Rio

Rio is a movie about Blu (voice by Jesse Eisenberg), a rare bird, the Macaw, that was kidnapped when he a small and accidentally dropped in the small town of Moose Lake, Minnesota. He was later found by a little girl, Linda (voice by Sofia Scarpa Saldanha (young Linda) and by Leslie Mann (grown up Linda)) and they grew up together. Eventually, from growing up with the little girl, the bird becomes domesticated.

One day, an ornithologist visits them and reveals Blu as the last male of his kind and request for Blu to come to his lab and mate with a female Macaw, Jewel (voice by Anne Hathaway), to preserve their species. Upon arriving to Rio and the lab, both Blu and Jewel are kidnapped by smugglers and, thus, begins their adventure.

The whole movie was fun to watch. Seeing that it’s a Rio setting, there’s colours and music. The bad guys are a fun to watch too, including the rejected bird, Nigel. He was a star before helping to capture exotic birds for his master. Along the way to escape from the smugglers, it won’t be complete with friends. Blu met Nico (voice by Jamie Foxx), Pedro (voice by Will.I.Am), Luiz (voice by Tracy Morgan) and Rafael (voice by George Lopez). One scene that was romantic for this movie was when Blu wanted to tell Jewel how he feels, assisted by Nico and Pedro’s serenade.

Overall, the movie is fun to watch and worth to watch for a second time.

Transformers 3 : Dark of the Moon

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon. It has been heavily promoted, change of stars, new stars, new cars, all action into the third installment of the Transformers franchise.

This movie starts from the Apollo 11 mission that was intended not to put the first man on the moon but to investigate an unknown crash on the moon. Although they say the name ‘Neil’, but it doesn’t imply it is Neil Armstrong. Even so, ‘first man on the moon’, it’s obvious. So, the astronauts went to the moon, found a wrack craft, take some samples home and keep it a secret til the day they die.

Moving to the present day, where Sam has a new girlfriend, Carly, and in dire need to find a job. How come he doesn’t get a job after saving the world? Because none of it never happened. His parents, however, is rich. The girlfriend works for a car collector and racer. The Autobots find Sentinel Prime, former Autobot leader. Anyways, to sum it all up, Sam stumbles upon Decepticons plans to use the Pillars from the space craft, Arc, to transport Decepticons to Earth. Sentinel Prime betrays Autobots because his intention is to preserve Cybertronian race. Carly’s boss is the human liaison for Decepticons. Conflict happens between Autobots and humans, Autobots get exiled from Earth. Somehow, they return, fight the Decepticons and win the war.

The movie packs a lot of action every now and then. However, I can understand why some Transformers fan didn’t like the movie. To me, one let down was when Optimus Prime uses armours from the trailer and it only last few seconds; after putting them on, slash some Decepticons and takes of the armour and continue killing some more Decepticons. The armour looks cool but it only lasted few seconds? This happens twice.

Besides that, was the battle at the end, where Optimus uses his full armour, including flight suit but got entangled in some construction wires. It was cool to watch and, yes, it lasted awhile. While his team gets trashed by Decepticons, he is still hanging on the construction wires. Until the last minute when Bumblebee was almost killed that Optimus comes to the rescue and kills most of the Decepticons.

The new squeeze, Carly. Indirectly, she was the one that wins the war. How? By being smart and telling the soldiers what to do and by telling Megatron that he should be ruler, not Sentinel. Kind of like a small little conscience to everyone.

For me, the whole movie is great in terms of being an action packed movie. However, story line wise, was kind of more action-ish. One point being, ‘Are there anymore secrets that Decepticons have that could possibly take over the world?’

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes

This movie’s title speaks for itself; Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes. The whole movie revolves around how the apes rise above all else to make ‘Evolution to Revolution’. Hence, the tagline.

The movie begins with Will Rodman (James Franco), a scientist finding a cure to Alzhemier for his dad, uses apes as the test subjects through the invention of ALZ-112. When an ape goes loose and create havoc, his research is shut down. However, the ape that created havoc was only doing it to protect her baby. The baby is smuggled out of the lab and looked after by Will. He named the ape Caesar after the dad was quoting from the literature of Caesar. After years, he learned that the virus introduce to the mummy ape is inherited by the baby making the ape intelligent. This prompts the doctor to try it on his dad. And it works…at first. The human antibodies reacts to protect the body (which is a good thing because at least we know our antibodies work). However, for the apes, they gain intelligence. With that, they aren’t pets anymore.

Then they went on a rampage to reach the woods but is stopped by humans. The whole rise of the apes movie revolves on the beginning of the rise. It ends with a possible sequel. One thing that was cool, the ape can talk, only Caesar though. The first words ‘NO!’. All they wanted was to return home; ‘Caesar is home’ (another word mentioned by Caesar).

Upon reading through websites,this movie was intended to be an alternative to the previous movie. To me, it’s kind of like the previous movie where the astronaut return to a different world. So, imagine this new movie as another alternative earth.

Overall, the movie displays a good balance that animals are not violent for the wrong reason, just based on instincts and some human touch to it. For human, a balance of not all are violent too. The movie is interesting to watch but it is a 50-50 decision if I want to watch for a second time because some movies is just suited to watched once.

