Simon's Movie Reviews

  Despite all the fantasy elements and the many battles, it would be reasonable to consider Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy a holiday tradition. All three movies all came out during the holiday season, feature family and friends joining together, and it is wonderful escapism to enjoy on a cold winter day. The Return of the King (2003) is especially joyous since it is the culmination of all the adventures the characters have gone through, even though there are about five different culminations as the movie winds down. Whether you are a fan of the fantasy genre or if you have read the books, seeing The Return of the King on the big screen is quite the experience. It is not with every movie that you get to see thousands of riders charge against an army of orcs on a battlefield only to get attacked by a battalion of elephant-like creatures. That is one of the most spectacular scenes in a movie filled with plenty of spectacular scenes over a two and a half runnin...

  Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) should be what all action movie sequels aim to be. Some people say less is more; James Cameron says more is more. With this sequel he pitted two terminators against each other, turned Linda Hamilton into a heroine for the ages, and just as he did with Aliens, he increased the scale of the action sequences by 10. On paper the concept for the Terminator films sounds like a low-grade B movie: a robot from the future, played by an Austrian actor with the world’s thickest accent, is sent to the past to kill the leader of the human resistance. What ended up on screen is a ground-breaking special effects bonanza that takes viewers on an epic adventure. This was a seminal 90s movie, so of course my brother and I ended up owning a copy on VHS, which had repeated viewings. Some of the action scenes were probably too graphic for my age at the time, but I’m not complaining. Whenever I feel today’s action movies have too many G-rated gunfights with superhe...