Cooper Ogden – Google

I don't understand who this movie is for. It's too kiddie for adults, too slow for kids. It feels like they failed to pick a demographic and just made it unsuitable for either by trying to pander to both. I personally found the combo of slow pacing, a kind of mean protagonist*, and dull visuals (muted, grey colour grading) made for a movie that failed to keep my attention. It's like if bridge to terebithia had none of the fun and whimsy, and was instead just grim from the start. *To my understanding it's played in a comedic way in the books, the way she's written in the movie just comes off as rude and snarky, but certainly not funny. Her circumstances justify her attitude, but it doesn't make it less grating to watch.

Most fast paced and overwhelming movie I've seen. It's constantly throwing a million things at you. You are immediately faced with a hefty chunk of narrated exposition, then from there on out every single line tries incredibly hard to be witty one liner. Seriously, it is like they had a three-joke-per-minute quota. Most don't land. A large cast of characters is brought in like they are some kind of epic Avengers teamup, but you have no idea who they are and they are never really introduced. I genuinely thought there MUST have been prior movies that I missed, and that was why I was so disoriented by all the niche superheros it was casually tossing my way as if they were familiar names in the DC cinematic universe. There was not. The attempted messaging re: american interference in foreign conflicts is incredibly mixed. The rapid fire pacing makes what are supposed to be somber, emotional moments read as comedic (I was full on laughing at one character death, it was so goofy and abrupt). In some scenes a character's head is poorly edited onto another person's body, which it is much too large for, and their voice is dubbed over by someone who sounds nothing like them. Overall the effects were... not up to the standard you would expect from a film of that budget in 2022. Atom Smasher was obviously directed to imitate Tom Holland as Spider-Man. However, it was so spectacularly bewildering in the choices made in creating it, and so deeply terrible, that I found it very entertaining. Don't regret seeing it. I was mostly laughing at parts which were trying and failing at being serious, but I must admit, a couple of the 100s of jokes attempted got an actual chuckle out of me. I also liked that The Rock was constantly full on murdering people.