Iron Man 3

Iron Man 3 is one of the most anticipated movie of 2013. The story continues from Iron Man 2, after the battle at New York City with the Avengers. In the movie, Tony is trying to cope to anxiety attacks he keeps having whenever there's a mention of New York City. The movie begins with Tony Stark recalling a New Year's Eve party in 1999 in Switzerland with a scientist he met; Maya Hansen. She shared with him about her research; Extremis. The research is about how plants can regenerate itself. And this was the key towards helping those who are crippled/disabled. There was a man; Aldrich Killian, who introduces himself to Maya and wants to work with her and fund her research through his company; A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics).
Then coming to the present day, Tony builds more Iron Man suits and can sleep due to his anxiety attacks. While that is underway, a terrorist called The Mandarin starts to threaten the President. Happy Hogan, Tony's previous right bodyguard, now takes care of Pepper Pots. When Killian comes to see Pepper Pots, Happy becomes suspicious and follows Killian's bodyguard. He sort of survives an attack and is admitted to the hospital. Tony becomes angry and issues a threat to the Mandarin. Maya, from his previous encounter in 1999, appears to warn Tony about something but not in time because Tony's home gets blown up. One of the cool part is when Tony uses his new invention; the armour can be activated through his hands movements. When his home was blown up, he activates his armour to protect Pepper. "I got you!" as Pepper uses the Iron Man suit. After saving Maya and Pepper, Tony uses the suit and return fire to the attackers. He gets suck into the water with his home. Another cool thing was his armour's hand/glove disengaged from his arm and acts as a 'helping hand' to pull Iron Man from the wreckage under the seabed. And Jarvis launch him off to Tennessee, where Tony found similarities of the bombings by Mandarin. And the world believes Tony is dead. However, he bunks in with a kid in Tennessee and fix his suit while investigating what happened in Tennessee. And soon gets discovered by Killian's bodyguard. Tony learns that the bombings that left no trail was actually a human bomb. Those army that signed up for Killian's research became invincible and are able to heat up their body or get blown off if Extremis can't be contained in their body. Tony got away from the fight with the bodyguards with the help of the boy, including helping Tony to get over his anxiety attacks. What do mechanics do? They build.
Now bent of revenge, Tony sets on to hunt down Mandarin. However, by this time, the story reveals that Maya is working for Killian, Pepper gets kidnap as leverage for Tony to help Maya perfect Extremis (it was unstable), Pepper gets injected with Extremis, Extremis is Killian's weapon of mass destruction, Iron Man suit is still down and......*spoiler alert!*....Mandarin was just a decoy. He's a Brit actor, Trevor Slattery. He squirms at Tony coming to him with a gun, not the suit. It was funny. Tony gets caught by Extremis agents. He jokes with them about how he's going fight them while tied up. But it was really about his suit coming all the way from Tennessee. This part was cool in how he fights the bad guys while getting piece by piece of his suit. But the question at this point would be, Mandarin? Why? There's two ways of seeing this:

1. As we may know, Mandarin is the oldest enemy of Iron Man. However, in this movie, he was just a decoy, which may be disappointing to fans. Perhaps the real Mandarin could be in another movie (or Universe, comics are known for creating alternate universe where there's a different story to the superheroes we initially know).
2. It takes on a new breath because Aldrich Killian is also an enemy of Iron Man. He first appeared in Iron Man comics in 2005. In the comics, he was selling Extremis to terrorists but later killed himself because he was overwhelm with guilt. This is different from the movie.

So this could be a different turn in the Iron Man story as we popularly know. Anyways, back to the story, Killian's main plan was to kidnap President Ellis and kill him on live tv and use the vice-president as a puppet because the vice-president wanted a cure for his crippled daughter through Extremis. The Iron Patriot, aka War Machine (new name from serving the country), goes on a wild goose chase tracking down, supposedly, locations of the Mandarin. Unfortunately, he is lured into a trap and his suit taken. In his place, President Ellis is put in the suit and hung up high at an oil-drilling platform. And Tony and Rhodes come to the rescue. However, there are Extremis agents all around. So what does Tony do in this kind of situation? Reinforcements! This is one I was waiting for. All his Iron Man suits appear to take out the agents. It's exciting to see all the suits. Kinda makes you wonder, why was Tony busy fixing  his main suit, when he had a whole closet of Iron Man suits undamaged from the attack at his home? And we get to see, similar to The Avengers scene, when Tony jumps of platforms and one of his suits would come and suit up. There were a few times he tried and his suit gets damaged. His main suit came to the rescue but as soon as he puts it on, it fell apart. So much for fixing the suit, throughout the movie.
As the battle of agents and suits continues, Tony tries to save Pepper but fail. Some may anticipate that the fall was not the end (remember Pepper was injected with Extremis?). So Killian and Tony (most of the time his suits get torn off) fights, and Killian died from the blast (with Tony's hand movements/activation, his suit was put on Killian and contained. Killian blows up in the suit). However, Killian survives and just when he was about to kill Tony, Pepper appears from the burning wreckage and kills Killian. Tony tells Jarvis to activate self-destructs on all his suits as to show his loyalty to spending time with Pepper.
The end is vice-president gets arrested, Mandarin or Trevor Slattery gets arrested, Tony research on Extremis to cure Pepper, Tony's arc reactor and sharpnel is removed from his heart, throws his arc reactor to the sea and say he will always be Iron Man. It indicates that Tony finally found a way to cure his heart. Throughout the story, Tony is kind of working on his own without the suit and this could have lead to him saying "I will always be Iron Man!". I was expecting the ending to be.......Tony transformed as Iron Man but it didn't happened. It could either be cool or weird because he should retain his human side.
In the post-credit, as in most superhero movies, it shows Tony telling his story to Dr. Bruce Banner, whom fell asleep. "Where did I lost you?", "Switzerland".

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