Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom (Astérix et Obélix: l’Empire du Milieu) – Movie Review

TL;DR – While it captures the vibe of the original comics, some choices kept ripping me out of the film.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.

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

Disclosure – I paid for the Netflix service that viewed this film

The village.

Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom Review

Growing up, one of my joys was going to the library and finding a new Asterix comic I had never read before. Then I got old enough to understand that all the names were puns, and a new world opened up. I know they have done a couple of live-action movies before, but now was a chance to see if they could capture that joy from the original comic.

So to set the scene, it is 50 BC, and all of Gaul has been concurred by the Roman Empire … well, not all of Gaul because on the coast, one village holds out. Four Roman camps at Totorum, Aquarium, Laudanum, and Compendium surround the village but still cannot concur. Out in the forest hunting for boar are the titular Asterix (Guillaume Canet) and Obelix (Gilles Lellouche), who show why the village can not be concurred thanks to the magic potion brewed by the druid Getafix (Pierre Richard). But one day, a surprise chariot arrives in the village carrying Princess Fu Yi (Julie Chen) from China escaping a forced marriage with Deng Tsin Qin (Bun Hay Mean), and our pair have to go off on a new adventure.   

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Countdown – My Personal Top 10 Films of All Time List

TL;DR – Today we countdown my Top 10 films of all time; from towns where there are a lot of ‘accidents’, to all forms of Sci-Fi, to do you know the man with six fingers on his right hand, and everything in between.

Countdown

Recently I watched the CineFix crew countdown their Top 10 films, and it had me thinking what are mine? Now it was at this point where I of course naturally spiralled as how can you reduce thousands of films that you have seen into only a Top 10. Just before I threw my hands up in resignation and chucked in the towel I happened to catch an episode of Movies with Mikey on how he determined the best sequel. With this in mind I wondered if there was a set of criteria that I could use to categorise the films into a list that I would be happy with, and after some work, I came up with the following criteria that work for me.

  • Films that are beautifully constructed
  • Films that mean something to me
  • Films that are always re-watchable
  • Films that have added to my love of the craft of cinema

With this criterion in mind I went through all the likely candidates and with a bit of a struggle I think I have been able to come to a final list, well at least until I change my mind next week, which is always a chance.

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Movie Review – Assassin’s Creed

TL;DR – The best movie adaption of a video game, but that was not really a high bar to cross and Assassin’s Creed kind of just stumbles across it.

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

Assassin’s Creed. Image Credit: 20th Century Fox.

Review

It is one of those weird things of Hollywood that no matter how many times they try, no one has made a decent adaptation of a video game into a movie. Now part of this has been that people have been adapting video games without understanding what there were, and also there are a lot of difficulties condensing a long interactive experience (sixteen hours for the first Assassin’s Creed game) into a two-hour passive movie. To the point where the most successful and critically acclaim versions of this genre Wreck-It Ralph & Tron used video games as just the backdrop for their story. This can be complicated even further as video games are big multi-billion dollar industry so if you’re making a film, you’re gonna want to franchise the heck out of it, the big problem with last year’s Warcraft (See Review). So within all this mess comes the Assassin’s Creed film, based on the incredibly popular series of games that has the fascinating caveat that you could set it at any point in human history. So how does it go, well for a video game adaptation movie, it goes quite well, for just a movie, it is a bit meh.

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