Category Archives: Review

Doomsday

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Sometime in 2002 I saw Dog Soldiers. I’d never laughed that much during a horror flick, and I don’t really ‘do’ horror flicks, either I have an over-active imagination or I’m just a wuss, discuss after class. Anyway, I loved Dog Soldiers and was excited at the time to hear the British writer/director (Neil Marshall) was planning to make a trio of movies. That turned into dissapointment when I heard about The Descent, I knew that I really didn’t want to watch that one.

Then earlier this year I saw a trailer for Doomsday and thought it looked fun, and only later did I find out it’s the 3rd of the trio of movies that Neil planned, and that increased my anticipation. I didn’t manage to catch it at the cinema, but after seeing the trailer, reading one review and enjoying Dog Soldiers I bought it on DVD sure that I’d enjoy it.

I wasn’t disappointed. Doomsday is an unrepentant homage to Mad Max and Escape from LA/New York, a small twist of 28 weeks/days later and a hint of Reign of Fire thrown in for good measure. It’s not a serious movie, if you’re looking for something serious you need to look somewhere else. But it’s not a comedy either, it’s just a little bit over the top, that’s all!

In the not too distant future, Scotland is struck by a deadly virus and is quarantined and locked away behind a steel wall. Thirty years pass by, and the rest of the world assumes everyone north of the wall has died. Then the unthinkable happens and the virus returns, this time in London. There’s no choice but to send someone beyond the wall to see if there are any survivors and maybe a cure.

It’s a simple story, with some very minor twists (which are pretty obvious from the outset). The script isn’t elegant but it’s engaging, didn’t make me cringe and has some funny moments. The action sequences are superb, although some of the close quarters fighting is edited with some pretty swift cuts. It adds some style but I wonder what it was used to hide. None of the characters really stand out and step up beyond the cookie cutter description of them, but it doesn’t detract a great deal, this is never billed as a character story. There’s enough empathy with one or two of the characters to feel a bit of pain when they snuff it. I would have liked the film to be about 20 minutes longer and to show a little more interaction between some of the major players, but overall thought the pace was pretty good.

It’s a huge cliche, but it’s true to say this film won’t win any awards. It’s not as good as Dog Soldiers, but it’s hard not to enjoy the Britishness of the script and the dialog. It certainly pushes home (to me at least) how American the dialog in our regular staple of movies is (I know, obvious but I felt it was worth saying).

Overall I enjoyed the viewing experience, I had a few laughs, and the imagery in the movie was like an old friend. If you like apocolyptic sci-fi action fantasy comedy heroic action movies, you’ll like this!

The Fifth Element

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Fifth Element is an excellent science fiction action love story (girl dies, gets reborn, girl meets boy, boy falls in love, boy and girl save the world) with amazing visuals, excellent dialog, enaging action sequences and a lot of heart.

Cloverfield

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So I’m late to the party. We watched Cloverfield on TV this evening (it won out over Juno). It’s engaging, fresh and interesting. It wasn’t too tense for me (I’m a wuss) which was pleasing. The dialog and acting were superb I have to say, it really did feel like it was being shot live and the actors didn’t know what was going on.

But (and it’s a big but) I hate the camera work. For me it detracts 100% from the movie going experience. I understand the whole style and the entire intent of the film is wrapped up in that style, but I was just constantly dragged out of the experience by the camera work.

I really do understand how it adds atmosphere, and that the drama of the scenes were enhanced because of the style, but for me, I hate it. There, I said it.

So, Cloverfield, if you can stand the camera work, it’s really good, if you’re like me, it’ll just bug you.

Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits

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I guess this is sort of a review. I blogged a short while ago that I was reading a Constantine graphic novel (Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits, an anthology), and I promised to maybe let you know if I enjoyed it. So here I am. Dangerous Habits is the comic from which one of the main threads of the Constantine movie is taken, and there are a couple of other minor references in the movie to this anthology. I wanted to read this anthology as my introduction to the Hellblazer world exactly because it was the movie that got me interested in the character.

That was probably a mistake. Dangerous Habits is not, it would appear, a typical collection of Hellblazer stories. It’s enjoyable, and I wanted to finish the material, but I got the immediate feeling that this was really a transition period in Constantine’s life and not a regular story about his world.

The artwork is okay, I’m really not that enthused about comic / graphic novel artwork, I guess I’m more interested in the story and characterisation, hence my tendency towards regular fiction. I found myself focussing on the words, and really not looking that much at the art. Every few pages I would encourage myself to go back and look at the pictures. Maybe I’m so used to having to use my own imagination 100% to form images around the words I’m reading, I’m just not used to having them presented for me. I love movies, so I obviously have no problem watching someone else’s visualisation, but if I’m reading words on a page, I’m really not expecting someone else to present images showing me how things look.

Anyway, I found the writing ok, the overall storyline is interesting and the side-characters were interesting. However, I found both showdowns between Constantine and the Forces of Darkness to be lacklustre and without logic. Supreme evil isn’t necessarily entirely stupid. Of the two showdowns, the first, smaller one was the most absurd and beyond logic and destroyed any credibility the story had for me. The final one simply iced the cake, and although I can see where it was coming from and what it was trying to do, I just didn’t feel it was given enough context for it to be viable.

Now, this may be entirely because I’ve not read anything else in the Hellblazer universe, maybe the way the enemy behaved is entirely in-character and in-keeping with it’s normal behaviour, but if that is the case then Constantine has an easy life.

Overall, maybe I picked the wrong entry into Hellblazer, but this was a disappointing purchase which provided a few hours of diversion but no real feeling of satisfaction.

