A few more movies
27 May 2026 16:54![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
teratornisI haven't been digging up movies to watch at quite the rate I was a few weeks ago, but I've watched a few films over the course of May that I thought I'd talk about a little. Or a lot, maybe. I have Opinions.
Films discussed are 50 to 1, Primitive War, Haywire, and The Sheep Detectives.
50 to 1
This film is a fictionalized retelling of the story of Mine That Bird, the 2009 Kentucky Derby winner, who won by 6 ¾ lengths (that's an insane distance for a horse race) at 50-to-1 odds.
I ended up watching this movie as a result of my brief annual obsession with horse racing (I am very aware that there are many, many horrible and abusive practices involved in horse racing, both for the people behind the scenes and the horses, but a lot of it still fascinates me), and only after I began watching it did I remember thatkillabeez had also recommended it at one point as a good Christian Kane film.
I have mixed feelings about it. The beginning had a good setup, and I enjoyed the lead-in to the main story, but a biiig chunk of the middle portions of the movie felt distinctly unfocused to me. I'm not sure how closely the film follows real-life events for the characters involved, but I felt like the movie couldn't figure out what it most wanted to show. The friendship between Bird's owner and trainer? The tension between the trainer and one of the riders working for him? The anxiety over the trainer's failing business? The process of training Bird for the upcoming race?
The film felt like it wanted to be a sample platter of all of these things, and as a result sort of bounced aimlessly between those aspects for quite a while. There were a bunch of kind of disconnected snippets of story, and I feel like the movie would have been a lot more compelling if it had chosen one or two of those aspects to focus on and stuck to it, rather than sashaying around a bunch of different details. Unfortunately, the aspect that I would most want to see in a film of this nature - the work with Bird and his growth and training for the Derby - probably got the least amount of attention in the film, and suffered most heavily from a tell-don't-show mentality, which really disappointed me. I'm here to watch a horse movie. Show me the horse.
This is especially disappointing since they established early on that Bird was clever and strong-willed, and tended to like to cause problems on purpose. Focusing on the relationship between the trainer and the owner and Bird would have been a great way to approach this movie, and I'm a little bummed it wasn't that.
That all being said, the ending of the movie was everything I could have hoped. The film made the interesting choice of casting Calvin Borel, Mine That Bird's actual for real jockey in the Kentucky Derby, to play himself in the movie. A little bit of research told me that he apparently took to playing a role on film like a duck to water, and he sounds like a truly delightful man. The final scene showing the race itself was just as tense as I hoped, and incredibly satisfying to watch. It felt every inch the impossible triumphant win it was. I actually rewatched the final scene several times, because it is extremely satisfying.
I tried to find info on the horse or horses that played Bird in the film. I was curious if it actually was Bird himself, because it looks an awful lot like him, but I was sadly unable to find that info. I'd love to know more about the horses involved in the movie.
Primitive War
This one gets its own text cut because I ended up writing almost 1.5k words about it.
This movie was mentioned to me by a friend, who had it on their roster of Bad Movies (they have an ongoing list of bad movies to watch and heckle and inflict on their long-suffering wife, and this was one of them). It was mentioned to me because it has dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs were reportedly pretty cool.
Now to be clear, this is indeed an objectively bad movie. It's got one of those absolutely ridiculous premises, and the main goal of the movie is to show a bunch of dinosaurs fucking up a bunch of dudes, and vice versa.
That being said, I really enjoyed it.
The premise involves a specialty military squad in the Vietnam war getting sent into unknown territory to search for another missing squad. They discover quickly that this area is absolutely overrun with dinosaurs, pulled through a wormhole to the past by a Russian scientist who was doing. . . some ill-advised research, it doesn't really matter.
I was pleasantly surprised almost immediately by the main squad of soldiers. I'm very much used to films like this depicting an array of indistinguishable square-jawed stubbly white men with cookie cutter personalities, but I found every single one of the main characters to be distinctive enough to recognize easily, both in appearance and personality. I found them all relatively compelling to watch, they had good chemistry, and a lot of their exchanges and relationships were genuinely interesting to watch.
