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In order to assure a spoiler-free review, I had planned to make this one only five words long.

“I enjoyed watching this film.”

(We had different five-word review ready, too.)

It is not a surprise that Darth Vader has a grandchild. That Harrison Ford and Peter Mayhew have much larger roles than some obligatory “original-cast cameo” was a delightful surprise. You do not have to re-watch the prequels or look up hundreds hours of supplementary material to understand this film.

If you were a fan of the original three movies, you will enjoy this one. The new characters are not terribly deep, but they develop over the course of the film and show promise. The new “Dark Lord of the Sith” (Kylo Ren, played by Adam Driver) expertly shows us the concept of anger leading to the dark side. In contrast to the unlikeable muppet in Revenge of the Sith, Kylo lets go of his anger in an obvious and dramatic fashion. Similarly, the power of the force is demonstrated such that it is evident why legions of soldiers fall in line behind those who wield it.

Like A New Hope, this is a hero’s journey. Or rather, it is a heroine’s journey. One thing that struck me was the overt way in which more female characters appear. J. J. Abrams seems to be putting women in the corners of every shot he can manage. Two X-Wing pilots walk by long enough to show their faces and long hair; the chrome-plated stormtrooper captain has a female voice; but most prominently, Rey, played by Daisy Ridley, is the central hero.

Princess Leia Organa has always been a strong female character and good role model, but the films used her as the damsel in distress (twice). This story uses Rey differently. She is the one who goes about enacting the rescues and generally being the main character of this film. General Princess Leia does make a strong showing, taking over for Mon Mothma as leader of the Republic’s Military.

It is not just female characters. The Force Awakens demonstrates diversity across the board. We see aliens of several types in the cockpits of fighters. FN-2138 (Finn), played by John Boyega, shows a bad guy, wearing white, who is redeemed and removes his helmet, revealing a black man. (This awkward sentence brought to you to parody a ridiculous online statement about racist overtones of Star Wars.)

The Force Awakens is a modern film. It uses more techno-babble than the previous ones, and some characters use slang in a way that felt out of sync with the franchise. It shows its roots, though, with several Easter egg props for sharp-eyed fans and space physics that are unrealistic for the sake of a compelling story.

As in A New Hope, we were not left with a cliffhanger, but the door is definitely open for more. For that, at least, we are happy.

There has been some controversy about whether or not Suicide Squad is a good movie, and we’re going to come down firmly in the middle.

I enjoyed it but had more problems than I can address in a 500-word review.

This isn’t a character driven story. This is a shooty, punchy, action romp. It is fun, written with comic book sensibilities, but paced like a video game. It’s big enough for the big screen but doesn’t make good use of it. It is too dark and hard to tell who is hitting what.

In the age of the internet, superhero movies often rely on the audience to be familiar with characters before seeing a film. This can be used to good effect, but it often misses by requiring the audience to research a film thoroughly beforehand. In Suicide Squad, the characters’ origins are covered by scattered bits of flashback, but they don’t waste any time introducing anybody.

This is especially evident when people literally walk into shot and join the team. “Now that you’re suited up, here’s another member of your team: [Panda Man] The Guy Who Can Climb Anything.” Wait, what?! Climb anything? We have an impossible class sniper, two meta-humans, and crazy chick, but our team isn’t complete without a guy and his pair of rope guns? What kind of mission is this? Should we all have climbing gear? Saaay, adding him at the last second wouldn’t have anything to do with those bombs you placed in our necks before we had a completely disposable character, would it?

You think we added him at the last second? Start the helicopter and walk Katana on. First appearing in the ninja-crazed 80s, she’s cliché enough that we don’t even need the flash card intro.

Viola Davis re-imagines Annalise Keating as director of a secret government agency. Will Smith was a pleasant surprise as Deadshot. They might have carried the movie alone, but they were overshadowed.

Mistah J thought I should blend in more.

Harley Quinn is the wedge. Like her, love the film. Have any problem with her, hate the film.

Margot Robbie did a good job. Really. She nailed the personality. Unfortunately, she was saddled with: a script that gave her nothing to do besides be Joker’s girlfriend, demonstrate psychotic, and hit things; and cinematography that felt the need to key-light her (and only her), make sure she bent over as much as possible, and (when it ran out of ways to show us hiked up shorts and close-ups of the gap between her thighs) turned her into a one-woman wet-t-shirt contest.

This evaluation has nothing to do with Harley Quinn as a character but everything to do with the way she was used in this film. Think she was strong and independent? Before she got naked in front of all the soldiers, she pulled the full harlequin jumpsuit from her bag. Why didn’t she wear that instead of the shorts that had to be digitally lengthened for the TV trailers?

