Italy 2018: In-flight movies

Long overseas flights aren’t the most enjoyable thing in life but on the plus side they allow to me catch up on movies that I’ve not gotten around to watching. On my flights to and from Italy I was able to finally watch a few films that I missed in the preceding years and below are some very quick thoughts on them. There will be no spoilers for any of the movies in today’s post so don’t worry if you’ve not seen them yourself.

The Great Wall
Matt Damon goes to China and fights some monsters. That’s really all you need to know about this movie. Overall it’s an ok film though I suspect your enjoyment of it will heavily depend on whether or not you like other big budget Chinese epic movies. If you liked movies such as Hero (starring Jet Li) you’ll probably like this one too.

Ant-Man and the Wasp
Another predictably great Marvel film. I say “predictably” because if you’ve seen all or most of the other Marvel films from the past five or so years you know what to expect from this entry in the Marvel cinematic universe, and that’s probably its biggest weakness. I’m not sure where exactly I’d rank it in the grand pantheon of Marvel films but it’s definitely at least around the midpoint or higher.

Ghost in the Shell
I honestly thought this was going to be a bad movie but it’s surprisingly decent. Having watched both seasons of the Ghost in the Shell anime I’m fairly familiar with the universe that the movie is based on and while it’s not a great film it does to a good job of translating the source material onto the big screen. Ghost in the Shell also manages to avoid the pitfall of trying to cram too much of its source material into a single film, which was the big mistake of the Fullmetal Alchemist live-action movie.

Solo: A Star Wars Story
The more I think about it, the more I feel bad for this movie. Solo is ok, maybe even good, but The Last Jedi did so much to alienate a large chunk of the Star Wars fandom that it got unfairly passed over by a lot of people. As many people have noted, the best part of this movie is Donald Glover’s performance as Lando Calrissian, to the point where I really hope Lando gets his own spinoff movie.

Avengers: Infinity War
I already saw this movie when it came out in theaters but ended up watching again on both flights across the Atlantic. This movie is just so enjoyable and fun to watch, though if you’ve not seen most of the other Marvel films it probably won’t do as much for you as it does for me.

In addition to the above-mentioned films I also watch chunks of several other movies, including Lincoln, Catch Me If You Can, Minority Report, Ready Player One, and The Avengers. These movies were ones that I wasn’t interested in watching in full and only wanted to see certain sections of. Had I skipped over them I could have fit in at least one more movie during my flights over the Atlantic. In any case, these movies make those long overseas flights a lot more bearable and I’ll be looking forward to again binge-watching movies whenever I’m next able to travel abroad.