I also fully expected this movie to be one of those where pretty much everybody dies, except for maybe one or two guys, with deaths played up for theatricality more than anything else. I was right about there only being a couple of survivors, but the movie made the deaths of the other characters startlingly impactful. They all had a visible impact on the other characters, and were all emotionally wrenching in a way I hadn't expected. They had a lot more weight than deaths in movies of this variety tend to, and I thought they were handled very well.
I was also surprised at which characters survived. My guesses as to which characters would walk away at the end of the movie were completely off base in a way I found really quite satisfying. It was an unexpected turn I appreciated, and I liked the way it was handled.
Also Tricia Helfer's in it. I like her quite a bit. And despite her presence among a squad of soldiers, there was no hint of any unnecessary romance plots. I was delighted by that, I was worried for a minute they were going to try to shoehorn some stilted romance in, and they didn't, and it was great.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I watched this move for the dinosaurs, and I was not disappointed.
The dinosaurs were awesome. Someone behind the design and animation of those dinosaurs really cared about what they were doing, and it showed.
They had t-rex, of course, but it was I think one of those most interesting t-rex designs I've ever seen. Anatomically it was pretty solid, but they made a choice to include some deliberate sexual dimorphism between the male and female t-rex. The female was slightly bigger (also a feature of most modern theropods, i.e. birds), and the male was more boldly patterned (also a common feature of birds, and also the rexes had patterns! They weren't just plain gray or brown!) and had short feather-quills on his neck and back. That part has no basis in science, as far as I know, but it's an entirely feasible design choice.
They did not stop at rexes, either. They had three different kinds of raptor (velociraptor, deinonychus, and utahraptor), and all were both appropriately sized for their species, and covered in some really gorgeous feathers. The animators in this took one look at those stupid claims that feathered raptors aren't scary and went "Bet". It was hard to see details, considering how quickly they moved, but the velociraptors especially were really cool. They were patterned something like your standard rooster or red jungle fowl, which was a super cool choice. The utahraptor had mostly iridescent black feathers, a coloration we know microraptors for sure had.
They also included the very cool detail to specifically name the velociraptors and deinonychus in the movie itself, but they didn't have a specific name for the utahraptor. At the time of the Vietnam war, both velociraptor and deinonychus were species names that were in use already, but name utahraptor wouldn't be coined until the 90s.
They included a ton more dinosaurs, too. They included some staples of the day, including triceratops, spinosaurus, ankylosaurus, brachiosaurus, and wonderfully alarming depiction of quetzalcoatlus (though they actually looked more like hatzegopteryx to me, but whatever, giraffe-sized pterosaur that wants to eat people), but it also included a lot of much more rarely depicted dinosaurs. There were four different hadrosaurs (maiasaurus, edmontosaurus, lambeosaurus, corythosaurus), two more species of sauropods (amargasaurus, dreadnoughtus), and also suchomimus.
You never see a lot of these. Even in actual nature documentaries along the lines of Walking with Dinosaurs or Prehistoric Planet, I have never seen some of these dinosaurs depicted on-screen. How cool, that they not only included them, but made an effort to make them recognizable.
And they were colorful! They all had colors and patterns and markings! So often, even today with the scientific breakthroughs that allow us to know what colors and markings some dinosaurs actually did have, so many times dinosaurs get depicted as flat gray or brown or green, with nothing more than a bit of countershading for a pattern. I was so thrilled to see so much color and variety in the dinosaurs here.
They also did a better than average job showing fairly realistic animal behavior from the dinosaurs. One of the characters says repeatedly "they're just animals, if you don't bother them they won't bother you." Obviously this is a movie that involves fighting dinosaurs so that doesn't always hold true, but even with the predatory dinosaurs that are so often depicted as mindlessly violent rage-machines in media, there were a ton of scenes that showed a cautious but relatively peaceful coexistence between the human characters and the dinosaurs. The humans just passed on their way, and the dinosaurs just went about their business, save when it was plot-necessary for it to be otherwise. If the raptors didn't break and run when they realistically would have when things got too dangerous for them. . . eh, I can live with it.
