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Reviews
Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (2008)
This was simply a bad movie
I can accept a lot of the tropes of science fiction: faster than light travel, teleportation, subspace communication, light sabers, ray guns, etc. but I can't accept that there would still be organized religion hundreds of years from now. What makes it harder to accept is that the original Starship Troopers movie made no mention of religion, which makes me think the people who made this movie saw it as a flaw that needed to be fixed.
The original Starship Troopers was very subtle about making the Federation seem sinister. Earthlings invaded bug space and they saw us as a threat so they attacked us but then our plan is genocide. Luckily Earth already had a fascist system in place so getting recruits to fight the bugs wasn't a problem. Oh and the bugs resemble human insects so killing them isn't a problem for most of us.
This sequel turns that on its ear. With "God on our side" we are the good guys and the bugs become Satan's minions. There's no room for moral questions anymore. The execution of anti-war protesters then seems like right-wing wish fulfillment in retrospect. "If you aren't with us then you are against us". George W. Bush actually did say that, didn't he? The change in tone of the movie also reminds me of Bush's comment regarding the 911 terrorists: he said they "hated the American way of life". That was his explanation for why they attacked the U.S. In other words, they were part of an "axis of evil". In other words, we are "good" and they are "bad". So, presumably, Moslems, like bugs, are to be exterminated and war protesters executed.
The original Starship Troopers demanded a sequel. Simply capturing a bug brain didn't end the war. This sequel now leaves the bugs in disarray, their threat effectively neutralized. A third sequel should then see the Federation collapse as mankind demands justice for those who were executed protesting the war. We really don't need another sequel that promotes racism and genocide.
Æon Flux (2005)
Satisfying SF
Word of mouth, including from people who actually saw it, has been pretty bad for Aeon Flux. Apparently the studio felt the same way because they didn't screen it for critics. I, myself, only recently saw it on video.
Charlize Theron stars as Aeon Flux. Set in the year 2415, 400 years after a virus had wiped out 99% of the human population, Aeon Flux is a member of the Monicans, an elite group of assassins who intend to kill the rulers of Bregna, the last city on Earth, presumably under the assumption that all you have to do is remove the dictator in charge and you'll instantly have a democracy. This sounds like a scheme George W. Bush might have thought of. Some reviewers have ironically referred to the Monicans as "manikans" in the sense that the acting is wooden. It's possible that the director, Karyn Kusama, is actually in on the joke because the Monicans, especially the Handler played by Francis McDormand, never crack a smile. By contrast, the supposed villains, the Goodchilds, played by Marton Csokas and Jonny Lee Miller seem genuinely happy and chummy in the scenes where they are first introduced. As a viewer, I felt confused, realising that the villains had so far come across as more sympathetic than the heroes. Fortunately, this was a good confusion in the sense that it foreshadowed the fact that things were not as they seemed.
Just as in this year's Ultraviolet, the hero comes to realize that those she is working for may be no more righteous than those she's been hired to kill. Yet while Ultraviolet solves this dilemma by killing everyone, both foes and former friends alike, Aeon Flux takes the time to ponder the situation and ask herself whose side she is on and who the bad guys really are. As a result, the movie has been criticized for being slow and introspective. Where have we come as a society where we criticize our heroes for not immediately killing everybody who appears on screen? The solution, while satisfying science fiction, does leave some unanswered questions. How exactly did the Goodchilds remain in power for 400 years without being overthrown? One would imagine that they must have been genuinely well liked because it wasn't *that* difficult for Aeon Flux to get past their defenses. And how is it that after 400 years the big secret that the Goodchilds were protecting never got out into the open? I can just imagine people saying "Wow, Trevor, you look just like your father. And his father. And his father. Etc. Etc. Etc." Otherwise the big revelation made a lot of sense and explained everything quite nicely, as long as you are willing to suspend your disbelief to the point of accepting the idea of genetic memory.
Of course, the movie had to end with a big explosion. For a moment there it looked as though Aeon Flux was going to cause an explosion big enough to kill everybody in Bregna and, thus, doom the human race to extinction. Somebody needed to tell her that no sufficiently advanced technology (short of a world ending bomb) should be considered evil or unnecessary and that Trevor was right in telling Aeon Flux not to make that choice for everyone else. No. That's what he did. Or his great great great (x5) grandfather anyway.
