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Quick Cuts: What’s Your Favorite Science Fiction Movie?

Posted in 1950s Movies, 1970s Movies, 2012, Aliens, Apes!, Apocalyptic Films, Classic Films, Dystopian Futures, Quick Cuts, ROBOTS!, Science Fiction with tags , , , , , on June 22, 2012 by knifefighter

QUICK CUTS-  Favorite Science Fiction Movie
With Michael Arruda, L.L. Soares, Nick Cato, Mark Onspaugh and Garrett Cook

 

With the recent release of PROMETHEUS (2012), audiences got to watch a big release science fiction movie—the first in a while.

Today our panel of Cinema Knife Fighters is asked:  What’s your favorite science fiction movie of all-time?

*****

MICHAEL ARRUDA:

Several films jump out at me right away.  Three of my all-time favorite science fiction movies are from the 1950s:  THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956), and THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951), with THE THING probably my favorite of the three.

From the 1960s it’s PLANET OF THE APES (1968), from the 70s it’s ALIEN (1979), and that’s about it.  I realize these are pretty standard picks, but they happen to be the ones I like the most.

My favorite of all time?  I’d probably go with PLANET OF THE APES.  I actually saw it at the movies when I was four years old!  So, it’s been in my consciousness for a long, long time!”

 *****

GARRETT COOK:

My favorite sci-fi movie of all time is FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956). It retells Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” in the space age, and deals with the destructive power of repression and anger. Anne Francis is stunning, Walter Pidgeon is anguished and Leslie Nielsen is a surprisingly effective space hero.

Great monster too.

*****

NICK CATO:

This was VERY hard, but I think I’ve got it!

While not a special effects extravaganza or action-packed offering, FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966), a UK-lensed adaptation of the classic 1953 Ray Bradbury novel, has haunted me since the first time I saw it as a young teenager.

I was captivated with “Fireman” Guy Montag’s struggle to not burn books (as per his totalitarian government’s orders) and his eventual decision to join the rebels who are secretly committing books to memory. The film’s themes of censorship and freedom are timeless, and few sci-fi films offer as much food for thought. The ending has also stuck with me almost as intensely as the conclusion to the original PLANET OF THE APES (1968), despite it not being as shocking.

 

*****

MARK ONSPAUGH:

I have several:

Best All-Around SF: BLADE RUNNER (1982)—Where do I start. It’s  just wonderful.


Best Old School SF: FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) —Robbie the Robot, Anne
Francis, the Krell and a Monster from the ID! That’s SF, baby!

Best SF Comedy: BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985) —So funny, such a perfect script,
and everyone gives such a great performance—Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Crispin Glover—never better.

Best SF Horror: ALIEN (1979), ALIENS  (1986) and THE THING (1982, the John Carpenter version with special effect by Rob Bottin)
Runners-up: INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (’56 and ’78) and THE FLY
(1986, the Cronenberg version)

Best SF Romance: SOMEWHERE IN TIME (1980) —So great, from the story by
Richard Freaking Matheson to Chris Reeve and Jane Seymour as time-crossed lovers.

*****

L.L. SOARES:

This one is actually kind of easy. My favorite science fiction movie, and my favorite movie, are one in the same. A little flick called A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) by director Stanley Kubrick. Watching it for the first time, I sat there convinced that I had seen the closest I would ever find to cinematic perfection. The acting, the storyline, the visuals, the music, it all clicked with me. Plus some of it is downright disturbing.

For those who don’t know, it’s the tale of Alex (Malcolm McDowell in an amazing performance), a teenager in a not-so-distant future London where teen gangs dress up in costumes and go around perpetrating the most horrific crimes, seemingly without repercussions—that is, until Alex is arrested and sent to prison, where he volunteers for a new kind of “therapy” that tries to implant within him a severe aversion to violence. Does the process work? See the movie and find out. (Based on the novel by Anthony Burgess, which also deserves some attention)

Needless to say, Kubrick made another science fiction masterpiece, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), which has its own list of merits to recommend it, but A CLOCKWORK ORANGE always seemed more human to me. More visceral.

Another big favorite of mine is A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975), directed by L.Q. Jones and based on the classic novella by Harlan Ellison. This time we’re brought to another future where the world has been rocked by nuclear war, and for some reason more teenage gangs survive the big drumroll. A young Don Johnson plays Vic, who survives on his wits, and the help of his telepathic dog, Blood.

RUNNERS UP would include: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968, which I already mentioned above), BLADE RUNNER (1982, probably the best Philip K. Dick adaptation to date),  the original ALIEN (1979 – no matter how much I enjoyed PROMETHEUS, it didn’t even come close to Ridely Scott’s ALIEN), and of course 1968′s PLANET OF THE APES, which is just brilliant.

 

—END—

 

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PROMETHEUS (2012)

Posted in 2012, 3-D, Alien Worlds, Aliens, Blockbusters, Cinema Knife Fights, Monsters, Prequels, Ridley Scott, ROBOTS!, Scares!, Science Fiction with tags , , , , , , , on June 11, 2012 by knifefighter

CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT: PROMETHEUS (2012)
By Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

(THE SCENE: An alien world, much of which is composed of desert. L.L. SOARES is sitting on a lawn chair next to a tent. He’s stretched back, getting rays, when MICHAEL ARRUDA happens by, driving a moon rover)

MA: Hey. You do realize that excessive sun isn’t good for you.

LS: Who are you, my mother?

MA (dressed as an elderly woman): What are you doing sitting around all day! Clean your damn room!

LS: Now there’s a scary image—you as someone’s mother!! Anyway, there’s six more hours of daylight. Leave me alone and let me get a tan.

MA: I would, but we’ve got a movie to review.

LS: Oh yes, the much-anticipated PROMETHEUS. I almost forgot.

MA: Almost forgot? I think the sun has fried your brain! PROMETHEUS is one of the movies you and I have been most looking forward to in 2012. How could you “almost forget” about it?

(In the distance, a humongous space ship takes off into the sky)

MA: Wow. It sure is nice to have an unlimited budget here in Cinema Knife Fight Land.

LS: Oh yes, in the realm of the imagination, we can do anything!

MA: Okay. If you can do anything, how about starting with a review of PROMETHEUS?

LS: All right I will, if that will make you happy.

MA: Please do.

LS: Ridley Scott’s new film, PROMETHEUS, is a prequel to his 1979 masterpiece, ALIEN. Let’s make that clear from the get-go, shall we? Scott and other people involved have been very cagey about whether or not the events of this movie occur before the story of ALIEN. Well, wonder no more. The ambiguity is gone. PROMETHEUS is clearly a prequel.

MA: Yes it is, although I would have enjoyed it more had there been more references to ALIEN.

LS: PROMETHEUS begins with an odd scene where a muscular albino alien is standing on a cliff over a waterfall.

MA: I liked this scene. I thought it was a very cinematic way to open the movie.

LS: He ingests something that appears to be acid (and also appears to be alive) and commits suicide, falling into the raging waters below. We’ll be seeing him (or, more of his kind, at least) later on.

The story then shifts to Scotland. It is the year 2089, and scientists Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) and Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) discover a cave that has prehistoric drawings on the walls. The drawings include an image they have seen many times before: a giant figure reaching out to the sky, in the direction of five spheres. They believe this image is a message, since they have found it in other caves, in other parts of the world.

Using the image as a map, they are able to track down a planet in a solar system far away that has an earth-like atmosphere (although the carbon dioxide levels are rather high). Charlie and Elizabeth are sure the messages are telling them that this planet is the cradle of civilization—the place where aliens they call “Engineers” came from, and came to Earth to create us.

To get there, the scientists need cash, and this is readily provided by the Weyland Corporation, a mega-corporation with seemingly unlimited funds, headed by Peter Weyland (an unrecognizable Guy Pearce, in heavy old man make-up). Weyland, through a hologram, tells them he was very eager to find out if the scientists are right about their findings, but he has appeared to have died in the meantime (the craft has taken a few years to get there). In his place, as the corporate person in charge of the expedition, is the cold and authoritative Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron). She makes it clear from the get-go that while Charlie and Elizabeth are the ones who initiated this expedition, Meredith is calling the shots, since it is her firm’s money that bankrolled it.

(Sigourney Weaver’s character from ALIEN—RIPLEY—comes by, carrying a very large gun)

RIPLEY: You guys see a big ALIEN go by here?

MA: No, we haven’t.

LS (points): He went that-a-away!

RIPLEY: Thanks (she goes in that direction)

(The tent behind LS shakes)

MA: What was that all about?

LS: Who knows? As I was saying….The ship is piloted by a man named Janek (Idris Elba) and his team. The expedition is made up of a several other scientists, as well as an android named David (Michael Fassbender) who was created by Weyland to be his eyes and ears. David clearly has his own agenda when it comes to the mission, and often does things that everyone else is unaware of (things that are not always in their best interest). During the initial voyage in space, David is only one “awake” in the ship, while the rest of the travelers are in suspended animation.

Once they reach the planet, they find strange dome-like structures there, that clearly were not made by nature. Too eager to wait, a group of them immediately go out to investigate one of the domes. What they find there is rather remarkable, and potentially very dangerous.

The rest of PROMETHEUS shows us what they find in that dome, what it represents, and the can of worms the scientists open up by disturbing the site.

I went into this one with very high hopes, and clearly PROMETHEUS is one of the movies Michael and I have been most looking forward to in 2012. Personally, I am a huge fan of Ridley Scott’s ALIEN, and the idea of Scott returning to the “world” of that movie was rather exciting. Scott is a top-notch director, who was not involved with the various ALIEN sequels, so his directing the prequel is something of an event. He also hasn’t made a science fiction movie in decades, and since this is also the man who made BLADE RUNNER (1982), a lot of people were eager to see him return to the genre. After all, how many filmmakers can be credited with creating two films that many people consider to be among the best of cinematic science fiction?

So, considering the expectations I had going in, it is almost impossible that PROMETHEUS could have lived up to them. That said, the film is very good.

MA: Nah, I’m disagreeing here right away. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed with PROMETHEUS, and for me, it didn’t have to do with high expectations. I just didn’t find PROMETHEUS to be a great movie. It’s a good movie, but it has a lot of flaws.

But I’m jumping the gun here. You were about to say why you thought the film was so good. So, what did you like about it?

LS: First off, the direction is top-notch, as you would expect in a Ridley Scott film.

MA: I would agree, up to a point.

LS: The cast is also above-average. I thought everyone did an excellent job here, and the cast includes many of my favorite actors. Noomi Rapace was Lizbeth Salander in the original Swedish films based on THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO trilogy. She was intense and extremely believable in those movies. Here, her Elizabeth Shaw is softer and less guarded—dare I say it, more human—but in her way, is just as tough.

MA: No arguments here. I liked Rapace as Elizabeth Shaw a lot. Rapace created a very resilient heroine in Shaw, and I thought she was strong enough to carry this movie.

LS: Idris Elba is someone Michael and I have been watching for a while now, first noticing him for stand-out performances in movies like 28 WEEKS LATER (2007), THE UNBORN (2009) and the remake of the slasher film PROM NIGHT (2008).

MA: Yep, I’m a big fan of Elba.

LS: I thought that he often was better than the movies he was in. More recently, he appeared in last year’s THOR and was an alcoholic Vatican enforcer in GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE. But his star has actually shone brighter on television than in feature films, for the most part, especially his role as Stringer Bell in the stellar HBO series,. THE WIRE, and his lead role in the current BBC series, LUTHER, which has been earning him much acclaim. He’s quite good in PROMETHEUS as Captain Janek, and even brings a sense of humor to the role, like in a scene where he tries to talk ice queen Martha Vickers into bed.

MA: Yeah, I liked that scene, but for the most part, I thought Captain Janek was just your standard good guy captain. I had no problem at all with Elba’s performance, which I enjoyed, but I thought the character was one-dimensional and not that exciting. I expected him to take on a more heroic and central role as the movie goes on, but that didn’t really happen.

LS: Actually, it did. He does do something very heroic toward the end.

MA: Yeah, I know, but for me it was too little too late. I mean, the action he takes is dramatic enough, but long before that, I wanted him to be a key player, and I didn’t feel he was.

LS: Let’s face it, Janek was a supporting character. Everyone can’t be the lead. Considering how many strong characters there are in the movie, I think they did a good job of giving everyone ample screen time.

MA: Oh, he’s in it enough. He’s just not that interesting.

LS: As for Vickers, it seems like actress Charlize Theron can do no wrong lately. I loved her in last year’s dark dramedy, YOUNG ADULT. And we just saw her as the evil queen, Ravenna, one of the high points in the movie SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN. Here, she’s another cold, unapproachable woman—a type she’s done several times before, and which she’s good at. I have to admit, I like it when she plays characters that are more outside of the “ice queen” box—characters who are a little more vulnerable, perhaps—but she makes the best of this role.

MA: Theron’s fine, but I thought Vickers was terribly underwritten. I wanted to know much more about her, and I wanted her to have more screen time, and play a more prominent role towards the end of the movie. She’s a very cold character and is almost more robotic than the actual robot character, David, in this one. I wanted to know why.

LS: Well, there is a scene where Idris Elba’s character asks her if she’s a robot!

As for Michael Fassbender, as the robot David, he might just be the most interesting character in PROMETHEUS.

MA: I think he is.

