Hidden Gems of Netflix's Watch Instantly

Yeah. Too bad RRR is only dubbed on Netflix. The lip-sync is always weird.

slazev wrote:

Yeah. Too bad RRR is only dubbed on Netflix. The lip-sync is always weird.

I watched RRR (Hindi), was that a dub, too?

Mixolyde wrote:
slazev wrote:

Yeah. Too bad RRR is only dubbed on Netflix. The lip-sync is always weird.

I watched RRR (Hindi), was that a dub, too?

Yes. It was originally filmed in Telugu (a language typically spoken in South Indian states), then dubbed into Hindi (I presume for broader appeal across India) an subtitled into English for Netflix release.

I'm certainly no expert on the numerous Indian languages and dialects, so please forgive and educate me if I've misstated anything.

And done with Resident Evil.
Parts of the ending were great, but others were a let down. Not because they were bad, but because they left a lot of major plot points unexplained (clearly intentional and meant for future seasons to explore). I call it a let down because this is Netflix, after all, who like to kill shows way too early and leave anyone who watched them on massive cliffhangers. I'd certainly like to watch more, so hopefully Netflix gives it a second season. If they don't though, there's zero reason for anyone to even start watching the show, since it'll only end in disappointment.

My biggest complaint is that the outbreak hasn't actually started yet in the pre-End timeline by the end of the show. Given how hard they've danced around various things that could have caused it, it's pretty disappointing. We get shown what will (almost certainly) cause it, and can certainly imagine what happens in the next few minutes to cause it, but we don't actually get to see it.

I really liked Evelyn as the main antagonist.

Spoiler:

She get props for being one of the few people in a zombie movie to do the smart, but unthinkable thing of killing someone she loved as soon as they got bitten rather than having them suffer and turn while they fruitlessly try to find a cure.

Edit - as for the bad reviews it's been getting, they seem to be mostly coming from "gamer" outlets and people i wouldn't be surprised to find out were big into gamergate, so I don't put much stock in them. It’s also weird as hell to hear them talk about the games like they were shining beacons of excellent storytelling and act like they didn't majorly retcon the series with every new addition. I said before I'd only ever played the first two game so i don't have a huge connection to the lore past that, but this is a good adaptation of what i know. The only thing keeping me from saying it's worth watching is that Netflix hasn't announced a second season. If it gets one, it's worth watching, but if it doesn't, there's to much left untold to be worth it.

Is there such a thing as reverse deus ex machina? Or deus ex machina evil twin? Because though I did enjoy Resident Evil, it suffers from it. And TBH, it does it in a less bleaker way than TWD. Otherwise I would have dropped it after 3 episodes.

What do I mean? It is an endless chase a la Friday the 13th or Terminator but with pacing that trivializes the protagonist's efforts to escape. In those movies, they have a healthy mix of jump scares with viewing the villain off in the distance. They let the audience breathe with the hero only to methodically erode that safety.

Those movies would be received much differently if they doubled the amount of confrontations and used only jump scares. That is what Resident Evil does. Every episode has a half dozen feebly earned MacGuffins that teleport the villain on top of the hero to thwart them. Except it makes the hero look stupid and incompetent.

It keeps the show from getting its sea legs. Every narrative gets an executioners axe several times an episode. If it weren't for the exceptional performances of a few of the characters, it would be very hard to follow.
I really hope the narrative matures in the second season if it gets one.

I felt that the constant stream of things that could have been the start of the outbreak (but turn out not to be) gave the pre-outbreak timeline an effective way of building (and then temporarily relieving) a sense of dread. Granted, some of them were due to the stupidity of the girls, but they're 14 years old, so most of their dumber decisions didn't seem terribly out of line with normal teenage stupidity.

The post-outbreak timeline was where all the things from the games (zombies, monsters, and action sequences) fit best, but ultimately it was the less interesting of the two for me. Not that it was bad, i just wanted to find out how things got that way more than I wanted to know where things went from there. Outside of episode six, I don't think adult Jade ever felt stupid or incompetent, she was just up against Umbrella, who had way more power and resources than she did on her own, so the best she could do was to temporarily escape from them.

There were too many things like:

Spoiler:

The last episode where adult Billie uses the drones to wipeout the zombie threat. (including killing her own soldiers) to be universe breaking. I get that Umbrella having the capability to wipe out the zombies with technology like that but keeping the zombies around for control somewhat compelling. Yet, it is not developed sufficiently since Umbrella seems to have control anyways or at least the zombies have served their purpose long ago and are now blocking Umbrella control.
Here is a list of all the MacGuffins that would have worked had they stopped at one or two uses:
Evelyn (in fact the only time I liked her was when she was being controlled by adult Billie)
Evelyn's head henchman
Adult Billie
Baxter
And sometimes Wesker

Whenever the plot needed to block the hero's progress, (4-5 times an episode) she turned around and *poof* one of those was there.

I admire your patience, fangblackbone.

