Doomsday

Up until now Neil Marshall had done relatively small movies.  The cast was small, the story was small, but the production felt bigger than it was in reality.  With the success of The Descent Marshall decided to go all out and make a giant film.

I knew absolutely nothing about this when I saw it in theaters and was pleasantly surprised.  Marshall took Escape from New York, The Road Warrior, Aliens, Gladiator, The Warriors and who knows what other pictures and put them in a blender.  That sounds like a disaster but it works better than you would think.  The story is about a virus that kills people almost instantly.  It broke out in Scotland so they quarantined the whole country.  No one gets in or out.  Thirty years later the virus shows up again but this time in London.  Now all of a sudden there’s interest to find a cure which some suits believe is in Scotland.  Living people have been spotted there which means some are immune to the disease.  Scientists could make a vaccine from their blood but they need someone to go over the wall and bring back a specimen.

Now I want to say right off the bat that I like this movie.  It’s a helluva ride with a lot of good action.  There are gun fights, a sword fight, a car chase, a dude gets burned alive and there’s even a gladiatorial match.  And it’s all done much better than its contemporaries.  The lead character, Sinclair (Rhona Mitra (Highwaymen, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans)), is basically a female Snake Plissken.  She has only one eye but wears a fake eyeball (that can act as a video camera) instead of an eye patch, she dresses pretty much all in black, she has a doesn’t-give-a-shit, take-no-shit attitude and you get the idea.  Definitely not as good as Snake but who the fuck is?  The other two characters that were cool were Sol, the leader of the cannibalistic Road Warrior type gang, and Canaris, some evil high up guy that wants to rule the UK.  Everyone else was just ok.

For this write up I went back to watch this sucker again and still enjoyed it but realized a couple of things.  First, the plot doesn’t really make any sense if you think about it.  For three years the British government knew that living folks existed in Scotland and just ignored it until the virus hit their home turf.  (Spoiler) Also at the end Canaris gets a hold of a survivor (remember they can find a cure for the disease with this person) but says that he’s going to wait yet another bunch of years before administering a vaccine.  I get that he’s the bad guy and he was to do shit that will make him look like an asshole but this is just baffling.  He says he’ll look like a hero later when he shows up with a cure but why wouldn’t he look like a hero if he came out with a vaccine immediately?  The only thing I can think of is that he’s going to make money off of the cure and wants demand to be at its peak.  But that’s not the smartest business move.  People are dying so there won’t be as many folks to give the vaccine to.  The sick aren’t the only ones that are gonna need this shit.  The healthy will need it too to prevent the disease from setting in to start with.  This felt pretty lazy and like the filmmakers didn’t think that Canaris was evil enough so they had to have him do this other shit that is definitely villainous but doesn’t add up.

Another thing is that the team that gets sent into diseased Scotland looses their bio suits after a little while.  None of them seem to get the deadly virus while they’re over there which lessens the threat of the quarantined area.  I mean the disease was the reason why Scotland was cut off from the rest of the world.  The few living people over there are supposed to be immune but our group of heroes isn’t.

And the whole idea of a covert operation with sneaking people across the border isn’t really necessary.  They say in the movie that they don’t want to fly a helicopter in there to arouse suspicion.  But we’re talking about the entire UK at threat of being decimated.  They should’ve just flown a chopper in, grabbed the first couple of people they saw and flown back over the wall.  This aspect of the film actually isn’t that bad but it’s definitely a forced spin on Escape from New York.  Marshall couldn’t come up with something as good as the president being held hostage in the quarantined section.  It makes more sense that a covert operation would be implemented in that situation.  But a virus that’s a threat to the world?  Just find a cure ASAP, who cares if people notice.  And even if someone did notice, they don’t know what’s going on so it doesn’t seem like there’s a big risk there.

This film isn’t as good as the ones it’s imitating (except maybe Gladiator).  It’s too influenced by its influences.  I would’ve liked Marshall to be more subtle about it.  He kind of took one step forward and two steps back with this one.  Instead of continuing to expand the boundaries of horror or making another best-in-subgenre movie he went for an action extravaganza with a cast of hundreds, filming in South Africa, incorporating so many different types of action, extreme makeup and blood effects and even going back to the old art of using a miniature for the exploding bus at the end.  All that shit’s cool but I just want it to be more original and/or less reliant on its inspiration.  It borders on big dumb action like Invasion U.S.A. and Death Wish 3 where you’re treated to a pretty incredible spectacle but there’s almost no depth to it leaving you somewhat unsatisfied.

