Film Theory: What is Disney’s Body Count (YouTube): The Film Theorist YouTube channel begins their quest to find the most deadly Disney movie. This episode lays the groundwork, such as the rules, and eliminates the zero death movies.

Mortal Engines (movie): A tale involving life after a destructive war. To survive many of the cities, such as London, became mobile. A young man and woman must team-up to stop London’s plans to conquer everyone.

While I enjoyed the movie and am looking forward to reading the book, I did find the movie a little cliché. Tom Natsworthy is a Londoner who fully believes that what London does is the best–at least until he meets Hester and learns not everything is as it seems. But, I really enjoyed the action and flow of the movie. It seemed to continually be moving forward.

I did get confused when Tom has Katherine open up the city’s engine. It shows him hovering the glider-plane as it opens and then it just changes to him rescuing Hester. It never really tells why he wanted the gate opened. I’m assuming he did something to halt the city’s engines.

I enjoyed the character development. Hester goes from a revenge seeking woman who cares only about killing the one who murdered her mother to someone trying to stop London’s plans. I also liked the twist of why Hester is being hunted by a bounty hunter.

4/5

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (movie): The movie focuses on Miles Morales going from normal teen to the next Spider-Man.

I really enjoyed the art style. They managed to have a mix of animation and comic book style. I liked how they would have thought bubbles or narration/voice-over boxes appear at times.

The movie had everything you’d expect from a Spider-Man film: action, humor, and web-swinging. I enjoyed the running gag of the Spider-People telling their origin story each time they showed up. And the sight gags never let up either.

The voice work was great. The characters really sounded scared or upset.

Finally, I liked the Spider-Man Easter Eggs, such as the old Spidey vehicles. They also managed to show pretty much every Spider-Man costume, including the new Gameverse (aka Marvel’s Spider-Man for PS4) costume. I also liked how they kept showing the number “42” now and then.

About the only thing I didn’t like is that they hinted at Spider-Verse sequels, which means now I have to wait for the next one to come out. Ugh, couldn’t they just do a weekly series instead. I don’t want to wait for more!

Truthfully, I did notice a few times when the animation was a little…laggy. The characters would jerk weird or their moments didn’t seem as fluid (and I don’t mean those times when the characters were purposefully glitching out for plot reasons).

4.9/5