Tag: Justice Smith

REVIEW: Ron’s Gone Wrong [2021]

Jared Mobarak

Let’s make friends. The CEO of tech giant Bubble (Justice Smith‘s Marc) had good intentions when creating the Bubble-bot. His goal was to eradicate childhood loneliness by supplying boys and girls the world over a personal SEO-equipped “Smart” device that doubles as a best friend and geo-locator of other like-minded real friends. The toy’s launch proves a huge success as Marc randomly selects an audience member to electronically imprint on the first unboxed Bubble-bot before then having it wirelessly connect to the app-aggregated meta data cataloged on every child’s phone…

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REVIEW: Pokémon: Detective Pikachu [2019]

Jared Mobarak

I can feel it in my jellies. It’s almost shocking that nobody made a live-action Pokémon movie considering the card game’s heyday was back in the 1990s while the anime and video games still ruled kids’ televisions. That’s not to say the property ever disappeared. Nintendo couldn’t have turned “Pokémon GO” into an international smartphone phenomenon without strong brand recognition spanning multiple generations. But what was there to lean on narratively? The creatures themselves can’t say anything but their names and the human characters are kids trying to catch them…

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REVIEW: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom [2018]

Jared Mobarak

They’re alive. Like me. Anyone who read/watched Jurassic Park in the 1990s should have known the product of John Hammond’s hubris: a marriage between mankind’s extinction and evolution into something more. This is what the themes of control and the lack thereof portend. To play God is to risk losing everything we have built in the past 300,000 years. Because whether we bring back that which nature destroyed (dinosaurs) or create something wholly new (through genetic manipulation and cloning), we breathe life into a being not meant for the present…

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