Even though I shat on this a bit I can’t deny that I smiled a bunch during this thing.  It may be too obvious a mix of your favorite action pictures and segmented as such but man is it fun.      

The Descent

I haven’t seen this one since it was in theaters and it’s way more interesting than I remembered.  I mean I liked it but the ratio of horror movie to non-horror movie was less than memory served and also after watching Neil Marshall’s previous picture (Dog Soldiers) I have a newfound appreciation for the guy.

Now I’m gonna assume that you’ve seen this already because even if you haven’t someone told you all about this fuckin’ thing.  Am I right or am I right?

So the traditional horror part is only the last half hour while the cave and intro parts make up roughly an hour.  I remember it being more like 50/50.  And because of that this movie caught me off guard again.  Well first of all I think the spelunking part can work as horror for some people and I’ll admit that I’m one of them.  It’s not the claustrophobia aspect but the fear of going into a fucking hole in the ground with your only exit being tiny tubes that just lead to other rooms made of fucking rock and there’s no way you can call for help or for people to come and get you and it’s pitch black down there and fuck man.  Not to mention on top of all of this is the possibility of a cave in at any moment.  Between the tight spaces, the darkness, remoteness, danger factor and idea of venturing into the unknown there’s a lot of creepy shit that this cave exploring premise has built into it.

Then the creature part is your payoff.  The spelunking-gone-wrong section goes on for so long and you get caught up in it that either you forget that there are supposed to be monsters in this or you begin to wonder what the fuck your friends were talking about when they told you about these cave crawlers.  It’s a risky way to do a horror film but it works here.  I’m glad there wasn’t a rash of pictures after this came out with the first two thirds about one thing that’s maybe a little creepy and the last third filled with typical scary movie shit.  That trend would’ve been a fucking bore. 

You see I knew how the monsters were revealed and it got me pretty good the first time.  But even this time around this fuckin’ film got me again.  I mean I literally said out loud to no one “fuck, they got me again” and I had to rewind the movie so I could pay more attention to the reveal.  I can’t believe Marshall fuckin’ set the trap, lulled me in and caught me sleeping twice.  And having the *bam* horror stab happen a second after the creature appears on the camera is more effective than if they had the appearance and the stab occur at the same time.  Because when the video camera pans over the first thing you see is one of our characters and when you finally notice the monster it’s synced to the horror stab.  It’s almost like the stab plays just for you.

That ending is pretty fucking good too.  I love that Marshall put that (sort of) happy ending in there for everyone and then said “This is how you expect this to end right?  Well fuck you.  I’m gonna end this motherfucker the way I want to.”  It would’ve been ballsy enough to have a bleak ending but to dangle a fake hopeful conclusion in front of your face only to take it away immediately is goddamn crazy.  Good for him for sticking to his guns and putting in the ending that he thought was best.

I don’t even really need to go on about the creature battle do I?  On a scale, the trapped-in-a-cave part is probably about a 4 but Jesus the last half hour they crank it up to 11.  So much blood, so many brutal deaths, such ferocity, such brutality and even though it’s short, so satisfying.  After all the shit that these women have been through it feels so good to see them get out their frustrations unmercifully on these fucking beasts.

Marshall sure has a strange and interesting idea of what a horror movie can be.  Dog Soldiers is straight forward: a group of soldiers fight werewolves.  That’s a little different than The Descent’s premise: a group of friends go spelunking, get trapped in a cave, endure hardship while trying to find a way out, encounter and combat humanoid cave creatures that try to eat them, no one gets out of the cave.  Man, that must’ve been a hard sell to studios.  Well I’m glad Marshall made it and that the film was successful. 

You can officially count me as a Neil Marshall fan (for those of you that tally that sort of thing).  I dig his little-CGI-as-possible approach and his incredible sense for action.  His shooting style has improved a bunch in his second go around which is nice to see.  Apparently there were no real caves used in this film and that’s really impressive because the sets look phenomenally real.  Marshall knows what the fuck he’s doing guys.  The way The Descent is constructed could’ve been disastrous (and on paper it should’ve been) but Marshall knew it would work.  He admits that he ripped off the idea of reevaluating what a happy ending is from Brazil (meaning if the character is content in their own mind is that considered a happy ending (our lead is still stuck in the cave but has finally found some inner peace) or is something more traditional only considered a happy ending (escaping the cave)).  It’s a fascinating idea and not something that you would expect out of a horror picture.  This is way deeper than Dog Soldiers folks.      

If you haven’t seen this sonuvabitch and you read this piece anyway I don’t know what the fuck your problem is.  Get a hold of a copy and check it out.  I wouldn’t go as far to say that this is a classic but parts of it are excellent.  This one’s difficult to categorize and an anomaly in horror.  It’s certainly different and definitely good.  

