Archive for the 'Pandemic' Category
March 22, 2008 - 8:44 pm - Posted by Administrator
Any movie where New York City is one huge ghost town is alright with me. However, I Am Legend feels like a re-write too many on a concept that’s nearly overdone at present–the concept that thinking, feeling humans have disappeared and the world is populated by mindless, blood-thirsty beasts, devoid of emotion and feeling.
Will Smith stars as Robert Neville, the last known survivor of a plague that began as a viral cure for cancer. In 2009, the plague nearly wipes out the human race. Neville is left as the lone remaining human in New York City, the rest of the inhabitants having been transformed into ‘zompires’ by the virus. OK, they’re not really called ‘zompires’ but they might as well be. I Am Legend’s screenplay was co-written by co-producer Akiva Goldsman–producer of such winners as Deep Blue Sea, Starsky and Hutch, and Poseidon. Goldsman’s screenplay was in turn based on a screenplay by John William Corrington for 1971’s Omega Man starring Charleton Heston, which was in turn based on the novel by Richard Matheson. Why the studio would decide to bring a classic science fiction novel to the big screen by borrowing from a badly-done version of the story from the seventies is beyond me. Perhaps it’s Goldsman’s penchant for lame remakes. Note to Goldsman: you’re standing on the shoulders of giants and ruining what they’ve achieved.
Couple the remake-prone producer Goldsman with a director [Francis Lawrence] whose only credits are music videos, and you’ve invited disaster. I look forward to the day when movie studios understand that classic science fiction stories need to be produced and directed by auteurs with singular uncompromised vision, not thrown together from fragments of screenplays and helmed by whomever happens to be free to direct/produce at the moment that fits the studio’s schedule. It’s about more than money.
Robert Neville spends his days in New York City hunting for food and having conversation with his only friend… his dog. He maintains a sense of normalcy by watching DVDs–one at a time–which he faithfully retrieves from a video store each day, talking to the mannequins he’s arranged in the store as if they were real humans. He has recorded a message which is repeatedly broadcast on the radio–a plea for anyone who hears it to meet him on the pier at midday. His wait for a response stretches into it’s third year, and Neville keeps busy by continuing his work as a biologist in his basement lab, working on a cure for the virus which has turned nearly six billion people into “darkseekers”–blood thirsty mutants with compulsively violent urges. They are powerfully allergic to light and stay inside in the day, coming out at night to feed on blood.
The problem with movies like I Am Legend is, there is only one reasonable outcome… the lone survivor of the apocalypse will eventually discover he’s not alone. Knowing that in advance, it can get pretty frustrating waiting for the other humans to show up when the story moves at a snail’s pace like this one does.
There are lots of great special effects, and the city of New York makes a great character, even when it’s empty, but the story just didn’t hook me. The computer-animated nature of the “darkseekers” gives a sense of artificiality to villains who would have been far scarier had they been more human. Neville’s flashbacks to his prior life are annoying as well. The whole movie I kept thinking they would have been better-served to have just told the flashback part of the story first, then progress to the post-apocalypse part of the story in linear fashion instead of flashing back and forth the whole time.
In the end, making this bad adaptation of Richard Matheson’s story only ensured one thing–that this story will eventually be adapted again. Let’s hope they get it right next time.
Posted in 2007, Pandemic, Post-Apocalypse, The Future, Two Star Rating | No Comments »
February 24, 2008 - 4:32 pm - Posted by Administrator
Children of Men is a rare example of a science fiction concept that’s so intriguing and unique, I decided I had to see it just because it was different. It’s 2027 and the scourge of mankind is none of the usual suspects… not cancer, not HIV, but unexplained infertility. It’s been 19 years since a human was born on planet Earth.
As with most of the science fiction films of the George W. Bush era, the post-apocalyptic storyline neccessitates the incorporation of concepts from the headlines, including homeland security, the erosion of civil liberties, and citizen internment. Many scenes were reminiscent of the imprisonment of the Jews as widely depicted in the war films of the last several decades. Children of Men is a virtual study of our society’s deepest darkest fears at a time when western ideas are reviled, technology is suspect, and religious fundamentalism is at an all time high.