I bailed out after Episode 1 when

Spoiler:

we learned that Umbrella's highly-sensitive facility is entirely unguarded, protected by a security system defeatable by a couple of teenagers with a key card and a voice recording, and operates an alarm system that triggers ABSOLUTELY NO RESPONSE at all.

Oh... and dog carrying a mutant virus is kept in a box on the lab floor...

Nope. There is nothing for me to see here.

fangblackbone wrote:

There were too many things like:

Spoiler:

The last episode where adult Billie uses the drones to wipeout the zombie threat. (including killing her own soldiers) to be universe breaking. I get that Umbrella having the capability to wipe out the zombies with technology like that but keeping the zombies around for control somewhat compelling. Yet, it is not developed sufficiently since Umbrella seems to have control anyways or at least the zombies have served their purpose long ago and are now blocking Umbrella control.
Here is a list of all the MacGuffins that would have worked had they stopped at one or two uses:
Evelyn (in fact the only time I liked her was when she was being controlled by adult Billie)
Evelyn's head henchman
Adult Billie
Baxter
And sometimes Wesker

Whenever the plot needed to block the hero's progress, (4-5 times an episode) she turned around and *poof* one of those was there.

To be fair, those are all really just different facets of the same thing: Umbrella. And blocking the hero's progress is what they're supposed to do, Umbrella is the antagonist of the whole Resident Evil universe.

Spoiler:

They still very much need to zombies to act as something they can protect against. The map that was brought up at one point shows them only really being in control of Western North America. Them providing "security" to that English city was a very new development, and likely the very start of them trying to expand into the area. Umbrella's didnt have any actual control over the areas they chased Jade through, they just didn't stick around long enough for it to become an issue. Baxter only followed her into the Brotherhood territory because Jade was their #1 most wanted, and they were majorly outnumbered and easily captured hy the Brotherhood. The only reason Umbrella's "rescue" team didn't have to fight the Brotherhood over Jade was that all the Brotherhood forces in the prison had either died or evacuated when Jade and Baxter let all the zombies loose.

Thinking that Umbrella could end the zombie threat if it wanted to was the same mistake the guys who rescued/captured adult Jade from the caterpillar made. There's less than 15 million humans left alive, against over 6 billion zombies and who knows how many T-Virus infected creatures. Divide the 15 million amongst all the factions that were on that map and Umbrella just doesn't have the personnel to control the entire world. Even if they did have enough ammunition to kill every zombie, they're still greatly outnumbered by the other factions.

Hmmm.... (sorry for being longish)

Spoiler:

I thought they mentioned 300 million humans versus several billion (6?) zombies.
If it is only 16 million, it makes even less sense to indiscriminately kill non infected humans.
I must have completely missed the map showing the region Umbrella controls. I only played a bit of Code Veronica, but I am aware of Umbrella and I have seen all (4? 5?) of the trashy movies. The movies aside from Jesus Mary Sue Jovovich (which I sort of enjoy) set up the Umbrella and zombie threat better.

The TV show just plays madlibs with whatever villain is going to be right around the corner. Take another example. The giant alligator leaps and barely misses the helicopter with adult Billie in it. The helicopter escapes. Then the tension mounts as the alligator chases Jade's daughter. But minutes later just as the gator is going to smash the girl, it becomes friends instead. Okay, so the girl has some powers over the infected. But, oh no, we blink and Billie helicopter is there, charging back, firing rockets to chase off the gator. Why? This sort of ungrounded twist happens all the time.

How did Billie know what was going on flying away on a helicopter several hundred feet up let alone minutes away? It makes sense Billie would want the girl after we see that she is special, but how would Billie have seen, known or learned that?

Anyways, they just need to work on that stuff more for next season as it is coming across as lazy/convenient writing. I don't blame detroit20 at all.

Watch something better about Umbrellas.... Umbrella Academy. Its so insane and good, and the opening 'fight' in Season 3 is legendary.

If that is the scene you can't escape having spoiled for you on youtube, then yes, it is legendary!

fangblackbone wrote:

Hmmm.... (sorry for being longish)

Spoiler:

I thought they mentioned 300 million humans versus several billion (6?) zombies.
If it is only 16 million, it makes even less sense to indiscriminately kill non infected humans.
I must have completely missed the map showing the region Umbrella controls. I only played a bit of Code Veronica, but I am aware of Umbrella and I have seen all (4? 5?) of the trashy movies. The movies aside from Jesus Mary Sue Jovovich (which I sort of enjoy) set up the Umbrella and zombie threat better.

The TV show just plays madlibs with whatever villain is going to be right around the corner. Take another example. The giant alligator leaps and barely misses the helicopter with adult Billie in it. The helicopter escapes. Then the tension mounts as the alligator chases Jade's daughter. But minutes later just as the gator is going to smash the girl, it becomes friends instead. Okay, so the girl has some powers over the infected. But, oh no, we blink and Billie helicopter is there, charging back, firing rockets to chase off the gator. Why? This sort of ungrounded twist happens all the time.

How did Billie know what was going on flying away on a helicopter several hundred feet up let alone minutes away? It makes sense Billie would want the girl after we see that she is special, but how would Billie have seen, known or learned that?