Dog Soldiers

Alright boys and girls let me just set this up for you.  A military exercise in Scotland with a squad of rookie soldiers goes very wrong when fucking werewolves come out of the woodwork and attack them.  They hold up in a farm house and make a stand fighting these fuckers off throughout the night.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking, “sure, that sounds good but it’s probably pretty shitty, right?”  No!  This is fucking great.

I mean this is essentially Night of the Living Dead but with werewolves instead of zombies.  But holy shit did they up the ante.  Our gang of soldiers fights the creatures off with machine guns, shotguns, handguns, grenades, swords, boiling water and blunt objects.  These wolves are ferocious so you need something equally ferocious to battle them with.

And I actually wanted to see our characters survive.  I cared about them man.  Everyone does a bang up job but the three main dudes are especially good.  Sean Pertwee (Event Horizon) plays the sergeant and he just has natural charisma.  Kevin McKidd (Trainspotting, Brave) is our real hero though and rises to take command of the squad when the sarge gets injured.  Like Pertwee, charm and leadership come easy.  And finally Liam Cunningham (The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Safe House) is the human villain.  I’ll tell ya, he reminds me a lot of Powers Boothe by the way he looks and acts so of course, I really dug this guy in this role.  I love how we’re set up to hate him by having him demand McKidd shoot a dog as the culmination of his training.  And then when McKidd refuses Cunningham just does it himself for absolutely no reason.

But definitely the best thing about this movie is the werewolves themselves.  For a long while you only get very quick glimpses of these things.  There’ll be a shot of it in the shadows or a close up of its snout of something.  As the film goes on you get longer and better views of the creatures and man do they look good.  They’re people in full body costumes on stilts with an animatronic head.  No fucking bad CGI here.  And not only do I absolutely love the way these things look but I also love how they’re handled in this picture.  The camera never holds too long on one of them which was the right approach.  A lot of times we only see the arms and that was extremely effective.  For example there’s a scene where the soldiers are running from the wolves and hop into a truck.  A werewolf rams its arm through the roof swatting all around while our guys are cramped in this tight space with nowhere to go.  The arm is basically a human arm but muscular, dark in color and with claws on the fingertips.  It looks fucking great and kinda scary actually.  This was the scene that made me realize that I had something special on my hands.

On the making of featurette on the DVD the filmmakers shit all over CGI and make the case for using practical real life effects.  The producer says that people would be focused on the CGI and be in awe of it (in a good way) instead of focusing on the movie.  I agree with him except for that last part.  People would be in amazement of how shitty the CGI would look, not how great.  But good for them for flipping that shit the ol’ bird and doing it the way it should be done even though it means more work.  The filmmakers argue that they could only do the shit they wanted to do with traditional effects like punching these motherfuckin’ werewolves, stabbing them through the chest , shooting them, burning them and blowing them up.  Fuckin’ a.

The director is Neil Marshall and he’s the dude that did The Descent.  This was his first movie and he did a damn good job.  Ok, maybe technically it’s not so great.  Like he edits every scene like it’s an action scene with all quick cuts and the flow of the story for the first fifteen or twenty minutes is a little weird.  But once the werewolves show up Marshall settles in nicely. 

This is a low budget horror flick but Marshall makes it feel more like they had a mid level budget.  He describes it as Saving Private Ryan with werewolves and he looked dead fuckin’ serious when he said it.  This is totally not that.  But you do get a ton of bang for your buck.  And dare I say best werewolf movie ever?  An American Werewolf in London is good and a better movie if you catch my drift.  But I dunno guys this thing kicked fucking ass.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and highly recommend it.
  

Pentathlon

I had initially only heard of the pentathlon through the title of this movie.  And then about a month ago a buddy of mine told me what it entailed.  There are five events that the athlete has to compete in and they include swimming, running, fencing, horse riding and shooting a gun.  My friend described it as “the movie villain training event” which is a great summation and one that I totally agree with.  So because the 2012 Olympics are underway I thought it would be fitting to check this one out.

Dolph Lundgren (Universal Soldier: Regeneration, Johnny Mnemonic) plays Eric Brogar, an East German athlete competing in the 1988 Seoul games.  His coach is Heinrich Muller (David Soul (Salem’s Lot, Magnum Force)) and he’s a neo-Nazi crazy sonuvabitch.  He wants Eric to cheat by taking some sort of drugs but Brogar refuses and wins the gold anyway.  Eric then promptly defects to the U.S. to escape his miserable life in communist Germany and his coach.  Well only a couple of months later the Berlin wall falls and Brogar feels like an asshole.  He becomes depressed and an alcoholic.  Years later Muller decides to commit a terrorist act in America right before the 1996 Atlanta games.  Eric pulls himself together (with the help of his boss/trainer at the local rib shack…I’m not kidding) and decides to compete once again but gets caught up in Muller’s bullshit.

