2047: Virtual Revolution
It felt like this was trying to be one of those litRPG stories in cinematic form. Or Blade Runner with updated tech. Pass on this.
The Colony (2013)
Paint by numbers zombie smash and grab, in an arctic-weather apocalypse. Also pass on this.
Sunshine
I watched this while I was high on Vicodin (LEGALLY) from my shoulder surgery, so I’m misremembering a lot of this. A “deliver the Macguffin” film, though honestly exploding a super bomb inside the sun, so that it works right, isn’t quite so Macguffin-y. There was a scene where the Chinese woman’s space garden was set on fire and I was upset.
Trigun: Badlands Rumble
Ah ha! Something good here. Vash deals with the bank robber Gasback, twenty years after he interfered (in Vash’s own way) with one of Gasback’s heists, letting his henchmen get away with all the money. Utterly chaotic and detailed animation, mostly hand-drawn, and a pretty good English dub. The entire movie is up on Youtube.
Jupiter Ascending
This shares shelf space with John Carter, being a very ambitious, well-funded sci-fi fantasy epic with a vast narrative, made for sequel treatments. People never took to it. Some good high-tech chase scenes and humor about alien bureaucracies, scattered among disjointed dialog and character motivations.
Shanghai Fortress
Another Chinese export. Something of a standard alien invasion story; not as good as The Wandering Earth, but it wasn’t a bad watch. This was another Vicodin movie so you can feel free to doubt my assessment.
Aniara
A ship full of civilian Martian colonizers veers off course, and they spend the whole movie trying to get back. There’s also an AI on board that helps people go into some kind of waking trance state to help them relax, and as the ship’s situation worsens, AI turns the weird factor up to 11. Far future ending, which I like. One thing I wanted to really harp on is the inciting action. Usually I’ll give a story one or two really big coincidences or disasters, then the action has to continue within some scale of believability. Aniara really comes close to the edge for me here: one rather minor collision with space junk and the entire mission is in jeopardy. A spaceflight of that level of significance would have a dozen contingency plans if an admittedly rare collision happened. Are you telling me no one accounted for getting those people to Mars if one bad thing happened? I’d like to speak to the manager.
Knowing
Nicolas Cage is kind of cheesy, so are “stop the apocalypse” stories, but I enjoyed this one, and good on him for avoiding a lot of the usual industry churn (for all of its turbo-degeneracy, add on “boring stories” and “wasting peoples’ time and money” to the list of Hollywood offenses). This wasn’t typical of American studios, because (SPOILER) the apocalypse did happen and just about everyone died, and there was a genuine narrative curveball during the resolution.
Mad Max: Fury Road
Vicodin movie. It was okay; some really great visuals and action sequences. The story was nothing like the Mel Gibson installments. I don’t know the entire history of the casting/production, and I don’t care to really research it. Gibson is problematic in Hollywood circles, and although Gibson’s character (Max Rockatansky) is in the film, I don’t doubt that the director and writers would want to distance themselves from the original material.
Lady in the Water
This would be a better movie if M. Night Shamalamadingdong Shyamalan didn’t direct it. Not because he’s bad at it (he definitely isn’t), but at the time of this release, his style was starting to really wearing thin for audiences. They knew to expect the unexpected, which he delivered. This was in 2006, and I think the industry was really starting to look for hyper-edgy and graphic material. Shyamalan’s style doesn’t quite cut it in that arena.
2 Comments
I saw Virtual Revolution; it’s on YouTube somewhere with the title intro removed, so I never knew the name of it. I thought it was okay; the underlying philosophical questions were worth watching a movie that was just okay. Jupiter Ascending sounds like it might be okay, as does Knowing. The original Mad Max was a farce in the first place; the story got steadily less interesting as the series wore on, and bigger star power didn’t help a bit. Only a few funny lines are memorable from the whole series. You can keep the rest of the films listed here.
Maybe I will re-watch Virtual Revolution. Not being heffed up might change my perception, or at least help me remember it better.
Jupiter Ascending was good. I watched it twice. The love story in it wasn’t too terrible as far those things can go in action movies, though it was a bit predictable.