We don't need an extensive preamble for this, right? Let me just note that this is the first year in some time that there were enough good (or at least decent) fantasy and science fiction films to make a good Top Ten list from (without checking, I'd guess you'd have to look back at least a decade to when the Lord of the Rings trilogy was coming out, if not longer -- the 80s, maybe?). Anyway...
Honorable Mentions: 4:44 Last Day on Earth, Chronicle, The Hunger Games
10. Prometheus - While it was perhaps inevitable that Ridley Scott's proud return to the Alien universe would fail to live up to the hype, we at least got an interesting (if somewhat confused) sci-fi epic filled with monsters and fascinating alien worlds (well, one world) and Michael Fassbender. Maybe he can make a sequel to it that could properly use his full talents...
9. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - This movie had a lot going against it from the start, so I suppose it's a credit to the film that it made the list at all, despite being based on the least eventful and interesting of Tolkien's books (at least excepting the Silmarillion, which Jackson decided to cram chunks of into here), being split into three films for seemingly no reason beyond a blatant cash grab, and being used to test drive new digital cameras that apparently make the film look like a soap opera (I didn't see the 48 fps version, so I can't comment on that). Despite itself, once it finally gets going it winds up being a pretty entertaining adventure, with an epilogue that all but promises that the second and third film will be better.
8. Snow White & the Huntsman - No, I can't say that I would have ever been expecting to say that a film starring Kristen Stewart would wind up being really good, and yet here we are. First-time director Rupert Sanders (who is now apparently using his success to do a remake of Van Helsing with Tom Cruise, because why not?) managed to update the Snow White tale into one that's visually lush and suprisingly epic-feeling, despite being based on a short story. There's only one glaring flaw to the whole thing, and I'll leave it to you clever sleuths to try to deduce what that could possibly be.
7. Holy Motors - I somewhat dreaded trying to describe this, as the film is so deliriously weird and plot-free that I'm worried I'm just going to make it sound dreadful. Basically, we spend a day with Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) as he is chauffered around the city, playing various roles for various people. He is, at various points, a business leader, a madman, a virtual reality lover, a murderer, a murder victim, and more, for reasons that are never fully explained, and are visibly artificial (not only does he at one point bite some woman's fingers off and then kidnap a model without anyone acting particularly disturbed, but he is straight up killed twice and just keeps going). It's an utterly absorbing film, one that you're just going to have to let wash over you.
6. Seeking a Friend For the End of the World - Of the two "end of the world" films released in 2012, this was easily the more moving effort. Steve Carell really shows off his melancholy side in this film, completely stripping away all of the comedic trappings he is most known for as he lives trapped in his own depression as a humanity-ending meteor is three weeks away from hitting Earth. This is also a directorial debut by Lorene Scafaria, whose previous film effort was as the screenwriter for Nick & Nora's Infinite Playlist. This is a much superior film, in large part due to Steve Carell and Keira Knightley being just slightly more capable of detailing depression and ennui than Michael Cera and Kat Dennings could.
5. Mirror Mirror - There were two major releases in 2012 based around the Snow White legend (and also some straight to DVD nonsense and one or two European productions that I don't recall the names of), and both of them were much better than the old Disney film. This one, directed by Tarsem Singh, is every bit as visually impressive (and more inventive) and trades the epic fantasy adventure tale for a more comedic and light-hearted effort. In that regard, I imagine that which film you prefer is going to depend on whether you'd rather watch a comedy or an adventure.
4. Men in Black 3 - I can't say I had very high hopes for this, the first Men in Black film in ten years, and the follow-up to the disastrous-yet-appropriately-named Men in Black 2. I certainly wasn't expecting this to be the best film in the series, but thanks to a loopy time travel plot and Josh Brolin doing a dead-on impersonation of a young Tommy Lee Jones, we've got both the funniest and the most surprisingly heartfelt effort director Barry Sonnenfield has yet managed.
3. Moonrise Kingdom - If this isn't my favorite Wes Anderson film, that's mainly a testament to just how damn high he's set the bar for himself. It's an effortlessly charming tale about a young boy and girl that fall in love on an island and decide to make a break for it. As with any of Anderson's films, the plot isn't as important on its own merits as it is a chance to create some weird alternate reality populated by goofy, whimsical individuals, and while that means that his movies frequently feel a lot alike, it's not something that has yet gotten old for me, nor do I expect it to anytime soon.
2. Looper - Until all of the positive reviews came out, I hadn't been planning on watching this at all, which I guess shows how much of a sucker I am for a bad ad campaign. This is one of those films that we used to get once every year or two until the rise of the superhero movie: a clever, thoughtful action-based science fiction story of the sort that we all perhaps needed a bit of a breather from after the third Matrix film. As long as you don't get hung up on the various time travel issues, this ranks up there with some of the best sci-fi action movies.
1. Cloud Atlas - Oh, and speaking of the Matrix films, here we have the Wachowskis greatest film, and at an estimated budget of $100 million, the most expensive independent movie ever made. You can largely ignore the ad campaign promising how you'll get to see how it all interconnects, because for the most part it doesn't. What it does is present us with six epic (or less than epic, a couple of them) stories from the past, present, and future, complete with the rather curious stylistic choice to have the same actors play the main roles in all six stories. Seriously, I loved just about every minute of this movie, but just try watching Hugo Weaving as a Nurse Ratched clone and tell me there's a god.
Next week: Animation!
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Top Ten Science Fiction & Fantasy Films of 2012
Monday, April 2, 2012
The Hunger Games
Well, I suppose two posts a month shouldn't be too hard to maintain, if I'm going to keep this site revived. And what better way to commemorate that than by reviewing the film with the third largest opening at the box office ever?
The Hunger Games is based off of the young adult novel of the same name by Suzanne Collins (who also co-wrote the screenplay). I never read the book or its two sequels, so I had the benefit of going into it semi-blind, albeit with the knowledge that the plot was supposed to be pretty similar to the awesome Japanese film Battle Royale. For the two of you that haven't seen/read it yet, it's basically set in a future where the countries divided into twelve districts, and each year each district has to pick one boy and one girl aged 12-18 to compete in the Hunger Games, a reality show in which all 24 contestants have two weeks to fight each other for survival out in the wilderness, with the last survivor winning fame or something (I don't remember a prize ever actually being mentioned, unless the prize is that they get to return home alive).