If that sounds like a lot of story, I guess it kind of is.  The plot changes pretty frequently but it never gets confusing.  I like how quickly things move in this.  It’s not an action movie really but there’s a bunch of exciting shit.  Like the constant tension between Muller and, well, everyone, the comeback of Eric, the defecting scene towards the beginning and the terrorist plot towards the end.  It’s all good.

It’s interesting that this is an R picture.  I can’t help but think that if something like this was made today it would be PG or PG-13.  These guys went for it and had cursing, Nazis, terrorism and people getting shot and beat up.  I especially like that Eric uses some of his pentathlon skills to battle the bad guys.  There’s a scene where Brogar has a sword fight and another where he shoots some henchmen.

You know, Dolph Lundgren is a better actor than I think most people want to admit.  I mean he was really menacing in Rocky IV, kind of sad and pathetic but mean as hell in The Expendables and Universal Soldier, totally whacked out in Johnny Mnemonic and even sweet, caring and vengeful in Showdown in Little Tokyo.  He’s got some range to him.  In this one Lundgren has inner demons that he has to triumph over as well as some real life demons, the fucked in the head coach.  Sure, maybe his accent isn’t consistent throughout but I feel like I’m in good hands with Dolph.  Like whatever comes up he can deal with it and we’ll eventually pull through this shit together.

And I have to mention that the director is Bruce Malmuth who did Hard to Kill right before this.  He also did the unfortunately boring Nighthawks starring Stallone.  Pentathlon was the last thing he directed before he died.  Between that and Hard to Kill, he went out on top in my eyes.

So yeah, I would recommend this movie.  The bulk of it has less to do with the Olympics than I expected but it’s still a fun time.  Not great but not bad.  It’s perfect for a one time watch.

In Time

This is a prime example of a good idea executed poorly.  It’s sad when you can see the potential while it’s being killed right in front of your eyes.

In the future everyone has a set amount of time to live.  The first 25 years are free but after that you only have one additional year to get your shit together.  The glowing green clock on your arm starts ticking and it can’t be stopped.  Because of this the currency is in time.  So if you want a cup of coffee it’ll cost you four mins, a bus ride can cost an hour, your rent will be a couple of days, etc.  When you work you get paid in time so that’s one way to stay alive.  You can also transfer time from person to person by grabbing someone’s arm just like how you can give someone ten bucks.  Potentially you could live forever as long as you have time on your clock.  So everyone talks about time and almost nothing but time (which is something that took longer than I expected to get used to).  And just like people with and without money there are those with tons of time (like decades or hundreds of years) and those with little (like days or hours).  There doesn’t appear to be a middle class but hang on to that thought for later in this piece.  The two classes are separated by time zones (get it?) that cost like months and years to cross which gives the rich town and the poor ghetto a buffer.

So that’s a cool concept, right?  It’s pretty damn original and has potential.  Well it’s too bad that the script is a piece of shit.  The story goes that Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) lives in the poor town and one day he saves a guy’s life that has a century on his clock.  This dude is fed up with life and actually wants to die so while Will is sleeping he gives him all of his time.  The mystery man is dead and Salas now has over 100 years.  He goes to tell his mother but she runs out of time and dies because they jacked up the bus fare, fuckin’ dicks.  Will vows to bring the system down or make them pay or something.  He goes to the rich town, finds the love interest (Amanda Seyfried (Red Riding Hood)) and then it very oddly turns into Bonnie and Clyde/Robin Hood for the rest of the movie.  These two rob banks of time and give it to the poor.