LS: Created to act and appear human in every way, David is not as subservient as he first appears, and clearly is more in control of the situations the crew comes across than anyone else. It should come as no surprise that Fassbender is so good in this one. He’s been impressing us in a lot of movies lately. Fassbender was also in 300 (2006) and was the British Lt. Archie Hicox, a memorable role, in Quentin Tarantino’s INGLORIOUS BASTERDS (2009). Since then, his star has only continued to ascend. Last year alone he was Magneto in the above-average superhero flick X-MEN: FIRST CLASS; played psychiatry pioneer Carl Jung in David Cronenberg’s A DANGEROUS METHOD; and played a sex addict, in a fearless performance in British director Steve McQueen’s movie, SHAME. Fassbender just seems to be very good at everything he does, and his role here, as David, is no exception.

MA: I agree. I like Fassbender a lot, and I think he gave the best performance in PROMETHEUS. The only problem I have with his character David is we’ve seen this before. David is an android with a private agenda, apparently working in secret for the Weyland Corporation. This is clearly reminiscent of the character Ash (Ian Holm) in the original ALIEN, who had the same agenda, and was working for the same company.

LS: I think that was intentional, don’t you?

MA: Absolutely, but I still found it repetitive.

(One of the monsters from the PREDATOR movies comes by, carrying a gigantic gun)

PREDATOR: You guys see an ALIEN come by here?

MA: Nope. We’re reviewing a movie here.

LS (points): He went that-a-away!

PREDATOR (closes his helmet): Thanks!

(PREDATOR runs in that direction, turning on his cloaking device to become invisible)

(Tent next to LS shakes again, and there is the faint sound of giggling)

MA: Hmm. What’s the deal with the tent?

LS: How should I know?

MA: What are you up to?

LS: Nothing. Let’s just finish our review.

The rest of the cast is also quite good, with other stand-outs including Logan Marshall-Green as Elizabeth Shaw’s fellow scientist (and lover) Charlie Holloway. He plays just the right combination of cockiness and earnestness here. And Sean Harris is also a stand-out as the unorthodox geologist Fifield, who seems more like punk rocker than a man of science at times (however, I’m sure it’s quite possible to be both).

The effects are pretty impressive here as well. The movie was released in both regular and 3D versions, and while I didn’t get to see this one in 3D, I bet it looked pretty good in that format as well. The spaceships, the alien landscapes, and the alien creatures we see are all pretty flawless and believable, which only enhances a movie like this.

MA: I saw it in 3D, and while I enjoyed the visuals of the alien landscapes and spaceships in 3D, I have a feeling it looked just as good in 2D. Let’s put it this way. There weren’t any scenes where I sat there thinking, “this is so cool in 3D. I’m glad I saw this in 3D!” As has been the case with most 3D movies we’ve seen in the past few years, the 3D effects are almost an afterthought.

LS: If I have any complaint at all, it is the pacing. At just over two hours, I found that certain parts of the movie seemed stretched out and slow, throwing off the movie’s pace a bit. It was something I almost “felt” more than saw. And it’s funny, because early on, things move pretty briskly. We’re not in Scotland looking at caves very long, before we’re suddenly on a spaceship, approaching an alien planet. But once on the planet, there were just some scenes that seemed longer and slower than they should have been.

MA: Yeah, the pacing was slow in places, but interestingly enough, the pacing isn’t one of the things that bothered me about this movie.

LS: Considering how excited I was to see this one, I thought it might be that rare film that passes the four knife mark. But after seeing it, I was actually on the fence about whether to give it 3 ½ or 4 knives. A very good film, but not a masterpiece. I really expected even more from Ridley Scott, if you can believe it.

But what the hell, I ended up giving PROMETHEUS, four knives out of five, one of the best ratings I’ve given for a movie this year. It’s smart, it’s ambitious, and I really enjoyed it.

MA: I gave THE AVENGERS four knives, which is the highest rating I give movies (a five knife movie would have to be perfect, and that’s never going to happen!) and I think THE AVENGERS blows PROMETHEUS out of the water.

LS: No way! They’re two very different kinds of movies: one is pure fun, and the other tries to be much more than that. But I think PROMETHEUS is as good as THE AVENGERS. In fact, I think it’s better.

MA: Yes, they are two very different movies, but THE AVENGERS pushes all the right buttons and is nearly flawless, whereas PROMETHEUS, while good, falls short.

LS: And while it’s going to be very rare that we rate anything higher than four knives, it is possible. I gave KILL LIST four and a half knives earlier this year.

MA: PROMETHEUS could have been something truly special. It asks great questions—who made us? where did we come from? where do we go when we die? — but it gives us answers that are clearly inferior to these questions. I kept thinking, these are the answers the writers came up with?

LS: What if we found out the answers and they really were a letdown? Wouldn’t that be rather ironic?

MA: I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of PROMETHEUS. The movie had an awe-inspiring science fiction feel to it, and I thought the film was heading towards moments akin to things found in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. I enjoyed the story, the visuals, and I liked the idea of humans on a quest to find our creators. I was definitely going along for the ride.

LS: I’m glad you brought that up, because I thought there were a lot of parallels between this movie and Kubrick’s 2001. From the clues that scientists find that tell them there was life on other worlds (in PROMETHEUS, it’s the cave paintings providing a map, in 2001, it was the more physical artifact of the Monolith), to a machine that has its own agenda and turns on the people who think they are its masters, to even the pacing and some of the visuals (the alien space ship here looks somewhat like the orbiting space station in 2001).

MA: And there’s some good suspense along the way as well. The scene in the cave with the weird snake creatures is one of the more intense scenes in the movie, and I absolutely loved the scene where Elizabeth has to perform surgery on herself to remove a certain “addition” inside her body. It’s by far the most intense scene in the film.

LS: Thanks for bringing that up! The surgery scene is one of the best in the movie! I loved that scene.

MA: But that’s about as intense as the movie gets. Later, as it builds towards its conclusion, I found the suspense lacking.

And in terms of awe-inspiring science fiction, the film hits its climax in a really cool scene when David discovers, among other things, a 3D map of our solar system, and at this point I was looking forward to the “where do we go from here” stuff. Unfortunately, where we go is strictly standard drama.

Compared to ALIEN, for example, PROMETHEUS is a dud when it comes to that kind of suspense. It’s not that scary.

LS: Yes, I think this is one thing that should be pointed out. Even though PROMETHEUS is a prequel to ALIEN, it is not a horror movie. Sure, there are some scary creatures here, but overall, PROMETHEUS is more a movie about ideas. Maybe that’s what threw off the pacing for me. I thought it was building like a horror film, slowly ratcheting up the suspense, and it wasn’t. It’s not that kind of movie. While ALIEN was unabashedly a horror movie set on a space ship, PROMETHEUS is a science fiction film that doesn’t follow the same blueprint at all. It’s not meant to be a rehash of ALIEN. It’s a completely different animal.

MA: I agree with you, but the problem I have is that in spite of this, PROMETHEUS still gravitates towards the horrific, but unfortunately it’s rather tame horror. And then, getting back to it being a movie about ideas, it doesn’t finish the job by giving us a big payoff. I liked the fact that it was about ideas, but I wanted these thought-provoking ideas to take me somewhere.

The “Engineers,” for example, prove to be about as intellectual as the alien monsters themselves. PROMETHEUS is missing that grand moment when everything comes together and you say, “Wow!”

There’s no Wow.

LS: I think I agree with you on that. I think that’s another reason why I had a problem with the pacing. In a way, there is really no payoff. There is an ending—and a set up for a sequel, I should add—there are major things that happen, but you’re right. There’s no big Wow. The question is—can it still be a great movie without one?

MA: I found the screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof to be muddled. There were several moments where I found myself scratching my head, like when Captain Janek is suddenly talking about having to protect Earth from this alien race who has been building weapons of mass destruction. What weapons of mass destruction? And how does Janek know this?

LS: The weapons of mass destruction here are biological. The things in the pods. Those are the weapons. The alien ship is full of them. That’s how Janek knows—the same way we know.

MA: Yeah, I get that, but I found it an odd way of saying it, and for me it was a distraction. Why not just say these dudes are messing around with biological experiments so let’s get the hell out of here!

I also wondered why Peter Weyland was played by Guy Pearce in “old man” make-up. I thought perhaps it was because at some point in the story he’d somehow be getting younger. Nope.

I was also disappointed with the answer to the “Why were we created?” question. I don’t want to give anything away here, but I found the answer unimaginative and disappointing, which goes back to there not being a grand “Wow” moment.

LS: I didn’t think it was unimaginative at all. And if it was disappointing—well sometimes things in life are much more underwhelming than we had hoped.

MA: And I also was disappointed that the famous discovery early on in ALIEN, where the astronauts discover the giant alien pilot sitting in his ship with his chest cavity exploded, isn’t recreated here in PROMETHEUS. I thought sure that image would be one of the last images seen in this movie, but that’s not how things play out.

LS: Yes, that’s strange. The giant alien pilot is explained. In fact, it sounds like that’s the germ of where PROMETHEUS, the movie, springs from, in a way. But, you’re right, there’s no scene that exactly replicates that image from ALIEN.

MA: I wanted more of a direct connection between PROMETHEUS and ALIEN.

With or without the hype, I expected more from PROMETHEUS. I liked its imaginative visuals and storyline early on, but later, when I expected it to become very suspenseful and dark, it doesn’t cut it, mostly because it never gets all that dark. And I didn’t like the answers it provided to its thought-provoking questions.

LS: I think you were looking for a movie that was much more like ALIEN, and PROMETHEUS isn’t it, because it wasn’t meant to be. It’s a different kind of movie, and I actually found it refreshing that it didn’t follow the rules we expect from sequels and prequels. As for the answers, just because you are disappointed in them doesn’t mean they aren’t thought-provoking.

MA: But that’s why I was disappointed. I didn’t find them thought-provoking. Seriously, in terms of it being a movie about ideas, it’s no 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, that’s for sure!

I give it two knives.

LS: We sure disagree on this one. I think you’re the one who’s been sitting in the sun too long. Speaking of which, I think I’ll go back to working on my sun tan now.

MA: Okay. I think I’ll take this moon rover for a spin. Sure you don’t want to come along?

LS: Nah. I’m in the mood to relax and contemplate some thought-provoking questions.

MA: Really? Like life, the universe, and everything?

LS: No. Since we’ve got an unlimited budget here, I was wondering more about what I’m going to have for dinner. Steak or lobster?

(One of the monsters from ALIEN pops its oversized head out of the tent)

ALIEN: I’d recommend the steak! (hands LS a beer) Here you go buddy, thanks for watching my back!

MA: I should have known..

—END—.

© Copyright 2012 by Michael Arruda & L.L. Soares

Michael Arruda gives PROMETHEUS ~ two knives!

LL Soares gives PROMETHEUS ~four knives.

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Cinema Knife Fight COMING ATTRACTIONS: MAY 2012

Posted in 2012, Aliens, Based on TV Show, Coming Attractions, ROBOTS!, Superheroes, Vampires with tags , , , , , , , on May 4, 2012 by knifefighter

CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT –  COMING ATTRACTIONS
MAY 2012
by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

(THE SCENE:  A gothic mansion shot in grainy black and white. Spooky music is playing.)

WOMAN’S VOICE-OVER NARRATION:  My name is Victoria Winters.  I used to introduce each episode of DARK SHADOWS with a voice-over just like this one.  This month, on May 11, a new version of DARK SHADOWS will be released, and this new version will be a comedy.  A comedy?  A flippin friggin comedy!!!

(WOMAN shrieks and pulls her hair, kicking and screaming as she runs away.  MICHAEL ARRUDA & L.L. SOARES enter the scene.)

L.L. SOARES:  Boy, was she angry!

MICHAEL ARRUDA:  I can’t say that I blame her.  I’m pretty miffed that the new DARK SHADOWS movie by Tim Burton will be played for laughs.  But hey, if it’s funny and it works, I’ll be sure to change my mind about it.  But right now— let’s just say I had been really looking forward to it, until I saw the previews.  Now I’m nowhere near as excited about it.

But anyway, welcome to another edition of our COMING ATTRACTIONS column, where we preview the movies we’ll be reviewing in the month ahead.

LS: Welcome to our May 2012 edition.

(MA & LS enter the mansion and find the main room full of superheroes, busily signing autographs for long lines of fans.)

MA:  Up first on May 4 is the highly anticipated Marvel Superhero extravaganza THE AVENGERS, featuring Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Chris Evans as Captain America, Mark Ruffalo debuting as the Hulk, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, and Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow.

LS: Don’t forget Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye. Then again, when I first saw him, I didn’t even know it was Hawkeye, without his distinctive mask. The guy has a simple costume, what’s up with the bare face?

MA: Like legions of Marvel comics fans, I’m looking forward to this one big time, but would it be unfair of me to say my expectations have dropped somewhat?

HULK:  Very unfair! Hulk Smash!

CAPTAIN AMERICA:  Not to mention, unpatriotic!

LS:  Hey, enough of that!  No politics allowed within these pages!

MA:  Amen to that!

LS: No religion either!

MA:  Well, that’s not to say we frown upon politics or religion.  We just don’t want to talk about them here.  Only movie talk allowed.

