CX Reviews

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CX Reviews

Postby CX » Sun Apr 17, 2011 7:14 am

I'm starting a new thread for "normal" movies and shows I watch just to separate it a bit from the anime reviews I've been doing. While I was hoping to start out with Avatar or Abrams Trek, and just not bother with anything else, I thought I might do some reviews of some more obscure sci-fi as well as some older more well known stuff. Look for my 2001 review at some point in the future. ;)

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Re: CX Reviews

Postby CX » Sun Apr 17, 2011 7:14 am

Cargo
(2009 movie)

While this movie was a bit small in scope and definitely derivative, it was still an okay movie, and pleasant to watch.

Taking place in 2267, the movie follows protagonist Dr. Laura Portmann as she signs up for a cargo run that she hopes will pay for an emigration to Rhea. Rhea is the driver of the plot here, as it is Earth's only colony world, which is important because Earth itself has become uninhabitable due to an ecological collapse. Humans now, for the most part, live in huge orbital stations that are overcrowded and were never really meant to be home to so many people. So basically Rhea is humanity's only real hope of having a home again, as far as anyone knows. It's also where everyone wants to go, but few can afford to do so. Laura's sister actually won a lottery, which is why she is now on Rhea. The two communicate regularly, and Laura's sister isn't happy that Laura signed up for this cargo run in light of recent terrorist attacks which have been intensifying recently. The terrorists are sold by the news as just being essentially anti-technology, though to be honest after learning the "truth," I can't say the media was all that far off.

Laura goes aboard the Kassandra, a run-down old cargo ship with an extremely small crew, a fluctuating scale, and a rocket engine arrangement that makes me cringe. It's an eight year mission to an unnamed "Station #42" (four years there, four years back), and to accomplish this, most of the crew is going to be put into cryogenic sleep, with each crew member taking turns running the ship in 8 1/2 month shifts. As an aside, the cryo-sleep was probably the most original aspect of this movie, as it had people lay fully-clothed inside a tub full of what looked like runny applesauce. Unfortunately between the look of the ship, which was run down and had dripping water in places, and the small number of crew members, I really couldn't help but be reminded of Alien. It even had a male captain with a female first officer, two male mechanic types, and a female computer expert. Basically Laura took the place of the insane Ash robot, and there was a creepy security officer who joined the crew at the last minute, and that was the only really difference in the set-up. What followed was basically the same kind of mystery/horror plot as Alien, except here it was a human they were looking for instead of an alien, and at first no one believed that Laura hadn't wandered into the ship's cargo bay, which was supposed to be off-limits to even the crew while the ship was in transit. There's also the way that not everything is as it appears, and that certain crew members are also keeping secrets and have their own agendas, it's just that there are more of them instead of just a crazy android played by Bilbo Baggins.

Crew members are picked off one by one, starting with the captain. While he conveniently has a security camera in his eyeball, unfortunately he didn't see who his attacker was. The rest of the crew, save the first officer and the computer chick, venture into the cargo bay to check out the cargo container that the captain had found open before someone chucked him over the railing. Inside they find a young girl in a cryotube and realize that the container is full of them. The plot thickens a bit, because the first officer is immediately angry and insists that they put the girl back. She isn't happy when the security guy and Laura pull rank, as they have security and medical concerns they can't simply ignore. Plus they want to know why they're hauling humans and there was nothing about this in the cargo manifest. Laura also has the computer expert, Yoshida, look into where the ship is actually going. At one point she'd sent a message to her sister, and instead of it taking an impossibly long amount of time to ever hear back, she got a response in only 20 minutes. You can probably see where this is going, because it turns out the ship is heading for Rhea, and for some ludicrous reason, the ship's course can only be set at the start of the mission and can't be changed along the way, so it was impossible for the captain and first officer to not know where they were going. Then Yoshida turns up dead. Naturally, Laura suspects the first officer, but right around that time the first officer uncovers that the security officer isn't who he appears to be and has him arrested. This is super-awkward for Laura, as they'd totally just had sex in the airlock.