I also found it really interesting that the end of the movie did not even remotely solve the dinosaur problem. It wrapped up the story the movie was telling, but by the end there are still hundreds of dinosaurs wandering around Vietnam, and that's going to have consequences down the line. The credit sequence actually took actual photos from the Vietnam War, and edited dinosaurs into the shots, implying some of those ongoing consequences. I like it when a movie acknowledges that this big a problem is not going to be solved with a handful of dudes with some rifles and grenades and a can-do attitude.
There were some kind of baffling plot threads that sort of circled aimlessly around the main story, and got brought up when it felt like the writers remembered they existed, and then just weren't terribly important to the main story of the film, and could have been safely left out or at least integrated better with the rest of the plot.
It was also quite a gory movie, and while I get that's kind of the point in a lot of movies of this variety, and the gore is the reason some people might watch this film, I thought it was needlessly egregious at points, personally, and for me at points it distracted pretty heavily from the story and character interactions. There's also some pretty period-typical racism and sexism going on. Didn't surprise me, but wasn't called for under these circumstances.
Despite the occasional plot weirdness and gore, though, I had a great time with this movie. I was thoroughly enraptured for the whole thing.
Haywire
I learned about this movie whenannavere wrote a review for it a little while back. I'd never heard of it, so I was intrigued and decided to watch it and see what I thought. Regrettably, I did not especially enjoy it.
This movie wants to be gender-flipped Bourne Identity so, so badly, and unfortunately just doesn't have the chops to pull it off. A lot of the story beats are pretty similar, and the way scenes are shot and framed was pretty reminiscent of the Bourne movies, to me. Some of the visuals and scenery were nice, and the action sequences were pretty visceral in a way I enjoyed seeing, but this movie was also extremely, impenetrably dark. Like, visually dark. That's a problem with a lot of movies these days, but I feel like a solid third to half of this movie, I could not for the life of me see what was going on, and I found a lot of the action sequences to be somewhat confusing because of it.
The main character is withdrawn and standoffish in a way that doesn't strike me as the usual untrusting guardedness we see in a lot of international spy/assassin type characters, it mostly felt to me like the actor just didn't want to be there. I found a lot of the interactions to be uncomfortably stiff, and this movie could not resist throwing in like three unnecessary romance plotlines, even if one of them was an undercover sort of thing. For a movie with such a solid cast involved, it felt a little like most of the actors were sort of phoning it in, to me.
I did enjoy Fassbender's role, he does an excellent suave besuited spy dude, and the ultimate fate of Tatum's character did make me experience an emotion or two, but to return to the visual darkness thing, it would've been a lot more compelling if I could have seen anything that was happening when he got killed. That death was at least paced pretty well, there are a fair number of other character and plot threads that I feel got picked up and then unceremoniously dropped with no further mention
I also felt like the final confrontation didn't have much lead-up to speak of, and it felt to me like it kind of came out of nowhere, even if it was sort of the inevitable conclusion to the plot. The location and framing fell a little flat, and the whole sequence just didn't have the impact I felt it should have.
I will say, though, defeating your villain by getting him trapped under rocks in a low tide zone and just leaving him there as the tide comes in was a pretty choice poetic fate. I can get behind that little sequence.
Over all a movie trying to be something it can't quite pull off, kneecapped by some weird writing choices, terrible attention to lighting, and some sub-par acting, but with some cool action and a couple of reasonably compelling characters.
The Sheep Detectives
I'd been planning to see this movie since I first watched trailers for it, so when my dearest mother suggested we go see it together yesterday, I was quite happy to do so.
I honestly loved it. It was very much the fun whodunnit romp I was expecting, but it had considerably more depth to a lot of aspects than I had anticipated.
The mystery was entertaining and kept you guessing, you spend some time as a viewer side-eyeing most of the characters and wondering which of them might have committed the murder, and there's that spot-on sense of entertained delight when a new clue comes forward to either exonerate or condemn one or another of the suspects. It's an exceptionally fun journey, and the conclusion of the mystery felt quite satisfying, in an "oh of course they're the murderer!" sort of way.