Our normal length review style seems unnecessary (and excessive) for this hilarious parody.  Allow us instead to set up the climactic scene:

In order to save the chosen one, Thor (Norse God of Thunder and Protector of Humanity), Hackerman (in his battle-robot form), the two machinegun wielding viking chicks (Babarianna and Katana) with their t-rex mount, and Triceracop emerge from the time portal to battle Adolph Hitler (aka Kung Fuehrer).

If, like us, you were raised on a steady diet of medium budget Sci-Fi and action movies, then your new favorite film can be seen here:

There are certain movies that are really good, despite being hard to watch. Set in Serbia in the mid 1990s, A Perfect Day follows a group of aid workers trying to do the right thing amidst a civil war and the peacekeeping efforts of the United Nations. While not specifically a true story, it is a real story.

The central dilemma is a human corpse that has been deliberately dropped into a well with the intent to poison a local water supply. A simple length of rope would solve the problem, but rope, it seems, is in short supply. That is, rope to use for removing a dead bodies from wells is unavailable. There is plenty of rope for other purposes—holding a flag on a pole to prove this guy didn’t surrender, for example.

The point of the film is to relay the odd mix of humor and humanity amidst the frustration of futile effort through a blended cast of characters. Benicio Del Toro plays the leader of the band. He is grizzled and jaded but maintains a sort of patience to endure the insanity and weird bureaucracy because he believes what he is doing is right. Tim Robbins is a different sort of experienced, having no sense of the insanity around him and becoming slightly insane himself. The audience has a relatable viewpoint through Mélanie Thierry, a French actress you’ve probably never heard of before who plays the well educated but naïve newcomer to the war.

The poisoned well is one of three, but the other two are known to be surrounded by mines. Landmines are a severe humanitarian crisis because of their use and abandonment near civilian populations. Though we never see one go off, they are a continuous secondary obstacle in A Perfect Day. The ubiquitous hidden explosives help shape the setting as an ever shifting landscape of problems. The film is humanity learning to live within such a place.

People who have spent some time in conflict areas, dealing with international coalitions, or interacting with people whose concerns are alien to their own will appreciate A Perfect Day. People who wish to renew their outrage at the sheer stupidity that attends conflict zones and international coalitions might find they enjoy A Perfect Day a little more than they expected. Overall it is worth taking the time to watch (through your on demand service) and consider.

I have been a fan of Masamune Shirow for a long time—nearly thirty years. The cyberpunk and technological themes of Appleseed, Dominion/Tank Police, and Ghost in the Shell are obvious influences on my own work. The presence of strong, capable, female lead characters … Deunan Knute and Matoko Kusanagi were vastly different than other female heroines of the time, both earning ranking positions in elite police units through their range of skills and bold thinking. Because of this fandom, the trailers prepared me to strongly dislike Scarlett Johansson Ghost in the Shell. (Is that not the official title? That’s the way the announcer always says it.)

The film bears uncanny resemblances to the animated movie Ghost in the Shell (1995). So much so that they likely used the same story boards for several key scenes. I don’t know if that was intended to be fan service, or if the director just couldn’t think of anything better, but it was like watching the exact same sequence with different textures. If you haven’t been exposed to the earlier work, you’ll be treated to some delightfully cool sci-fi action sequences. There are a few cringe worthy CGI moments, where it looks like they hired the animators from Daredevil (Ben Affleck version), but if you blink at the right time, you’ll miss them.

The story is decent and coherent (in a way that Shirow sometimes wasn’t), but it is definitely Americanized. Like every superhero movie, it has to be an origin story. Like every thriller, something has to be a lie. These conventions hurt the film by introducing the most unbelievable element. Instead of a highly trained military officer who transferred her “ghost” into a prosthetic body, the Major (Scarlett Johansson) is some runaway turned anti-technology protester who was abducted and murdered by a robotics company which wiped her memory and installed her brain in a weaponized body as an experiment. Starting from zero, on a heavy course of memory suppressants, she obtained the rank of major and became team leader of the elite Section 9, in one (off camera) year. I guess they promote fast in cyberpunk Japan; such a lack of experience might explain her team’s pronounced delay in reacting to beeping bombs and grenades.

Scarlett Johansson does a good job playing the robot body. The script gives her a few moments of reflecting on humanity, but it doesn’t resolve these scenes. Pilou Asbæk brings life to Batou’s balanced mix of tough, sensitive, carefree, but professional. Takeshi Kitano stands out as Chief Aramaki. The cast is not as Hollywood white-washed as it was reported. The main character is a Japanese girl in a robot body; the Chief speaks Japanese throughout; and Togusa—the most American looking character in the source material—is played by the most “Chinese looking” member of the cast, Singapore native Chin Han.

All in all, the movie is good, but avoids most of its potential. The visuals are (mostly) as good as they were when we first saw them in 1995.