Theo Faron [Clive Owen] works for the Government and his ex-wife Julian [Julianne Moore] is a member of a radical anti-government insurgency. Together they find themselves transporting a young British girl with one remarkable attribute–she’s pregnant. And hence my dislike for the movie. Like most of the grey science fiction concepts of late, nothing much happens other than “let’s go here, now we have to run away“. Repeat twelve times.
Director Alfonso Cuaron [Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban] did a great job of building the universe and filling the back story through the incorporation of background elements like billboards, media reports, and even graffiti. Britain is the last bastion of civilization (and only modestly civilized at that) and the government has implemented mandatory fertility testing. Non-compliance is a crime. Citizens are urged to report suspicious activity. Believing infertility is a punishment from God, religious groups urge repentance. All are introduced in the background.
Unfortunately, all that heavy symbolism (and the stunning sobriety of Clive Owen as hero Theo Faron) didn’t do much for my viewing experience. I must be the rare exception to the rule, because nearly every science fiction fan I’ve talked to thought Children of Men was the second coming of cinema. I didn’t care for it.
Children of Men is bleak and beautiful, well-crafted and thought-provoking. That said, I still thought it was boring and below-average. That unique and intriguing concept I mentioned at the beginning is all this movie really has at the end. An interesting situation filled with cardboard characters.
** Two Stars **
Posted in 2006, Environmental Disaster, Pandemic, Post-Apocalypse, The Future, Two Star Rating | No Comments »
February 23, 2008 - 9:42 pm - Posted by Administrator
Alright, I’ve fucking had it OK? I give. Please stop making Resident Evil movies. It’s massively fucked up when you can turn this into an economically-successful movie franschise.
I’ll admit, when the original came out to respectable praise, it did bring an aura of legitimacy to movies that began as a concept for a video game. And the sequel was pretty okay too. But this is too much. Seriously.
First, at the beginning of the movie when Milla Jovovich does a voiceover explanation of events thus far, she explains how the human race has come nearly to extinction and the continents are now barren deserts. The very next sequence is an aerial shot of the desert. And I wonder immediately if the story has been modified on a whim by a screenwriter or director who thinks post-apocalypse pictures have to look like a Mad Max movie (or a Tupac Shakur video if you prefer). No green stuff allowed please! OK, me being anal. I’ll grant you.
In the first minutes of the movie our primary heroine Alice [Milla Jovovich] is killed (to my great puzzlement). Then we’re informed she was merely one clone of dozens… presumably so we won’t be surprised when a character who should be dead shows up alive later in the movie. I think it’s always good for a character to be made disposable, don’t you? Who cares if she lives? They’ll just poop out another copy of Alice and we can try again. Maybe somebody could have asked Sigourney Weaver how that worked out for Ripley’s box office receipts.
But, when we get to the first major action sequence–I say ‘major’ because there’s no shortage of action, major, minor, necessary or unnecessary–it’s Alice versus a redneck family who lured her to a radio station with a phony distress broadcast. They’ve trained the now-familiar Resident Evil hellhounds to attack like doberman junkies on t-virus dope, and Alice’s first battle is a protracted one with multiple slimy red mutts. Once she escapes from the mutts–and the rednecks–the real movie can begin.
The t-virus has destroyed the world. To survive, humans must stay mobile and ready to confront any number of viral villains, including the aforementioned doggies, infected birds, and of course a plethora of zombies.
It only took forty-nine minutes before I saw a scene that was so derivative, so cheesy, so poorly done that I wanted to press ‘Stop’ soooo bad… a scene where the scientist–Dr. Isaacs [Iain Glen]–has a conversation with a holographic character in a black suit and black shades. The actor whose name I have been unable to track down appears to be overtly trying to emulate the appearance and tight-mouthed speech pattern of Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith from the Matrix movies. And the special effect used when the holograph disappears is so cheap, it reminded me of my days grazing episodes of Star Trek: Voyager on UPN–cheap special effects to make up for bad storylines–it’ll work great! Once I saw this scene, I couldn’t stop thinking about how some movie studio head saw the first cut of Extinction and said
“You know I don’t see any hipness to this cut… couldn’t you add some of those snazzy suits and Ray-Ban sunglasses like the Matrix? All the kids seem to love that stuff these days.”