The balance worked out pretty well, too. This movie could easily have turned into kind of a mire, given that it needs to focus on the sheep and their perspective as they attempt to solve the mystery, and the parallel investigation being conducted by the human characters. That easily could have become kind of a confusing mess, but the movie did a very good job balancing those aspects, and tying them together where it was needed. All of the characters were fun and distinct, and their interactions were great.
It was also absolutely gorgeous, visually speaking. Beautiful scenery, beautiful lighting, beautiful costumes. Extremely atmospheric in a way that set the mood for each scene really, really well, and it had some truly excellent editing. There were a couple of shots and scene changes that actually made me gasp, they were so well and cleverly done. I love seeing some good quality filmmaking, especially where you might not necessarily expect to find it, like in a movie about a bunch of sheep solving a murder.
The sheep themselves looked pretty damn good, too, given that I believe they were pretty exclusively CGI. A lot of films that use CGI for animals look pretty uncanny to me, and there's frequently some weirdness going on with fur texture or anatomy or facial expression, but the sheep were really on point.
The sheep also very much had their own culture, which was an aspect of this movie I really loved. They had specific beliefs, some good, some bad, and a rather interesting ability to forget stuff they didn't want to remember on command. The movie very easily could have framed these aspects as just a fun quirky aside, an amusing detail about the sheep because hahah how quaint, sheep, but that is not the route they took at all.
Instead, these beliefs and abilities the sheep have come up again and again and again. Their assumptions about how life works, their prejudices, and especially their ability to forget, are all extremely deeply ingrained with the plot. These aspects are used as an emotional weapon again and again, making for a much more genuinely heartfelt film than I had expected going in. The characters have some really difficult emotional struggles, and some very difficult revelations, and these are all handled in a way that hit really powerfully. It wouldn't have been nearly so powerful if the film hadn't leaned so heavily on the distinct culture the sheep have. There were constant aspects of grief and rejection and the nature of both justice and acceptance, and how those things can shape someone's life, for better or worse.
I am a Movie Crier, so it's not a big surprise, but I definitely cried several times throughout.
Thoroughly enjoyable. Will definitely be watching again sometime down the line.
Films discussed are 50 to 1, Primitive War, Haywire, and The Sheep Detectives.
50 to 1
This film is a fictionalized retelling of the story of Mine That Bird, the 2009 Kentucky Derby winner, who won by 6 ¾ lengths (that's an insane distance for a horse race) at 50-to-1 odds.
I ended up watching this movie as a result of my brief annual obsession with horse racing (I am very aware that there are many, many horrible and abusive practices involved in horse racing, both for the people behind the scenes and the horses, but a lot of it still fascinates me), and only after I began watching it did I remember that
killabeez had also recommended it at one point as a good Christian Kane film.I have mixed feelings about it. The beginning had a good setup, and I enjoyed the lead-in to the main story, but a biiig chunk of the middle portions of the movie felt distinctly unfocused to me. I'm not sure how closely the film follows real-life events for the characters involved, but I felt like the movie couldn't figure out what it most wanted to show. The friendship between Bird's owner and trainer? The tension between the trainer and one of the riders working for him? The anxiety over the trainer's failing business? The process of training Bird for the upcoming race?
The film felt like it wanted to be a sample platter of all of these things, and as a result sort of bounced aimlessly between those aspects for quite a while. There were a bunch of kind of disconnected snippets of story, and I feel like the movie would have been a lot more compelling if it had chosen one or two of those aspects to focus on and stuck to it, rather than sashaying around a bunch of different details. Unfortunately, the aspect that I would most want to see in a film of this nature - the work with Bird and his growth and training for the Derby - probably got the least amount of attention in the film, and suffered most heavily from a tell-don't-show mentality, which really disappointed me. I'm here to watch a horse movie. Show me the horse.
This is especially disappointing since they established early on that Bird was clever and strong-willed, and tended to like to cause problems on purpose. Focusing on the relationship between the trainer and the owner and Bird would have been a great way to approach this movie, and I'm a little bummed it wasn't that.