Anyways, they just need to work on that stuff more for next season as it is coming across as lazy/convenient writing. I don't blame detroit20 at all.

Spoiler:

The human side could be higher. I had thought it was 300 million too, but didn't want to replay the episode to track down the exact quote. The 15 million number came from an article written about the trailer, and it's possible they changed the number between the trailer dropping and the show releasing. Either way, Umbrella was established with that first group that wanted to sell Jade to them as being willing to kill indescriminately to get what they want and not valuing the lives it's employees. If it came down to it and they needed more shock troops, they could just restart their cloning program, which Evelyn said they shut down because it required too much maintenance when talking to Wesker about his injections.

As for the alligator, that was all perfectly grounded (at least as much as a giant mutant alligator in a show about a zombie virus can be). Billie came back because she wanted payback against the alligator. She was pissed at it for ruining her plan, almost killing her, and destroying her toys (the drones). As they approached in their attack run, she saw it chase after Bae but not attack her once it got to her and wants to know why. As for how she saw that from so far away, those looked like some pretty fancy helicopters so I imagine they have some decent cameras and fancy software that lets them identify and track any potential targets, all stuff we saw their surveillance tech able to do easily in the pre-outbreak timeline.

I enjoyed The Gray Man enough. It is 30-45 minutes too long like every other Netflix-produced action feature. Character dialogue felt over-written, if you could call it that. Fight choreography was mostly forgettable except a couple rare instances when Gosling's superman felt threatened, including a nice team up with de Armas against a competent assassin. The Chris Evans heel turn where he's cast against type is kind of neat but he comes across as too cartoonish instead of being menacing.

I found The Gray Man to be very enjoyable.

I still say it should be canon that Chris Evans' character was the spoiled kid in Knives Out after he got cut off from his inheritance.

I enjoyed Gray Man but found it largely forgettable.

It looks dumb as hell, and I look forward to watching it.

In Resident Evil there

Spoiler:

already had been one outbreak, presumably, because they’re in New Raccoon City. They reference what happened in Raccoon City a few times. I was waiting for them to discuss that even a little more than they did, to tell us how NRC fit in with that earlier tragedy.

Sandman is awesome so far! Just finished episode 1. So crazy this thing got made.

So many scenes cut wholesale from the comic. Gives me goosebumps

muraii wrote:

In Resident Evil there

Spoiler:

already had been one outbreak, presumably, because they’re in New Raccoon City. They reference what happened in Raccoon City a few times. I was waiting for them to discuss that even a little more than they did, to tell us how NRC fit in with that earlier tragedy.

Spoiler:

My understanding is that the show treats what happened in most of the games to have also occurred in its timeline/universe. The t-virus got out of control and they nuked Raccoon City (RE 1, 2, & 3). Then, with the help of the US government, they successfuly covered it up with a story about a massive gas line explosion. The original Wesker died in a volcano just like he did in RE5, so presumably the general events of that game also happened. RE4 and RE6 & up are in a spot where they're not directly contradicted, but also aren't necessarily treated as having happened.

New Raccon City was just Umbrella exploiting their own atrocity in a PR move by naming their new company town after the city whose destruction they were responsible for. It doesn't really fit in with the Original Raccoon City any deeper than that, at least, not intentionally. Umbrella didn't build NRC with the intention of doing on-site T-virus research there, they had moved that to their Tijuana site, but they did create it with the intention of it being a town they had complete control over. Clone Wesker was supposed to be the head of research there, and wanted to focus the labs on avenues of research other than T-virus/Joy. He might even have been able to had the Tijuana incident not happened, and had Evelyn not relocated to NRC so she could drug her wife with Joy.

Late to the party but finally watched Midnight Mass. I really loved it. It’s definitely a slow burn, but that made the explosive horror and violence at the end more impactful. Unlike some shows that feel slow because they don’t have enough story to tell, this felt like a deliberately measured rumination on life, death, and religion. Highly highly recommended if you like spooky stuff.

Midnight Mass really nails the Catholic vibe. I was raised Catholic and it was like getting flashbacks to my childhood.

I watched all ten episodes of Sandman over two days and as someone who had read and reread the comics for years…

…I loved the whole f*cking thing!!!

I don't read comics but thought I'd give Sandman a go. Only 3 episodes in but it sort of works for me as a fantasy series, will definitely finish it off.

I cant remember how many times i have read the Sandman and Lucifer comics now. I watched the first episode of Sandman last night with my wife who has never touched them.

I generally enjoyed it a lot although got slightly irked by some of the changes to make things more obvious which is of course required for the change in medium in particular:

Spoiler:

The Corinthians entirely exposition based visit to Roderick Burgess felt really egregious to me

Really looking forward to watching the rest amusingly my wife who has no baggage with the series loved it. Really hope the series keeps this up and if it does that they can make it all the way through.

The Audible full-cast production of Sandman is also fantastic.

The Sandman episodes 5 and 6 are instant classics in the comic book TV pantheon.