So yeah, plotwise it's pretty close to identical to Battle Royale, as we get a dystopian future and a villainous government that forces a large group of teenage kids to kill each other, though stylistically thw two films are still pretty different. BR managed to be simultaneously much darker, with a level of violence that might well have gotten it an NC-17 if it had ever gotten a theatrical release here, while also having a good deal of gallows humor to itself. Hunger Games is obviously much more mild with its PG-13 rating, though it's as serious as a heart attack once it finally gets to the Hunger Games.
That's actually one of the main problems I had with the film. Not so much that it takes the premise very seriously, mind you, but that it takes it very seriously almost exactly half of the time. The other half of the movie is devoted to a ridiculously over-the-top parody of the main government and the fashions (and over-elaborate facial hair) on display in District 1. It's an extremely jarring tonal shift, and one that weakens a pretty large chunk of the film.
That said, the Games themselves are pretty entertaining, with a good deal of action and strategy. There were some bits that confused me here and there, such as the seemingly magic medicine used (which actually led to me asking my friend Jasmine if it was meant to be a virtual reality environment, which would have also explained a few other things -- it wasn't), and the outrage racists felt over how a "major character" like Rue was cast by a black girl, when she's barely in the movie anyway, but these are all minor quibbles. Somewhat more major is the ongoing Hollywood obsession with shaky cam for every action sequence in what feels at times like every damn movie that comes out, but while irritating that's obviously hardly a problem exclusive to Hunger Games. Much more fun are the strategies employed by Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) to try to defeat her rivals, from blowing up the food supply to dropping a hive of killer wasps into their midst.
This isn't a great movie by any means, but it's pretty entertaining all the same. I don't know that it really warranted getting the third biggest opening of any film ever (and the outright largest for a non-sequel), but it was good enough that I'll probably go see the next one in a year or two when it comes out. Those of you that can handle more violent material, though, should definitely check out Battle Royale. It's pretty much the same story, though much darker and (mostly) more intelligent too. By the way, while I mentioned earlier that I haven't read any of the books, supposedly the film hews pretty closely to them, and while obviously a few things had to be abbreviated or outright removed to keep the film from being four hours long, I should probably thank co-writer/director Gary Ross for apparently deciding to heavily downplay the love triangle that every damn young adult writer feels they have to include in their books these days. Stop that shit already.
Rating: ** 1/2
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Tron: Legacy
It’s been a while since I reviewed a nice, big, loud, dumb action movie (I think the last I did was Prince of Persia, and that one was far from nice), so it was kind of fun to try to watch Tron and Tron: Legacy back to back earlier today (I say “try”, as I kind of fell asleep halfway through the original -- I don’t get to sleep much during the week). If they aren’t exactly “good” movies, per se, they’re at least modestly entertaining ones, and sometimes, that’s all you really need.
The film, directed by newbie filmmaker Joseph Kosinski, is every bit as video gamey as movies get. It keeps the plot both minimal and incomprehensible, and the action fast-paced and beautifully gaudy. Basically Jeff Bridges (the star of the original film) has been missing for over a decade, and his now-adult son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) is a sort of directionless youth that indulges in screwing over his dad’s company Encom and parachuting off of skyscrapers. One day, however, he gets a page from his dad back at his abandoned arcade or whatever, and when he goes to investigate he finds a portal that sucks him into the Tron universe. There he quickly discovers the place is ruled by Clu, a program with his father’s face CG’d onto him, who has him fight in the various arena games. Just before he’s killed in one massive group race, however, he’s rescued by a mysterious woman (Olivia Wilde), who takes him to his father’s secret lair, where they can then plan out how to fix everything that’s gone wrong. Or at least on how to escape. Or at least on how one or two of them can escape.
As flimsy action movie plots go, this one is retarded but serviceable, and provides us with several action sequences, the best of which is the group race that I just gave away the ending to. There’s also a big climactic battle with a bunch of planes that starts off rather exciting, but drags on far too long, and has way too many cutaway scenes of Jeff Bridges saying things like “Yeah!” and “All right!”, which reminded me of nothing more than young Anakin during the equally lengthy pod race scene in Phantom Menace. A little goes a long way, people.
I also have to take some issues with the color scheme. It’s become almost a cliché that half the movies now just obsess over showing blue and orange color contrasts since they’re at opposite ends of the color wheel, so did we need an entire movie world that’s solely those two colors? It’s about as lazy a method of visual design as we can get in such a film. Though it is still a great deal better than the “All brown and gold all the time” color scheme used to such fugly effect in Prince of Persia.
I am, of course, being too unkind to the movie. For what it is, and what it tries to be, it succeeds moderately well. There may be no real soul to any of the characters, but you don’t go to a big effects-driven movie like this expecting really memorable characters and stories, do you? No, you go to these expecting some really flashy effects and a few cool action sequences, and that’s exactly what this movie delivers. It goes on a bit too long, and it never really excels at any point, but at least it’s never boring or tedious like so many movies of its kind. It’s a movie that’s just the right amount of idiotic, without making you feel like everyone involved fully believes you are an idiot for watching it, you know?
Rating: **
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Monsters
While this doesn’t really qualify as a horror movie despite the monsters alluded to in the title and so doesn’t qualify for the Top Ten Horror Movies of 2010 list I’m still considering doing for this blog, I’m quite glad I saw this, as it’s one of the more intelligent and subtle films of the year. I’m not sure whether to say the social commentary is blatant or subtle, as it’s rather blatant that they’re making social commentary, but somewhat subtle in what exactly it is they’re talking about.
The film is somewhat minimalist in its cast, mostly just following around two characters, Andrew (Scoot McNairy) and Samantha (Whitney Able). He’s a photographer that’s finally managed to get clearance to photograph the giant aliens that have taken up residence in Mexico (I could be wrong, but the map of the Infected Zone does seem to encompass that entire country), but finds himself stymied by having to first secure passage for his boss’s daughter back to the United States. They miss the ferry after being robbed the night before, and so he has no choice but to escort her all the way through the Infected Zone of Mexico.
The aliens, who came here on a NASA probe that was sent out in a search for extraterrestrial life, are pretty massive, though not quite on a Godzilla or Cloverfield scale. The United States has erected a wall around the Infected Zone (Subtextual Hint: Much like the border fences our government has put along the Mexico border) and frequently sends soldiers out to kill the monsters, though they seem to be fairly docile unless attacked first. The bulk of the movie is just the two of them, wandering through the forests of Mexico, learning about each other and the aliens, who he still hopes to photograph in hopes of defining his career.