Martin Phipps
Ultraviolet (2006)
I really wanted to like this movie
To say that this movie is all style and no substance is to give it to much credit. Unlike Kurt Wimmer's previous effort, Equilibrium, there didn't seem to be much point to this movie other than showing off Milla Jovovich's abs.
Don't get me wrong: Milla Jonovich has great abs and if all you wanted to see was those abs then you'll get your money's worth and then some. It did seem as though every shot of Milla Jonovich was really her -or possibly a stunt double- and not just some CGI version of a scantally clad woman a la Catwoman.
No, the problem, as I've said already, is that there didn't seem to be any point to all this. Please don't accuse me of not paying attention: the problem is I paid too much attention. In the end, the movie doesn't deliver anything in the way of clear motivations for any of the major characters: the Vice-Cardinal turns out to be evil for no other reason than simply be evil. You can't blame it all on bigotry given what we learn in the final act of the movie. Thus, the movie tries to pass off as a clever movie with a twist but instead turns out to be a silly movie that makes little sense.
I have an even harder time trying to figger out Violet's motivations. Here we have the main character in the movie who kills friends and foes with equal nonchalance. I guess they are all bad people and they all deserve to die. Oh if only the real world had the logic of a bad action movie then we could all be serial killers and not have to worry about morality.
Yes, I know Violet trying to protect a child. This is a child who is going to die. She herself is going to die. Granted, the movie ends with the child surviving and offering to cure her. But she doesn't know anything about the child half way through the movie other than the fact that he is dying. Indeed, she has every reason to think the child is a retard (sorry... mentally challenged individual) who can't even speak.
Not only can the child speak but he's very articulate. Not only is he articulate but he's a genius who knows how to cure vampirism. So why wait until the final act to tell Violet this? Why does he really on his over abundance of cuteness as the only way to get Violet to save him? This is a woman who just killed thirty of her friends without so much as blinking (although, granted, technically all she did was dodge bullets). He needed to provide a better reason for wanting to keep him around. She even decided to abandon him at one point and he just said "Goodbye". Why didn't he say "Don't let them take me and turn me into a weapon! Oh and, by the way, I can cure you." Three major characters. Three characters with no clear motivations. That's three for three.
Actually, there is one character who has clear motivations and that is he doctor/friend played by William Fichtner. She asked him "Why did you go to all this trouble?" and he says "Isn't it obvious?" (meaning "I want to get into your pants"). Unfortunately, Violet isn't the brightest psychopath on the planet. I wouldn't be so quick to assume that anything came as obvious to her.
Martin
Elektra (2005)
It had one flaw... okay maybe two
We are supposed to root for Elektra, not because she's Jennifer Garner, not because we already saw her in Daredevil, not because we read any of the comic books, but because the character is inherently likable and/or sympathetic. The Punisher (2004) worked because the main character wasn't introduced as a killing machine: we saw his family die and we saw what it did to him. The same argument could be made for the success of La Femme Nikita. Elektra was introduced as a killing machine and this made her less sympathetic to most movie goers, even though I dug this movie on many levels.
The good guys weren't good enough. The bad guys weren't evil enough. We find out too late in the movie who killed Elektra's mother. Besides, maybe she deserved it. Didn't Elektra's victims all deserve to die? You can't have it both ways. If the child of one of Elektra's victims were to fight with her, does that mean that Elektra now deserved to die? Simply stating in the opening title sequence that the Hand is an evil organization doesn't make it so. Was Stick's group really any better? Even Elektra herself seemed unconvinced.
I saw this movie already knowing that it was a flop and I went there to find out what went wrong. What I found was, to me, a good movie, so I had to work extra hard to come up with an explanation for why the movie didn't work. This was the best explanation I could come up with. Some people have said "people don't want female superheroes" and, yes, perhaps Elektra did suffer from a comparison with Catwoman. This was a better movie, by far, but the fact that the comparison can be made at all is bad news for the makers of this movie.
