Movie Review #802 WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES.

Like Pirates & Transformers, another movie franchise that seems to pop out a new iteration every few years or so. This is #4 in the Apes series and IMHO is by far the best to date.

By #3 I'm usually seeing ho-hum and sleepiness but on this occasion pleasantly surprised as our simian hero Caesar encounters The Colonel, one Woody Harrelson.

Now Woody-boy has made a habit of picking up sinister evil dude roles in recent times, something he does very well and this is no exception. And while this evil dude is not much different to his other evil dudes, it does slot nicely into this plot of hidden agendas, family tragedy, cute kids, betrayals and the occasional loopy monkey.

King of CGI Andy Serkis is again Caesar with Steve Zahn popping up as Bad Ape, the aforementioned loopy who is more reminiscent of Serkis' Gollum than anything else.

Stands on its own nicely without having to have seen the predecessors, although it would help and each new franchise episode seems to bring further advances in CGI  and this one is no exception.

Only a slightly corny finale holds this back from being a great sci-fi movie, rather sits in the pretty good category.

If you enjoyed the others you will enjoy this. 8/10. 

Movie Review #1037 TRANSFORMERS : THE LAST NIGHT.

Sorry folks I can only score this out of 6 as I slept through the other 4! And yes that is a reflection of how much I enjoyed this the fifth in the thrashed Transformer franchise.

These movies were fun, well, the first one ten years ago was at least and all it comprised of was a few cool cars turning into a few cute robots along with Shia LaBoeuf, his dolly girlfriend and a dickhead dad, all of whom brought some amusement to the proceedings.

Fast forward to this disaster and we have cigar-smoking, wise-cracking, smart-assing robotic sophisticates, playing out character biographies pretty much the same as all cute animals, cute aliens, cute kids, cute apes or cute whatever's. Being the second of the Mark Wahlberg outings, there's no LaBoeuf here but there is one Anthony Hopkins, who turns up as an English lord although I would have thought he should have known better.

Optimus Prime is resurrected again to save humanity from Megatron, himself resurrected, and Quintessa, a new nasty who plans on replacing Cybertron with Unicron as her home planet, which we find out later is in fact one known to us all to well. Like Guardians the other week, this just has far too much going on both story-wise and on-screen to be decently followed with little robot Transformer pets running round along with another that thinks she's a Vespa.

Sorry folks, don't bother, like Pirates of the Caribbean before it, this has been done to death and lo, yes, there will be another.....groan! 2/6!