So, getting back to the point I was about to make about the Marvel movies, the last couple of Marvel movies, CAPTAIN AMERICA and THOR, were good, but they weren’t great.  I wonder if the Marvel movie formula is growing old and tired?

TONY STARK:  Old and tired?  I’ve never looked better!  (A group of women coo, “Oh, Tony!”)

MA:  Show off!

LS:  Don’t worry about it.  We have our own set of adoring fans.  (Behind them a long line of cheering zombies, undead, werewolves, vampires, and other assorted monsters and misfits.)

MA:  That’s true.

Anyway, perhaps THE AVENGERS will be just the ticket the series needs to get back on its feet again?  We’ll find out on May 4.

The impressive cast also includes Stellan Skarsgard, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury.  Also listed in the cast is Harry Dean Stanton, and for some reason, I could have sworn he had died. I guess I was wrong.

LS: That’s awful! Stanton is one of my favorite actors!

MA: Same here, so I’m actually relieved that he’s still with us.

THE AVENGERS was written and directed by Josh Whedon, who wrote the screenplay for THE CABIN IN THE WOODS.  Can he have back to back hits?  Let’s see.

LS:  Whedon didn’t just write this one, though. He directed THE AVENGERS, too.

I am on the fence about this one. I grew up reading the comics and I guess I should be excited that The Avengers are finally coming to the big screen (and look, they beat DC’s Justice League there!). But you’re right about that formula. Marvel superhero movies have become so standardized, so boilerplate, that you just know there aren’t going to be any real surprises.

I’m sure I’ll find something about it to like. But, if the trailers are any indication, I won’t be in geek heaven as I watch it.

The wild card here is Whedon. The guy has talent. I just hope he’s able to pump some fresh blood into this movie.

On May 11, we’ll be reviewing Tim Burton’s DARK SHADOWS.

(MA & LS enter another room where the Collins clan is sitting down for dinner.)

Another movie I was excited about when I first heard about it. But then I saw the trailer, and found myself wincing all the way through it.

MA:  Like I said, I had been really excited about this one too, until I saw the trailers, and saw that it was a comedy.  I’ll reserve final judgment until after I see the movie, but as it stands right now, I’m not thrilled about it.

I used to be a big fan of Tim Burton, but nowadays I’d say it’s hit or miss with him.  I didn’t like SWEENEY TODD:  THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (2007)

LS: I didn’t mind SWEENEY TODD. It was fun for what it was.

MA: …and I had no interest in seeing ALICE IN WONERLAND (2010) or CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (2005).  The last Tim Burton movie I liked was SLEEPY HOLLOW (1999), and the last one I REALLY liked was ED WOOD (1994).

LS: I liked SLEEPY HOLLOW a lot, and ED WOOD even more.

MA: I have to admit, though, DARK SHADOWS does have an impressive cast, topped by Johnny Depp, but there’s also Michelle Pfeiffer, Eva Green [who I really liked in the Daniel Craig James Bond flick CASINO ROYALE (2006)], Chloe Grace Moretz…

LS: Hit Girl!

MA:….Helena Bonham Carter, and Jackie Earle Haley as Willie Loomis.  It also features some original cast members in cameos, including the original Barnabas Collins Jonathan Frid, and even Christopher Lee gets in on the fun!  It’s a cast that’s hard to beat.

I’m still dreading it though.

LS: Me, too. This is such great material, with so much potential as a straight horror film. It doesn’t need the campy humor and stale jokes. Both DARK SHADOWS and Johnny Depp deserve better. What was Tim Burton thinking?

On May 16, I’ll be reviewing THE DICTATOR. This is the new movie by Sacha Baron Cohen who previously gave us the ALI G TV show, and the movies BORAT and BRUNO, both of which were also directed by Larry Charles (who directed THE DICTATOR,  too). Cohen’s  trademark has been playing these characters as real, and interacting with real people who reacted to his hijinks. THE DICTATOR is a departure from that. This time, there’s no hidden camera tomfoolery. Cohen plays a fictional dictator of a fictional Middle Eastern country who comes to America. When he comes to visit America, he ends up having his trademark beard shaved off and can’t convince anyone who he really is. And, from the trailer, we see that hilarity ensues…..

God, I hate that phrase!

I like Cohen, and while I’ve seen the trailers for this movie way too many times and expect a lot of the jokes to no longer be funny, I’m still looking forward to this one. I hope it has lots of laughs I don’t know about yet.

MA:  On May 18, we’ll be reviewing BATTLESHIP, starring Liam Neeson, and I guess this one is based on the popular game, but I’d say it’s loosely based on it.  I mean, it’s a cool game and all, but I don’t remember the game ever having anything to do with aliens, which this movie is about, battleships fighting aliens.

(Booming explosions occur outside a window.  MA looks out window to see a battleship firing on an alien spaceship.)

MA:  I had no idea this place was on beachfront property.

(LS looks out window.)

LS:  Me neither.  Hey, look at all those hot chicks in bikinis playing volleyball.  (MA returns to the window just as there’s another loud explosion.)  Oops!  Never mind.

MA (shrugs) To me, BATTLESHIP looks pretty silly.  It looks like it’s going to be on the level of the TRANSFORMERS movies, which I’m not crazy about.  I can only hope it’ll be better, but I won’t be holding my breath.

LS:  Yeah, I actually reviewed the trailer for this one way back in the only installment of my column TRASHING TRAILERS, a concept I keep meaning to do more of. Back then, I said that the trailer looked pretty abysmal. That hasn’t changed. This one stars Liam Neeson as a Navy admiral, Taylor Kitsch (from JOHN CARTER) and Alexander Skarsgard from TRUE BLOOD. Hell it even has the singer Rihanna in it. Sounds like a wasted cast to me. I hope it’s better than it looks, but I still can’t understand how the board game turned into an alien invasion movie. Doesn’t’ the game take place during World War II or something?

And we’ll finish off the month with a review of the very cool looking CHERNOBYL DIARIES on May 25.  This is the new movie by Oren Peli, who wrote the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movies, and he co-created the recent ABC series THE RIVER (which I don’t think will be renewed for some reason). I like Peli’s work so far, and this one looks interesting.

A bunch of young American tourists in Russia visit the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. They think the town is abandoned, but someone seems to be watching them. Someone who might be dangerous.

It doesn’t look like this one is filmed in the fake documentary style that Peli usually uses for his film and TV projects. That might be refreshing. This movie has potential, and I hope it lives up to it.

MA:  Yeah, this one looks pretty good, and it’s horror, which seems to be a rarity among mainstream movies here in 2012.  Like you said, one of the writers who worked on the screenplay is Oren Peli, the guy who wrote all three PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movies and directed the first one, so this is a good thing. But unfortunately, he didn’t direct this one. Bradley Parker did. And this is his directorial debut.

Also a good thing is I don’t know a whole lot about it, other than what I saw in the trailer, and so I’m hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

Okay, that wraps up our column and another month here at CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT.

LS:  We’ll see you on May 4 with our review of THE AVENGERS.

(MA & LS return to the main hall full of superheroes.  Thor is showing off his muscles to his fans, while Tony Stark has his arms around two beautiful babes.)

MA:  Maybe we should have gone into the superhero business.

LS: Nah!  I’ll take our fans any day of the week!  (puts his arms around two undead rotting corpse girls with parts missing)

(Cute vampire girl snuggles up to MA.)

VAMPIRE GIRL:  Want a hickey?

MA:  Now, you’re talking!

—END—

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Suburban Grindhouse Memories: CHOPPING MALL (1986)

Posted in 2011, 80s Horror, Campy Movies, Nick Cato Reviews, ROBOTS!, Slasher Movies, Suburban Grindhouse Memories with tags , , , , , on October 20, 2011 by knifefighter

SUBURBAN GRINDHOUSE MEMORIES:
The Dangers of Advanced Security
By Nick Cato

March, 1986: While I’m assuming most fellow members of the class of 1986 were busy scouting colleges and making plans for their post-high school graduation, I was transfixed on the above advertisement I spotted one Friday in the New York Daily News’s weekend section. CHOPPING MALL: “Where shopping costs you an arm and a leg.” Priceless. Perfect. How come no one had thought of this earlier? Who knows? Either way I made my way to the (now defunct) Rae Twin Cinema on opening night despite the frigid temperature, not knowing what to expect.

Judging from the brief TV ad, it looked like a typical slasher film set in a mall. But CHOPPING MALL turned out to be a sci-fi-tinged outing, although it basically follows a slasher-film pattern.

A bunch of teenagers (who don’t look like teenagers) decide to hide in a shopping mall. Their plan is to party once everyone has gone home for the night. What they don’t realize is the place has recently installed a state-of-the-art computerized security system, which not only locks the place down tighter than Fort Knox, but also unleashes three 1950s-looking robots, armed with high-tech laser weapons (because, you know, all malls need laser-spitting robots to protect the priceless merchandise).

Among our group of partiers are Barbara Crampton (who, at the time, the audience referred to as “HEY! It’s that hot chick from REANIMATOR!”), who provides one of the mandatory topless scenes, main star Kelli Maroney (who had roles in NIGHT OF THE COMET (1984) and FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982), before battling these robots and becoming a TV star) and Tony O’Dell, who had starred a year earlier in the wonderfully inept and insane EVILS OF THE NIGHT (1985).

Wouldn’t you know the same night our partiers get things going, a nasty thunderstorm sends lightning into the mall’s roof antenna, causing the high-tech security system to malfunction? And, besides our teens not being able to get in or out, the three laser-spitting robots are now running amuck, their first victim a night janitor played by cameo king Dick Miller. He gets zapped in some of the most horrible-looking “electric” effects since the psychic-battle at the finale of Ted V. Mikels’s BLOOD ORGY OF THE SHE DEVILS (1972). Come to think of it, most of the teens are killed by the robots electrocuting them.

So what about those laser beams?

In the film’s most memorable scene (next to Barbara Crampton showing off her post-REANIMATOR ta-tas) one poor lass (played by the cute Suzee Slater, who also had a role in LAS VEGAS SERIAL KILLER the same year as this masterpiece) has her head blown to smithereens by a killbot (the film was titled KILLBOTS in pre-production, and expensive theater posters with this title can be found at sleazier horror conventions or on eBay). The effect is quite effective, causing everyone in the theater to scream. I was a bit taken back, too, as no one thought these little rolling ‘bots had this much aggression in them (not that electrocuting or pushing people off the second level into a hot pretzel stand is anything mellow). This glorious four seconds of celluloid was as gruesome as the head explosions in both DAWN OF THE DEAD (1979) and SCANNERS (1981). Kudos to special effects artist Anthony Showe—who—despite not being a common name among genre fans—has a respectable list of credits under his belt, including 1982’s CONAN rip-off, SORCERESS, 1985’s slasher classic THE MUTILATOR, and horror comedy effort SATURDAY THE 14TH STRIKES BACK (1988). I challenge you to find ANYONE who has seen this film and ask them what they remember about it. It won’t be Crampton’s rack or the silly-looking killbots. It’ll be this gooey, disgusting, explosive display of cranial destruction.

The audience got a real charge (full pun intended) out of our heroes, when they realize what’s happening and start looking for things to protect themselves with. When one guy comes walking out with an M-16, I nearly fell out of my chair in hysterics. While I don’t recall any shopping malls in my area selling any type of guns (let alone a military-issued assault rifle), I think the film would have had a TAD more credibility had he armed himself with a cheese grater, or a shiatsu massager, or..I don’t know…ANYTHING you’d find more easily in a mall than an M-16!

But what else can you expect when you plunk down your cash to see something titled CHOPPING MALL? It’s goofy…it’s a borderline slasher satire…and it has a few interesting kill scenes. AND it has Dick Miller.

What more does a grindhouse fan need?

© Copyright 2011 by Nick Cato

Leslie (Suzee Slater) about to have a high-tech facial make-over in CHOPPING MALL (a.k.a. KILLBOTS).

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REAL STEEL

Posted in 2011, Boxing, Cinema Knife Fights, LL Soares Reviews, Michael Arruda Reviews, Richard Matheson Movies, ROBOTS!, Science Fiction with tags , , , , , on October 10, 2011 by knifefighter

CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT: REAL STEEL
By Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

(THE SCENE: An abandoned boxing gym. MICHAEL ARRUDA enters from one side, followed by a large, golden robot. L.L. SOARES enters from the other, followed by a sinister-looking robot of gleaming black metal.)

MA: Nice to see you showed up.

LS: Was there ever any doubt?

(The robots enter the boxing ring in the middle of the room. LS and MA go to their robots’ corners. Both men are wearing headsets)

MA: Why don’t you begin this one?

LS: Oh, I’ll begin it all right. (to Robot): UPPERCUT!

(The black robot suddenly punches the gold one violently, knocking it backwards)

MA: Oh yeah? ROUNDHOUSE!

(The gold robot lashes out at the black one, and they start trading punches)

MA: This is fun, but we really should review the movie.

LS: Okay, okay.

This week we’re reviewing the movie REAL STEEL. This one stars WOLVERINE – I mean Hugh Jackman – as a down-on-his luck former boxer who now fights using robots, because real boxing has died out and robot boxing is the new national sport. For an explanation, they tell us something like real boxing wasn’t vicious enough, and robots can fight to the death without anyone getting hurt. Or something like that. For me, the reason real boxing is such a great sport is because it’s two men, face to face. The humanness of the sport. But let’s move on.