There really isn’t much in the way of a story for the film, it’s mostly just a premise that gets the two leads talking and bouncing off of each other. For example, she asks him how it feels to do a job where he doesn’t make any money unless someone’s in pain, to which he replies “you mean like doctors?” Of course it goes a bit further than that, but it was a nice immediate rejoinder to her intentionally antagonistic bullshit. Point is, they have some great chemistry together, and they don’t shy away from uncomfortable topics, which is kind of essential for a film whose main purpose in existing is to quietly explore such issues under the guise of a sci-fi movie.
Of course, there are some problems with the film, if you’re a nitpicking asshole like myself. First, while I appreciate that it’s less a straightforward movie than it is an extended metaphor, it would be nice if there were still a bit more plot to the film. I don’t need action every minute, but when close to half the film is just two people walking through the jungle talking, it can get a bit taxing. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t need a big gun fight every ten minutes or anything to be happy, but I do want something more to happen. Sure, they have to deal with occasional encounters with the aliens, and it does become rather tense when they reach the edge of the Infected Zone and call in the military to get evacuated out, but the majority of the film is just two people talking. It’s mostly interesting conversations, but come on.
Still, it is a mostly fascinating movie, and if there’s not enough going on, at least it’s more intelligent and thoughtful than most films that came out last year. This was writer/director Gareth Edwards’ directorial debut (aside from some TV work that I’m not counting), and it makes me pretty damn eager to see what he’s got up his sleeve next. He did a damn fine job with this film, and should hopefully have a nice long career ahead of him.
Rating: *** ½
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Plan 9 From Outer Space
I’m happy that I got to end the week with this, Ed Wood’s unquestioned masterpiece of filmmaking. It features all the things that one would want in a film like this: ghouls rising up from the grave and staggering about with their arms upraised, a deliriously insane evil plot, dialogue that begins at hammy and works its way rapidly downward, and a wonderfully appalling misunderstanding of science. Best of all, here Wood managed to correct the problem he’s had with his previous films, diving into the action good and early, and sparing us the dull filler I’ve come to expect from him.
The film follows the heroic exploits of a military pilot and his wife as they face the terrible menace of aliens in flying saucers who have decided to solve the threat humans pose to the universe in the most logical way possible: with Plan 9. Plan 9, for those of you who don’t have access to the Galactic Ruler’s files, involves the resurrection of the dead. Specifically, it involves here resurrecting three people from a graveyard in California and having them roam the graveyard and occasionally menace the nearby home of the pilot.
I’m sure you’ll agree that this is a very solid plan, though I’m uncertain as to what they were hoping to accomplish by this. The aliens alternate between wanting to march their zombies on the various governments of the world, and wanting to hide their actions from the pilot, as though he were going to be a bigger threat than all the world’s armies. Of course, they’re also doing all the talk of hiding their existence after having flown their saucers in broad daylight through Washington and had the army opening fire on them, and shortly before complaining that they tried to be peaceful at first but the world governments refused to acknowledge they existed, so there’s some serious mixed signals going on here. This is all, naturally, to stop us before we can learn the secrets of Solaranite, a type of bomb that would work by detonating sunlight -- all sunlight, everywhere the light from our sun has reached in the entire universe. Because SCIENCE~, that’s why!
The script’s problems, of course, are partially due to Wood having started the movie by filming his friend Bela Lugosi prancing around a graveyard in a cape without any real plan in mind beyond that his friend wanted to make another movie. Then, when Lugosi died with only a couple minutes of footage filmed, he quickly cobbled together a story that could utilize such footage, and cast his wife’s chiropractor to play the rest of Lugosi’s scenes with a cape covering most of his face to compensate (they still look nothing alike, of course, but at least the attempt was there). It also features wonderfully over the top narration by famous prognosticator Criswell, to help further muddle the plot under the pretense of explaining it.
For those of you that have heard of Ed Wood, but were uncertain how to start with his movies, this is the ideal starting point. It contains all the delirious fun madness without any of the more tedious aspects involved in trying to properly develop the plot or pad out the running time (ironically, this was his longest film up to this point, clocking in at a scandalous 79 minutes). This should be required viewing for any fan of cheesy cult movies.
Rating: ***
P.S. Youtube informs me that a remake is currently being filmed, and is quite a bit more graphic and bigger budgeted. We’ll see how that works out.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Bride of the Monster
Ed Wood Plus Sick: The Life And Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist Week continues chugging along, this time providing me with the mild disappointment that is Bride of the Monster. Ed Wood has long been my favorite Tim Burton movie, so I went in fully prepared for the delightfully goofy sci-fi plot that this movie has going for it. I was just somewhat less prepared for how damn long it takes for that to get going.
To be fair, it does start right off with two men caught in a torrential downpour out in the woods somewhere, both inexplicably armed with rifles, so we’re on pretty good ground here. After a quick attempt at hiding in a supposedly abandoned haunted house that turns out to have Bela Lugosi residing there with his giant henchman Lobo (pro wrestler Tor Johnson). After fleeing the two of them (Lobo in particular has a great intro, casually popping onscreen behind the two armed men with his arms outstretched, ready for bear -- that’s a terrible description, but if you see it you’ll appreciate how awesome it is), the pair runs afoul of the local legendary monster -- stock footage of an octopus that quickly makes short work of them.
So that’s a pretty effective, charmingly silly opener. Unfortunately we then get about a half hour of chitchat at the local police station, where our heroic trio is introduced, discusses the recent disappearances, complain to each other about various levels of secret keeping (two of the heroes are police officers, and the third is the reporter girlfriend of one of said cops), and various other nonsense that grinds the film to a halt. Eventually the reporter manages to drive down to the haunted house (well, she drives near it, at least, before running off the road just like a woman and getting menaced by a snake and fainting, and being carried to the house by Lobo), and the film picks up quite well from there, but when the film is only 68 minutes long, you really can’t spend such a vast length of time setting everything up.
It’s a shame, too, because when the film is working, it works pretty darn well. That’s obviously a fairly subjective statement, as we are describing a movie where the evil monsters tend to be whatever animal stock footage Wood found prior to filming (in addition to the octopus and snake, we also get an alligator attack) for the characters to point offscreen at in horror, but the goofy, low budget charm of it all really is quite effective. After all, who among us can hear a line like “Maybe it’s like the papers say, all those atom bomb explosions distorted the atmosphere”, in response to all the thunderstorms they’ve been having lately, and not have a smile on their face? Who wouldn’t enjoy hearing Lugosi’s grand monologue about how he was going to create a new race of Atomic Supermen to rule the world with, starting with the plucky female reporter for reasons that I never understood? And who could possibly dislike how Lugosi’s secret laboratory contains stone walls, manacles on one wall, tons of stock fifties mad scientist lab equipment, and in the corner a regular kitchen sink, countertop, and refrigerator? Nobody I’d like to continue knowing, that’s for sure.
