Mainly the difference is that the book has a big battle in the middle that the movie doesn’t have at all, and the movie has a love story that’s nowhere in the book. See below for complete plot summaries of the book and movie.
I didn’t know anything about this movie before watching it, except that it looked colorful; my husband watched a trailer, and I got a glimpse of it. In particular, I didn’t know this was an origin story about Optimus Prime and Megatron. It took me waaaay too long to figure that out! However, I’m proud that on my own I identified the voice of Laurence Fishburne (who played Morpheus in The Matrix).
Characters
Orion Pax (a younger Optimus Prime) is curious, brave, and loyal, but I wouldn’t choose him for a friend. He has about 500% too much spontaneity for my taste. D-16 (a younger Megatron), his best friend, is sadly lacking in resilience, it turns out. Elita-1 is ambitious and hardworking, and somehow gets tangled up in Orion Pax’s drama in spite of her strong preference for doing things by the book. B-127 (a younger Bumblebee, or as he calls himself, “Badassatron”) is awkward, energetic, and irrepressibly talkative.
Setting
The story takes place on Cybertron, a whole planet of transformers. Orion Pax, D-16, and Elita-1 work in the energon mines. B-127 works sorting trash, also deep below the city. The dynamic, metallic surface of the planet is home to some robot-like animals, some ruins, some actual green plants, and a colony of outcasts. And it’s visited by aliens from another world… Why?
Premise
Cybertron was defeated in an interplanetary war, and its guardians, the primes, were all destroyed, except Sentinel Prime, who periodically leaves the city to search for the Matrix of Leadership, an important object of power that was lost in the war. Orion Pax is looking for it too, because he dreams of being a hero; he feels his potential is being wasted.
Theme
There’s a very explicit theme: a rejection of “Might makes right.” Subsidiary messages have sensible things to say about the importance of friendship, truth, and self-actualization.
Style
It’s a PG-rated animated science-fiction action/comedy with a slick, bright neon color palette that manages to suggest the 1980s.
Overall?
I hope we get more of these! I was so disappointed with the Michael Bay series (I think I only watched the first two), for their trashy tone, meh choice of lead actor, and loud chaotic action. Therefore, it pleases me that someone has, uh, transformed the source material in a manner appreciably more watchable.
“We do not know why we are here. We do not know who built the Silo. We do not know why everything outside the Silo is as it is. We do not know when it will be safe to go outside. We only know that that day is not this day.”
Silo is the grown-up version of City of Ember, which I love (the book version, at any rate). It’s also based on a book series. It’s sci-fi dystopia in which 10,000 people live in a city consisting of an underground silo. The world of the Silo, stratified vertically into different classes of citizens with different roles and lifestyles, is interesting in itself, but the characters bring it to life and drive the plot. The characters all have goals that motivate and explain their decisions (and conflict with other characters’ goals), and they all learn as they go, shifting their allegiance, or not, as suits their aims and principles and the information they happen to have.
Like all good sci-fi, Silo is about big questions made into relatable stories…
If you lived in an underground Silo, wouldn’t you want, first of all, to prevent your fellow citizens from threatening the existence of your world, even if it meant following orders and not asking questions, or concealing (or distorting) the truth? If the stakes are survival, don’t the ends justify the means? Curiosity killed the cat; it could kill you too—and 10,000 others with you! Is knowing the truth so important? On the other hand, is it possible for humans to happily ignore huge unanswered questions? What kind of truth requires such secrecy that people have to die for it? Aren’t we better off finding out whatever there is to find out, and knowing whatever there is to know? And anyway, isn’t it our nature that we will inevitably seek the truth, even if it doesn’t make us better off?
Who do you identify with: those who are willing to kill for the sake of secrecy in the name of safety, or those who are willing to die for the sake of solving a mystery? In probably every dystopia story, the audience is meant to side with the rebels. Silo, while clearly siding with the characters who seek the truth (as per the tagline), makes a pretty strong case for the local tyrant: there’s no twirling of mustaches here. Every issue has as many sides as there are characters, because every character has his or her own individual perspective. And yet, in the end, the truth matters.
Season 1 kicks off with a couple of mysterious deaths, but the greater mystery is whether the world outside the Silo is as inhospitable as the residents have been led to believe. Juliette, a gifted engineer responsible for the health of the Silo’s generator, is thrust into a new role that she leverages to find the answers to increasingly dangerous questions. Above all, she’s tenacious. Whatever she does, you root for her.
Season 2 is gripping in the sense that you want to know what happens to the people you met in Season 1, but it’s less gripping in the sense that the biggest mystery of Season 1 has been revealed. Moreover, Season 2 bounces between two separate plotlines. Circumstances are more strained; Season 1, even when people die, is more about solving intellectual puzzles, some of them political and all of them secret; Season 2 is more political rather than less so, but now there are many more overt physical conflicts: explosions, gunshots, arrows, and more than enough water to drown in!
There’s not yet any release date for Season 3, but it will probably start airing in 2026. 🙁 I’m tempted to read the books, but I also believe that would be a terrible idea, so I’ll wait until I’ve finished watching the show; then I’ll read the book series and compare.
This was fun. Silly, but with strong themes of hope, friendship, and family.
Wikipedia says: Polygon said Carrey’s “gloriously deranged one-man, two-character musical” contrasted with the “utter sincerity” of Reeves, who made Shadow a “weirdly likable little ball of pain”. Sounds about right.