Jackman’s character, Charlie Kenton, is a compulsive gambler who loses regularly and owes a lot of people money. He keeps thinking his robots will get him out of the hole, but he hasn’t had very good luck with them, either.

MA: The reason he hasn’t had any luck is he’s not too swift up here (points to his head). His idea of making a decision is act first, think later. So, he’s not only a compulsive gambler, but compulsive period!

LS: Yeah, he is kind of an idiot. In an early scene, where he’s supposed to be controlling his robot, he gets distracted by a girl in the audience for a moment—even though this is his profession and he’s got a LOT of money riding on it—and because of that, his robot loses to a bull! There are other scenes where he also makes stupid moves. For an expert at this robot fighting stuff —and a former boxer himself—he sure doesn’t seem all that smart a lot of the time.

Desperate for money, Charlie finds himself in the middle of a court battle for his son, Max (Dakota Goyo). The boy’s mother has died, and Charlie doesn’t know the kid because he ditched the girl and their son when he was younger, and didn’t stay in touch. Sounds like a deadbeat dad to me.

MA: I’ll say. Early on in this movie, there’s not much to like about this guy.

LS: But it’s Hugh Jackman. You know he can’t stay as sleazy as he starts out. You know he’ll become heroic as the movie goes on, because that’s what he does! In other words, he’s more of a star than an actor, and we never once believe that he’s this Charlie guy. He’s always HUGH FRIGGIN JACKMAN.

The boy’s Aunt Debra (Hope Davis) wants to assume custody, but the courts usually give children to their remaining parent in these kinds of cases. But Charlie has clearly not been interested since Day One, so he’s more than happy to give Debra custody in exchange for some cash (he makes a deal with Debra’s rich husband, promising to keep it secret).

However, Debra and her husband are off for a vacation in Italy with their rich friends and don’t want to bring a child along, so they get Charlie to agree to watch the boy for the summer until they get back. WOW! They get custody and the first thing Debra and her husband do is fly off to Italy and leave Max behind. What a great way to start out as a new parent!! They’re as sleazy as Charlie is.

At first, the relationship between Charlie and Max is rocky.

(Suddenly, Bill Conti’s ROCKY music fills the gym, as ROCKY BALBOA enters.)

ROCKY (looking over shoulder): Yo, Adrian. I’ll be right back. I just heard my name mentioned inside this gym so I’m going to pay my respects and say hello.

MA: Hey, Rocky!

ROCKY: Yo, how’s it goin?

LS: Fine, but we really didn’t call you. I was using “rocky” as an adjective.

ROCKY: Adjective? What’s that? Some kind of swear or something?

MA: No, it’s a part of speech. Anyway, feel free to hang out while we spar over the new movie REAL STEAL.

ROCKY: Yo, Adrian! I’ll be along in a minute. I’m going to watch these guys spar over some new movie or something. Those are some pretty cool-looking robots you have there in the ring. Are those things real?

MA: Movie special effects.

ROCKY: That’s good, cuz if those things was real, I might be out of a job, you know what I’m sayin?

LS: Hey, we got a movie to review here, do you mind?

ROCKY: No, I don’t mind. I’ll just sit back and. be quiet and let you guys do whatever it is you do. Those are some big robots.

LS: COMBINATION 4!

(LS’s robot does a combination of moves and knocks MA’s robot to the mat)

MA: Hey! I was talking to ROCKY!

LS: Time to get back to the review, boyo. Pay attention!

MA: COMBINATION 18!

(MA’s robot gets up from the mat, and the two robots start fighting again)

LS: Back to REAL STEEL. As always happens in these movies, the guy and his kid grow to know and care about each other over time. (Sweet sugary music starts to play in the background). They find a common bond through the robots that Charlie uses to compete with. Eleven-year-old Max, already a video game fanatic, gets hooked on robot boxing as well, and even shows a knack for it when they acquire a new robot, Atom, when they break into a junkyard, looking for parts.

By the way, the way they find Atom is really stupid. Max slips down a cliff of junk and is about to fall to his doom, when a robotic hand reaches out from the scrap heap and saves him. In return, Max digs the robot out, intent on returning the favor. It’s just sappy. Why would a robot in a junk heap suddenly power-up and save a kid. It’s just DUMB writing.

MA:  Yeah, it was a little unclear what happened there.  I wasn’t sure if the robot reached out, or if his arm was just extended in that position already, hooking Max by accident as the kid slid by.

LS:  Atom is an old robot that was used for sparring, and was built more to take punishment than to dish it out. But Max and Charlie change that, turning Atom into a formidable fighter. They start off by playing the underground circuit, and then eventually, as their fame grows, they go legit, scoring an official fight in the big leagues. Which leads to a final battle between scrappy Atom and the Number One robot in the business, Zeus.

Everything about this movie screams “ROCKY,” but with robots instead of people.

ROCKY: Yo, that’s me! Am I like going to be on TV or something?

LS (ignores ROCKY): It also looks like a giant version of the kids’ game Rock Em Sock Em Robots, from the control panels people use to activate the robots to the way some of them punch each other’s heads off.

MA: I know people have said that, but it didn’t really make me think of Rock Em Sock Em Robots. Sure, they both have fighting robots that compete in a boxing ring, but that’s about it.

LS: It’s enough of a similarity.

MA: But the ROCKY connection is another thing altogether. The parallels between the plot of this movie and the first ROCKY (1976) are so obvious and transparent, I think Rocky here should complain about not being credited as the source material.

ROCKY: Yo, what he said.

LS: Supposedly, according to the credits, this movie is based on the short story “Steel” by Richard Matheson (which was also an episode of the old TWILIGHT ZONE series), but, aside from the concept of robots boxing each other, the story and the movie don’t have much in common.

I like Hugh Jackman, and he’s okay here as Charlie.

MA: Okay is the key word. He certainly didn’t wow me.

LS: Of course, most people know him as Wolverine from the X-MEN movies. In  REAL STEEL,  Charlie is a washed-up boxer, a gambling addict, and a deadbeat dad, and yet, we like his character right away, and continue to empathize with him throughout the movie.

MA: You liked his character right away? I thought he was a jerk. Anyone who treats his son the way he did at the outset has loser written all over him, as far as I’m concerned.

LS: C’mon, it’s Hugh Jackman. You never once really believe he’s as bad as he starts out to be. You know he’ll redeem himself. It’s mandatory in this kind of movie.

MA:  I still didn’t like him, and even later when he becomes more heroic, I had a hard time warming up to him.

LS:  Evangeline Lilly from LOST is a real knockout as Charlie’s lover, Bailey Tallet. Her father was the man who trained Charlie as a boxer, and she’s a pretty good robot mechanic in her own right.

MA: Yep, she gets to look pretty in this one, but that’s about it. Strangely, Lilly and Jackman share no screen chemistry at all. I thought their scenes together were flat and sanitized. There’s no sexual energy to speak of.

LS: Yeah, you’re right about that. But this is a safe PG-13 movie, so I knew going in that there would be no sexual energy between them. Her role is a pretty thankless, typical Hollywood “girlfriend” role. That said, I think she’s cute as hell, and I wish she’d get better roles. She deserves to be the lead in something – not a supporting character. As she showed us in LOST, she can do more than just bat her eyes and look pretty.

MA: Compare their relationship to Rocky and Adrian from the ROCKY movies. In that series, you knew the couple loved each other. In REAL STEEL, they’re just going through the motions. Heck, in the ROCKY movies, Rocky has more of a relationship with his old crotchety trainer Mickey than Jackman has with Lilly.

MICKEY (pops up): You tells em, you bastard!

LS: I also liked Kevin Durand as the villainous Ricky, a cowboy who used to be one of Charlie’s opponents in his boxing ring days. He beat Charlie back then, and for some reason he wants to keep beating him. This guy’s got a mean streak, and he really wants to humiliate and hurt Charlie.

MA: Durand’s okay, but we really don’t know much about Ricky as a character. He’s just a stock villain and kinda bored me.

LS: We don’t know much about ANYONE in this movie. It’s all about action, and the father and son crap. It’s NOT about character development or giving us anyone who’s actually believable. So, in that context, I think Durand does a good job. I liked the little jolt of sadism he put into his role.

But, aside from Jackman, the other main character here is Max, and I guess it’s time for me to address him. I have a really mixed reaction to this kid. Sometimes, Max seemed like a real kid to me. But more often, he seemed like a cutesy Hollywood version of a kid. His growing bond with his estranged father seems believable enough, and then suddenly Max looks like a mini Justin Beiber, teaching his robot how to dance (a real wince-inducing scene). Another scene, where Max is trash-talking after a fight, challenging the ultra-rich and famous creators of the champion robot Zeus to fight his robot, was also really irritating. I had mixed feelings about Max throughout the film. I really wanted to like the kid, but there was enough about him that just plain irritated me that he never won me over completely.

MA: Yep, I’d have to agree with your assessment of Max. When he’s acting like the kid in TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991), he’s cool, but when he acts like little Anakin Skywalker in THE PHANTOM MENACE (1998), he’s annoying.

LS: I didn’t like either of those movies!

MA: In Goyo’s defense, I actually thought his performance was fine throughout. It’s the writing that’s the problem. The writer couldn’t make up his mind whether Max was supposed to be cute or street smart. The kid’s cute to begin with, so they should have stuck with street smart. The scenes you mentioned were too much “cute.” I wanted to throw up.

LS: I think I actually did throw up a little in my mouth. It tasted funny.

And it didn’t help that some of the music (by Danny Elfman, no less) is downright manipulative, and certain scenes are structured just to pull at your heart strings. Personally, I hate when a movie tries to manipulate my emotions, and I loathed those aspects of REAL STEEL.

MA: I would agree with you again.

LS: However, despite my problems with the movie, it won me over during the fight scenes. I’m guessing the robots were mostly CGI, but for once, that didn’t bother me so much. I was able to accept them as realistic-looking constructs, and the battle scenes are exciting and very well done. I guess it didn’t hurt that boxing great Sugar Ray Leonard was a consultant to the film.

MA: Yep, I liked the fight scenes too, and they were the only things that saved this movie for me.

LS: Karl Yune as Zeu’s creator Tak Machido, and his ultra-glamorous girlfriend and partner Farra Lemkova (Olga Fonda) were good at just standing around looking evil and pissed off all of the time, but I wanted to know more about these characters. Like most of the people in this movie, they’re more caricatures than characters.

The robots were cool, though, even plain old Atom. Although I could have done without his dance moves. It is interesting how he had a “shadow ability” to imitate Jackman’s fighting moves when necessary, and there are even some scenes that make us wonder how self-aware Atom really is (like when he looks at Max a certain way, or another scene when he looks at himself in a mirror).

MA: Exactly! But it’s too bad the movie doesn’t take advantage of these bits and do more with them, because as it stands, nothing comes of these moments.

LS: You’re right. But I went in to REAL STEEL expecting to completely hate it. Based on the trailer, it looked like a variation on the TRANSFORMER movies with an annoying kid. But it was actually better than I thought it would be.

While it did not win me over completely (there were too many annoying aspects about the film), it did keep me glued to the screen throughout, and I have to admit that, for the most part—as long as I didn’t think too much about what I was watching—I enjoyed this one.

MA: Well, it’s better than TRANSFORMERS, I’ll give you that much, mostly because the robots in this one don’t talk, so we’re spared their ridiculous dialogue.

The biggest problem I had with REAL STEAL is it just never won me over. It never truly drew me into its story, and I never really connected to its characters.

First off, let’s start with the story, which is so based on ROCKY I knew exactly where the boxing scenes were going and how this one was going to end.

LS: Yeah, I saw the ending coming a mile away. Two miles.

MA: Screenwriter John Gatins borrowed too heavily from the ROCKY movies, there’s no doubt about it. If they decide to make a sequel, all you will need to do is watch ROCKY II (1979) and you’ll be able to figure out how that one is going to end.

LS: IF they decide to make a sequel? You’re kidding me, right? This one has “SEQUEL” written all over it.

MA: Sure, I exaggerate somewhat here…..

LS: Not much.

MA: ….but as I sat in the theater watching this movie, watching the robot Atom win these bouts as an underdog, I couldn’t help but think, I’ve seen this story before, all the way up to his having no business being in the same ring with the champion, yet he gets his chance, and as in ROCKY, it’s not so much about winning, it’s about surviving, getting back up when you’re hit, proving you can stay in the ring with the champion. Seen it all before. And as much as I like Hugh Jackman, in a movie like this, he’s no Sylvester Stallone. He doesn’t have the charisma or likeability that Stallone had in the ROCKY movies.

LS: Some surprises and variations on the ROCKY plotline would have been nice.

And just for the record, if we’re talking boxing movies, I’d have to say RAGING BULL (1980) still blows them all away.

MA: The other thing about the screenplay is it never really gets down to the nitty gritty. The fights are all won too easily when they shouldn’t be. Sure, I enjoyed the fight scenes, but I enjoyed them because of the visuals, not the story. The outcome of these bouts are never in doubt, which I found boring.

As I said before, the characters Charlie and Bailey share no onscreen chemistry, and a lot of this is because we don’t ever really get to see these two in a relationship. She says she likes him, and he spends time with her, so we’re supposed to accept that he likes her, but he seems to be more interested in how she can help him build robots. Not exactly the building blocks of a stable relationship.