So yes, the film does have some legitimately fun parts to it. It’s just that the film is deeply schizophrenic, with half the film made into a fun little science fiction movie, and the other half being what I can only assume was an attempt at recreating the magic of His Girl Friday, only without the humor. I suppose you can just skip it all and have a much better viewing experience as a result, just be aware that you may want to have another film to watch with it, because it’ll be over really quickly.
Rating: * ½
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Dead Space
It seems like almost every week I sit here and prepare myself to tell you about the latest Alien ripoff I’ve seen, and now…wait, didn’t we just have this conversation? I’m not honestly sure that this makes for the greatest double bill with The Terror Within, as not only are both films bad (though Dead Space is clearly superior), but both are shameless ripoffs of the same damn movie (okay, this one’s a remake of Forbidden World, but Forbidden World itself was a bit of an Alien clone), to the point where they have almost identical plots. At least this one’s set in outer space, though, so points for that.
The film stars Marc Singer, who as everyone knows is the Goddamn Beastmaster, as the captain of a spaceship whose idea of r & r is to lean back in his chair and kick his feet up while wearing only a speedo. “Sadly”, his rest is interrupted by a distress call from a nearby research station that’s under threat from what starts out as a deadly virus, but which quickly turns out to be the birth of an alien monster that quickly grows larger than any of the humans at the research station. Now, Singer has to try to stop the monster, as it stalks the station and kills the researchers one by one, before he becomes its next victim.
There are a great many ways director Fred Gallo was able to make this better than The Terror Within was. The most important, and the one I am most grateful for, is that it’s much shorter, clocking in at a lean, mean 70 minutes. First-time filmmakers, take note: a 70 minute running time is nothing to be ashamed of for your debut film, particularly if you’re making a cheapo genre film. If you’re reading through your script, and you’re uncertain as to whether or not you have enough interesting material for a 90 minute film, that means you don’t, so start trimming the fat. Of course, there’s no real guarantee that cutting it down by twenty minutes is going to make the film good, but it certainly isn’t likely to make it worse, now is it?
There are other aspects of this film that are superior to Terror Within, such as Singer’s presence. While I obviously enjoyed George Kennedy in Terror, he was only a supporting character and died stupidly, leaving us to deal with the guy that was imitating Michael Biehn and the girl whose name I never learned as our non stars. The Beastmaster, on the other hand, is just effortlessly charismatic and action star-y. Just watch him in the trailer below; you could buy a car from that man, you just know he’d treat you right. The film is also somewhat better lit -- while it’s still a fairly dark film, you can at least see what’s going on at all times, and I can’t stress enough how much it benefits a film when you can actually watch it. The monster’s a bit of a wash, though. It’s got a more interesting design than the one in Terror, but was clearly unwieldy, as rather than seeing a guy in a monster suit running around, we’re largely just limited to close-ups of its head moving around, and cuts to frightened reaction shots of the poor humans in its path. This is what happens when function tries to follow form.
I feel rather conflicted here. This is still a very bad movie, but The Terror Within set the bar so low that I want to praise it at the same time, as it takes the same basic story and visibly improves on it. I’ll just say this instead. If you’re a big (and I mean somewhat obsessive here) fan of lousy no budget science fiction from the 80s, then this movie should hold some appeal for you. The rest of you should probably look elsewhere.
Rating: * ½
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
The Terror Within
It seems like almost every week I sit here and prepare myself to tell you about the latest Alien ripoff I’ve seen, and now here’s another one for me to share with you all. This is another of Shout! Factory’s recent Roger Corman releases, on a double bill DVD with Dead Space (which I guess I’ll be reviewing tomorrow), and it’s almost eerie how little effort was involved in its creation.
We’re in the future and most of the world has been wiped out by some man-made plague. We center on a small group of survivors led by George Kennedy that live in an underground bunker out in the desert somewhere (ideal for a post-apocalyptic film, as it greatly reduces the chance of a car driving by and wrecking the shot), as they venture out of their lair in search of food, finding both some monsters (called gargoyles) and a pregnant woman that’s somehow survived the plague without the vaccine those in the bunker had taken. Of course, as anyone who’s seen Alien can expect, it’s actually a gargoyle baby, and when it comes time for her to give birth, it tears its way out of her belly (spraying blood all over the medical staff) and skeedaddles into the air vents. After that, it’s just a matter of hunting and being hunted, and preparing various weapons (including, yes, a flamethrower) to take down the abruptly adult gargoyle that’s now in there with them.
So let’s see: we’ve got a monster that impregnates other species with its young (though these monsters admittedly eschew the facehugger-style monsters in favor of just raping the women), a tiny crew of people in a confined, dingy metallic area with poor lighting, a monster that goes from being infant-sized to full adult in about an hour, lots of hiding in air vents, and a black guy trying and failing to stop it with a flamethrower. Does this sound at all familiar to anyone else? I didn’t think so, because this is the most original film I’ve seen since Snakes on a Train.
Of course, a lack of imagination isn’t always enough to kill a movie, so let’s get to the other problems. First, there’s the rubber suit design of the gargoyles themselves, which look like the creature on the cover of the Neon Maniacs DVD but with a crocodile snout (I haven‘t actually seen Neon Maniacs, so I can‘t really say if the monsters in that look like they do on the cover or not -- though given that it came out three years before this film, I have to assume it‘s more than coincidence). We also have the sheer delightfulness of how director Thierry Notz seemingly decided to disguise his inability to make an exciting action scene by shrouding the film in so much darkness that you can barely make out what’s going on half the time (this was a frequent occurrence back in the 80s, particularly among first time filmmakers like Notz who apparently didn’t realize just how much lighting they needed in order for their scenes to actually be visible). The bare bones lighting is kind of like today’s shaky cam action movies in how it renders the film impossible to follow at times. This means a good deal of the money shots of the gargoyle killing people are also buried in shadow, though the ones that we can see easily tend to be pretty lazy and uninspired, so I guess it evens out.
I’d also try to criticize the acting, but I have an unwarranted amount of love for George Kennedy due to a misspent youth involving constantly rewatching all the Naked Gun movies and Police Squad! You’ll never get me to find fault with him, so don’t even try. I can’t even criticize the male lead, played by Andrew Stevens of Night Eyes 3 fame, as he spends the whole movie trying his hardest to look like Michael Biehn did in The Terminator, for no discernable reason, and so I assume it was done specifically to confuse us and make us think the movie couldn’t possibly be ripping off Alien when it’s clearly ripping off Terminator instead.
