JG Judgementally Comments…

What’s The Movie? The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure / 해적: 도깨비 깃발

What’s It All About, JG? Pirates. And treasure. You might just possibly be able to infer what kind of movie this is, but let’s do the necessary. A bunch of bandits, led by the spectacularly-haired Woo Moo-chi (Kang Ha-neul), are adrift at sea when they are rescued by Hae-rang (Han Hyo-joo). She’s the owner of a pirate ship and is on the search for – you guessed it – the royal treasure of Goryeo, which vanished at sea without a trace. The rest of the movie is basically a quest to find said treasure, which leads to all sorts of what can only be described as shenanigans – nearly dying via a herd of CGI cows, getting sucked into a vortex, sword battles in the middle of lightning storms, that sort of thing. Ranged against our unlikely band are Bu Heung-soo (Kwon Sang-woo) and his crew, rebels who are also after the treasure. It all ends with comedy penguins and sailing off into the sunset. Yup, it’s that kind of pirate movie.

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What’s The Movie? All The Old Knives

What’s It All About, JG? Two former CIA operatives, Henry Pelham (Chris Pine) and the now-retired Celia Harrison (Thandiwe Newton) meet up in a luxurious restaurant to discuss a case from 2012. A plane was hijacked in Vienna and despite the CIA’s best efforts all the passengers and terrorists were killed. New information has come to light years later that there may have been a mole, and Henry has been tasked with getting to the bottom of what happened. What follows is two stories told in parallel. Firstly there’s a series of flashbacks to the 2012 incident itself, including the psychosexual relationship between Henry and Celia, which outlines the events and characters involved. Secondly, and interwoven with the flashbacks, there’s the contemporary scenes set in the restaurant where the two former lovers play cat-and-mouse with each other, before the final reveal of what really happened and the consequences of it.

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What’s The Movie? Moonfall

What’s It All About, JG? The moon is falling towards the Earth. Now I know what you’re thinking – sounds credible! And it is! Turns out the Moon is, in fact, a megastructure placed there aeons ago by the ancestors of humanity as a kind of ark when AI became too self-aware and tried to wipe humanity out. A plucky band of plucky heroes pluckily try to stop them. You know the type – characters with so much depth and character development they might as well have been called Feisty Female, Butch Male, and Nerdy Redshirt. While they try and figure out the whole moon thing, a teenage boy (Butch Male’s son), an Asian woman who serves no plot function whatsoever but presumably helps with that all-important Chinese market, and Male’s ex-wife and new husband, have typical disaster-movie adventures – getting stuck under falling trees, getting carjacked by local yokels, trying to escape the end of the world by running away a bit – until the plot requires them to not do that any more. The moon gets pluckily fixed thanks to some other aliens and (massive sigh) an EMP device, at the cost of Nerdy Redshirt’s life, and, um, goes back into orbit, so all’s well that ends well, other than the vast unprecedented destruction. Oh but Nerdy Redshit isn’t dead after all, he’s been uploaded to the Moon’s AI, and now it’s time to get to work. Cue sequel? Er…

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