The father and son relationship is OK, but it’s way too syrupy sweet for my tastes.

And while I liked the look of the robots, they don ‘t have enough personality. Atom should have been an extremely memorable character. He’s not. You mentioned those scenes where he shows that there could be more going on inside his head, but these moments are never exploited.

REAL STEEL also lacks a serious villain. You mention Kevin Durand as the villainous Ricky, and he’s okay, but he’s really just a supporting character in this movie. The main villain, the champion robot, we don’t even see him in action in the ring until the climactic final fight of the movie. How can we get psyched for the huge bout against the champion when we haven’t even seen him?

And Zeus’s “handlers,” Karl Yune and partner Farra Lemkova, could have been played by mannequins. I didn’t really feel as if I knew these people at all. They just stand around looking ruthless. They didn’t do jack in the movie.

I think director Shawn Levy, who’s directed a bunch of comedies, might want to stick with comedies. The action/boxing scenes here are adequate, but they really aren’t all that memorable.

That being said, I did enjoy the boxing scenes, mostly because of the way they looked and not so much because of what happens in them, and I did enjoy the robots, but I wasn’t really wowed by either. I also thought all the characters in this movie, with the exception of young Max, were flat and uninteresting, and Max suffered from too much of the “cutesies” to be really likeable.

REAL STEEL was fairly entertaining. I’ve seen better, and I’ve seen worse. In spite of the fact that it’s rated PG-13, I couldn’t help but think that it was better suited for younger audiences, say 12 and under. For the rest of us, I thought it was like eating sweetened kids’ cereal for breakfast. It’s colorful, and it looks and sounds good at the time, but after a few bites, it becomes apparent that it’s way too sugary sweet to satisfy.

LS: I love sugary kids’ cereals! (holds up a box of FRUITY PEBBLES). And what about the product placement in this movie? There’s a whole scene that’s pretty much a commercial for Dr. Pepper!

MA: You said it.  The only thing missing from that scene was Atom holding a can of Dr. Pepper in his robot hand!

All in all, I give REAL STEEL two knives.

LS; I guess I liked it a little better than you did. I give it two and a half knives. But I agree, if I was 12 years old, I probably would have loved this movie. Luckily, my mental age is a few years older than that.

MA: Wow, I can’t believe you liked this movie. Here I was expecting you to give it 0 knives, and you end up liking it more than I did. Who would have thought?

But for boxing movie entertainment, I’d much rather watch the ROCKY movies.

ROCKY: Gee, thanks. I appreciate you saying that. It’s a nice thing to say.

MA: Well, it’s true.

(LS’s giant black metal robot strikes and knocks the head off MA’s giant golden robot.)

LS: I’ve knocked your block off, sucker!

MA: Hey, wait a minute! I wasn’t even looking! I was talking to ROCKY.

LS: That’s your problem, not mine. It’s not my fault you can’t do two things at once. You lose buddy. And that means you owe me a case of beer.

MA: Some fighter you are. Hitting a guy when he’s not looking.

LS: Is there a better time to hit someone?

MA: You’re philosophy of life never ceases to amaze me.

How about a rematch? Double or nothing?

LS: Hmm, Let’s see. (counts on his fingers) Two cases are better than one. You’re on!

MA: Let me just replace my robot’s head, and we’ll have at it. Okay, folks, that’s it for now. We’ll see you next week with a review of another new movie.

LS: Hurry up and fix your robot. I’m thirsty!

—END—

© Copyright 2011 by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

Michael Arruda gives REAL STEEL ~ two knives

L.L. Soares gives REAL STEEL ~ two and a half knives


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Remote Outpost: FALLING SKIES

Posted in 2011, Aliens, Apocalyptic Films, Mark Onspaugh Columns, Remote Outpost, ROBOTS!, Television with tags , , , , , , , on July 27, 2011 by knifefighter

REMOTE OUTPOST: FALLING SKIES
Does it taste like Chicken… Little?
Television Review by Mark Onspaugh

In a simpler time. all we needed to repel alien invaders was a wise-cracking Will Smith and a genius hacker like Jeff Goldblum. Sure, we might lose a national monument or two, but then the President would take action and fight them Bill Pullman-style – the aliens would be blown to atoms and the pitiful remnants of their hellish fleet would hightail it back to Arcturus with their spiny tails tucked between their disgusting lower limbs.

Nowadays, people in the real world feel like they’ve been let down – the economy sucks, unemployment is at an all-time high and our elected officials are either involved in scandal or wasting their time on the future of incandescent bulbs.

How could such leaders ever hope to combat an alien horde?

So it is that today’s alien stories aren’t about preventing conquest, they’re about the conquered (us) fighting their oppressors (them). It doesn’t take Fellini to see that perhaps those beings we are rallying against may be closer than the next galaxy… Much closer.

FALLING SKIES is the new Dreamworks series from Executive Producer Steven Spielberg, airing Sunday nights on the TNT cable channel, and it is similar in some ways to the recent film BATTLE: LOS ANGELES (2011)—Earth has been taken over and now ragtag bands fight with dwindling resources against overwhelming odds and superior technology. Like BATTLE, conquered cities have large towers of sinister design and intent raised their ruins.

FALLING SKIES very much evokes the “Spirit of ’76” note in its tone and content. After all, we were founded by a guerilla force composed of civilians, militia, old people and kids, fighting a superior force with better weapons and supplies. But the guerilla knows his home turf, and knows how to survive… He might have to live like a rodent for a while, but he can make the enemy miserable until they decide it’s too costly to remain. The action takes place in Massachusetts rather than California, evoking that feeling of fighting the War of Independence once again.

FALLING SKIES left me cold initially. Although I felt the exposition of the invasion told through children’s drawings and voice-overs had a certain charm, I wanted to see some of the devastation and carnage. We’ve gotten very little of that, and I suspect the producers not only wanted to save money, they wanted to show this was no Michael Bay explosion-fest. I do believe they wanted to create some fully-realized characters, but that takes time. It’s clear the network was nervous about this gradual build; early episodes had a sort of carnival barker announcer at the end assuring us we didn’t know all the mysteries behind the invasion. Unlike a show like LOST, THE X-FILES or FRINGE which are compelling from the get-go, FALLING SKIES needed a little more time to be something other than THE PATRIOT (2000) with extraterrestrials. Thankfully, the barker is missing from later tags, which is fine by me.

The fight to take back the planet is seen through the eyes of Tom Mason (Noah Wylie – ER, the LIBRARIAN franchise) a history professor turned soldier and liaison between civilians and Captain Weaver (Will Patton – ARMAGEDDON (1998) and THE FOURTH KIND (2009)). Tom’s wife was lost while scavenging for food with Dr. Harris (Steven Weber – THE SHINING TV-series from 1997 and the sitcom WINGS). We get the feeling there may have been more than hunting for cans of Hormel Chili going on, but the doc is killed two episodes in, in the worst case of prisoner baiting since Fritz tortured Frankenstein’s Monster with a lit torch. Tom is now a single dad with three sons – fighter Hal (Drew Roy), alien slave Ben (Connor Jessup) and Maxim Knight as little tyke Matt Mason (named, I’m sure, for Mattel’s space explorer action figure from the 60′s). (By the way, how cool a name is Maxim Knight?  I may have to change mine.)  Tom has all the usual single dad issues, plus he’s fighting aliens. Fortunately, he and Moon Bloodgood (the short-lived TV series DAY BREAK and the movie TERMINATOR: SALVATION (2009)) have caught each other’s eye. She is the unit physician and has to deal with everything from depression and fractures to kids with alien harnesses on their backs (more on that in a moment). The cast of humans is a good mix of humanity, although it remains to be seen if any character is openly gay or not. With aliens around every corner, there isn’t much time for people to make their proclivities known.

Aliens have taken over and humanity struggles for freedom in FALLING SKIES

Now, how about them aliens?  Back when yours truly was just a tyke running around the Outpost, aliens were largely spray-painted humans in outlandish costumes (LOST IN SPACE, TIME TUNNEL) or men in rubber suits with little or no change of expression (the Gorn that fought Kirk in STAR TREK). THE INVADERS (1967 – 1968), in what has to be the money-saving concept of all time, had aliens who looked like us except they couldn’t bend their little fingers, prompting one to guess they had evolved from highly-mannered tea drinkers.

CGI has made it possible to move away from cumbersome rubber puppets (prone to look silly and/or fake, malfunction and rot over time) and the ever-popular Star Trek brow appliances to creatures that are extremely non-human… Hell, they’re not even humanoid. At present, designers of such critters are going to spiders and crabs for inspiration (BATTLE: LOS ANGELES and SUPER 8, which both came out earlier this year) and tentacles are always a favorite fall-back appendage. Most of us have an innate fear or disgust of spiders or anything like them, so creatures of such design are repellent to most of the audience. The aliens in FALLING SKIES (called “Skitters”) look like large crab-spiders with tentacles and walrus-spider faces. Their movement is crab-spider-ish, and they are quite unpleasant to look at. The design isn’t as compelling or groundbreaking as Giger’s alien (And remember how many films ripped off that design?| Boy howdy.), but the face of the alien allows it some range of emotion. Skitters are very fast and hard to kill, although our people are learning their vulnerabilities. Go Humanity!

The Skitters are also equipped with scout ship/fighters (nothing to write home about, design-wise) and “Mechs” which are bipedal killing machines that stomp around like the ED-209 in ROBOCOP (1987) and have a sort of jack-o-lantern visage (in cool blue) that I kind of like. They also make a roar similar to the LOST smoke monster, so maybe he got some voice-over work. Since the Skitters are multi-legged and the Mechs are bipeds, I suspect that they are being piloted by the teens the Skitters take as slaves and outfit with “harnesses”, a strange, biomechanical slug-like monstrosity that fuses with the kid’s spine and nervous system. Kids under the influence of said harness walk like zombies and seem to be in telepathic contact with the alien overlords. Removing the harness is messy (metal links into the spine must be cut with a torch and leave behind metal studs running down the kid’s back) and risky (several kids died until the late Dr. Harris pioneered a procedure to keep the kids from convulsing and flat-lining). A new development has some adults nervous and bigoted about these freed kids, calling them “razor-backs” and proclaiming that they attract Skitters and their loyalty is compromised. Surely a metaphor for children fathered by invading forces, unable to belong in either country.

He followed me home, Mom. Can we keep him?

As I mentioned, I was ready to give up on FALLING SKIES after two episodes, (and some of you may have done so), but hung in there, being a diehard sci-fi and horror fan… Two episodes ago it turned a corner. The characters had been one note clichés, even the ever-dependable Will Patton, who was gruff and unyielding to the point of parody. But now all the principals have been allowed to breathe and stretch—there have been some very good scenes, particularly between Tom and his kids and Captain Weaver and Jimmy Bolland (Dylan Authors), a thirteen-year-old trying to find his place on the battlefield. Also, and most interestingly, some aliens seem to display compassion (one stroked the head of a sleeping slave child in a very maternal way, not like a master with a pet) and we have been told their agenda is not all it seems.

Of course, I have seen shows like this which were so cool in the beginning run dry creatively and begin to wander far, far away from their original mission statement (it happened when David Vincent of THE INVADERS found a group of people who believed him about the Invaders, and when the mythology of the THE X-FILES became so unwieldy and was suffering the absence of its heroes Mulder and Scully)… Right now, we have an interesting mix of humans dealing with the aliens on FALLING SKIES – some are courageous, others slaves, still others greedy looters or traitors colluding with the aliens… That’s great, humanity isn’t totally unified, and the enemy isn’t just extraterrestrial or all of one stripe.

But we’ve been fooled before… the moment may come when an alien skitters forward and offers to help Tom and his friends… They end up calling him Uncle Bob because his alien name is too hard to pronounce, and he ends up with a fondness for pickle brine and bouncing laughing children on his many knees. At that point the producers will have either jumped the shark or will be revving up their Fonzie-cycle to do so, and we will be just a treacly “very special episode” or Christmas special away from the Hanna Barbera version of FALLING SKIES where they throw in a (nearly) talking dog and a nervous Don Knotts type for comic relief.

But, hopefully, such a day never comes, or is at least five seasons away. We need good science fiction on television, so let’s hope this show may avoid the traps and pitfalls that dooms it to one or two seasons like CAPRICA, THE EVENT, V, DAY BREAK and SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND. For now, the acting and writing have gotten better, the effects are good, the aliens are interesting and loathsome and there seem to be some twists coming our way. Those are all good reasons to watch. Remote Outpost out.

© Copyright 2011 by Mark Onspaugh

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TRANSFORMERS: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

Posted in 2011, 3-D, Action Movies, Blockbusters, CGI, Cinema Knife Fights, Daniel Keohane Reviews, Hot Chick Movies, Michael Arruda Reviews, ROBOTS!, Sequels with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 4, 2011 by knifefighter

(Editor’s note: Listen to Pink Floyd’s album “The Dark Side of the Moon” while you’re reading this, for an extra kick.)

 CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT: TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON (2011)
By Michael Arruda and (special guest star) Dan Keohane

 

(The Scene: The interior of an office building. MICHAEL ARRUDA is seated at a table when suddenly the building begins to tilt dramatically, and people and objects begin to slide past MA, who remains calmly seated. One of the people grabs onto the table and manages to take a seat across from MA. It is DAN KEOHANE).