And some studious little movie rat went and wrote it into the movie as an afterthought.
Ali Larter is too hot and feminine for a badass chick in a post-apocalyptic world, not to mention too clean–rub some dirt on her face will you? The cowboy character is annoying. The science storyline is a waste of time. The blood is excessive and unnecessary and has lost it’s power to shock. And something about the Resident Evil franchise taking a post-apocalyptic turn–with earthtone textures and cloudless blue skies–in a story that began as a tale about zombies in a gothic mansion… it just doesn’t seem right. I almost wonder if they went too-far to the science fiction end of the scale when maybe they should have stayed to the left end of the suspense/horror scale.
The original is worth seeing, the sequel if you’re desperate, but this third installment blows. Forget it.
Anal Probe Rating: It’s two hours of discomfort and you won’t remember it tomorrow.
Posted in 2007, Anal Probe Rating, Environmental Disaster, Pandemic, Post-Apocalypse | No Comments »
February 23, 2008 - 8:06 pm - Posted by Administrator
Fifty years from now, when we look back on the movies of this first decade of the millenium, we will compare them to the science fiction of the seventies. Bleak. Downbeat. Realistic.
28 Weeks Later is a stylistically brilliant example; aesthetically beautiful from lighting to editing. As a sequel, it remains visually and cinematically true to the original, 28 Days Later (2002) in it’s desperate depiction of survival in a post-apocalyptic London which has been virtually wiped out. There is no joy, no future, no hope.
The storyline picks up right where the original left off, but with a new set of characters. Great Britain has been destroyed by the infection, but the infected who wander the streets eventually starve to death. Under the direction of a U.S. led NATO force, the reconstruction of London begins. But it seems the claims the infection had run it’s course were far too optimistic.
This movie will make you squirm in your seat. The main characters, a family trying to survive and stay together, take you on a kind of emotional roller-coaster to a very sensitive place, which in turn makes the gory scenes of unbelievable violence all the harder to take. When Don (Robert Carlyle) is infected, transforms into a zombie, and then proceeds to gouge out the eyeballs of his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack) with his thumbs, I almost gave up. Fortunately, I was watching with a group of friends and couldn’t just turn it off. I was glad to see it got better, although it is violent and gory.
28 Weeks Later does have it’s shortcomings. First and foremost, no Cillian Murphy. His role in the original pulled you in and kept you for the duration. The sequel suffers from it’s own serial-killing… all of our heroes end up dead in a relentless parade of uber-violent death scenes, including the aforementioned thumbs-in-eyes bit, the obligatory throat-tearing and limb-eating scenes we’ve come to expect from Zombie movies, and the immolation of an American Soldier with a flame-thrower. And just in case you’re not grossed-out enough, we also get countless head and chest explosions from high-caliber firearms, and the topper–the killing of dozens of infected with the blades of a helicopter. And at it’s core, the zombie premise limits the movie to the standard zombie-film mold–it’s a chase flick.
Like the original, 28 Weeks Later is loaded with societal parallels and ponderings, including homeland security, illegal immigration, and civil liberties. Like the movies of the seventies, this story mirrors reality in a difficult time–the implication being the thinking citizen has disappeared and has been replaced by blood-thirsty autmomatons. Where are the powers of good? Where are the voices of the righteous? But perhaps I’m over-thinking it.
*** Three Stars ***
Posted in 2007, Environmental Disaster, Pandemic, Post-Apocalypse, Three Star Rating | No Comments »
January 9, 2008 - 10:20 pm - Posted by Administrator
OK, so I’m gonna admit right up front, I had about five beers and a couple of margaritas in me, and it was about one thirty in the morning before I finally sat down to watch Final one night. I think I DVR’ed it from the Independent Film Channel if I remember right. It’s possible that I don’t because of the beers and margaritas, but if you’ve been reading much of this blog, you probably already know I’m full of shit, so no point pretending I’m informed now.