That all being said, the ending of the movie was everything I could have hoped. The film made the interesting choice of casting Calvin Borel, Mine That Bird's actual for real jockey in the Kentucky Derby, to play himself in the movie. A little bit of research told me that he apparently took to playing a role on film like a duck to water, and he sounds like a truly delightful man. The final scene showing the race itself was just as tense as I hoped, and incredibly satisfying to watch. It felt every inch the impossible triumphant win it was. I actually rewatched the final scene several times, because it is extremely satisfying.
I tried to find info on the horse or horses that played Bird in the film. I was curious if it actually was Bird himself, because it looks an awful lot like him, but I was sadly unable to find that info. I'd love to know more about the horses involved in the movie.
Primitive War
This one gets its own text cut because I ended up writing almost 1.5k words about it.
This movie was mentioned to me by a friend, who had it on their roster of Bad Movies (they have an ongoing list of bad movies to watch and heckle and inflict on their long-suffering wife, and this was one of them). It was mentioned to me because it has dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs were reportedly pretty cool.
Now to be clear, this is indeed an objectively bad movie. It's got one of those absolutely ridiculous premises, and the main goal of the movie is to show a bunch of dinosaurs fucking up a bunch of dudes, and vice versa.
That being said, I really enjoyed it.
The premise involves a specialty military squad in the Vietnam war getting sent into unknown territory to search for another missing squad. They discover quickly that this area is absolutely overrun with dinosaurs, pulled through a wormhole to the past by a Russian scientist who was doing. . . some ill-advised research, it doesn't really matter.
I was pleasantly surprised almost immediately by the main squad of soldiers. I'm very much used to films like this depicting an array of indistinguishable square-jawed stubbly white men with cookie cutter personalities, but I found every single one of the main characters to be distinctive enough to recognize easily, both in appearance and personality. I found them all relatively compelling to watch, they had good chemistry, and a lot of their exchanges and relationships were genuinely interesting to watch.
I also fully expected this movie to be one of those where pretty much everybody dies, except for maybe one or two guys, with deaths played up for theatricality more than anything else. I was right about there only being a couple of survivors, but the movie made the deaths of the other characters startlingly impactful. They all had a visible impact on the other characters, and were all emotionally wrenching in a way I hadn't expected. They had a lot more weight than deaths in movies of this variety tend to, and I thought they were handled very well.
I was also surprised at which characters survived. My guesses as to which characters would walk away at the end of the movie were completely off base in a way I found really quite satisfying. It was an unexpected turn I appreciated, and I liked the way it was handled.
Also Tricia Helfer's in it. I like her quite a bit. And despite her presence among a squad of soldiers, there was no hint of any unnecessary romance plots. I was delighted by that, I was worried for a minute they were going to try to shoehorn some stilted romance in, and they didn't, and it was great.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I watched this move for the dinosaurs, and I was not disappointed.
The dinosaurs were awesome. Someone behind the design and animation of those dinosaurs really cared about what they were doing, and it showed.
They had t-rex, of course, but it was I think one of those most interesting t-rex designs I've ever seen. Anatomically it was pretty solid, but they made a choice to include some deliberate sexual dimorphism between the male and female t-rex. The female was slightly bigger (also a feature of most modern theropods, i.e. birds), and the male was more boldly patterned (also a common feature of birds, and also the rexes had patterns! They weren't just plain gray or brown!) and had short feather-quills on his neck and back. That part has no basis in science, as far as I know, but it's an entirely feasible design choice.
They did not stop at rexes, either. They had three different kinds of raptor (velociraptor, deinonychus, and utahraptor), and all were both appropriately sized for their species, and covered in some really gorgeous feathers. The animators in this took one look at those stupid claims that feathered raptors aren't scary and went "Bet". It was hard to see details, considering how quickly they moved, but the velociraptors especially were really cool. They were patterned something like your standard rooster or red jungle fowl, which was a super cool choice. The utahraptor had mostly iridescent black feathers, a coloration we know microraptors for sure had.
They also included the very cool detail to specifically name the velociraptors and deinonychus in the movie itself, but they didn't have a specific name for the utahraptor. At the time of the Vietnam war, both velociraptor and deinonychus were species names that were in use already, but name utahraptor wouldn't be coined until the 90s.