This is not the kind of movie one watches by themselves unless they either have a very masochistic streak in them, or they are concerned the average ratings on their movie blog are skewed too high. It’s bad in just about every way possible, and is perhaps the worst Alien clone I’ve yet seen. I trust Dead Space will turn out better, but I’ll keep you posted either way.
Rating: *
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Not of This Earth
While I seem to be disappointed by them as often as not, I’m rather glad that Shout! Factory has been releasing so many of Roger Corman’s productions from the late 70s through early 90s. For one, I’m a bit of an idealist and want every movie ever made to have a DVD release, and for two, I’m always excited to have another early Jim Wynorski film getting a proper showcase.
Of course, being a fan of cheap exploitation directors like Wynorski does mean that one will be frequently let down by them. I had here been hoping for a film on the same level of quality as Sorority House Massacre 2 or Chopping Mall (or at least on the level of Transylvania Twist), and instead wound up with something closer in quality to Komodo vs. Cobra but with much more nudity. Granted, I’m hardly one to turn my nose up at naked women, but outside of Traci Lords, none of the ladies here are really attractive enough to justify themselves.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again. The film stars Arthur Roberts as Mr. Johnson, a vampiric alien who comes to Earth on a mission to see if his species can survive on our blood. Disguising himself as a human, he soon enlists the aid of a nurse (Traci Lords) who moves into his home to give him a series of transfusions to keep him alive, while slowly discovering a little too much about her new employer. Like his ability to drain all the blood out of his victims instantaneously just by removing his sunglasses and looking at them, for instance.
The main problem with the movie, if I had to point one out, is that there’s about enough of a plot for an episode of the Twilight Zone, here stretched out for about 80 minutes. It’s a very slow-paced, draggy film, and aside from Lords’ willingness to get naked frequently and a faint trace of Wynorski’s normal humor (though much more muted here than in his other efforts of the time), there is very little to offer here. There are some entertaining scenes scattered here and there (the highlight easily being when he picks up a trio of the most ridiculous prostitutes in film history, though the opening, featuring a couple getting it on in a car being killed by an alien is pretty nice too), but they account for less than half the film’s running time.
Even though I wasn’t really expecting much out of the film, it’s hard for me to not feel a little bit disappointed in it. After all, when I watch a Jim Wynorski/Roger Corman match-up, I do have a right to expect a bare minimum level of quality that just wasn’t shown here. It’s easily the dullest Wynorski film I’ve yet seen, and all the Traci Lords nudity in the world doesn’t fix that. Though I would not be opposed to her trying it some more.
Rating: * ½
Monday, November 8, 2010
Predators
One of my friends saw this in theaters and helpfully informed me that it was the best Predator movie since the second one, which has to rank among the faintest praise a major motion picture can get. Better than Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem??? Why, it must be a classic!
Well, fortunately, it did turn out to be pretty good after all. This is a little surprising, considering how director Nimrod Antal’s previous film Armored was one of the most tedious cop movies I’ve ever seen (he also directed Vacancy, which I thought was decent, but I seem to be a minority opinion there). The plot’s pretty simple: a group of Earth’s toughest badasses wakes up in freefall above a jungle, where they start banding together and realize they’ve been selected as prey for an alien race of big game hunters. Led by Adrien Brody, they now have to try to find a way off this alien world and make their way back home before any of the predators now hunting them can finish them all off.
Since it’s an action movie, we can start our analysis of the film with that. A good deal for the film, too, as the action scenes are the best parts of the movie, though they still aren’t anything that amazing. Too many of these sequences either feel fairly generic and unoriginal, or feel like they were blatantly designed to evoke the memory of the original (most keenly felt when the yakuza character decides to buy the rest of the team time by staying back to go one on one with a predator while armed only with a katana, shades of Billy from the first film). The ones that work best tend to be earlier on, when they’re accidentally triggering traps that have been placed around, or when they fight off a pack of horn-covered beasts that are set upon them.
I can’t give this a firm recommendation, as the film’s various flaws tend to be too numerous and pervasive to comfortably ignore. There’s the problem of the dialogue, which gives us such classic lines as “Your ass is amazing” and “Come on, you alien faggot. Come on, come on, come on, come on!” There’s the completely unsurprising third act revelation that the quiet and seemingly out of place doctor (Topher Grace) is actually the worst one of them all. There’s the troublesome CG, which makes the film look like it was rushed to make it in theaters by its release date before it was really finished (this is particularly noticeable during one high speed pan through the jungle, where -- well, let’s just say it doesn’t look quite as impressive as Avatar, but more like a PS2 game). Antal does try to overcome the screenplay’s various weaknesses by hiring a bunch of actors talented enough to partially compensate for it, from Walt Goggins to Laurence Fishburne to Danny Trejo, but they mostly have a thankless task trying to overcome the dialogue they’re given (Goggins in particular has such terrible lines, including the ass line above, that it was almost depressing to see how far Shane Vendrell has fallen). Louis Changchien, as the yakuza character, somehow manages to fare the best, but that almost certainly has to do with how almost all of his lines are in Japanese.
I would have off-handedly assumed that any of you considering watching this would have managed to already, but IMDB sadly informs me that it only made $52 million in theaters, roughly $30 million less than the first Alien vs. Predator did. This may be a somewhat mediocre effort, but it deserves better than that, at least. Still, while I hesitate to ever call something a rental only (after all, the movie’s either worth seeing or it isn’t), this is definitely one you won’t want to blind buy.
Rating: ** ½
Monday, October 11, 2010
Splice
Between Frozen and Splice, it’s beginning to look to me as though 2010 has actually been a good year so far for horror movies, merely with the caveat that all the ones worth seeing were the ones nobody actually saw (for those keeping track, the three highest grossing horror movies of the year so far -- not counting Twilight: Eclipse, which you shouldn’t -- have been the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, the remake of The Wolf Man, and the fifth Resident Evil movie, and no doubt at least one of these will soon be outdone by Saw 7). In fairness, though, in Splice’s case, a large part of the problem came from its story, which -- in order to maintain the film’s surprises -- meant that the trailer only showed footage from the first half hour of the film, leaving potential audiences to assume the film was some lame Species ripoff.
It is a shame too, as aside from some surface similarities -- the film’s plot involves Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as scientists that specialize in splicing the DNA of various animals, and decide one day to flout anti-cloning laws and make a human hybrid that rapidly develops into a seemingly intelligent adult (played by Delphine Chaneac as an adult, and CG as a creepy baby and toddler). It’s at this point that the movie begins to move in some unexpected directions, and it’s really not fair of me to spoil them, so I’ll have to move on to somewhat vaguer comments.