Occasionally I take notes while I’m watching movies so I can refer to them later when I blog it. Here’s what I wrote for Final:
I don’t know if I can buy Denis Leary in this type of role.
What the hell is going on in this movie?
What the fuck?? Is that Jim Gaffigan?
Is something going to happen soon?
This is a science fiction movie without special effects!
After that my writing trails off on the page and ends in a stain that can only be the drool from where I fell asleep at about three am.
Here’s the deal. Final is one of those concepts that was borne out of a love for science fiction, minus the money to do it properly. Final is as low-budget as they come. Denis Leary is Bill, a man who wakes up in something that’s not quite a prison, but a little more than a hospital. We do not know exactly what Bill’s malady is, but we are treated to flashbacks from his life where he appears to be going through a very tough time. He’s the outcast of his family, he’s broken up with his fiancee, his father has died, and eventually he flashes back to his own apparent attempted suicide.
His therapist Ann (Hope Davis) is in charge of deciding whether he’s “recovering” or not. She begins work figuring out why he has delusions of being cryogenically frozen for four hundred years, and why he believes he will soon be executed. Just as you’re about to go, “OK, what the fuck??” and hit the stop button on the DVR, the story unfurls itself all at once and you find out that Bill hasn’t been frozen for four hundred years, but he is going to die soon.
The pacing in Final is terrible. Nothing seems to happen for the first half of the movie, then they reveal, like, ten plot points all at once, then there’s a long slow slide to the end. It’s like Denis Leary said “I’ve been frozen for four hundred years” and the doctors said “No you haven’t. Seriously.” Then as the movie viewer, you go “OK, whew. Cuz that would have been weird.” Then the Doctors say, “Instead you’ve been in a coma, your mom died, your girlfriend abandoned you to a science experiment and got remarried, we froze you, there was a terrible epidemic that ravaged the world, now we woke you up, but we have to kill you so we can save the world with your tissue cells because you were frozen before the pandemic burned into the human genome.” And all of that is revealed in less than five minutes. Nothing else happens. And the entire movie (except the brief flashbacks) happens in the hospital. Jim Gaffigan plays a hospital orderlie who hardly ever speaks.
But then maybe I was just drunk.
** Two Stars
Posted in Pandemic, Post-Apocalypse, Suspended Animation, The Future, Time Travel, Two Star Rating | No Comments »
December 13, 2007 - 8:42 pm - Posted by Administrator
The Postman had two strikes against it when it hit theatres in 1997. First, Kevin Costner was the star and director at a time when his choice of roles [Waterworld], and his reportedly flimsy acting skills were the subject of tabloid chatter. Second, it opened in theatres on the same day as Titanic. I acutally went and checked it out by myself that night (my wife was out of town) and I was all alone in the theatre. They had Titanic running on eight of the other screens in the same cinema complex.
The actual script for the Postman is pretty good. Be warned, this one is also an epic and clocks in at 177 minutes.
It is 2013 and war and plagues have wiped out civilization as we once knew it on Earth. The United States of America no longer exists. Survivors have retreated from the cities to fortified rural communities and forts.
Costner plays The Postman, a drifter who stumbles onto a wrecked postal truck one night while searching for shelter in a freezing rainstorm. He dons the cold weather clothing from the corpse in the drivers’ seat and entertains himself by reading the mail. When he later tries to gain access to a gated rural community, he is forced to con his way in by making up a story about delivering the mail for the “Restored United States”. And that is where the story truly begins, the story of liberty’s triumph over the forces of tyranny–the villain General Bethlehem played excellently by Will Patton. The movie also features an early onscreen performance by a relatively unknown Giovanni Ribisi.
One small drawback of this movie would be the decidely non-science fiction setting. The vehicles of choice in The Postman are horses, and most of the action takes place outdoors. But for those who love post-apocalyptic sci-fi like Mad Max, I Am Legend, and The Omega Man this movie is an absolute must-view.
**** Four Stars
Posted in 1997, Environmental Disaster, Four Star Rating, Pandemic, Post-Apocalypse, The Future | No Comments »
