G20 – Movie Review

TL;DR – Much like the action films of the 1990s, which were a clear inspiration, G20 may hit just about every cliché in its runtime, yet it still gets to be a fun blast.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There are mid-credit scenes.

Disclosure – I paid for the Amazon Prime service that viewed this film.

All the world leaders standing together for the group G20 photo.

G20 Review

My background is in International Relations, and one of the many facets it explores is the strength and use of international organisations. These tend to be contextually quite dull from a Hollywood story perspective, but every now and again, my two worlds collide. Sometimes, these are pretty fascinating choices, like in The Hitman’s Bodyguard, and other times, they can be a confusing mess, like with Rumours. However, today, we are upgrading from the G7 to the G20, and calamity is afoot.  

So, to set the scene, something is very wrong in Washington DC. It is so bad that they must wake Madam President Danielle Sutton (Viola Davis) in the middle of the night. Because her daughter Serena (Marsai Martin) found a new way to get around the Secret Service and escaped the White House to go to a party. Now on her first international trip, President Sutton is on the backfoot domestically and internationally as she arrives in Cape Town, South Africa, to sell the G20 on her plan for a digital currency for farmers. The hotel was meant to be a fortress, but a fortress only protects from external threats. One surgical strike later, and the security becomes terrorists, and now twenty world leaders are hostages.     

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Movie Review – Familiar Strangers

TL;DR – An interesting experimental film that hits that overlap between film and a technology demonstration    

Familiar Strangers. Image Credit: Murat Sayginer.

Review

I have seen quite a few films that you could call experimental in my time but today might take the cake as one of the more weird concepts that I have ever seen. Something that at first sight is deceptively simple but then it is clear a lot of work has gone into making it come together.

Familiar Strangers might be also one of the shortest films I have reviewed, clocking into only four minutes. However, that is just the right amount of time for you to process what you are seeing on the screen. Which is row upon row of actors faces apparently rendered using deepfake technology while Air on the G String by Johann Sebastian Bach plays in the background.

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