First off I just want to say that Timberlake disappointed.  Did anyone else think he was awesome in Alpha Dog?  Did anyone else think Alpha Dog was a good movie?  I thought it was a lot of fun, well except for the end.  That was kinda tragic but otherwise I had a blast.  And Justin was perfect in the role he was cast.  I think that’s because it wasn’t too far removed from who he is in real life, some fun lovin’, pot smokin’, party throwin’, lady’s man.  Sure he’s involved in some illegal shit but that’s part of what makes his character appealing.  In In Time Timberlake is like the perfect person.  He’s always helping people by giving them his time, he wants people to see that the system if fucked up and corrupt, he runs from the cops but knows that they’re just doing their job and aren’t the real bad guys, he’s willing to sacrifice himself at the end to save his girlfriend, he buys his mother flowers and etc.  This guy doesn’t have a flaw of any kind and it makes me fucking hate this character.  Salas is such a good person that it’s annoying.  And Timberlake gives a pretty fucking bad performance too.  He can’t do a range of emotions at all.  He can do happy just fine and maybe angry for a second but anything else?  I don’t think so.  Watch the scene where Timberlake tries to convey sadness after his character’s mother dies and you’ll realize that he shouldn’t play people that aren’t like Frankie Ballenbacher from Alpha Dog.  Oh, and everyone else is really bad in this except Cillian Murphy (Red Eye) but he’s a little flat.  He plays the cop hot on Will’s trail and he’s got the badass name the Timekeeper.

The whole movie has this real slick look to it like you’re watching a Giorgio Armani ad come to life.  Almost everything is in black and white, the clothes, the cars, the buildings, etc.  They were going for a retro future look, like the cars are all from the 60’s or 70’s (but they make that whirring noise when they start up and stop like all futuristic cars in these types of movies) and there aren’t any cell phones (they actually use a payphone).  I’m not really against the way this picture looks but I’m not really into it either so in the end it didn’t do much for me.

There are three main reasons why this film doesn’t work.  The first is the characters are bland.  No one is exciting or interesting to watch.  Everyone feels stiff and too confined within their roles. 

Second is the pacing.  There’s so much downtime with Timberlake and Seyfried talking about how much time sucks and that they wish it didn’t have to be this way.  We get it fellas.  We got it in the first ten minutes.  You don’t need to hit us over the head with this shit for the entire movie.  Think about it.  Pictures about money and greed don’t have the characters constantly talking about money and nothing but.  There’s usually other shit that happens and non-money topics come up.  With this film the people are too enamored with their own world.  They can’t get past the fucking ticking clock on their arms and that prevents anything else from entering the conversation. 

And third, oddly enough, is the we’re-running-out-of-time situation is overplayed.  For almost the entire picture Salas is almost out of time.  He’s constantly down to a minute and change or even seconds but he always finds some way to get more time.  I mean in theory this is exactly what I want to see out the concept presented to us.  It sounds exciting if our guy has to continually think of ways to get time.  It should sorta be like the Crank movies where the whole thing’s on edge.  But here it gets boring real fast.  I never felt like Will was actually gonna run out of time after a little bit.  I never got sucked in and felt worried that he might not get out of one of his many sticky situations.  And I think I know exactly where this idea died for me.  When Salas travels to the rich town he decides to go to the casino and play some poker, well one hand of poker anyway.  People are wagering like 100,000 years (which I don’t think Will has but he’s able to bet it anyway) and he ponies up.  In a total James Bond type scene he has a sly conversation with the bad guy during the hand about possibly being out of his league.  Will wagers everything he’s got only leaving himself a couple of seconds, doesn’t bat an eye and wins a million years or some shit.  Not only is this scene out of place (arguably the whole movie is out of place) but the day before when Salas was talking to the mystery dude that coughed up a century, Will told him that he wouldn’t waste all that time.  Blowing all of your time on a hand of poker is clearly wasting it.  This is also after Will vows revenge.  Gambling everything you have isn’t a good way to get your revenge plot in motion in my opinion, especially if it’s going to leave you dead.  Anyway this was the part of the movie that made me not care about this character running out of time.  If he doesn’t value it why should I?

Obviously this film is a statement on inequality in society though.  It feels like the filmmakers were going for more of a message than entertainment which I guess is fine but it’s so heavy handed.  The film is saying that in the future the middle class will disappear and there will only be the super rich and the super poor.  The rich will control everything, including raising rates to keep the poor in poverty, and live forever.  The poor must die because the conundrum is that with this premise of time=life you can’t have everyone live for eternity.  There wouldn’t be enough room or resources.  The question they pose is would you allow people to die so you could be immortal?  And of course Will says at the end that not one person should die for immortality.  The film argues that time (money) should be spread more evenly among the people and not horded by a small group.  The bad guy contests that doing so will create an imbalance and the world will come to an end.  But the thing is that the world is already imbalanced so for these very poor people they don’t have much, if anything, to lose.  And there’s also a message in there that rich people don’t really “live”.  They’re just soulless beings while the non-rich can “do a lot in a day”.  I get what they’re saying but I just wish they had done it in a subtler way.  No one likes being obviously preached to, especially in a sci-fi adventure flick.