First, there is the subplot of the two spliced together creatures the couple make before creating Dren, their semi-human test tube baby. Named Fred and Ginger after…well, you should know who, the demonstration showing them to the scientific community goes awry in a brilliantly Gallagher-ish way. It’s a bit out of place with the rest of the film, but it was such a funny scene that I simply don’t care. Also, while the acting is surprisingly good all around (yes, that is always a nice surprise in a horror movie), special mention has to be made of Adrien Brody, who is just an unrepentant creep throughout the whole film. He’s smug, judgmental, quick to anger, and about as quick to make bad decisions as the average cast member of the Jersey Shore. He’s the kind of wonderfully awful character that really should be popping up in every film.
The film isn’t without its flaws, however, and like a great many movies its main weakness is at the climax, where it feels the need to devolve into a standard monster movie instead of the intelligent moral quandary we’ve been enjoying up to that point. Sure, for what it is, it’s well done, but I’m kind of tired of movies continually luring me in with an interesting and unique first and second act, and then turning into a hundred movies I’ve already seen before when it comes time to try to wrap everything up. Not only is it completely unnecessary, it’s also rather insulting to assume that nobody in the audience will be satisfied unless the film completely shifts gears and becomes a different, less imaginative movie for us.
Still, while that is aggravating, the bulk of the movie is really good, and well worth watching. It’s certainly a great deal better than most of the theatrically-released efforts this year, and while that may be somewhat faint praise, it should really take what it can get. In this troubled economy, movies shouldn’t really be so damned picky.
Rating: ***
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Inception
This review may be coming a little bit late, as, going by its box office business, somewhere around 27 million people have already seen this in the United States alone. Admittedly, that’s not quite on the level of Christopher Nolan’s previous film The Dark Knight, but that does make it currently the fifth highest grossing movie of the year, and still doing well enough that it might yet rise up to fourth. All of this doesn’t matter, of course, nearly as much as whether the movie is actually good. To discover that, one must delve past the break. Or, you know, look at the star rating I gave it in the tags.
So yes, anyway, I quite enjoyed the film, to the point where I’d argue that this was the second great movie that I had seen in 2010. That’s not honestly as impressive as it sounds, as Shutter Island and Get Him to the Greek were the only other worthwhile films I had seen up to that point (I’ll leave it to you to determine which of them I thought was outright great). The film feels like a blending of old and new Nolan films, by which I mean that it’s got the complexly-layered, tightly wound story you’d expect to find in something like Memento, where everything builds up to the very final shot, and the heavy special effects of his Batman movies, where the film cost a fortune and every penny of it is right there on the screen. This is of course as opposed to something like Last House on Dead End Street, where over three quarters of the budget allegedly went into buying drugs, though I suppose you could see the results of that on the screen too.
The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb, the leader of a group that drugs people and manufactures dreams for them in the hopes of getting them to divulge their business secrets while asleep, and then selling those secrets to their competitors. This system breaks down surprisingly early, as the very first time we see them attempting it they screw it up horribly, and the businessman (Ken Watanabe) they were trying to rob then forces them to help him plant the idea in the son of his chief competitor (to commit “inception”, as it were) to break up his father’s company, by means of a ridiculously complicated, three (or four, or five) layered dream world.
Nolan, being the deeply logical filmmaker that he is, never really tries to delve into an kind of actual dream logic (aside from casually stating that we accept what we see in dreams as normal), giving us instead a dream world of car chases and gunfights, and then a second dream world of gravity-free fights in a hotel, and then more James Bond-style gunfights in yet a third dream world. It goes on a little long, but it’s almost certainly going to end up as the best action movie of the year.
After the movie first came out, I read one amusing review complaining that the film played out like a badly flawed video game that spent far too much time on the tutorial explaining how to do everything, and then not giving you enough time to actually play with everything you were shown. While this isn’t really an unfair criticism (they shouldn’t have shown the cutesy-named Ariadne, played by Ellen Page, learning how to do things like folding the city in on itself, if we’re just going to be immediately told ‘don’t ever do that’), I do feel that what we end up getting is pretty damn impressive all the same. Yes, Nolan could have made it into some Fellini-style surrealist nightmare (well, Nolan couldn’t have, but another director might) and would have run into the issue of it costing the same fortune ($160,000,000 according to IMDB) and then playing only to the art crowd, leaving us lucky if it didn’t drive Warner Bros. into bankruptcy. While this isn’t my absolute favorite movie of the year so far (that‘ll come later this week, I promise), I won’t be surprised when it gets its well-earned Best Picture nomination.
Rating: ****
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Nightmare Museum
Well, I do always say that I watch these films in the hopes of seeing something I have never seen before, and this certainly delivers in that regard. After this, I think I can make do with some more standard films again.
So yeah, you remember that sex scene in Team America, where two of the puppets got naked and had crazy monkey sex? Now imagine that stretched out over an hour’s running length, and apparently not done for laughs. Yes, this is a vaguely sci-fi adventure set in the year XXX3 where we get a group of Barbie and Ken dolls that have sex for about an hour (interspersed with shots of food when a robot kills one of them) before the abrupt Godzilla-style fight at the end. As an added benefit, all the characters are voiced by actual porn stars, so we can get the moans and dirty talk as accurate as possible.
I have no idea how to interpret this movie. It’s almost as if they just took a regular porn movie and re-enacted the entire thing with dolls, which suggests both that writer/director Igor Pickles (whose only other credit is the prequel Erotic Avengers) has a fetish above and beyond anything I’ve got and that there is a distinct possibility that the porn star voice acting was directly taken from another film and so they may not even be aware that they appear in this film. Now, I’m not saying that’s definitely the case -- after all, once you start having sex for money, being paid to be the voice of a doll that’s having sex can’t be any worse -- but given the cheapness of both this film and the other films in this set, I can’t really rule it out. And why is it in a set of horror movies? And why did this have to be one of the next films for me to review when I’m frantically sending out job applications?
So should you see this? Well, if you’ve made it this far into the review, then you already know whether you want to see it or not. I give it a negative review, as it’s a terrible movie, and more importantly, not my personal brand of perversion (to put it mildly), but there are absolutely people out there that would drool at the thought of this. If you happen to be one of them, please don’t tell me.
