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Reviews
Gravity (2013)
It's no Jurassic Park
Gravity, in my opinion, is everything that is wrong with cinema today. The notion that a spectacle will more than make up for a void where a story should be is a ridiculous one, yet one that is employed time and again when making these 'blockbuster' films. I watched Gravity on a 15inch MacBook and it was so depressing that once it had ended I drank a bottle of cheap red wine mid afternoon and watched a weeks worth of Come Dine With Me so I didn't feel my whole Sunday was wasted. Would it have made the experience more enjoyable had the bits of satellite shrapnel floated around my front room and Sandra Bullock's heads up display really had been heads up? Probably. Would I have still got drunk and tried to forget about the whole thing afterwards? Definitely, only I wouldn't have had to wait until the morning to get a headache, cheers 3D. This film is painfully dull and yet it is set in space, the coolest location for a film in the world (joke). Just because you can CGI up a convincing globe doesn't mean that it's all I want to look at for two hours. Though arguably after the 110th thing goes wrong for whatever Sandra Bullock's character is called, and the film just becomes one long moan, you couldn't care less what you're looking at anyway.
The point however is not that Gravity is poor, the point is that cinema has become a waste of time. I learned nothing from Gravity other than the Russians are stupid, the Russians drink Vodka in space, the Russians don't put fuel in their space craft, and the Russian space suits aren't as white as the American ones. What was happening on screen didn't matter as I couldn't have cared less about the two astronauts. I didn't believe that that many things could go wrong for one woman, I didn't believe the escape module would sink, I didn't believe they'd let an emotionally unstable woman in to space, and I certainly didn't believe that when Sandra Bullock stood up at the end it merited the drama of when Dr Grant first saw the Diplodocus in Jurassic Park. I didn't believe any of these things because not once was I invited to care, because this is a shallow film from a poor storyteller that suffices only to prove what a shallow and poor audience bankrolls modern cinema.
One star, or infinite stars. Depending on how good your TV is.
Pandemic (2016)
Who even am 'I' supposed to be?
Arguably the 4.6 Pandemic (2016) has on IMDB is a little harsh, though really it is to expected. Whilst it is a much better stab at the Zombie slasher than many attempts, it is confusing, nauseating and a gross waste of evident budget and acting calibre. However, this film makes big claims and so has to watched at least. The case states the following:
'Pandemic is like nothing you have ever witnessed before. Shot in a completely revolutionary 'First Person Perspective' Pandemic makes YOU the star of the movie. YOU fire every shot and YOU throw every punch.'
'The only hope for a cure is for YOU to lead a team into the field to rescue survivors...'
It would appear that whoever wrote this back of the case blurb was unaware of two vitally important things 1) Lady in the Lake (1947) and 2) what actually happens in Pandemic. Indeed, the very same technique was employed by Robert Montgomery in his ambitious, brilliant, but painfully flawed Lady in the Lake. Shot in 1947, when the uninterrupted use of a subjective camera was actually 'revolutionary', Montgomery invites 'You' to solve a murder mystery with him as the camera takes the place of detective Montgomery. Therefore, and regardless of what the packaging says, Pandemic is not revolutionary in the slightest, and anyone ignorant of the history in his field would be well advised to band about terms such as 'revolutionary' with extreme caution. Moreover, some knowledge of what had preceded Pandemic would have seen improvements in the product manifest beyond its cover, as the film itself exhibits many of the flaws suffered by the sibling 69 years its senior.
One of the main problems (of which there were many) faced by Lady in the Lake is the strange position the audience finds itself in. We are to solve a mystery with Montgomery, and yet we find ourselves, visually at least, in place of Montgomery. We are neither Montgomery nor not Montgomery, we are seeing what he is seeing, yet overtly aware of not seeing him. We have his eyes, sometimes his hands, but we are with him and not him. It is a confusing relationship held between Lady in the Lake and its audience, one which resulted in unfair dismissal of the subjective camera by many critics, and a fairer though unfortunate dismissal of the film. All that said, at least the 'You' in Lady in the Lake meant us, and whilst there may have been confusion with our relationship to Montgomery and his co-stars, we were still 'us' and free to figure all that out for ourselves. Pandemic and its premise however bring about a new level of confusion regarding the 'You' and the 'I' of its attempted sharing of subjective experience.
The 'You' referred to so excitedly on the cover of Pandemic explicitly indicates that 'I' am to lead a team into the field to rescue survivors, the product of such an excursion somehow being a cure for the infection that earned the film its name. Holes in the concept become immediately apparent when 'I' am a camera in a smart phone looking at female protagonist Dr. Lauren Case. Granting benefit of the doubt, one is able to excuse this odd occurrence as it is Dr. Case' phone and the film uses personal cameras to obtain its footage. However things become undeniably farcical when 'I' become a cantankerous drill sergeant staring at Dr. Case as 'I' complain about something, not even wearing the odd apparatus that contains the personal camera. And the farce gains momentum as 'I' become an array of cctv cameras, an angry colleague, a dead colleague, another colleague, sometimes I don't even know what 'I' am as a result of crazed cutting and bizarre content, though I am certainly not leading a team into a field of any kind. At least I don't think 'I' am. By the time the film had ended I wished that 'I' had fallen victim to the infection early on in the saga and escaped lightly with an early death, as I feel the brain damage suffered by a 'level 5' would have damaged my brain far less than trying to make sense of what Pandemic presented before me.
A few cool shots, a few interesting ideas, but ultimately trite and stupid.