Martin
Sherlock (1984)
CSI: London
In the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it was always Sherlock Holmes who was the investigator and Dr. Watson who was writing everything down. Nowadays, Doctors are called upon by the police to do autopsies and investigate crime scenes because they have expertise that the police don't have. That is the opening premise for Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes starts by working with Dr. Watson who is already investigating crimes for the police as a coroner. I'm not sure if such a position actually existed in Victorian times or if the script is meant to imply that Dr. Watson was the first of his kind. Other elements placed out of their usual time frame include having Professor Moriarty be the world's first heroin dealer and a scene taking place in the newly constructed London underground. Sherlock Holmes fans might be put off by the sex and violence but James Bond fans might actually find this action hero take on Sherlock Holmes more to their liking.
Martin Phipps
The Punisher (2004)
A damn good movie
The Punisher is a damn good movie. This is coming from somebody who never understood the appeal of the Death Wish or Dirty Harry movies.
I suppose those movies would appeal to you if you believed that any consideration of human rights only served to interfere in carrying out of the righteous slaughter of the criminal element of society.
Nevermind the debate on capital punishment, let's just skip the arrest, the trial and jury deliberations and just shoot criminals on sight! Hell, for that matter, why should I take the time to recommend this movie at all when I obviously strongly disagree with the very notion that any one man has the right to decide who lives and who dies? Indeed, there is even the subtle implication in the phrase "this is not revenge but punishment" that suggests that The Punisher is acting out of righteous indignation when he plays the role of judge, jury and executioner!
Thing is, as I said, this is a good movie, probably too good for the genre which is why it, ironically, didn't do as well as might have been expected.
The basic problem, I suppose, was that this is not quite the same character as in the comics: in the comics, The Punisher was a Vietnam War vet who, after seeing his family shot down in a gangland style massacre in Central Park, snapped and started going after all criminals. I presume that he did so with the objective of, in the process, killing the people responsible for his family's death but, in the comics anyway, he didn't see it so much as his personal revenge but as some kind of war. The movie character is slightly different in the sense that Frank Castle (Thomas Jane), having apparently finished his military service, had been working for the FBI, hunting down the very criminals who ended up killing his family. In the movie, the murder of his family is no longer random and neither is his response. The result is a more thoughtful, more methodical character who can imagine more inventive ways of punishing you than simply blowing your head off.
The fact that Frank Castle didn't go straight to Howard Saint(John Travolta)'s home and blow his head off in act one was, no doubt, a source of great frustration to fans of the Death Wish and Dirty Harry movies. (Indeed, the character of the Punisher in the comics was no doubt inspired by these movies.)
I must confess that I, too, was a bit confused seeing Frank Castle taking pictures and carrying around a fake fire hydrant. But where is the satisfaction in seeing the villain die without first being made to suffer?
When Frank Castle's plan started to come together, I was satisfied to see that he had taken the time to play with his opponents head before blowing it off.
After all, when a man has killed your entire family, one has the obligation to go to the extra effort of attacking him on more than one level!
Of course, we are "treated" to scenes in which the villains are shown to be truly evil so that we don't feel bad about their demise (much in the same way that the wedding massacre was shown over and over again in Kill Bill 1 & 2 in the hopes that we wouldn't start routing for the "bad" guys): Howard Saint kills one of his own men, his wife (Laura Harring) orders the massacre of Frank Castle's family, his second-in-command (Will Patton) carries it out and his surviving son has the honour of actually (making an attempt at) killing Frank Castle in revenge for his brother's death.
Even so, Frank Castle's neighbour (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) asks the obvious question "What makes you any different from them?"
Well, he isn't any different. That was the point of the comics when he first appeared as a villain in the Spiderman series, a point that got lost along the way when he went on to get his own series. But in this movie I was able to root for this protagonist precisely because he was following the golden rule and doing unto the villains exactly as they had planned to do to him. Indeed, as I have already stated above, for Frank Castle to have killed Howard Saint in the first act would have made the rest of the movie not only anti-climactic but would have rendered the movie completely soulless with Frank Castle going on to kill random drug dealers with whom he didn't have a personal grudge.