They included a ton more dinosaurs, too. They included some staples of the day, including triceratops, spinosaurus, ankylosaurus, brachiosaurus, and wonderfully alarming depiction of quetzalcoatlus (though they actually looked more like hatzegopteryx to me, but whatever, giraffe-sized pterosaur that wants to eat people), but it also included a lot of much more rarely depicted dinosaurs. There were four different hadrosaurs (maiasaurus, edmontosaurus, lambeosaurus, corythosaurus), two more species of sauropods (amargasaurus, dreadnoughtus), and also suchomimus.
You never see a lot of these. Even in actual nature documentaries along the lines of Walking with Dinosaurs or Prehistoric Planet, I have never seen some of these dinosaurs depicted on-screen. How cool, that they not only included them, but made an effort to make them recognizable.
And they were colorful! They all had colors and patterns and markings! So often, even today with the scientific breakthroughs that allow us to know what colors and markings some dinosaurs actually did have, so many times dinosaurs get depicted as flat gray or brown or green, with nothing more than a bit of countershading for a pattern. I was so thrilled to see so much color and variety in the dinosaurs here.
They also did a better than average job showing fairly realistic animal behavior from the dinosaurs. One of the characters says repeatedly "they're just animals, if you don't bother them they won't bother you." Obviously this is a movie that involves fighting dinosaurs so that doesn't always hold true, but even with the predatory dinosaurs that are so often depicted as mindlessly violent rage-machines in media, there were a ton of scenes that showed a cautious but relatively peaceful coexistence between the human characters and the dinosaurs. The humans just passed on their way, and the dinosaurs just went about their business, save when it was plot-necessary for it to be otherwise. If the raptors didn't break and run when they realistically would have when things got too dangerous for them. . . eh, I can live with it.
I also found it really interesting that the end of the movie did not even remotely solve the dinosaur problem. It wrapped up the story the movie was telling, but by the end there are still hundreds of dinosaurs wandering around Vietnam, and that's going to have consequences down the line. The credit sequence actually took actual photos from the Vietnam War, and edited dinosaurs into the shots, implying some of those ongoing consequences. I like it when a movie acknowledges that this big a problem is not going to be solved with a handful of dudes with some rifles and grenades and a can-do attitude.
There were some kind of baffling plot threads that sort of circled aimlessly around the main story, and got brought up when it felt like the writers remembered they existed, and then just weren't terribly important to the main story of the film, and could have been safely left out or at least integrated better with the rest of the plot.
It was also quite a gory movie, and while I get that's kind of the point in a lot of movies of this variety, and the gore is the reason some people might watch this film, I thought it was needlessly egregious at points, personally, and for me at points it distracted pretty heavily from the story and character interactions. There's also some pretty period-typical racism and sexism going on. Didn't surprise me, but wasn't called for under these circumstances.
Despite the occasional plot weirdness and gore, though, I had a great time with this movie. I was thoroughly enraptured for the whole thing.
Haywire
I learned about this movie when
annavere wrote a review for it a little while back. I'd never heard of it, so I was intrigued and decided to watch it and see what I thought. Regrettably, I did not especially enjoy it.This movie wants to be gender-flipped Bourne Identity so, so badly, and unfortunately just doesn't have the chops to pull it off. A lot of the story beats are pretty similar, and the way scenes are shot and framed was pretty reminiscent of the Bourne movies, to me. Some of the visuals and scenery were nice, and the action sequences were pretty visceral in a way I enjoyed seeing, but this movie was also extremely, impenetrably dark. Like, visually dark. That's a problem with a lot of movies these days, but I feel like a solid third to half of this movie, I could not for the life of me see what was going on, and I found a lot of the action sequences to be somewhat confusing because of it.
The main character is withdrawn and standoffish in a way that doesn't strike me as the usual untrusting guardedness we see in a lot of international spy/assassin type characters, it mostly felt to me like the actor just didn't want to be there. I found a lot of the interactions to be uncomfortably stiff, and this movie could not resist throwing in like three unnecessary romance plotlines, even if one of them was an undercover sort of thing. For a movie with such a solid cast involved, it felt a little like most of the actors were sort of phoning it in, to me.
