Yesterday is an entertaining sci-fi movie. It's very near to being an excellent film, and in fact is a vast improvement on many recent Hollywood sci-fi flicks. It works really well because the science-fiction takes a back seat to realism and characters.
Yesterday is well acted by the entire cast. It's slow moving, and has a lot more in common with say Heat or Pulp Fiction than your I-Robots or your Serenity's, which may put people off a little. Characters reveal themselves in totality gradually, avoiding you from being able to figure out the entire plot machinations like you could in a more obvious movie.
Action in the movie though sparse is terrific, handled brilliantly from a point of direction and filled with power and excitement. Very few outlandish special effects are used outside of explosions, all of which serves to ground it further in reality.
It's unfortunate then that the film is written in such a way that whenever something big needs to happen, reality gets thrown out of the window. The last twenty minutes turn the film into some over-the-top slasher type premise as serial-killer Goliath systematically demolishes the entire cast other than the two key leads. This is honestly intensely frustrating, as the movie bears the unfortunate hallmark of some Asian cinema that the leads are a little difficult to relate to. It's nowhere near as bad as the earlier Natural City, where I seriously didn't care about anybody in the entire cast, but the main female lead is really bland, and consistently out-shined by the other key female character May, who is preposterously killed off in a frustratingly stupid fashion in the final sequences, almost like Wash in Serenity. You'll watch this and think 'God, you could've sent her off a bit better than that, she would've easily dodged that'. I can't help but feel she got written out so the audience would concentrate on the central lead instead.
This is a good movie, and outside of the way it happens, the end is satisfying. If it wasn't for the slightly desperate final 20 minutes then this could've been a contender for one of the best films I've watched this year. Unfortunately this movie spends 100 minutes as a police thriller then turns into a cheesy slasher movie in the last 20. The ending is great from a story point of view, but the actual events feel more Freddy vs Jason than the Seven meets Heat thriller the rest of the film serves up. It's definitely worth a watch, but be warned it is long, slow and the ending is like suddenly skipping channels mid-film.
Yesterday is well acted by the entire cast. It's slow moving, and has a lot more in common with say Heat or Pulp Fiction than your I-Robots or your Serenity's, which may put people off a little. Characters reveal themselves in totality gradually, avoiding you from being able to figure out the entire plot machinations like you could in a more obvious movie.
Action in the movie though sparse is terrific, handled brilliantly from a point of direction and filled with power and excitement. Very few outlandish special effects are used outside of explosions, all of which serves to ground it further in reality.
It's unfortunate then that the film is written in such a way that whenever something big needs to happen, reality gets thrown out of the window. The last twenty minutes turn the film into some over-the-top slasher type premise as serial-killer Goliath systematically demolishes the entire cast other than the two key leads. This is honestly intensely frustrating, as the movie bears the unfortunate hallmark of some Asian cinema that the leads are a little difficult to relate to. It's nowhere near as bad as the earlier Natural City, where I seriously didn't care about anybody in the entire cast, but the main female lead is really bland, and consistently out-shined by the other key female character May, who is preposterously killed off in a frustratingly stupid fashion in the final sequences, almost like Wash in Serenity. You'll watch this and think 'God, you could've sent her off a bit better than that, she would've easily dodged that'. I can't help but feel she got written out so the audience would concentrate on the central lead instead.
This is a good movie, and outside of the way it happens, the end is satisfying. If it wasn't for the slightly desperate final 20 minutes then this could've been a contender for one of the best films I've watched this year. Unfortunately this movie spends 100 minutes as a police thriller then turns into a cheesy slasher movie in the last 20. The ending is great from a story point of view, but the actual events feel more Freddy vs Jason than the Seven meets Heat thriller the rest of the film serves up. It's definitely worth a watch, but be warned it is long, slow and the ending is like suddenly skipping channels mid-film.