A Christian knight named “Dante”, freshly returned from the Crusades, journeys through Hell looking for the soul of his lover Beatrice after she dies in his arms, the last of his family to be slaughtered by someone unknown. Her soul is snatched away from him by the devil as she screams that he must have betrayed her; he denies this. But at the gates of Hell, his torso is embroidered with a red ribbon cross depicting, like film slides, his sins. He meets Virgil and travels through the circles of Hell, attacking monsters, protesting his innocence, and calling out to Beatrice, whom the devil intends to wed. Can he stop the marriage? And is he worthy of Beatrice’s love? (Or God’s?)
This movie is based on a game that is based on the actual Inferno. The episodes in this Japanese/Korean/American production are animated in slightly different styles, but the plot all hangs together. It’s a clever fantasy/action/horror adaptation.
See below for more details about the plot. SPOILERS.
This historic movie was controversial because it featured two cross-dressing male characters; they pose as female musicians because they need to escape the mafia. I didn’t find it entertaining, just awkward and silly.
Your mileage may vary! According to Wikipedia, it “opened to critical and commercial success and is considered to be one of the greatest films of all time.” That’s why it keeps cropping up on lists of “must-watch movies,” and that’s why I watched it.
In this movie, Anne Hathaway plays Gloria, whose boyfriend kicks her out because she’s unemployed, broke, and out drinking with friends all the time. She leaves NYC, moves into the empty house her family owns in her hometown, and gets a job with the grade-school classmate who runs the local bar, which means she gets to keep drinking. Here’s the thing, though: she discovers that whenever she steps into the local playground, Seoul, South Korea gets attacked by a giant monster whose movements exactly match her own.
That’s the premise.
I think they mismarketed this movie as comedy. It’s really dark, actually. Okay, fine, it’s black comedy. I thinnnk I’m glad I watched it… but I wouldn’t watch it again. Yeah, she’s under the spell of alcohol addiction, but it’s actually a lot worse than that. You can shake addiction. What you can’t do is reason with a psychopath who has some sort of hold over you. That’s scary, man.
Anyway, the movie is a clever metaphor, and there are flashbacks that ultimately “explain” (not that it’s really explicable) the origin of the monster. So if you’re not afraid to see Gloria cornered by a violent psychopath in the second half of the movie, and you like black comedy, give Colossal a try, I guess.
Rotten Tomatoes currently says 82%; IMDB says 6.2/10; Google says 53%.
The show is about John, the extremely smart but hermit-like identical twin brother of a police investigator. John makes a living inventing puzzles under the pen-name Ludwig. John must assume the identity of his brother James in order to figure out why James has disappeared. (Don’t expect Season 1 to answer that question, though!)
The episodes, as you would expect, are a mixture of fish-out-of-water comedy, displays of intellectual brilliance that address some specific police investigation that “James” becomes involved in, and delicate attempts to pursue the dark secret of the disappearance of the real James. And is there a love triangle? Maybe so…
In 2024, I watched 50 movies (well, 46 movies, a miniseries, and three tv shows).
Part of the reason the number is so big is that I went on two international trips and watched 13 movies on planes. I try to watch foreign movies that I’d never even hear about, rather than Hollywood movies that I already know I want to see.
Siqi and I only watched 2 movies in theaters. China does screen Hollywood movies in English, but you kinda have to look out for them and plan to go when they’re available, and we didn’t pay that much attention.
We (re)watched 14 movies and shows on DVD. Sadly, most of my DVDs are currently in storage.
Luckily, Chinese streaming services are super cheap and have a ton of English-language Hollywood movies, and we have a big TV in our living room. So we watched 21 movies and shows online. (Still, like everyone who uses a streaming service, we had to go looking for things on multiple platforms because licensing.)
See below for the complete list, with comments and recommendations.
Well, it combines a wide variety of genres: I’d say it’s sci-fi, martial arts, midlife crisis, coming-of-age, multicultural, LGBT, and dramedy—also, according to Wikipedia, it has elements of absurdism, surrealism, animation, and fantasy. Some of the humor is too deliberately gross, sexual, or absurd for my taste, but perhaps that’s inevitable, given how many styles are mixed together.
Kind of like Free Guy (2021), it was a creative, entertaining, meaningful, optimistic synthesis of many things I’d seen before. There’s a TV Tropes page on it that, well, lists the tropes it uses; and it’s lonnnnng….
Maybe what the movie reminded me of most (since arguably the movie’s salient aspect is zaniness) is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005), especially the effects of the improbability drive (“Ford, I think I’m a sofa!”). Oh, and actually also Spies in Disguise (2019), which features defensive “weapons” that defuse violence instead of perpetuating it. And then there’s the idea, also found in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), that humans can’t absorb all the information in the universe without ceasing to be human.
The “themes” chunk of the Wikipedia article is worth reading. TLDR? It says the movie urges us to resist nihilism. In the end, something matters. That’s what overwhelmed Chinese immigrant Evelyn has to learn—but she’s in the middle of an IRS audit of her laundromat, a divorce, and a fight with her distant, angsty, overweight, tattooed, lesbian daughter about whether to tell grandpa she’s a lesbian. She’s mediocre at everything. How can she be expected to save the multiverse?!