Rating: ½ *
Saturday, January 17, 2009
The Asphyx
One thing that I rather admire about the British horror films of the 60s and 70s is in how they seem to have a great deal more thought to them than their American counterparts (and much more than the bulk of their European brethren at the time – Spain, France, and Italy may have been making some damned entertaining horror in that time, but intelligent would not be a word I’d use to describe most). Led primarily by Hammer Studios, the films of that time tried both to re-envision classic horror themes in exciting new ways and to try to envision entirely new types of horror films to thrill us with. The Asphyx is one of the latter.
The film is set in the late 1800s (I think), and stars Robert Stephens as Sir Hugo Cunningham, a beloved and respected scientist who makes a startling discovery. It seems that every photograph taken of someone as they are dying features the same dark smudge hovering around them. He soon theorizes that this must be the “asphyx”, the spirit of the dead written about in ancient Greece, and soon sets his scientific sights on finding a way to make the spirit visible when it arrives, and then on finding a way to capture it. This is no minor thing, as capturing it and sealing it away ensures that the dying person or animal that summoned the asphyx will now live forever (or at least as long as their asphyx is sealed away).
One thing that makes this film so unique is in its overall tone. This is partly due to how there is no real villain in this piece, and if Hugo’s efforts transform into a closed-minded obsession after the tragic deaths of his wife and son, well, it’s a totally understandable one. There’s also a great deal more talking than in most horror films. Our main character is a man of ideas, a more benign Dr. Frankenstein, trying to puzzle together a newly-discovered mystery of the universe.
It ends in tragedy, as such a film must, with the deaths of some characters that we truly care about (the effort to capture an asphyx is indeed a risky one, since it requires each person to start to die in order to summon it), but one interesting thing – and I realize this is going to partially spoil the ending, but the opening scene of the movie spoils it anyway so I can’t feel too bad about doing it – comes in how two characters actually do survive to the present day. Of course, as the Greek legend of Tithonus could have informed Hugo, having eternal life isn’t necessarily all that wonderful without eternal youth to go with it, but still. Imagine if Frankenstein had ended with the doctor and his creation making peace with each other, and then continuing on together somewhere else, that’s sort of what this is like. This may not be as flashy or fast-paced as your average horror movie, but if you want something that tries something new and isn’t afraid to have actual ideas in it, you should definitely try to hunt this one down.
Rating: *** ½
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Gayniggers From Outer Space
Here’s a true oddity: a short film made in the early 90s that parodies old 50s sci fi by throwing in a lot of straight-faced gay jokes. I can’t really say that I fully liked it, but at the same time I can’t really say that it didn’t have my undivided attention, either.
The film follows the crew of an alien spaceship from a deeply advanced race where women are extinct and men are perfectly happy. While out exploring the universe, they stumble across Earth, and their initial scouting expedition meets with disaster when they come face to face with wild, hedonistic women that seem to have come straight out of a speakeasy. Armed with this news, the entire crew decides that it is their solemn mission to save this planet by using their ray guns to wipe out every last woman on the planet.
The visual and audio style is a large part of what makes the film entertaining. It really captures the cheesy, yet earnest look of those no-budget sci-fi efforts from the 50s, all black and white and shimmery. The special effects are dead-on, and the fact that it seems to have had all the dialogue and sound effects dubbed over just adds to the cheese factor (given that I first saw this done in Beast of Yucca Flats, a cheesy black and white science fiction movie from the 50s, sure doesn't hurt). There’s also a nice bit at the end when, after saving Earth from women, the film suddenly shifts into color as we get to witness the new paradise that all the men can enjoy (as they go swimming in their tighty whiteys). This isn’t a perfect movie (the overwhelming need, for instance, to give every crewmember a gag gay name like Sgt. Shavedballs is a little tiring), but for a 27 minute long film it certainly entertains well enough.
Rating: **
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Death Machine
It’s always a little odd when a film set in the future makes references to earlier films in the genre, or even worse, a then-present day pop culture reference. This film, made in 1995 and set in the Near Future, does both. This film has a pair of irritating Humanist goofballs trying to bring down an evil corporation, and almost halfway through the film one of them decides to do a Schwarzenegger impression and tell everyone “I’ll be back” (yes, he was doing Schwarzenegger’s voice, it’s not something that could have been passed off as a coincidence), and then a few scenes later does a Street Fighter reference, shouting out “Shoryuken!” before going to town on an evil robot. These are small moments, granted, but movies do tend to live or die on a series of small moments.
Fortunately, the rest of the movie is generally pretty entertaining, if generic. We’ve got our futuristic world that’s typically 90s cyberpunkish, we’ve got our evil corporation that’s developing evil weaponry, we’ve got a killer robot that seems to be comprised almost entirely of fangs and claws, and we’ve got a small group of people trapped in the building with it whose chances of survival seem to be pretty easy to determine from the moment each of them opens their mouths. There’s really nothing here that you haven’t seen before, but it’s always pretty fun to watch a bunch of people frantically firing machine guns at a big robot thing that’s trying to eat them all. Especially when it’s standing on a platform above them and they’re shooting the robot and everything around it so that a hail of sparks and shrapnel is descending upon them, but with nobody getting wounded from this at all.
This, like Little Erin Merryweather before it, was another film I had gotten at Fangoria’s recommendation, and I have a feeling I’m not going to find any outright classics from their list of obscure greats. Especially not when they’re as much of a pain to get ahold of as this film was: the original copy I had ordered from Amazon came in a Death machine box, the DVD had a Death Machine logo on it, and when I put it in my DVD player Cyborg 2 loaded up. I guess because one cheesy 90s sci fi movie is as good as another, right?
Rating: **
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Flesh Eating Ghouls From Outer Space
It is a definite mark of lowered standards that I am rating this film so high, but after such a lengthy string of terrible films from this set, I’m just happy to be finally watching another one that is nonawful, and which has the added bonus of being quite short, clocking in at a mere 18 minutes. It also has a fairly unique visual appeal, having the honor of being the first (and almost certainly only) puppet show in the entire collection.
Basically a mild parody of old science fiction monster movies (or at least in the same vein as the space alien movies from the Simpsons), this follows the bloody invasion of a group of deadly alien monsters that terrorize the world while everyone sings. We mostly focus on the monsters themselves, as the human characters tend to appear and get gobbled up pretty quickly. There’s a trailer trash couple that provide the first meal for our two aliens (there might possibly be more, but only two ever show up at once), a mother and daughter that obsess over Twinkies, and a dashing news reporter out to expose the invasion as a government cover-up. None of them matter, really, except to provide further victims, but they serve their purpose for the time they’re all given.
