I’ve already written about using my sick leave to catch up with Doctor Who, Red Dwarf and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but I watched other things too. Here are some of them.
The Princess Bride
It may be, ahem, ‘inconceivable’ that I’d never watched this before, but I did indeed watch The Princess Bride in full for the first time recently. I think I’d ended up with a voucher for a free film purchase on Amazon Prime Video after buying something else, and this was one of the included films.
I can see why it’s a cult classic, and almost 30 years on, it holds up well. The characters are charming, and by structuring it as a story being told by a grandfather to his grandson, it makes it less like a traditional fairytale story.
Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox
This was another freebie – if you’re an Octopus Energy customer and you’re signed up for Octoplus, you can claim a free film rental from Rakuten each month. Whilst it is a restricted list, it’s still relatively extensive and this was one of the films on it.
If you’re not an Octopus Energy customer, here’s my referral link.
I became aware of Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox because Felicia Day plays one of the characters, and is an executive producer. She’s been in lots of things – I know her from The Guild – but not many feature films, and so I gave this a try.
I’ll be honest – it’s not great. None of the characters are particularly likeable – especially the titular Tim Travers. You can also tell it’s a low budget film with some rather basic special effects – I appreciate that it’s hard to make a good, independent science fiction film, but I didn’t especially enjoy this.
Ready Player One
Ready Player One has recently become available on Netflix UK, and as I missed it in the cinema, I took advantage of its availability. It’s good – I mean, it’s a Steven Spielberg film, so you can expect at least reasonable quality. I clocked very quickly that it had been mostly filmed in the UK – largely in Birmingham, as it happens. As you would expect from a film that largely takes place in a computer game, there’s a lot of CGI, but it feels like the CGI you would get in a computer game.
Without wanting to give away a big spoiler, it ends up passing the Bechdel Test in a rather unexpected way, which is nice.
Naturally, if you play computer or console games, this is probably going to appeal to you more, but I think it’s worth your time. The film is based on a book, and while there is a second book, it was poorly received and so a sequel to the film seems to be stuck in development hell.
Warcraft: The Beginning
The Warcraft film came out in 2016, which coincidentally was the year I stopped playing World of Warcraft and when Warcraft’s popularity started to pass its peak. And I suspect this is part of the reason why this film didn’t do so well, and why there haven’t been any sequels.
The film is largely based on the first Warcraft game, Orcs and Humans, released in 1994, although many of the characters also appeared in a (then) recent World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor. So it was nice to see characters that I recognised on the big screen – or, at least, on Netflix. However, I suspect that if I hadn’t known who the characters were, I would have found the film harder to follow – again, this may go some way to explain its poor reviews. It’s also clear that some plot lines were left unresolved, to be covered in expected sequels, which will now almost certainly never happen.
The film should have come out years earlier, but got stuck in development with a change of director. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad film, but perhaps it was too ambitious and should have focussed on being a self-contained story, rather than setting up a series that then didn’t happen.
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
Here’s what I wrote in my Letterboxd review:
Ooooookay. 2004 me would have really enjoyed this, but 22 years on it hasn’t aged well. Casual homophobia and fatphobia, unnamed female characters who are just there as set dressing, and a couple of cameos by people who later turned out to be very problematic. The story is good, but a film like this wouldn’t be made nowadays and the world is better for it.
I gave it three stars, but by 2026 standards it’s a rather problematic film. If there was to be a remake, I imagine it would be rather different to this. I think I actually have the DVD somewhere, presumably bought years ago, but what prompted me to watch it was that it was about to be removed from Netflix UK. In any case, it’s a 20th Century Fox film and so it’s still there on Disney+ if you want to watch it yourself.
And that’s it. Although I’m on holiday at the moment, when I’m back, I’ll be back to work full-time, and so there won’t be as many opportunities to squeeze a film in. If I can, I’d like to watch some of the better DC cinematic universe films that I’ve missed, like Wonder Woman, but we’ll see.
