Sisu and Rebel Moon - Part 2: The Scargiver

Movies with high improbability.

Sisu

Finland, World War II. An old gold prospector trying to distance himself from the war strikes it rich and begins his journey to the bank. Unfortunately a platoon of Nazi's decide to try get in his way. Unfortunate for them that is! This funny and violent flick stays that shallow for the whole thing, and I'm glad that most of the speech is in English. Our heavily plot armored hero encounters a lot of unlikely situations but all are quite entertaining.  A good movie if you just want to see some old fashioned "one good guy takes down a lot of bad guys". Recommended!

Rebel Moon - Part 2: The Scargiver

The continuation of this space Seven Samurai flick features a lot more action than the first outing which is both good and bad. Good in that the action scenes are nice with plenty slow motion artistry and cool CGI, bad that story wise you will either not care or just hate some of the protagonists, especially if you didn't watch the first movie. The opening narration tries its best to get you up to speed if you haven't seen it but you'll encounter a lot of "why is this person doing this" and "where did this thing come from" questions. I think the writers realized this problem and shoved in a montage string sequence at one part to try put a backstory to some of them but I'm not sure it got the effect they intended. Anyway, it's still an improvement on the first movie at least.

Fast X and Rebel Moon

Movies of action!

Fast X

The Fast and Furious franchise has had a lot of the strangest stuff happen in it, and I'm actually happy to report that because they slightly toned down the craziness in this one it actually makes for a more cohesive revenge plot enacted by the son of a previous villain (wonderfully played by Jason Momoa) who is out to make Dominic Torretto (Vin Diesel) suffer. Nice action pieces and good fighting sections make this an enjoyable watch, and more so if you liked the previous movies.

Rebel Moon

On a planet at the edge of the space imperium is a little village that is threatened by a large antagonistic group to provide supplies in a number of months when they plan to return. Knowing that even if they do so will mean the end of their town, they instead decide to recruit a bunch of defenders to make a stand and... wait, isn't this the plot to Seven Samurai? Well yes! Despite the start concealing it very well it definitely goes down the Seven Samurai route but with a slight variation towards the end. Interesting CGI but some of the characters feel very shoehorned in, and while this movie certainly is shorter than the original Seven Samurai it is only part one of... who knows how many.

Seven Samurai (1954)

[Post #16 of the Blaugust Challenge!]

The story in this old film has been reused so many times in various reincarnations that I would be surprised if you've never heard of it before. Basically a bunch of bandits plan on raiding a humble and poor village - luckily for the villagers they overhear the plan (by chance in this movie) and decide to try hire samurai to protect them. Obviously this is a serious issue since they don't really have anything to offer other than rice. Despite that (as the title gives away) they do manage to get a handful to support them.

Seven, actually.

Length wise it is a LONG movie, sitting at 3 hours and 27 minutes, but other than a handful of scenes that I thought could have either been shorter or cut altogether the rest of the time Akira Kurosawa does a masterful job of giving all the samurai and the lead villagers personality, most with little subplots that tie in very well with the main action. The only group you don't really learn much about are the bandits themselves who serve more as a catalyst than anything else.

The film is also in black and white, and as you might guess the special effects budget is pretty low/non-existent but that only goes to show that with good camera work, decent music and a decent story, you don't need explosions everywhere to get the audience invested. The only main negative I have is that for a period movie with samurai, there's not a lot of decent swordplay but that's just a minor nuance. Overall I give it four and a half katanas out of five.

Blaugust Bonus: I think one of Belghast's writing prompts fits in with the grouping theme today, though I don't really have any that involve six other samurai. :P

"What is your favorite grouping experience? Even the most staunch solo artist eventually groups up, what is the best thing that has happened while grouped with other players?" 

Wow, I have so many which is odd being a solo artist. One of my favorites was in Ultima Online. My guild was trying to open a portal to the realm of the Harrower (uber monster in the game) because we hadn't been there yet. Basically what you needed to do was face a champion spawn altar and kill the waves of ever increasing monsters that came out as fast as you could until enough candles lit up to spawn the champion. Killing said champion would open the gate we wanted for a few seconds.

We split into three teams and went to our designated areas to begin the champion spawn (it was faster that way, it took fewer hours) and eventually beat the champion. Only my teammate Juris and myself made it into the Harrower's room before the gate closed. The place was empty except for the creature's spawning altar. After marking a rune there (our main goal) we of course decided to poke it only to be greeted with a message saying "The Harrower has already been spawned," which was a little scary since it meant someone else had already woken it up and it was wandering one of the many dungeons in game.