Of course, with that in mind, I dread to think what a sequel to this movie would be like. Presumably, in a sequel, Frank Castle would be no different from the character in the comics, deciding who lives and who dies on the spot and without any sense of remorse, one way or the other. While I understand Thomas Jane's enthusiasm in wanting to make a sequel, I no sooner want to spend two hours watching the Punisher shoot people than I would want to watch a Hulk sequel which was merely two hours of "Hulk Smash!"
Of course, there is always the chance, should a Punisher sequel ever be made, that I might be pleasantly surprised, yet again. Maybe.
Catwoman (2004)
The movie had its moments.
A movie needs two things above all else: a good beginning and a good ending. A movie needs a good beginning because you have just paid to be there and you are expected to watch it for two hours. You don't want the audience members to be sitting there thinking "Oh no, what have I done? Can I slip out of here and go see Spiderman II instead?"
A movie also needs a good ending. Without a good ending, movie goers will feel cheated and they definitely would not recommend a movie to their friends if they feel cheated.
Catwoman fails on both ends. It starts with a meeting at Hedare Beauty with Laurel Hedare (Sharon Stone) and George Hedare (Lambert Wilson). Why this scene had to be shot like a music video with split second cuts between Sharon and Lambert and even to the board members and then back to Sharon and Lambert I honestly don't know. I remember thinking, as I watched that scene, "So this is why people hate this movie so much! The editing is really bad!" Maybe if the movie had been sent back and re-edited from the original footage then it would have been a better movie.
Thing is, the ending was bad too. Catwoman (Halle Berry) said "I'm not a killer," but this was immediately after kicking Laurel Hedare out of the window. Yes, it was in self defense but what cop after seeing this happens tells her to run away so that nobody knows that Patience Phillips is Catwoman? Doesn't that make him an accessory after the fact? Couldn't he have testified in court that it was self defense? What goes into his official report? That she slipped and fell? Or that Catwoman killed her and got away but that he doesn't know who Catwoman is? How far is he willing to go to cover up for this woman who he slept with? Surely the department knew he had slept with the prime suspect in a murder case. Why wasn't he taken off the case as soon as the possibility conflict of interest reared its head?
The movie had its moments. The comment early in the movie about Patience Phillips having been given a leather outfit as a present was good foreshadowing and we did get to see that outfit later. But then the Catwoman outfit that we see in the rest of the movie is different.
Couldn't we have had a scene where Patience, like Selina Kyle before her, cuts up her old outfit and sews it back together, turning a sexy outfit into a sexy costume? Ultimately, why did she even need the costume? That was never explained.
Actually, the costume didn't work for me. Yes, we got to see Halle Berry's skin but a lot of the time it wasn't Halle Berry we saw in costume, it was all CGI. This aspect of the movie disappointed me more than anything else: if I wanted a sexy cartoon, I could have rented Japanese animation. I thought the whole point of the costume was that we could see Halle Berry's skin, not a computer generated character's skin. It would have been much better to have given her a full body costume and then it wouldn't have been so obvious when she was being rendered by CGI. It's clear from the way this movie was promoted in the trailers that the target audience was heterosexual males, not young kids, so why spend so much money on CGI anyway?
Even the cats were CGI most of the time! Would it have been so hard to train a real cat to crawl up onto Halle Berry and then have her wake up on cue? We know that this is only a movie so why remind us of this fact all the time by showing us CGI like this? Another example is the use of CGI in establishing shots: would it have been so hard to have used a helicopter to shoot footage of an actual American city rather than having all these shots be computer generated? I sometimes felt like I was watching a video game: I felt giddy watching the city scenes swirl around in front of me in ways that couldn't be achieved in real life!
I did enjoy this movie though. Halle Berry looked great and the fight with Sharon Stone almost had me cheering for Catwoman. The script wasn't bad but the ending left a lot to be desired. Don't they realize that they need to make sure that the first movie makes money BEFORE they make room for a sequel? I somehow don't think a sequel to Catwoman is ever going to happen. Halle Berry's career will go on though. I think she will continue to be offered roles and people will continue to go seeing her, hopefully in better movies than this.