I thought Salas and co. were going to find a cure for this clock thing and everyone would be freed from it.  All people get to start living normally at 25 until they die naturally.  But instead it’s about trying to find a way to make people’s lives more bearable with this man made catastrophe by giving them more time. 

It’s not a terribly fun film.  There are too many plot holes, boring characters, the production design is rigid, there’s a really bad CGI car crash into the L.A. storm drain, there’s a secondary villain whose purpose I didn’t understand, the thing drags a lot and the messaging is shoved in your face.  I want to say that it’s miscast too but the movie is pretty bad so that doesn’t seem so out of place.  Also, everyone in this is supposed to look 25 because in the universe of the movie that’s when time stands still for the human body.  But they didn’t cast anyone that looks that age.  Not only do they all look at the very least 30 but there are clearly age differences between the characters.  Nobody’s buying that Cillian Murphy, Johnny Galecki (Roseanne) and Justin Timberlake are all fuckin’ 25.

And speaking of the world this picture lives in, what if someone cuts off your clock arm?  Do you die or does the clock keep ticking on your dismembered arm?  I mean I like that you can kill someone in a conventional way even before their time is up in this movie but if the clock arm gets injured does that affect your time?  Is the clock something you’re born with or do they insert it when they’re writing up your birth certificate?  It would be cool if you weren’t born with it so there could be this whole underground society of non-clockers.    

Alright that’s enough rambling.  Even though these guys came up with a good idea it didn’t turn out very well.  Way too schlocky. 

Soldier

After Event Horizon totally fucking tanked at the box office Anderson made Soldier…which also fucking bombed.  And you know what?  It deserved to.

This one takes place in the near future where babies are raised in a strictly military environment.  When they grow up all they know is how to fight, take orders, endure pain and basically be a robot.  This mystery organization (that I guess is totally legit in society) wanted to remove as many human elements as possible and cast themselves the perfect killing machines.  However, these soldiers are replaced when a new line comes along and Todd (Kurt Russell) finds himself on the scrap heap of a garbage dump planet.  The residents are kind folk though and take him in.  They teach him how to be somewhat human.

I like the initial premise that we’re set up with for the first fifteen minutes or so.  We the see the upbringing that these kids are getting and it’s kinda wild what they’re exposed to.  Like they’re forced to watch dogs slaughter a hog, they go on miles long runs and they do weapons training.  And as a pretty nuts side note if any of these specimens lags behind the military dudes fucking murder them, like when they’re a young teenager.  The montage of when these kids are grown up and fighting in wars is kind of awesome (although it’s very cheap looking).  And in this montage I have to acknowledge the really goofy outer space war with spacesuits and guns firing in slow motion ‘n shit.  That scene comes off so fuckin’ funny that if you only saw that one part you’d swear the film was a satire. You know, for a minute there I was getting very into this movie.  But then in a moment of panic someone grabbed the wheel and drove this thing off a fucking cliff.  It started off as a real offbeat and intriguing idea but when Todd gets dumped on some planet, takes a liking to their people and learns a thing or two about how to live it goes right down the shitter.  The plot turns into the ol’ stranger-comes-to-town-and-the-town-takes-him-in story.  And the end fight with Todd against all the new soldier models isn’t that fun or satisfying because it was so painful to get to that point.  I didn’t fucking care by then. 

To be blunt this movie is a piece of shit.  It tricked me into thinking that it was going to be something new and strange but did a total 180 on me.  Gary Busey and Jason Isaacs (The Patriot) were both doing a real good job too as the leaders of their crazy experimental units.  Shit was looking up.  Oh well.    

With this picture Anderson went from being a kind of interesting filmmaker with lots of potential to the man he would be for the rest of his career.  And by career I mean at least through The Three Musketeers, which by the way was fucking terrible.  Before I checked that one out I only saw this one clip of the Musketeers on a flying ship utterly decimating this room that Orlando Bloom was in.  Like they were firing a machine gun, a flamethrower and tossing bombs.  The film looked like it could be fucking insane but alas it was really only that one scene.  Not that the rest of the movie wasn’t outrageous but it wasn’t outrageous like that clip I saw.  Whatever, fuck that picture.  And fuck Soldier.  There are much better movies out there that have similar plot elements like Universal Soldier and Robocop.  Watch those instead.