I don’t know what else to say about this, really. It goes in, does its own thing, and then leaves before I can really care one way or the other. It’s certainly not “good”, per se, nowhere close to the level of a Meet the Feebles or Twisted Puppet Theater (to grab at the only other demented puppet shows I’ve seen), but it’s better than a lot of the films in this set, so at least it’s got that.
Rating: * ½
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Demon Sex
As if in answer to my criticism yesterday of Death From Beyond openly mocking us by promising tons of nudity and not delivering any, here comes Demon Sex hot on its heels that gives us pretty much nonstop nudity throughout the entire film. Of course, this gift is a bit lessened when the very first person to get naked in it is Brinke Stevens, but I suppose I should make do.
For those who don’t know who Brinke is, she shows up in a lot of these horror porns, and I had previously seen her in Delta Delta Die! She’s popular largely due to her eagerness to completely ham it up, and her willingness to spend half her screen time naked. This would be a good thing if she were a bit younger, but as she’s over fifty years old, this is a bit of a hindrance. Still, most of the other girls in the film are much more attractive, and they pretty much all spend the whole film naked or on their way there.
But onwards and upwards to the film itself. The film opens very boringly, with a woman giving us a voice over about the alien history of the planet, and how a super advanced race evolved from here and eventually spread out over the neighboring star systems, but while still here they evolved early humans to provide some easy slave labor, but since we were too aggressive they gave up on us and created a second race called the Greys, or Demons (complete with picture showing them to be stereotypical X-Files style aliens), who were much more passive and helpful. Unfortunately, after their alien masters left for other worlds, the humans wiped out all the Greys because we’re so aggressive and Man is the true villain!!! Now it’s present day, and a cult of women (led by Brinke) has acquired the skull of a Grey and wants to extract the DNA from it so they can repopulate the world with Greys. If all of that sounded interesting to you, kill yourself.
Of course, even the filmmakers realized that this was a dumb plot, so after the first ten minutes or so, they start throwing naked women at us, and don’t stop until it’s time to give birth to the Grey baby at the very end of the film. So I guess the film really should be judged on how attractive the women are and how hot the sex scenes are. They’re mostly pretty average, verging on grotesque when Brinke strips down, but I do have to admit, seeing a naked girl on top of a guy that’s slapping her in the face so hard that she’s dripping blood down her chest and onto him while she’s choking him until he’s unconscious before she rides his limp form to orgasm is EXACTLY what I want out of my pornography. That and seeing a heavily pregnant chick stripped nude, that was hot. Definitely one of the better entrants in the collection thus far.
Rating: **
Sunday, December 30, 2007
The Man With the Screaming Brain
What an amazing misfire of a film this is. I’m a pretty big fan of Bruce Campbell, from his Evil Dead days to his successively more show-stealing cameos in the Spider-Man films, but with this, his first time directing (not counting random TV episodes) and writing solo, he makes a total mess. Not only does it not strike the right tone, it completely forgets that it needs to strike a tone at all.
Theoretically a parody of 50s science fiction films, it follows an American business mogul (played by Campbell) who, along with his ex-KGB chauffeur, are murdered in Bulgaria. A local mad scientist, eager to test his theories on reanimation, takes half of each of their brains and restores them in Campbell’s body. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but Campbell spends so much time trying to capture the feel of those old movies that he completely forgets that he’s also supposed to be parodying them. Instead, we’re left with a story that’s not even as funny as those old movies were, nor half as interesting.
Comedy is one of the hardest things to direct properly, and this film shows that better than just about any other example I could name. Bruce Campbell is an extremely funny guy. I’ve seen him in tons of movies and TV shows, and he has never failed to make me laugh before. Perhaps it’s just the stress of pulling triple duty on writing, acting, and directing that threw him off, maybe it’s how (according to IMDB) it took him 19 years of trying to get this film made, and the no doubt endless rewrites of the material during that time just sucked all the passion and energy out of the film. It was made on the cheap despite the presences of Campbell, Ted Raimi, and Stacy Keach, and tech-wise it looks just a half step above some straight to DVD horror movie, so perhaps the struggles with overcoming the budget just had a draining effect on everyone. Whatever the actual reason, it wound up being an hour and a half of complete forgettability. I don’t care if Microsoft Word denies that being an actual word, it fits this movie better than any real ones.
Rating: ½ *
Friday, December 21, 2007
Battlestar Galactica: Razor
A word of caution for anyone reading this: the *** review here is assuming you’re already familiar with the show before watching this. I have to assume anyone randomly stumbling across this TV movie without having already watched the first two seasons of Balactica will be hopelessly lost.
Anyway, for those who have watched the show but don’t know what this is, this is basically a TV movie set before and during season 2 dealing with the Battlestar Pegasus and its history, and was seemingly designed to keep fans of the show satisfied during the seemingly endless wait between seasons (seriously, when the hell is season 3 coming out on DVD already?). Dealing with the aftermath of the Pegasus’ harsher, military-gone-wrong crew, and their decision to essentially kill the passengers of over a dozen civilian ships by scuttling their supplies and essential personnel, it functions less as a movie and more as an extended episode, much as the X-Files movie did. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, if you happen to like the show like I do, but again, it will make it a bit hard on anyone unfamiliar with the series.
One thing I really enjoy about the show is how it’s quite possibly the most overtly militaristic sci-fi show I’ve ever seen. Most science fiction since the 60s has tended to follow the Star Trek path of a semi-utopian future where, even when evil is encountered, it’s still dealt with fairly easily before the cast can become all sunny and cheerful again. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but I do like the stark contrast in just how grim and mean this show can get, and how someone can make the command decision to, as said earlier, condemn hundreds of civilians to death at the hands of an enemy race, and still have enough of a gray area left behind that we’re left without being entirely certain it was the wrong decision. The film encapsulates this feeling in the character of Kendra Shaw, a fast-rising officer on the Pegasus who participated in the executions of several of the civilians, and who now serves under a captain from the Galactica. She has a nice meaty role here where she gets to both want to be punished for her crimes, while still not feeling as though there were any other choice, and still being exactly the kind of military hardass that led to such an event.
This is not as good as the show’s main seasons, but it certainly doesn’t let the show down either. For what was essentially filler, there was a good deal more thought and effort put into this than was really necessary, and will be well worth the view for any fans like myself that are desperate for anything new from the show. Now all I ask is for Ronald Moore to rescind his damn fool idea to end the show, so we can have it go on forever. And no, Sci-Fi Channel, spreading out season four so that it takes over a year to show every episode doesn’t really make it into two whole seasons, it just makes you dicks.
Rating: ***
