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Reviews
Pandorum (2009)
Attended the test screening on June 18
Pandorum is about two astronauts aboard an Ark ship who wake up from their cryogenic sleep tanks with memory loss. They don't know what the mission is, where they are, nor what has happened to the rest of the ship. As they explore their surroundings, they learn that the ship is teeming with mutants who are super-fast, super-strong, and super-loud. Chase scenes abound as the crew try to avoid being eaten while regaining control over the ship and come to terms with the mission.
The film starts off with obvious references to Pitch Black, Alien, and Aliens. Once the mutants appear, however, the film shifts into overdrive, and it becomes Resident Evil, Aliens, and Descent. The mutants all screech like the vampires in 30 Days of Night, but fortunately, the noise is blended in with the rest of the soundtrack, and so didn't give me a headache.
The film's real problem is one of its main selling points: the mutants. Without them, the crew wouldn't be running from set piece to set piece, and wouldn't be compelled to stop and question what they discover. But that also cheats some of the characters (like the non-English speaking Agricultural worker) out of some needed character development. It also cheats the film out of seriously dealing with the fine story that is bubbling just under the surface of the writhing mass of mutants. There is some fine SF here, you just have to ignore the action.
There are a couple twists along the way, which I will not mention here, but they are welcome additions of cleverness to an overall film that feels as if it's riffing on lots of other popular SF films. The ending was pitch perfect for SF, and I enjoyed the movie overall. I do have to wonder though: in a space ship the size of a city, wouldn't the designers have installed a couple windows?
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
Moore achieves legitimacy
This is the only Moore film I have been able to watch and not come away from it thinking, "Gee, I'd like to agree, but it seems like he's really playing fast and loose with the facts." This pretty much sums up what the liberal media has been saying for the last few months, and Moore does it with finesse. Randy Rhodes only wishes she were this eloquent, and conversely, I find her to be a little too far left nowadays.
Of course, a movie like this is important in two ways: it serves as a historical document of the administration, and it serves as a blast of balancing opinion to counter the overwhelming conservative bias of the mainstream media.
I only wish I lived in a battleground state. It will be interesting to see if this film makes an impact, since film is a rather unused tool in the fight for public opinion. That said, this film is a decidedly biased view of things. But if all you watch is Fox news, maybe you should listen to the other side for once and then decide.
Johnny English (2003)
Sucked pretty hard
I can only comment on the first 45 minutes of this film, since I walked out on it. The problems it has is telegraphing its jokes. Since you can see them coming 5 seconds before they hit, you can already have evaluated whether or not they'll be funny. Unfortunately, most of them weren't at all funny. The jokes are generally embarrassing faux pas or just general clumsiness. When he and his assistant are supposed to parachute to a building, and an identical one is right beside it, you can tell where he's going to land. That sets up all the rest of the jokes, but since you know what's going to happen, it loses its appeal. When the hearse he's following stops at a cemetery, you know what's happened and what's going to happen as a result.
Overall, it's unfortunate that the film didn't have more talented writers. That's the whole reason the movie fails.
Dreamcatcher (2003)
Mostly Sucked
I'll start with what this movie did right, since that will take the least time. What Dreamcatcher does right is present us with a small handfull of interesting characters, and it provides interesting relationships between said characters. It even gives us a sometimes entertaining story and conflict in which the characters are engaged. Now that that's said, we'll move on to the bad points.
For anyone not already familiar with the book, the story does nothing to prepare us for the fact that aliens are responsible for the events that are occurring. This makes the reveal a jarring, incongruous experience, which is so badly contrived as to be comical. Just because King leads us to believe that this is a formulaic supernatural 'King' story, and then runs completely counter to that doesn't mean the story is any good; it just means it has a gimmick. That gimmick is not enough to carry the weight of the characters or the potential the story has, and as a result, fails utterly.
The next thing (not sequentially in the movie) this film does wrong is provide the audience with possibly the longest running fart joke in the history of cinema. Audiences that delighted in The Green Mile will find this tiresome very quickly, although fans of Scary Movie will probably love it.
Next, the movie provides us with a gratuitous gross-out scene in the bathroom, where the fart joke becomes terminal. I found myself quickly bored and inured to the sight of the gore, which is one of the things that King always does wrong; going for the gross-out. The buzz about this scene being compared to the Shower Scene in Psycho is apt on one level: the shower scene made me afraid to take showers, and the bathroom scene made me afraid to watch any more Stephen King movies.
Overall, the movie is not nearly so interested with a well-crafted storyline as it is interested in rapidly hitting major plot points and moving on before anyone has time to react. This leaves us with the impression that we have followed the story, but it's only on a surface level. Why did the wild animals react the way they did? Why did they just sort of wander off, while the dog reacted with hostility? Why did the dog just whimper when the humans turned into gas factories? What happens to the people that don't succumb to Ripley? For that matter, what happens to the ones that do? And of course, why is it that with the capability of interstellar flight, mind control and telepathy, the aliens seem bent on taking over the planet? This last question is a source of embarrassment for many alien movies, most recently Signs.
All of these questions may be answered in the book, and that's exactly who I would recommend this movie to: fans of the book.
Solaris (2002)
The most intelligent SF film that will undoubtedly tank.
Its a real pity that Hollywood has tried to make an art house film. That's what this is, and audiences will no doubt be bored to tears by it. Its what happens when you raise generations of pigs on slop, and then cast pearls before them.
There is no action in this movie. Oh, there's plenty of conflict, but you won't see any interstellar battles, no eye candy special effects, and no sound effects in space. What you do get is a highly 2001-influenced chamber drama about our notions of reality.
An interesting film technique used by the film is prolonged shots of the female lead, which forces the audience to regard her, and the question of whether she is real or not. It is almost as if the camera is trying to make her real, but it serves the exact opposite purpose. Ultimately, nothing is explained, and the audience must make up their own minds about it. I though I would sleep through the film, but I got effectively caught up in the story.
Everyone else in the audience seemed to exasperatedly whisper and giggle, like taking your 5-year olds to church. Come on, America! Wake up and use your brains!