I did enjoy Fassbender's role, he does an excellent suave besuited spy dude, and the ultimate fate of Tatum's character did make me experience an emotion or two, but to return to the visual darkness thing, it would've been a lot more compelling if I could have seen anything that was happening when he got killed. That death was at least paced pretty well, there are a fair number of other character and plot threads that I feel got picked up and then unceremoniously dropped with no further mention
I also felt like the final confrontation didn't have much lead-up to speak of, and it felt to me like it kind of came out of nowhere, even if it was sort of the inevitable conclusion to the plot. The location and framing fell a little flat, and the whole sequence just didn't have the impact I felt it should have.
I will say, though, defeating your villain by getting him trapped under rocks in a low tide zone and just leaving him there as the tide comes in was a pretty choice poetic fate. I can get behind that little sequence.
Over all a movie trying to be something it can't quite pull off, kneecapped by some weird writing choices, terrible attention to lighting, and some sub-par acting, but with some cool action and a couple of reasonably compelling characters.
The Sheep Detectives
I'd been planning to see this movie since I first watched trailers for it, so when my dearest mother suggested we go see it together yesterday, I was quite happy to do so.
I honestly loved it. It was very much the fun whodunnit romp I was expecting, but it had considerably more depth to a lot of aspects than I had anticipated.
The mystery was entertaining and kept you guessing, you spend some time as a viewer side-eyeing most of the characters and wondering which of them might have committed the murder, and there's that spot-on sense of entertained delight when a new clue comes forward to either exonerate or condemn one or another of the suspects. It's an exceptionally fun journey, and the conclusion of the mystery felt quite satisfying, in an "oh of course they're the murderer!" sort of way.
The balance worked out pretty well, too. This movie could easily have turned into kind of a mire, given that it needs to focus on the sheep and their perspective as they attempt to solve the mystery, and the parallel investigation being conducted by the human characters. That easily could have become kind of a confusing mess, but the movie did a very good job balancing those aspects, and tying them together where it was needed. All of the characters were fun and distinct, and their interactions were great.
It was also absolutely gorgeous, visually speaking. Beautiful scenery, beautiful lighting, beautiful costumes. Extremely atmospheric in a way that set the mood for each scene really, really well, and it had some truly excellent editing. There were a couple of shots and scene changes that actually made me gasp, they were so well and cleverly done. I love seeing some good quality filmmaking, especially where you might not necessarily expect to find it, like in a movie about a bunch of sheep solving a murder.
The sheep themselves looked pretty damn good, too, given that I believe they were pretty exclusively CGI. A lot of films that use CGI for animals look pretty uncanny to me, and there's frequently some weirdness going on with fur texture or anatomy or facial expression, but the sheep were really on point.
The sheep also very much had their own culture, which was an aspect of this movie I really loved. They had specific beliefs, some good, some bad, and a rather interesting ability to forget stuff they didn't want to remember on command. The movie very easily could have framed these aspects as just a fun quirky aside, an amusing detail about the sheep because hahah how quaint, sheep, but that is not the route they took at all.
Instead, these beliefs and abilities the sheep have come up again and again and again. Their assumptions about how life works, their prejudices, and especially their ability to forget, are all extremely deeply ingrained with the plot. These aspects are used as an emotional weapon again and again, making for a much more genuinely heartfelt film than I had expected going in. The characters have some really difficult emotional struggles, and some very difficult revelations, and these are all handled in a way that hit really powerfully. It wouldn't have been nearly so powerful if the film hadn't leaned so heavily on the distinct culture the sheep have. There were constant aspects of grief and rejection and the nature of both justice and acceptance, and how those things can shape someone's life, for better or worse.
I am a Movie Crier, so it's not a big surprise, but I definitely cried several times throughout.
Thoroughly enjoyable. Will definitely be watching again sometime down the line.
no subject
Date: 28 May 2026 14:36 (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 May 2026 16:31 (UTC)Sheep Detectives
Date: 28 May 2026 14:40 (UTC)I, also, will watch it again someday. Maybe I'll read the book it's based on, too.
Re: Sheep Detectives
Date: 28 May 2026 16:43 (UTC)I thought I remembered it was a book originally, I may have to check that out as well.