is an attempt to resurrect the deservedly-moribund disaster movie for reasons that, beyond box office, remain thoroughly mystifying. It’s not like any of these movies were decent the first time round…

Mission: Impossible – Fallout

Fallout? What were they even arguing about?

What’s The Movie? Mission: Impossible – Fallout

What’s It All About, JG? Having Tom Cruise be manly in manly ways which involve being manly in the service of IMF and/or the United States. In this one… well, you know. There’s lots of running and explosions and the spy stuff takes a back seat to seeing what ludicrously over-the-top shenanigans Tom Cruise can get up to / humblebrag about on chat shows. It’s a Mission: Impossible film, in other words. Like the last one, but with slightly different locations.

The Expanse

Space… the slow-moving frontier.

What’s The Show? The Expanse

What’s It All About, JG? Hard sci-fi for the Asimov and Clarke crowd who find the likes of Star Trek too silly and unrealistic, the likes of Doctor Who too fantastical, the likes of Dark Matter to soapy, but who want to spend some time above the clouds nevertheless. Set in the near future, The Expanse gives us a vision where humanity has spread out among the solar system and split into, essentially, three power blocks, Earth, Mars and “The Belt”, the latter being a group of largely disenfranchised peoples who live and work in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Colony

A host of problems on this family-drama-meets-alien-invasion series

What’s The Show? Colony

What’s It All About, JG? At some point in the near future, Earth is invaded by largely-unseen aliens, referred to as “hosts”, who have taken over the planet for nefarious but obscure reasons. After their arrival, cities are completely enclosed in via massive metallic “walls”, turning them into the “colonies” of the title. Our story starts in LA, where a cookie-cutter family have cookie-cutter rebellions against cookie-cutter collaborators in cookie-cutter situations. There are quislings, rebels, people just trying to get on with their lives who get swept up in events… you know, the kind of thing that lots of dystopian near-future fiction tend to go in for. Who will live? Who will die? Who will care? That’s the trick with these kinds of stories – there are so many dystopian near-future TV shows, movies and books that they all kind of blur into one, so to make yours stand out you really need some memorable characters to anchor familiar plot beats around.