I have Hellblazer: Bloodlines, another anthology which I’m intending to read as well, and hopefully I’ll see some of the material which causes so much enthusiasm among the fans.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

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Hellboy II: The Golden Army is the second del Toro Hellboy film, and it assumes you’ve seen the first one. There’s no setup, hardly any introduction (there’s a little bit) and it gets straight into the action. I like that, if you wanted character intro’s for the lesser characters you had the chance to watch the first one before you went to the cinema.

HB2TGA (can’t spend the entire review writing Hellboy II: The Golden Army) is visually amazing. I believe; I believe this stuff exists somewhere and del Toro just took a camera along. The special effects make this film work, they make you truly believe. The pace is good although the overall film felt a little shorter than I would have liked. The script is snappy and isn’t going to impress your literature teacher, but if you went in to this movie expecting anything deep, you weren’t watching the same trailers as me in advance. Character interplay is solid enough, however I think the Liz Sherman character was underused. There’s a shot towards the end of the movie with her and Abe standing around looking useless while Hellboy and another character do their thing, and I wondered if it wouldn’t have been possible to use her a bit more.

Speaking of ‘another character’, there’s a new addition to the team in this outing and he’s entertaining and interesting, but I do wonder if it detracted from the original team of three a little – I always get edgy when movies have too many main players.

The action scenes are excellent overall, and we get to see Hellboy showing more than just ‘crush ’em’ type combat skills, which was nice. Despite several good goes there still wasn’t much of a sense of threat to Hellboy or the major players though; but there were some subtle references to his destiny and Liz having to make some choices that may affect it.

There are two particularly good comic sequences (more than two in the movie, but two stand out) which had most of the cinema laughing out loud.

The bad guy is multi-faceted and well played, there is certainly no caricature of evil here, but a complex individual with specific morals and the drive to obtain his desire at the expense of the human race. I had read a review or two complaining about the ‘echo-warrior’ bandwagon, which is basically complete tosh. The sentiment expressed by the Elven Prince is a long-standing theme in celtic fantasy and celtic real-world crossover fantasy in particular. The elven princess is equally well played in my view and entrancing.

I came home after seeing it, determined to write a blog post about people releasing trailers containing footage not in the final movie and how it annoys me. There was, I believed, a shot in one of the trailers I’d seen of the Prince in a room full of other elves and mythical beings calling for war and being given a good reception. It implied the Prince had a lot of backing and support, and that was missing from the film (you’ll see). So I got in, and watched all three trailers – and of course the scene isn’t there. I can see why I got that impression, and I recognised all the bits they had put together. I don’t know if they intentionally decided to give that view, when it’s not there in the film, but I guess I can’t complain about entire scenes that were missing when they never existed in the first place. It does say something interesting about how trailers and moving images can leave vivid impressions about something that never existed.

Anyway, this is a high quality movie with stunning visuals, a more than average complexity villain and some real laugh out loud moments interspersed with exciting action. If you can only go and see one movie this year, go and see The Dark Knight, but if you can see two, make this one a choice high up on the list.

The Dark Knight

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My advice is, go and see The Dark Knight in the cinema. I echo Mark’s view that we should make sure good quality blockbuster movies (as opposed to low quality blockbuster movies) continue to get made because people are prepared to go and see them in the cinema. You do need to see this on the big screen to do it full justice, but it’s a solid, character driven movie with depth and quality acting that will work well in any format.

The Dark Knight is the second Nolan directed Batman movie and is without a doubt the darkest of any Batman movie to-date. This is no jolly on-screen action romp, no adrenaline fueled crazy rush of action, it’s a dramatic, well paced, solid and dark look into heroes, heroics and sacrifice. This is a modern, real Gotham city filled with modern and real people. There’s just that edge of decay that makes sure you know it’s Gotham but it could be anywhere in our current time, the story is contemporary and the people and emotions are built on a foundation of reality that makes the violence and horror of the Joker even more dreadful.

Heath is fantastic as The Joker, but he’s not a god. His performance is fantastic because the backdrop on which it plays out is also fantastic, everyone around him puts in amazing performances to make sure he doesn’t steal every scene. Bale is excellent, giving us a flawed and emotionally torn Batman without turning him into a caricature, and his counterplay with Heath is totally engaging. The story is as you would expect, a slight parallel to the first Batman movie (and probably some of the comics, although I’ve never read them), The Joker taking on the Mob, the City and Batman all together. There are no major flaws, although there are one or two places where I wonder if we missed an edit or are supposed to have to read between the lines a little.

The pace is good despite a slow start which worried me. There’s not as much direct action as I was expecting, and far more personal drama which is no bad thing. What action there is feels deadly enough and The Joker’s body count is certainly high enough to give the story an edge and a feeling of danger. All of the major characters see character development of one kind or another, and there doesn’t feel like any wasted space on screen or wasted time with any particular person. The dialog is dramatic without being melodramatic, and there are some really nice touches and emotional triggers (which I won’t spoil for you).

I was slightly dissapointed with the Bat Pod and one or two ‘moves’ felt pretty contrived (the wall flip) but it didn’t detract from my overall enjoyment, I just hope we get a new Batmobile in the next one (assuming there is going to be a next one). It’s a tiny complaint in what is otherwise a really, really enjoyable flick.

The end is simply brilliant in my view, simple, honest and deeply satisfying.

It doesn’t quite live up to the insane hype, but then what movie could; it does however deliver an excellent and entertaining 2 and a half hours of dramatic quality movie going fun.