I know I’m not breaking any ground here but Paul W.S. Anderson is a shitty fucking filmmaker.  For a minute there it seemed like he took the Mortal Kombat job to break into Hollywood and build up some capital so he could work on shit that he was more interested in.  Event Horizon was a step in that direction and as bad as Soldier is at least it’s an original screenplay and not based off of a comic book or a video game or is a remake.  But it just turns out that Anderson wants to make movies that five year olds dream about, shit that lacks substance or thought.  I’ll tell you what though, at least his first three movies were fun to go through.  Maybe he’ll do something interesting again and not either a Resident Evil or a remake.  Until he does that though he can go fuck himself. 

Event Horizon

Oh the film that this could’ve been.  This one gets me worked up a bit because it’s made up of a lot of great stuff and a surprisingly low amount of schlock, yet it seems lacking.  Lacking what exactly?  Well let’s dive into this sonuvabitch and figure it out.

The story was originally pitched to the studio as The Shining in space but that’s definitely not the best description.  There is an element that’s taken from The Shining but I’ll get into that in a minute.  What we have here is more along the lines of Alien and The Haunting.  A ship called the Event Horizon was about to make its inaugural journey through a black hole, which it creates itself via a “gravity drive”, when it completely disappeared.  Several years later the ship’s signal is picked up at the edge of our solar system which prompts a search and rescue mission to be hatched.  The crew dispatched goes aboard the Event Horizon and it turns into a haunted house story with people experiencing weird visions, noises, occurrences, etc.

The cast they assembled for this thing is fucking great.  Laurence Fishburne is Miller, the captain of the rescue crew and he plays the role perfectly.  He has such a knack for playing leadership parts that there’s never any doubt that he’s an effective, courageous and badass commander.  Everyone respects him, even the characters that are supposed to be more on the loose cannon side.  Miller wants order and will strictly enforce his command to maintain it but he’s not delusional.  He tries to find rational explanations for the shit he sees aboard the Event Horizon and when reason runs out he does what he has to do to save his crew and survive.  You never see Miller act selfishly; he constantly puts his crew ahead of himself.  I don’t want to give the impression that this guy is a goody two shoes or anything though ‘cause he’s got a haunted past and that helps to make him seem just as real and relatable as he’s meant to be.  Miller’s the best character in this film and they couldn’t have gotten very many people that would’ve been better or even as good as Fishburne.

Sam Neill (Jurassic Park, In the Mouth of Madness) plays Weir, the scientist that built the gravity drive and he’s the expert that was sent by NASA (I think) to go along with the rescue crew.  Neill is underrated in the movie biz and I wish would get bigger roles because he’s just a good all around actor.  With his role in In the Mouth of Madness he goes from a regular guy to a person being driven insane and he does pretty much the same thing in Event Horizon.  This is The Shining aspect of the picture.  Weir is like Jack Torrance in that he seems like a fine rational person until he gets aboard the Event Horizon which turns him into a total maniac over a period of time.  It’s like the ship has an evil hold over him that can’t be broken at all. 

The way Weir and Miller play off each other is one of the wondrous things in this film.  They don’t seem to like each other that much before shit goes crazy so it flows organically that they would become enemies later.  Miller keeps trying to get answers out of Weir but Weir doesn’t even really know himself what’s happening with the ship.  The growing frustration between these men builds some nice tension.

The rest of the cast is good too.  Kathleen Quinlan (Breakdown), Joely Richardson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)), Richard T. Jones (Phone Booth), Jack Noseworthy (Breakdown), Jason Isaacs (Harry Potters) and Sean Pertwee (Shopping) do well in their roles.  I particularly like that even though Richard T. Jones is the comic relief he’s not really goofy.  He’s freaking out over all the shit that’s happening so it’s more like panic than comedy.  Jones also has maybe the best line in the movie.  It’s towards the end when he needs to fly through space to get back to the Event Horizon and when he launches himself he yells, “here I come motherfuckers!”

The imagery in this thing is fucking phenomenal.

This picture has great production design.  It’s like an updated late 90’s Alien look.  There are pipes, exposed steel, ladders to different levels, creepy spaceship design, eerie corridors, a giant cross shaped window on the bridge and other shit.  The room with the gravity drive and the gravity drive itself though are masterpieces.  But first in order to enter that room there’s a spinning tunnel that you need to walk through like what you would find in a fun house except this one’s lined with enormous sharp blades.  They even dub it the “meat grinder”.  The gravity drive room is a huge domed space with massive spikes sticking out of the walls.  Why do they need these spikes?  Because it’s supposed to look fucking scary and cool.  The drive has a Hellraiser puzzle box kinda look to it which is what the filmmakers were going for.  The reveal of it with those lighted rings spinning around the extremely large ball that line up just for a second to flash you in the face is incredible.  This is the bad guy folks.  I mean the whole ship is the bad guy but this is its heart.  And the design makes you wonder.  Throughout the movie you think “who the fuck designed this creepy ass fucking spaceship?”  But it’s not distracting.  I think it totally works as menacing atmosphere that helps to make you feel a bit uncomfortable.  It’s like the ship was designed by Satan. 

