Film: Shazam! Fury of the Gods

Maybe I'm just getting old, but these days all I'm really looking for in a movie is a solid production, a decent plot and zero overreach. And I'm glad to say that Shazam 2 (because who likes subtitles anyway) does exactly what it was supposed to do.

I can't say it's an original film, but in a world of Marvel-saturation, going back to the basics turned out to be quite the novel move. The acting was fine, the film was fun, and the superhero antics more than adequate. If this is what the new DCEU is going to be like going forward, then I'm all for it.

Film: Creed III

It goes to show how many legs the Rocky films had, given how Creed (the franchise) seems tired and running out of steam by the third. The film was equally convenient and implausible, both made all the worse by its rushed pacing. It laboured emotional themes, which also isn't necessarily a problem except when the emotions feel so cartoony.

There was some interesting bits - the fights were novel enough to be enjoyable, and the experimentation with their visuals paid off. There were only three though, with the final one not even being the better of them.

It was a decent jaunt I suppose... just not the knockout I wanted it to be. Disappointing.

Book: The Lost Metal, Brandon Sanderson

Maybe it's overexposure (whether that's for me to the books or the books to everyone I'm not sure) but The Lost Metal just didn't feel like a great book. It was very perfunctory, with a plot that had few twists or excitement as a result. What it did give instead is a shed load of Cosmere.

So fanservice then? I prefer "bridging", in that - finally - we have some explicit references to the Cosmere, World Hopping, Investiture and it's various forms and manifestations and how all the various geography of the Cosmere may fit together. Plenty has been left for the future, but as a start this makes TLM a pretty essential part of the wider series as a whole.

It also marks the last in Era 2 of Mistborn, and as a conclusion it was okay. It could certainly have been much worse. Either way the book was short (well at least compared to the more recent Stormlight novels) so however flat the substance of the book was it wasn't much to suffer from.

Otherwise everything else is as you'd expect by now - TLM was well written, never fatally boring and gave enough to keep me going to the end.