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Zone 414 (2021)
Ambitious BR clone but fails to entertain on any level.
There's been a lot of Blade Runner influenced movies since the 80s but this has to be one of the most blatant, sure it's impressive on some levels like the close up shots and the overall colour and lighting aesthetics but the wider shots reveal poor unoriginal set design, chuck in some neon strips and some old stock analogue equipment, pillars with some bust statues and hey presto instant Blade Runner and the landscape shots look perhaps one step above computer game quality.
Story and character wise, we've seen this a million times now, the crazy megalomaniac who wants to change the world, the beat down ex cop with a sad back story yawn. As this all plods along you become more and more disconnected from the story and its bland execution.
I guess the creators tried to cash in on the hunger that exists for more of the Blade Runner universe with a very limited budget and unfortunately a very limited imagination and script.
A Pointless exercise in plagiarism.
Syriana (2005)
Vague, convoluted, boring political drama with an ethical message or something?
A CIA operative, Clooney sells a missile launcher and a car blows up and he seems to have done something his superiors don't like.
Two oil companies merge causing some sort of political/financial dilemma. An Arabic Prince gets insulted by some big wig American who seems to work in the shadows/controls the oil industry or something?
A top financial US advisor of some sort, played by Damon vaguely warns the Arabians of the implications of such a merger and that the Chinese and other super powers are somehow a danger I think?
Then the advisors young son drowns in a pool at a party the Arabians arranged and life just goes on it appears?
Non Arabic oil workers are told they have no jobs anymore and have to leave the country ASAP, they live in terrible conditions.
Then they are beaten at the immigration office for speaking out of turn by nasty security guards with guns.
All of this and more subplots are happening with zero clarity, the dialogue seems to be written for those that are either are high up in the world of stocks/shares and the oil market, the political affairs of the Middle East and the US etc or either that I'm as thick as two planks or maybe I just zoned out as the characters were about as interesting as the dull and vague plots presented here.
Ultimately, this movie tries to be a clever political thriller but gives you no anchor from the outset, it just confuses and bores you, the shaky camera work and odd editing do not help much either.
If it achieved one thing, it was that it managed to put me in a bad mood within roughly thirty minutes. At this point I had to reach for the stop button. I'm usually a very patient viewer and enjoy slow moving movies that doesn't rely on heavy exposition to tell a story but the execution of the story was puzzling and this was a puzzle I had no desire to complete.
Dave Made a Maze (2017)
A unique and ambitious concept but fails to deliver.
At the start of this movie I kind of chuckled at the idea of a grown man connecting with his inner child while being left alone in his apartment for a few days and creating a maze that took over the main living room and a life of its own.
It seemed I was in for a quirky comedy with good characters, laughs & maybe some mad cap adventures but as the film progressed it failed to deliver any of these sadly.
I found it difficult to see where its audience is truly aimed at? The main theme has a very childlike imagination feel yet there are lots of adult humour & bad language and cartoonish gore spread throughout so it is not suitable for younger audiences while most adults would find the story hard to connect with.
Overall it felt like a movie for a very specific demographic, pseudo hipster gaming geeks that swear at their computer screens.
Sometimes, being visually unique and inventive doesn't equate to great entertainment.
Hostiles (2017)
I became more hostile towards Hollywood after this
There is so much wrong with this movie,
It tries so hard to tell a compelling human story of conflict, redemption, hate & love etc but fails on every level.
The troubled dynamic between Bales Character as a hate filled calvary sergeant & the Indian Chief is non existent, both are cliched and have zero personality, their conversations are barely functional which is a totally missed opportunity to give the terrible ending any foundation of believability/credibility.
The movie desperately tries to ram a politically correct message yet at the same time delivers cliched and offensive stereotypes. The attacking bad native Americans howling like they did in the Westerns of the 40's & 50's?
It tries desperately to make you feel empathy for all of the characters but you just don't care. There's lots of mumbling dialogue from various calvary members who spill their hearts out about the effects of the atrocities they've done & seen, usually while its raining or after some miserable event, only to be killed off once they've made their peace with someone.
I don't mind movies being slow paced but this drags on & on with repeating themes.
I cannot believe I managed to sit through the full duration, from the opening scene and how that played out I sensed I was watching something deeply flawed, I guess a morbid sense of curiosity kept me there.
Ultimately the message is that we can all change and leave hate behind, particularly if we are white.
Run All Night (2015)
Bad Santa meets Taken
I'd rather have the runs all night than watch this again.
It was out of morbid curiosity that got me to the halfway point.
So you are supposed to root and care for Nesson's character in this
mess of a movie? He's a drunken ex hit man. But he's only killed the
bad guys for his gang boss who is a sort moralistic crime lord, so its
Ok to empathise with him.
Nesson's son is a good guy, running a local boxing club, you know this because he tries to help a local black kid with advice about staying out of trouble in this tough neighbourhood, he has disowned his drunken ex hitman dad who behaves inappropriately to women while doing Santa at a Christmas get together.