Essentially the idea of the plot is that the Event Horizon went to hell and when it came back it was endowed with certain powers and became alive.  That may sound like a spoiler but it’s not.  The ship is fucking with our characters the whole time so it’s not a surprise.  This is a horror movie and like most horror movies it’s not about an intricate plot.  It’s about presentation and being smart enough to know how to build tension.  Anderson gives us a very nice picture to look at and is even able to fill that picture with characters that aren’t annoying.  These people are very likable and you want to see them get through this ordeal.  But what Anderson also does is take away our hope little by little until we have practically nothing left.  Again, this is typical for most horror flicks but it works a little better than usual here because there are other elements that fall into place.

Here are some cool things about this film.  The portrayal of the future is really practical in this and I dig that.  Like the Event Horizon uses CD’s or DVD’s to record their ships log (instead of the minidisc craze that was going on at the time.  Remember that shit?  They were used in The Matrix, Strange Days and Last Action Hero), there are still things like regular cigarettes, still photographs, bulky cumbersome spacesuits, flight suits and air scrubbers for breathable air.  And without knowing it the filmmakers predicted the iPad.  There are at least two scenes showing what looks exactly like an iPad doing exactly what an iPad can do like play video and skype or facetime.  And I want to take a minute to acknowledge this because it’s actually kind of unbelievable.  This thing they made up for a sci-fi movie in 1997 (that few people saw by the way, it did not do well at the box office) was supposed to seem really futuristic and like blue sky technology but it exists now.  Less than thirteen years later that device would be invented and used exactly the way it’s shown in the film.  That’s fucking amazing.  Do you think that’s where the folks at Apple got the idea?  Who the fuck knows.  Some other cool things are the river of blood homage to The Shining, two homages to Alien with a close-up of Kathleen Quinlan’s hand coming out of an opening from a lower floor and a scene where the crew is positioned the same way as in Alien while they discuss their situation in a circular room with an alcove, there aren’t any horrible subplots or a superfluous love story, the models and actual sets look good.  The filmmakers did come up with some other archetypal sci-fi stuff like a scanner that detects life forms, sleeping tubes for long distance space travel and a spaceship that can create a black hole. 

 

With all of that good shit this picture is still missing something though.  The CGI is fucking atrocious but that’s not really it.  There was a whole bunch of footage that was cut out because the studio deemed that is was too gory, too violent and too long, like 30 minutes too long.  That’s a shit load of shit to have to cut out of your movie.  This is probably the main reason why the film leaves you with a funny feeling.  We were supposed to see more of where the ship had been, essentially in a Hellraiser type world where people are perpetually tortured in brutal ways.  I think having that in the picture would’ve helped to classify and be unambiguous about just how evil this shit is that we’re dealing with.  Apparently there was also a whole sequence that first introduced Miller and his crew out on a different rescue mission.  That’s something that should have been cut.  I’m happy that didn’t make it in because we understand who these people are and what they’re all about just fine.  But I’m curious about what else could’ve been tweaked.  Exploring each character’s back story instead of just Miller’s would’ve been nice.  Maybe a problem is that we don’t see Weir crazy enough for long enough?  The ending is certainly rushed.  It’s one of those typical situations where once the bad guy gets his full ultimate power he’s foiled immediately.   Whenever that happens I always think the villain kinda looks like a buffoon.   Like he just got his shit together and should be unstoppable but somehow he’s easier to defeat than ever.  Back to the movie, overall it feels like there was too much cut out in the final edit.  I like how quickly the story moves though so there’s this conundrum of running time and, setup and explaining shit.  I’m not sure.  All the components by themselves are good but they just don’t add up to be totally satisfying.

I think this is a very cool picture nonetheless.  The blending of Alien, The Shining, The Haunting and Hellraiser works much better than you would expect.  If the script and the final movie were worked out a little more this would be a bona fide classic.  Anderson did a damn good job and progressed into a decent filmmaker by this point.  It was a good move for him to take a chance on this picture than direct X-Men.  A few years later he got his own franchise anyway with Resident Evil.  A Paul W.S. Anderson X-Men probably would’ve been awful but at the same time it might’ve turned out more fun than Singer’s.  Whatever, Event Horizon is definitely a good time but ultimately leaves you a little flat.  I really wonder what would have been if Anderson got final cut.