MA: Hey, Dan. Glad you could join me.

DK: No problem. (Brushing himself off) Thanks for giving me such a dramatic entrance.

MA: Well, this is one of the more dramatic scenes from TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON, and I thought it would be a cool way to start our review. Besides, I thought you’d get a kick out of sliding down a tilting building.

DK: Well, when you know it’s fake, it’s all in good fun.

MA (looks uneasily at camera, and then over DK’s shoulder as two screaming people slide through a broken window into oblivion.) Yeah, fake. Anyway, ready to start our review?
DK: Yep.

MA: Welcome folks to another edition of Cinema Knife Fight. Today I’m joined by Dan Keohane, who’s filling in for L.L. Soares today (who’s gone to Norway to get us the lowdown on TROLLHUNTER), and we’ll be reviewing the new Transformers movie, TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON (2011).

I’ll say right off the bat that I had zero expectations for this one, other than I expected not to like it, but for the most part, I was entertained and felt like I got my money’s worth.

DK: Well, almost. Linda wanted to see the 3D version so I relented, being the chivalrous chap I am. Until the movie was about to start and she realized we were seeing TRANSFORMERS and not GREEN LANTERN (2011) as she’d thought. But, we already had the glasses and the popcorn, so we stayed. Good thing, too, otherwise this review would have been pretty confusing.

MA: Chivalrous? Sounds like you pulled a fast one. “Sure, honey, let’s go see (covers mouth with his hand) Trans-gree- lan-mers. Yeah, the 3D one.”

DK: I saw the first TRANSFORMERS movie at the drive-in a few years back and was pleasantly surprised, so I figured I would be entertained at the very least with this one (caveat, never saw the second one). If you came for alien robot monsters destroying things and CGI effects on steroids, then yeah, I guess it delivered.

MA: TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON, the third film in the TRANSFORMERS movie series by Michael Bay, gets its name from its opening sequences, in which we learn that a Transformers ship crash-landed on the dark side of the moon, and this ship was discovered by the astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission. And the reason we have never gone back to the moon is because of the manipulations of evil Transformers here on earth who don’t want us going back. Until now. And this sets up the rest of the movie’s plot, as we switch to present day.

DK: I have to reluctantly toss in here that it was pretty entertaining how they messed with history like this, mixing footage from the original NASA moon landing with pretend stuff. They even had astronaut Buzz Aldrin in a cameo explaining the cover up. That was cute. Anyway, carry on….

MA: Yeah, the opening grabbed my interest, too. I liked the whole “dark side of the moon” bit, the whole NASA conspiracy, the “real” reason we got involved in the space race. I thought this was fun, and a strong way to open the movie. I also liked the way they did the historical footage, the mixture of actual JFK footage, for example, mixed in with new footage with an actor playing JFK. These opening scenes worked.

DK: Though they could have gotten better actors, or better makeup for the ones playing the presidents.

MA: Once we switch to present day, we meet up with Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) the young hero from the previous TRANSFORMERS movies. Sam is living with a new gorgeous babe Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) as he’s broken up with babe Megan Fox from the previous TRANSFORMERS movies. Gee, this guy has it rough! Sam is out of a job, and he’s depressed and frustrated about this, and during his job search he gets to utter one of the better lines of the movie, “I’ve saved the world twice, and I still can’t find a job!”

DK: Yeah, he had some cool lines. Hell, this movie was littered with clever lines. By the humans. The robots were annoying, but I jump ahead.

MA: Sam does find a job, working in the mailroom for a company run by an eccentric crackpot Bruce Brazos (John Malkovich). Malkovich is hilarious here and in top form. It’s too bad this character isn’t in the movie more. At this new job, Sam meets another crackpot Jerry Wang (Ken Jeong, basically doing a watered down variation of his Mr. Chow character from THE HANGOVER movies) who tells Sam of a conspiracy by the evil Decepticons that involves the dark side of the moon.

(VOICE from somewhere off to the right)

VOICE: Did someone mention Chow?

MA: Before Sam can learn more, Wang is sent hurtling by a Decepticon through his office window, falling to his death on the street below.

(On cue, a man hurtles past them and crashes through a window. He shrieks as he falls to the ground.)

DK (nodding approvingly): Very realistic. Well done.

MA: Yes— we —strive for realism here.

So, Sam decides to seek out answers, and he soon hooks up with old friends like former agent Simmons (John Turturo), and Autobots Bumblebee and Optimus Prime. However, he also has to deal with Secretary of Defense Charlotte Mearing (Frances McDormand), who, in a realistic turn, wants Sam to have no part in the operation since he’s a civilian who—in spite of his past—has no business working with the government at this level.

DK: I was SO psyched to see McDormand and Malkovich in this film. Both were terrific, and I agree, the film would have done well to have more Malkovich in it. I can never have enough of him.

MA: It turns out that on the dark side of the moon is the famed autobot Sentinel Prime (Leonard Nimoy), and Optimus Prime must revive him so they can defeat the evil Decepticons once and for all. Of course, once Sentinel Prime is revived, there’s a twist in the story, which all leads to the ultimate battle between good transformers and bad transformers, with the humans in the middle. If I said this wasn’t predictable I’d be lying.

DK: Yeah… (cough…) I saw that coming too… yeah, I really did, sort of…. Nimoy had some cute lines as well, homage’s to his Spock character throughout.

MA: TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON provides decent entertainment for 2/3 of its excruciatingly long running time of 157 minutes. Yes, this movie failed on the “butt comfort” meter. I was in pain by the end!

DK: Have to agree there. This movie was WAY too long. “Butt” seriously, what do you expect? They give someone like director Michael Bay a gabillion dollars and tell him to go ahead and do whatever the hell he wants. You get an exhausting two and a half hour movie with so much friggin’ violence, I actually checked the marquee to see if it was rated R. Nope, PG-13.

MA: You thought it was really violent? Either I’m getting desensitized, or you haven’t seen too many violent R-rated movies lately. I didn’t find it violent at all.

DK: Well, I was watching it with the idea that it’s kind of supposed to be aimed at kids. Wrong assumption I think, but in that light, it’s pretty intense. For an action film over all, not too bad.

MA: I have to give credit to Bay and screenwriter Ehren Kruger. They filled this movie with likeable characters who really held my interest for most of this movie, before it turns its attention to the Autobots and Decepticons. If this movie hadn’t been about Transformers, I would have loved it! But it could have been much worse. It could have been one of those colossal special effects bores, where there are no characters to speak of. This is not the case. The human element of this movie is very good.

DK: Yes! I really enjoyed the cast (most of them). I actually said at one point that this would have been a far better movie if they had fewer Transformers in it. At least, give them fewer lines. Actually, thinking about it now, the filmmakers seemed to do just that. Over such a long stretch of film, the Transformers themselves had very few speaking parts. In a way, I think Bay pulled a fast one on the producers and used their money to film quite a stunning alien invasion movie by writing the Autobots and Decepticons (man, those are the dumbest names—obviously I was never much a fan of the cartoon) just enough to get his paycheck.

MA: As I started to say before, I really liked the characters in this movie. Shia LaBeouf makes for a very likeable young hero as Sam. I think that of the three TRANSFORMER movies, this was probably his best performance.

DK: Agreed. LaBeouf was good. He plays his character straight, and his frustration with his job situation and girlfriend issues was well done.

MA: Speaking of best performances, John Turturo delivered the best performance in the movie as former agent Simmons, still interested in alien conspiracies, and as eccentric as ever. He was my favorite character by far, and although he is in the movie for a decent amount of time, I wish he had been in it more.

DK: Yeah, he was good, but I have to disagree. Along with Malkovich, my favorite was Alan Tudyk’s portrayal of Dutch. Tudyk (FIREFLY, DEATH AT A FUNERAL) has to be one of the funniest actors around. His fake German accent (and I think he tried to make it as bad as possible) and bizarrely out-of-place scene in a Russian bar was absolutely hilarious.

MA: Yeah, that was a good scene, but I still like Turturo better. His performance intrigued me more, while Tudyk just made me laugh.

Patrick Dempsey makes a good villain, as he plays Dylan, Carly’s boss, who at first just seems to be a weasel for putting the moves on another man’s girlfriend, but as the story unfolds, he’s up to things far more sinister.

Frances McDormand, as you would expect, is very good as Secretary of Defense Mearing. John Malkovich is hilarious as Bruce Brazos, Sam’s weird boss. While Malkovich is terrific, sadly the role is a thankless one and is nothing more than an extended cameo, since Bruce disappears for the entire second half of the film, which is too bad, because he’s a hoot.

Kevin Dunn and Julie White return as Sam’s parents, and I found them much less annoying in this movie than in the previous ones, mostly because their screen time has been greatly reduced. However, that being said, the brief scenes they share with Sam are excellent. Ken Jeong is also on hand as the outrageous Jerry Wang. Again, Jeong pretty much reprises his Mr. Chow shenanigans from THE HANGOVER movies, though here he’s giving us the PG-13 version.

VOICE: Did someone mention Chow?

(Mr. Chow is slowly crawling toward them, through the debris, when he loses his grip and slides through the window again, with a scream)

DK: Yea, the guy is a scene-stealer, especially in the bathroom scene (of course), but the actor seems grossly pigeon-holed into this kind of role. Like you say, though, every actor in this film, from the soldier grunts to Jeoong’s psycho-scientist, gave 110% to their roles. Everyone seemed to be having a BLAST making this movie.

(On cue, there is a huge explosion outside.)

DK: Even the sound effects seem real.

(Behind DK, blood spatters a glass window.)

MA (winces): Where was I?

DK: The cast.

MA: Yes, this is a veteran cast that does not disappoint. To Michael Bay and Ehren Kruger’s credit, they really stock this film with likeable characters. The problem is eventually they all take a back seat to the Transformers, which I find silly and boring.

DK: Me too. Visually, they were stunning to watch (because of the very cool CGI, NOT because of the 3D glasses).

MA: What would have made this movie succeed at a higher level, would have been including more of these characters at the end of this movie. During the final battle, Sam and Carly are pretty much the only main characters directly involved. Had John Turturo, Frances McDormand and John Malkovich also been there in on the action, we’d be talking about a much more entertaining movie.

DK: I have to disagree there. The soldiers (Josh Duhamel and Lester Speight, to name just two) were the main characters in the second half of the movie.

MA: I know. That’s why I didn’t like the second half as much, because I didn’t like these characters as much, nor did I consider them main characters.

DK: Well, the soldiers are involved at the end because, once the bad alien robots take over Chicago, it becomes a war movie. Sam and his always-stainless Stepford girlfriend were simply the visual constants running among the cast. For a war movie, it was pretty awesome to watch.

MA: Speaking of Stepford girlfriends, one cast member who doesn’t fare as well is Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, as Sam’s beautiful girlfriend Carly. Yes, she’s absolutely stunning and beautiful, but she’s also strictly eye candy here. Not that her acting was necessarily bad, because it wasn’t. She’s fine. She’s just rather dull, and if not for her beauty, we wouldn’t be talking about her. Another gripe, though not her fault, is during the film’s climactic battle, she’s running around in heels!

DK: Listen, this movie is geared to guys of our generation who watched the original cartoon (me being the exception), but it’s also aimed at teenage boys. Whiteley’s Carly is not a real character in any sense of the word. In fact, if we want to add any depth to the plot—just for kicks, because Bay and company had no intention to have this be the case—Carly is not real, she’s a figment of Sam’s imagination, a wish fulfillment of a young boy in a man’s body. Why else could she have been in a war zone for so long, in a building which was crushed and destroyed, tossed out a window, nearly crushed by a hundred blocks of concrete and a bus, and yet not have one stain or blemish on her flimsy outfit? Because she’s not real. Did you ever wonder why no one ever spoke to her except Sam and the bad guy (and, being the Bad Guy, he uses Sam’s delusions against him!). Actually, that’s quite clever. I’m a clever guy, did you know that?

MA: Well, you heard it here first, folks, on Cinema Knife Fight, the truth behind Carly’s character! Pretty neat theory. I don’t buy it, but it’s a fun theory. I mean, I think John Malkovich’s character talks to her at one point, doesn’t he? As does John Turturro’s character, and Frances McDormand— okay, toss out that theory!

There’s also a veteran cast voicing the Transformers. Peter Cullen returns once more as the voice of Optimus Prime. Cullen has voiced Optimus in all three movies, and also did back in the animated cartoon series from the 1980s. Cullen is also the voice of Eeyore from the WINNIE THE POOH cartoons.

DK: Really? I like Eeyore. He’s funny.

(Eeyore goes sliding past them.)

EEYORE: These things always happen to me.

(EEYORE slides off the edge of the building.)

DK: Was that—?

MA: Nah!

Hugo Weaving voices the villainous Megatron— we’ll be seeing Weaving soon as The Red Skull in CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER and Sentinel Prime is voiced by Leonard Nimoy, which opens the door for a bunch of STAR TREK in-jokes in the movie, as Dan mentioned way up at the beginning of this review. At one point, Mr. Spock is seen on TV in a STAR TREK episode, and as Sentinel Prime, Nimoy gets to deliver one of his more famous lines from the STAR TREK movie series, from STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982).