Anyway, you know the plot already, beat up old Nesson gets a chance to redeem himself and win his son back by killing more bad guys! Mmm, isn't this the reason his son disowned his dad in the first place?
The plot is driven by a serious of unbelievable coincidences, and for someone who is an alcoholic bum Nesson is able to take out people with incredible accuracy and style, I'm surprised they didn't use some Matrix style bullet time as this film is too ridiculous to take serious but it takes itself too serious to even laugh at it.
Utter garbage! It seems clear that this was aimed to fill a gap and make more money from the kinda people that enjoy the Taken movies.
Prometheus (2012)
All grandeur, no substance and pushing the boundaries of suspension of disbelief
From the very opening sequence I knew something was wrong with the "Prometheus" storyline.
What if in the original "Alien" you were shown the warrior at The very beginning? In Prometheus there's a missed opportunity for a much better reveal of the space jockey later in the movie.
If the movie is about a quest to discover who created us or where we come from etc, it leaves the audience with no mystery from the outset. The audience should be going on the ride with the characters in the movie.
The opening sequence raises some serious questions.
We see the humanoid who clearly likes pumping iron in his spare time somehow spreading its DNA into a stream somewhere on earth thousands, if not millions of years ago, which suggests its by design to create a life form on earth similar to themselves?
We are then taken into the near future where a group of scientist/archaeologists find a cave drawing of our ancestors communicating with the same alien life forms, which also gives them the location of an alien port somewhere in deep space.
This suggests that the humanoids have been travelling back and forth to earth to keep an eye on human progress. So why would they give earthlings a map of how to find them if they could already travel through space themselves? And why did they create another race on another planet? And then when the other race do finally develop the technology to travel through space to find them they are extremely hostile towards them?
Here's a few key moments in "Prometheus" that are pointless or defy logic:
If the humanoid life forms that created the face huggers and Warriors are so intelligent surely they could have devised a better way of containing/controlling them?
The awful comic relief with the two unrealistic guys left behind in the alien craft only for one of them to appear later as some sort of crazed killing zombie? The holographic recording of the space jockey's trying to escape along with the alien head being briefly re-animated only to explode like a shot watermelon, these scenes were clearly just added to give a bit of spectacle during the slower moving parts of the movie.
The sub plot of the main protagonist "Elizabeth" a rather second rate Ripley and her inability to have children, only later to be secretly impregnated with some new form of face hugger, was a feeble attempt of giving the scene an emotional edge, and for her to have a good reason use that auto operational device that was introduced earlier.
How the android "David" can somehow decipher the alien language? He's a computer/machine, machines only work from what information humans have inputed. Up to this point the only communication humans had with the alien life forms where thousands of years ago, which at this point the English language or any language wasn't even developed?
The ageing and clearly ill Weyland hidden on board the ship with a team of experts, the two years in hypersleep almost killed the clearly healthy and young crew at the beginning? plus surely in reality he would not risk going out there until he got news that it was safe to do so, conveniently he is really old so he has nothing to lose I guess?
The wakening up of the humanoid after thousands of years of hypersleep and his immediate bursts from the cryo chamber in an energetic and aggressive rage, still with his muscular physique? I know he may be a little cranky after waking up an all but it takes me at least five minutes before I have the energy to take a pee never mind bursting into full on combat after sleeping for thousands of years.
The crew of "Prometheus" happily flying their ship into the Alien craft to stop it from heading to earth, absolutely no emotion or reality of any kind in that scene. Again why if the alien created us would it want to return to earth to destroy us? Then again he had witnessed how soulless and annoying we had all become ; )
The pointless battle between the new octopus face hugger and the space jockey and then the even more pointless chest buster scene, come on!! We all know the purpose of the face hugger.
Why did the android character "David" try to kill "Elizabeth" earlier and then decide to help her at the end? And the two of them flying off in the Alien craft? What the hell is she going to live on? Anyway Logic would say, lets fly this thing back to earth and warn everyone not to go anywhere near these creeps and get the Weyland corp to spend trillions on defending earth from this new found alien threat, not flying off with no weapons, supplies, recovering from a major operation and nothing but a talking head for Christ sake.
So I feel that "Prometheus" is just another reason for Hollywood to cash in on its past glories, knowing that there is a hunger for something new and exiting in the Alien series which this clearly failed to deliver, fortunately Ridley Scott's direction is the only thing that keeps you Stimulated for the duration.
Overall "Prometheus" fails with its poor script, massive plot holes and obvious plot devices,lack of tension, poor pacing/editing, its pointless need to add grandiose special effect sequences, along with its poorly developed characters and often cringe inducing dialogue, oh! and its rather generic music score.
Ultimately all this leaves me wondering how can a team of so called creative writers, producers and a class A director sit around a room and all decide that these are great ideas?