At the start of this very good movie, I remember thinking what a huge shame it is that so many young people, through some accident of birth, were born into a poor family with virtually no way out of a bleak existence and they believe that their only alternative is to join the military. There is always a ton of money that is available to train people to kill other people, but there is far too little money to rescue the lives of so many millions of poor people, whose potential is forever lost just because of the meager circumstances under which they are born. The only caveat to this military option is that you may get killed or maimed, blinded, lose one or several limbs or have permanent PTSD that you never recover from. Apart from this, the job training that you were promised when you joined whatever military service you decided on, may not be a skill that could ever parlay into an actual job in the real world. How many jobs can you get after you leave the military when your only skill is repairing a tank? Once you’re in, you do what you are told and there is nothing you can do to control your own future. You are the property of the United States and other people dictate your future and that includes whether you live or die starting the first day you join the service. My thinking while watching the start of this film was why can’t we invest our money into the potential of a young person who has no viable future, instead of making this deal where maybe they can have a future and some money, but only if they risk their lives first.

The new film Megan Leavey is a true story about a young woman, played very well by Kate Mara, whose life after high school is a disaster. Living in a poor town with her mother and her boyfriend and a product of divorced parents, she wanders through bad jobs with no future until she realizes like so many other young people like her, that her only option is to join the Marines. A great scene in this movie was when Megan’s mother actually asked her daughter how much money she would get if Megan was killed in Iraq, confirming how bad her childhood must have been. What follows is the verbal and physical abuse of boot camp that eventually leads her, after getting punishment duty due to a public drunkenness incident, to cleaning out dog cages. The dogs in this part of the Marines are bomb smelling German Shepards whose special skills are badly needed in Iraq and Afghanistan and have saved many lives. What this movie makes clear is that these military dogs are as valuable and important as any soldier in a war and there is no such thing as “just a dog”. After begging her commanding officer and passing all of her exams to get the opportunity to be a dog handler, Megan Leavey finally gets her chance when another soldier is not able to handle the most difficult of all the dogs, named Rex. The greatest part of this movie is the friendship and bond that develops over time with Megan and Rex and that love grows understandably much stronger when they both face the extreme adversity of the war in Iraq. All of this leads to a very emotional ending that I thought was one of the best conclusions to a movie about the love of dogs I have ever seen.

That acting in Megan Leavey is outstanding and I think there is a chance that Kate Mara might actually receive an Academy Award Nomination. I highly recommend this movie.

There had to be a phone call during the time this movie was under consideration for production some years ago. Someone must have said, “well the script is really not that good and the story is rather poor”. The response probably was, “people love zombies and mummies and explosions and we can put an expensive plane crash scene in this mess, so who cares about the story”.

The truth will always be the same with movies; you just cannot throw expensive special effects at a bad script and expect anything but a bad movie to be produced. The ratings for The Mummy on Rotten Tomatoes are a very low 17%, so the odds are that this movie will probably not be received well enough to warrant another Mummy franchise are high. The first Mummy franchise was released in 1999 starring Brendan Fraser and I thought that movie was much better than this one.

The only scene that held my attention in this film, as I almost dozed off twice during the two hours, was the plane crash scene that was shot using the famous Vomit Comet that has been used so often to shoot weightless effects in movies. After the plane crash, this entire film is very quickly reduced to a series of chase scenes involving Tom Cruise and Annabelle Wallis who is an archeologist and a resurrected mummy queen named Ahmanet, played by Sofia Boutella. Russel Crowe is also in this film playing none other than Dr. Henry Jekyll in a role that was probably only created to increase the audience for this below average film with his fans.

This movie was a big disappointment and most likely a huge opportunity lost because it is likely that the critics will destroy any chance this movie may have in spawning a sequel in the next few years. Unless you’re a huge fan of zombies, this movie can be missed.

The ratings for the movie Wonder Woman are extremely high; 84% for IMDB and 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. While I agree that this is a good movie, I do not agree that it as good as these very high scores. This movie has very good special effects but a story that is not exceptional enough to consider this a great movie. The story of this film is essentially about good vs evil and in this case, the evil is Germany in World War 1.

An air force captain from England, Captain Steve Trevor, played by Chris Pine, flys through some kind of a time portal into a world of Amazon women while escaping from German soldiers who soon arrive in this strange ancient world. Within this Amazon world, the evil force they are fighting is someone named Aries. After a battle between Amazon women and the German soldiers from World War 1, it is decided that Diana, played by Gal Gadot will return to the Steve Trevor’s world of world War 1 and her reasoning is that she wants to kill Aries. What is not clear at this point is why Diana aka Wonder Woman does not realize that Aries does not exist in the World War 1 world, despite her obvious intelligence including being able to speak 10 languages and obviously going through a time portal. It is also not fully explained where or how this time portal came to being in the first place, although some meager explanation is offered at the end of the movie. Another interesting thought I had is that if Wonder Woman has huge powers by clicking her bracelets together, why does she waste so much time and take so much risk getting involved in so much hand to hand combat? Why not just click your bracelets and win the battle immediately?

Like most of the many Marvel comic movies that have been released in the last few years, the most important thing are the special effects and not necessarily the story. I thought this story was better than most of the other Marvel movies but not as good as the Iron Man series and the best in that franchise was the first one, released in 2008. Overall, I thought Wonder Woman was a very good but not great addition to the Marvel Comic movie franchise and I do recommend it.