So, it’s quite the cast, and that took me quite a long time to get through. Nearly 157 minutes!

DK: I had to go pee at one point. That’s a long movie.

MA: I enjoyed the screenplay by Ehren Kruger. The first half of the movie was very witty and good for some laughs, and Kruger did a nice job creating a bunch of likeable characters.

Even director Michael Bay gets some high marks for this one. The movie looks great, the action scenes are decent and entertaining, and for the most part they don’t go on too long.

DK: Yes, visually this movie was amazing and the scenes were short enough to not drag on. It’s just that there were so many of them.

MA: I loved the sequence in the tilting office building. It was completely unbelievable, but it was still fun!

DK: Totally over the top, but a hoot to watch.

MA: I saw the movie in 3D, too, though I knew I was going to see TRANSFORMERS and not GREEN LANTERN, and once again—so much so, I’m growing tired of saying so—the 3D failed to impress. It added nothing to the movie. In fact, again, midway through, I forgot I was even watching it in 3D. So, if you have the choice, save your money and see it in 2D. I didn’t really have the choice, because the 2D version was playing only once and at an oddball time, compared to the two convenient showings of the 3D version.

DK: Definitely, yes. The 3D is pointless here. Actually, one of theaters in Worcester had more showings of the 2D version than the 3D, which tells me even the theaters are growing weary of this gimmick.

MA: So, what’s wrong with TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON? The biggest thing wrong with it is it’s about TRANSFORMERS. I mean, regardless of the humongous budget, the impressive special effects and the veteran cast, this is, after all, just a big-budget big-screen kids’ movie about giant robots. It’s difficult to take this film seriously, and I certainly can’t classify it as satisfying adult entertainment.

Sure, this movie is probably the darkest of the series, but how dark can a TRANSFORMERS movie be? You know Megatron is not about to mercilessly murder our young heroes. Sure, he’s going to try but—I mean, it’s Scooby Doo stuff! Megatron would have taken over the world, if not for “those meddling kids!”

Lastly, the relationship between Sam and Carly is a microcosm for what’s lacking in these TRANSFORMERS movies. Sam is desperately in love with Carly, so much so, we’re supposed to believe he’d go to the ends of the earth and risk his life to save hers. Really? Why does he love her so much? Is it because she’s absolutely beautiful? Is that why he loves her? Because she’s an incredibly hot babe? It must be, because they share no on-screen chemistry. Nothing we see them do convinces us they’re in love. Their relationship is eye candy without depth, and that is the central problem with this movie.

You want me to care deeply? To really care about what’s going on? Then give me real characters, real relationships that I can believe in, give me a reason why two young people love each other so much, and I’ll return to your movie series time and time again, because I’ll care about your characters and won’t sleep unless I know what’s happened to them. If this were the case, then we’d be talking about raising TRANSFORMERS up a few notches.

DK: Okay, you just spent WAY too much time talking about Sam and Carly. Their relationship is merely there to serve as wish fulfillment for teenage boys. Period. And to show the mental delusions of Sam, who has suffered such serious post-traumatic stress from saving the world, that he invented a new girlfriend.

MA: I disagree. Sam is driven in this movie by his “love” for Carly. I’m simply saying I didn’t find this “love” believable, and had I found it believable, I would have liked this movie more.

DK: No, the driving force behind the character Sam is to keep moving before the clowns in the walls can get him and eat him up.

MA: Oka-ay.

TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON could have been much worse. As it stands, it’s a fairly entertaining movie that’s got enjoyable characters, a humorous script, decent action sequences and eye-popping special effects, but at the end of the day, it’s all fluff, the stuff that 10-year-old boys dream about. I give it two and a half knives.

DK: One point to make, and worth seeing, if you take a 10-year-old boy to this movie, keep one thing in mind: it’s pretty violent. You see innocent people in the streets of Chicago blown to pieces over and over again. Two of the good Transformers die pretty horrible deaths, one execution-style. It might actually be too traumatic a movie for kids under 10. Seriously.

MA (laughing): Seriously? I mean, there’s no blood in these scenes at all. I wouldn’t classify them as violent. However, the film is rated PG-13, so parents probably shouldn’t be taking their 10 year-olds in the first place!

DK: Trying to take what little kids will think (which isn’t hard, being a dad myself) into account, I thought the Chicago invasion and liberation section of the movie (the last third) kicked major butt. And the Transformers spoke very little, which helped a lot. And it could have been a shorter film, I agree. But despite all the money, all the special effects and all the cool actors, well, I kind of wished we’d gone to see GREEN LANTERN instead, because I didn’t enjoy this one much.

MA: Actually, GREEN LANTERN was worse! The characters in this movie were much more entertaining than the characters in GREEN LANTERN.

DK: But dinner was good afterwards (at least until the police called because, unbeknownst to me, I knocked over my neighbor’s mailbox on the way to the movies—but that’s another story for another time). I give it two knives.

MA: Well, that about wraps things up here. Thanks again, Dan, for filling in for L.L. today.

DK: Happy to do it. It was fun. Speaking of fun, now I can ride the slide.

MA: Excuse me?

(DK lets go of his chair and slides down the tilted building towards the edge.)

MA: No, Dan, wait!

DK: Geronimo!!! (DK slides off the edge of the building.)

MA: That’s not good.

(Cell phone rings. MA answers it.)

MA: Hey, L.L.! Yeah, we’re just finishing up now. Dan? Oh, he’s—he’s not here right now. He’s—

well, how do I put this?

(Suddenly DK flies into view outside window and gives MA a thumbs-up while in midair.)

DK: Trampoline! I’m okay! (DK falls out of sight once again.)

MA: He just had so much fun he had to go off and jump around some. You know Dan. Oh yeah, I’m sure he’ll be back to do this again sometime. (DK flies by again, dancing with Eeyore.) I hope.

—END—

© Copyright 2011 by Michael Arruda and Daniel G. Keohane

Michael Arruda  gives TRANSFORMERS: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON - -  2 and a half knives!

Dan Keohane gives TRANSFORMERS: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON - – 2  knives!

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Suburban Grindhouse Memories Goes to Times Square!

Posted in 2010, Aliens, Animals Attack, B-Movies, Campy Movies, Grindhouse, Hot Chick Movies, ROBOTS!, Suburban Grindhouse Memories with tags , , , , , , , , , , on November 11, 2010 by knifefighter

SUBURBAN GRINDHOUSE MEMORIES No. 17:
Sometimes You Just HAD to Go to the City…
By Nick Cato

1987 Newspaper ad from the NEW YORK POST

Regardless if you’re a horror, sci-fi, or fantasy film fan, the above ad managed to get anyone with a love for B-cinema out of the ‘burbs for one gloriously cheese-filled fall evening back in 1987.  As far as I can recall, this double bill was one of the LAST trash-fests to play in NYC’s Times Square, thanks to a distributor known as “Urban Classics” (who also released these titles to video shortly after their week-only theatrical run).  Was it worth the bumpy train ride, dodging peddlers, hookers and drug dealers, and attempting not to stick to the theatre floor?  Yes . . . and no.

The first feature, SLAVEGIRLS FROM BEYOND INFINITY, turned out to be a loin-cloth-bikini version of THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME (1932).  Two cute “slave girls” escape from a slave ship in a cheap-looking space shuttle and crash land on a planet where some nut named Zed throws them out into the jungle and hunts them with his goofy-looking robot.  Unless you’re a teenaged boy (as I was at the time), chances are you’ll scan through this with the fast forward (although we didn’t have that option in the theater).  If not for scream queen legend Brinke Stevens, and beautiful newcomers Elizabeth Kaitan (or Cayton—she has used both in several films) and Cindy Beal, the film would basically have been a total wash.  There’s one scene that did stick with me: our two hunted femmes find themselves at a ravine that’s bridged by a fallen tree.  At the time I thought, “Man, this reminds me of KING KONG.”  Sure enough, I read an interview with director Ken Dixon a year or so later where he said Kong did indeed inspire this sequence.  I’m also assuming most of the film’s budget went into this decent visual.

So, if you want to see cute girls running around on an alien planet (that doesn’t look much different from any national state park) in bikinis as robots chase them with continual lame dialogue, SLAVEGIRLS is the film for you.  The NY crowd I saw this with mocked the acting for most of the running time.  And despite the babes, I was eager to get on to the second feature.  (Did I mention Elizabeth Cayton returned a year later in the wonderfully-titled ASSAULT OF THE KILLER BIMBOS?  Surprise time: it was worse than SLAVEGIRLS!)

Moving on: Just two years after making a name for herself (and her shapely buttocks) in RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985), Scream Queen Linnea Quigley had already began her downward spiral with CREEPOZOIDS, a tedious ALIEN rip-off that features one of the dumbest-looking monster babies ever committed to celluloid.

Shortly after the film started, I remember everyone in the theater laughing because the film took place in the distant future of 1998 (!)

After the world has been nuked (yawwwn), a group of survivors find an underground government research facility, where they discover scientists were trying to find a way for humans to survive without food (yes, this script had Oscar written all over it).  The crowd laughed like hyenas at the attacking giant rats (which weren’t a quarter as cool-looking as those in THE FOOD OF THE GODS (1976)), and of course shouted praise for Linnea’s arse during the too-long shower/sex scene.  YES—even the shower/sex scene wore out its welcome in this darkly-filmed non-epic from director David DeCoteau, who had previously been responsible for gems such as DREAMANIAC (1986) and NIGHTMARE SISTERS (1987).  (Ironically, while researching DeCoteau for this article, I discovered he’s been actively directing ever since, his latest being a FOOD OF THE GODS remake slated for a 2011 release.  Heaven help us if he recycles CREEPOZOIDS’ rats for it).

Like all classic-era Times Square double features, the time spent outside the theater, along with the audience hi-jinks and continual insults at the screen, is what made films like these so enjoyable: I don’t know how well I (or anyone else) would do with them on home video, so even if you’re a sci-fi/trash film completist, approach both of these titles with extreme caution.

And a double-shot of espresso if you plan on making it to the end.

Linnea Quigley attacked by mutant rat in CREEPOZOIDS; Elizabeth Kaitan trailed by hi-tech robot in SLAVEGIRLS

© Copyright 2010 by Nick Cato


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TERMINATOR SALVATION

Posted in 2009, Cinema Knife Fights, Post-Apocalypse Movies, ROBOTS!, Science Fiction with tags , , , , , , , on February 6, 2010 by knifefighter

CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT: TERMINATOR SALVATION (2009)
by Michael Arruda and L. L. Soares

FADE IN

(THE SCENE:  a futuristic landscape, decimated by war, with screaming people fleeing in every direction, as an 80-foot tall terminator machine opens fire on them. MICHAEL ARRUDA and L.L. SOARES are among the fleeing humans. They jump into an abandoned jeep, and with L.L. behind the wheel, race away with the giant machine in hot pursuit).

MA (raising his voice to be heard over all the pandemonium):  Welcome to another edition of CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT. L.L. and I have traveled to the not-so-distant future to see firsthand what it’s like to live in the TERMINATOR world, to bring you the most authentic review possible of the new movie, TERMINATOR SALVATION (2009).

LS:  Yeah, and it sucks!

MA:  What?  The movie or visiting this futuristic world?

LS: Both! This world isn’t exciting enough for me. If we gotta be in a post-apocalyptic future, I’d prefer the one from THE ROAD WARRIOR or even Romero’s zombie world. This one is tired and predictable.

MA:  This is also a Cinema Knife Fight first:  the first time we’ve attempted to review a movie while traveling at excessive speeds in a burnt-out vehicle while being chased by an impossibly huge terminator machine. So, here goes. I hope you can hear me okay!

LS:  Hold on just a second. (while still holding the steering wheel with one hand, LS holds a machine gun with his other, and aiming over his shoulder, opens fire at the terminator behemoth with a hail of bullets.)  Take that, you oversized piece of mechanical shi—! (machine gun fire drowns out his words). Go to hell, mother f— (more well-timed machine gun fire).

(LS turns to MA) I hate that you insist on keeping this column PG-rated!

MA: Stop complaining and keep shooting!  Anyway, today’s movie, TERMINATOR SALVATION, is the fourth movie in the TERMINATOR franchise, following TERMINATOR 3:  RISE OF THE MACHINES (2003), and it’s the first not to star Arnold Schwarzenegger. This one stars Christian Bale, who gets to strut his tough guy self on screen once again, only this time sans the BATMAN mask.

I’ve always liked the TERMINATOR movies, with my favorite being the original THE TERMINATOR (1984), though I enjoyed TERMINATOR 2:  JUDGMENT DAY (1991) nearly as much. Still, I wasn’t all that interested in seeing this one. For some reason, the thought of another Terminator movie did nothing for me. I had low expectations, and though it wasn’t as bad as I feared it might be, it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.

This one is the first movie to take place in the future, and it tells the story of an adult John Connor (Christian Bale). Connor was the boy in the original movies who had to survive in order to grow into adulthood so he could lead the successful resistance against the revolting machines. Yeah, I know it’s kinda crazy, and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you think about it too much. Thanks to the “good” Schwarzenegger Terminator of movies 2 and 3, Connor does survive, and we find him here in the future doing his thing leading the humans against the machines.

Connor is also looking for Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) (Yelchin also plays Chekov in the new STAR TREK movie), the young man he must send into the past to save his mother from the original Terminator.

LS: Yeah, and Reese also gets to bang Linda Hamilton, since he also happens to be John Connor’s father in the past. Chew on that one for awhile.

MA:  Lucky, Reese. Anyway, trouble is, the machines are also looking for Reese, and for Connor, so they can kill them both.

While you would think John Connor would be the most interesting character in the film, he isn’t. That distinction belongs to new character Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington). As the movie opens, we witness Wright on death row, and just before he is to be executed, he signs his body away to be used for cancer research.

Wright awakens in the future, and finds himself in the middle of the war between humans and machines. He also finds Kyle Reese, though he doesn’t know Reese from a hole in the wall.

LS: Don’t forget Reese’s sidekick, the little mute girl played by Jadagrace.

MA:  I don’t know. I wasn’t that impressed by Jadagrace. Aren’t there always likeable little kids like her in these futuristic movies?  Like the kids with Charlton Heston in THE OMEGA MAN (1971)?  I think that’s where it started. They must all belong to a secret club.

After Reese is captured by the terminator machines, Wright hooks up with resistance fighter Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood) and accompanies her to her base, where he meets John Connor.

LS: Moon Bloodgood? What kinda name is that? Well, despite the goofy moniker, I thought she was really good here. And kinda hot.

MA: It is here where the discovery is made that Marcus isn’t human anymore, but is half- human/half-machine.

LS: Whoa! That’s a major spoiler you’re giving away. But it’s kind of hard to review the flick without spilling the beans. Then again, the trailer already gives that away, and there are plenty of clues beforehand. So it’s really not that much of a surprise, after all. Ho hum.

MA: It is also here where the film hits its high note and is most interesting. Marcus has to deal with the horror of learning that he’s really a cyborg. And John Connor is caught off guard by this discovery, because in the audio tapes his mother left him from the past, filling him in on every possible piece of information she deemed would be helpful to him, nothing is mentioned of half-human/half-machine beings. He realizes he is facing something new.

Connor is also confused because his first inclination is to destroy Marcus, but Marcus displays more humanity than he expects, and when he tells Connor he knows the location of Kyle Reese, and offers to find him for Connor, Connor is faced with the dilemma of not knowing whether or not he can trust the cyborg.

In addition to wanting to save his friend Reese, Marcus is also driven by the need to find out who made him this way and why.

The film builds to a conclusion that ultimately brings Connor, Marcus, and Reese together as they fend off the unrelenting, unstoppable terminator machines, with the future of the human race at stake.

LS: Well, they’re not really “unstoppable” – otherwise humans wouldn’t stand a chance!

MA:  Tell that to big dude chasing us!

I liked TERMINATOR SALVATION, but I didn’t love it.

The best part of the movie for me was the performance by Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright. I thought he delivered the best performance in the movie, by far. Whenever he was on screen, the film was that much more entertaining. And it also didn’t hurt that Marcus was the best written character in the film, by screenwriters John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris, who also wrote TERMINATOR 3:  RISE OF THE MACHINES.

LS: Yeah, I totally agree about Worthington. He’s the real actor to watch here. In fact, I would go so far as to say he is the ONLY reason to see this movie.

MA: Though John Connor is trying to save the human race, his character isn’t fleshed out anywhere near as much as Marcus. With his personal plight of discovering that now he’s half machine, Marcus is in a league above the rest of the characters in the film, in terms of drama.

Christian Bale is OK as John Connor. He certainly delivers a solid performance, but as written, Connor isn’t all that interesting. We know he wants to save the human race, but other than the fact that he’s the “Chosen One”, we don’t really get to see how he’s qualified to be that leader. He doesn’t say or do anything that puts his stamp on the label that he’s the “guy” to save the world, which I think is less the fault of Bale and more the writers.

LS: I am so tired of the whole “Chosen One” archetype. It’s so damn narcissistic! Oh look at me, I’m the only one who can save the whole planet. Look how special I am!

How lame. Too many movies rely on this crap.

As for the acting, I actually don’t think Bale is as great as everyone thinks he is. He was good in smaller movies like AMERICAN PSYCHO and THE MACHINIST. But I still contend that ANYONE can play Batman. He’s one-dimensional.

MA:  Tell that to Adam West!

LS:  I’m not talking about that show. That was a comedy. I’m talking about the recent movies.

MA (wearing Batman costume):  I’m Batman.

LS (opens fire at MA with machine gun):  Now, you’re dead Batman.

And John Connor isn’t much different. Connor seems to have just one emotional reaction to everything that is thrown at him – righteous anger. He’s so ultra-serious and ultra-bland that I found him to be the least interesting character in this movie. Every time he’s on screen I just found myself hoping it would be over soon.

MA (now without the Batman costume): Gotta love that Batman body armor!   I enjoyed Bale in the 3:10 TO YUMA remake with Russell Crowe, and I didn’t really mind him as Batman, but as John Connor, I’d have to agree with you that he wasn’t that interesting.

Moon Bloodgood is bloody good (heh, heh) as Blair Williams, and Anton Yelchin turns in a respectable performance as young Kyle Reese, though he was more memorable in the new STAR TREK flick. And Yelchin somewhat resembles a younger version of Michael Biehn, who played the Kyle Reese role in the original TERMINATOR in 1984.

LS: Like I already said, I thought Moon was good. But I couldn’t give a crap about Yelchin. I kept hoping the robots would kill him. Bale too.

MA: The weakest part of TERMINATOR SALVATION, however, is the lack of a central villain. This film needs a baddie, desperately. The bad guys here are terminator machines, and there are tons of them, in all their animatronic/CGI glory, but there’s no one main bad guy, who really gives Connor and Marcus a run for their money. Even in the films where Schwarzenegger’s terminator was the hero, there was a single bad guy, a central terminator villain for him to square off against. In general, the hero is only as good as the villain, and in this case, there really wasn’t a villain.

LS: I agree. Movies like this are only as good as their bad guys. In this movie, the bad guy is Skynet – a friggin military computer system that has acquired consciousness. How exciting is that?

(Quick shot of MA slumped forward on the dashboard, asleep, with a pool of drool beneath his lips).

See what I mean?  That said, there are some cool robots this time around. For example, it’s interesting how a lot of the man-sized terminators, with their exposed skull faces, reminded me an awful lot of zombies this time around. There’s even one scene with a robot who’s lower body has been blown away, that attacks Connor with just its upper torso, that really conjured up George Romero’s zombies. In fact, these models of the terminators even have a vulnerable spot in the back of their heads that causes them to lose control if you hit it.

MA: Aim for the heads!

LS: Yee-haw! Exactly. Another robot, that looks like a giant metal man without a head – just like the one that’s chasing us! – reminded me an awful lot of the recent remake of WAR OF THE WORLDS. Not only did the robot make the same screeching metal noise as the Martian ships did in that movie, but it also grabs humans and drops them into a gigantic basket, which is very similar to WAR OF THE WORLDS as well.

MA:  Too similar. I thought it was a rip-off of the WAR OF THE WORLDS movie.

LS:  Oh yeah, those worm-like aquatic robots were pretty cool, too. But wasn’t there something similar in the MATRIX movies?

It seems like the writers this time around took some ideas and imagery from other movies. I guess that’s called a “homage.”

MA:  Really?  I thought it was called “running out of ideas.”

I also thought the look of the film was nothing to get excited about. With its charcoal gray landscape, the film almost looks black and white at times.

LS: Yeah, it wasn’t bleak enough at all!

(A robot MOTORCYCLE zooms past the jeep)

MOTORCYCLE: Nyah, nyah, you guys can’t catch me!

LS: Who cares? You’re lame anyway (fires machine gun and the motorcycle explodes)

MA: The special effects were slightly above average. They certainly didn’t wow me by any means, but they served their purpose. The film was dedicated to the memory of Stan Winston, who passed away last year. Winston’s special effects in TERMINATOR 2 won an Academy Award that year.

Director McG handled the action sequences very well. While I’ve seen more intense sequences, I’ve also seen a lot worse

I thought the music by Danny Elfman pretty ordinary, and not up to his usual standards of film music. Other than the original Terminator theme music, which was played sparingly, nothing else stood out.

As a science fiction action movie, TERMINATOR SALVATION hits its mark. It’s not all that intelligent, but it is slickly done, generally entertaining, and far from boring.

LS: Far from boring? (laughs loudly)

MA: While you may find that funny, I wasn’t bored at all. However, it’s certainly not dark enough or horrific enough to be considered a science fiction horror movie, and this is consistent with the previous films in the series, which all leaned toward action rather than horror. If action’s your thing, especially of the science fiction variety, you’ll enjoy TERMINATOR SALVATION. It’s a decent enough thrill ride that won’t wow you, but it will entertain you. What did you think, LL?

LS: I have to admit, I’m not a huge fan of the Terminator series, but I did love the first movie. Despite its low budget, the first TERMINATOR was a lot of fun, and featured Arnold Schwarzenegger in perhaps his best role ever as a murderous robot from the future. He was just terrific in that role. T2 brought the storyline into the big budget blockbuster realm, and it never looked back. For me, I lost interest in T2 when Edward Furlong tells the Ahnald-bot “Do not kill.” In that moment, not only were Arnold’s balls snipped, but the entire series was neutered as far as I was concerned. Arnold’s killer robot wasn’t some kid’s pet to be domesticated.

By the time the third movie rolled around, I had just lost interest. The TV show, THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES, was much of the same. It started out promising enough (especially Summer Glau as a terminator who also happened to look like a teenage girl!), but over time got so bogged down in its own mythology that I  just found it all incredibly boring, and stopped watching.

So, I didn’t have very high hopes for the newest installment, TERMINATOR SALVATION. And, for the most part, it was as underwhelming as I expected. Although as we have discussed, Sam Worthington is the only reason this movie is not a complete waste of time.

It was also good to see the usually great Michael Ironside here, as resistance leader General Ashdown, even if his character was a complete idiot who refused to heed John Connor’s advice, just for the sake of creating dramatic tension.

The rest of the cast is pretty forgettable, including Bryce Dallas Howard as Connor’s pregnant wife, Kate. She has been the only saving grace in a few M. Night Shyamalan movies recently, but here she has a totally thankless and undeveloped role.

I didn’t totally hate TERMINATOR SALVATION, but I can’t really recommend it either. I found a lot of it rather tedious, and, aside from Worthington, there’s nobody here that really grabs your attention.

Maybe it’s time for this series to finally be put to rest. It’s starting to become as tiresome as the god-awful MATRIX movies, another series that I hope we’ve seen the last of.

MA:  I don’t know. The way things ended, it sure looks like someone out there is thinking about TERMINATOR 5.  And though I didn’t love this movie, unlike you, I do recommend it. I think the action is entertaining enough to make it worth your while, even though the story isn’t as imaginative as it could have been, and I didn’t mind the acting as much as you.

LS:  Well, I liked the fact that there were several different kinds of terminators, even if they were kind of “familiar.” There’s even a surprise appearance by an old school terminator late in the film.

(LS’s cell phone rings, and he answers it)

LS: Who the hell is this?

ARNOLD: This is the governor of California calling. I vanted to thank you for mentioning my cameo in the new TERMINATOR movie.

LS: That wasn’t even you, it was some kind of CGI effect.

ARNOLD: Oh no, that’s me. I’m bigger and stronger than ever now. I hope you enjoyed my performance. I am very big and strong, you know.

LS: Yeah, yeah.

ARNOLD: I must go now. My state needs me.

LS: So long.

ARNOLD: Hasta la vista, baby! (laughs uncontrollably)

LS: Jeesh, what a ham.

The ending is incredibly sappy, and the manipulative music score doesn’t help (so no, I wasn’t impressed with Danny Elfman’s work here either).

And, like I said before, this is easily one of Bale’s weakest roles in awhile. Then again I’ve never really cared much for the character of John Connor. Even though he’s supposedly some kind of messiah who is fated to save mankind from the machines, I never found him all that compelling. Which is why I always root for the robots in these movies.

MA:  I would have to agree with you about the character of John Connor. He’s boring.  But I like Bale, and I think had the John Connor character been written better, the results would have been more satisfying.

LS:  The robots are way cooler.

MA: Well, those same robots you like so much are trying to kill us now!

LS: It’s not their fault. They’ve just never met a cool-ass human before. Their loss.

(The jeep pulls up in front of a KFC restaurant, with tires screeching)

MA: You’ve got to be kidding me. This is no time for a snack.

LS: No, in the back, there’s a time machine, right next to the deep fryer. We can get back to our own time again.

MA: Finally! Well, this wraps things up for this installment of Cinema Knife Fight, the only review column where the writers put their lives on the line to bring you the truth about today’s movies.

(The giant robot fires a missile that blows up the KFC before they can reach it)

MA:  Ooops!  Not to worry, though. We’ll just implement Plan B.

LS:  Plan B?

MA:  As in, we just walk off the set.

LS:  We can do that?

MA:  We’re writers, we can do anything.

(LS and MA step from the jeep and walk down a set of stairs which leads them off the soundstage into a lobby).

LS: So much for the wonders of time travel.

MA:  We’ll see you all next time.

LS:   That’s right. (in his best “Arnold” voice)  Ve’ll be back!

FADE OUT


(Originally published on Fear Zone on 5/29/2009)

© Copyright 2009 by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares



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