After some brief misdirection, we finally find out what the hell is going on. There was a stowaway and the security guy was working with him. Both of them are from the terrorist group. Also, the first officer was keeping the fact they were headed to Rhea secret, because as it turns out, Rhea is The Matrix. Apparently humanity is in the planet-wrecking business, as when they tried to terra-form the semi-habitable planet they'd called Rhea, it ruined that planet's ecosystem, too. But rather than leave the people who thought they were going to colonize a new planet in orbit of Earth, they decided to build a station in orbit of Rhea that they could plug people into without their knowledge in order to keep up appearances while humanity searched for another planet to colonize. Also, the mechanics mutiny for no reason against their first officer and decide to help both Laura and the security guy out, even though he's a terrorist. They do end up finding the stowaway and end up killing him, and along the way Laura finds a video that shows Earth's ecosystem is practically recovered. Despite the fact this could have been faked, she just accepts it and ends up going along with the terrorist plan to blow up the communications antenna that allows communication between Earth and the colonists, with the provision that they get her sister out of there in the process.

As they arrive at Rhea, they are able to set up a time-delay on what is apparently an entirely automated process of unloading their entire cargo. The mechanics again just decide to betray their crewmates, this time screwing over Laura and the fake security guy and the two poor saps they pulled out of their cryotubes so they can enter the Matrix themselves. Basically Laura has just enough time to see her sister and send the message she was supposed to in order to inform everyone that Rhea was a lie and that they had proof they were bringing back – the little girl that they'd pulled out of the cargo hold and thawed out, as she had all the implants for being plugged in the way they were supposed to be. Unfortunately Laura's sister can't be pulled out, though it's never really explained why, because the security guy had actually found her physical body even though he'd had all of five minutes to do so along with setting the bomb and rescuing Laura from drifting off into space because of a faulty fuel cell that left her with no thrusters. While she was in the Matrix talking to her sister, he swapped out fuel cells with her because he knew with the combined mass of both of them they'd never make it back to the ship in time for it to leave, which it apparently was programmed to do all on its own. This goes about how you'd expect, with an attempt at drama from Laura losing the insta-romance she'd just developed with this guy. She does just barely make it back to the ship, and even manages to take out the now completely insane first officer on her own before hunkering down with the little girl for the four year journey back to Earth.

Now there are a number of problems with this movie, the first being a lack of development or even just getting to know the characters, even though there aren't that many of them. Even Laura, the main character, is a relative unknown. It's also rather convenient the way she just instantly trusts and believes certain people despite not having any reason to. For instance, how did she know that the video she saw of a restored Earth was genuine? How did she know that the security guy, who admitted he was a terrorist and was working with the head terrorist from the news at the beginning of the movie, was only planning to blow up the communications antenna and not the entire station? After all, that terrorist group had blown up civilian targets prior to that using rhetoric that showed an anti-technology bent, so why wouldn’t they blow up the Matrix/Rhea colony, as it was all a lie? Sure, she ended up being right in trusting these things, I guess, but really she had no logical basis for doing so. Which, speaking of, now that the gig is up, wouldn't Earth's government now want to intercept and probably destroy the Kassandra in order to prevent this proof Laura spoke of from getting out? After all, it's not like anyone who saw her message has any reason to believe her, so proof would be kind of important. There are plenty of other nitpicks I have, but really the next biggest one comes from character development in that what little of what there was felt forced. The biggest example of this is the romance between Laura and the security guy. After all, she seemed scared of him up until he just suddenly decided to kiss her, with good reason as she was at first suspected of breaking the law. Then with the way he snuck a kiss as she turned to look at an alarm that had gone off, well, I'd just have to think most women wouldn't go for that kind of thing.

The rest of this show's main weaknesses had to do with how derivative it was. Essentially it was Alien meets The Matrix, with an environmental message thrown in for fun. I'm not going to be too hard on it, because while it was derivative, I wouldn't really call it much of a rip-off, aside from the inside of the Kassandra, which was very similar in some ways to the Nostromo. And aside from that and the other problems I mentioned, the movie was somewhat enjoyable to watch. I'd actually recommend this mostly just for people to get a look at sci-fi from a country other than the United States, as this one comes from Switzerland and the spoken language is German. This unfortunately not only mans having to read subtitles but that the VFX tends to look more like something out of a game than a movie, but it's still an interesting experience and I'm glad I watched this movie. 6/10.
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Re: CX Reviews

Postby Distracted » Sun Apr 17, 2011 8:25 pm

Sounds cool. Might be difficult to get, though.
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Re: CX Reviews

Postby CX » Mon Apr 18, 2011 8:32 pm

A video rental place that had a foreign language section might have it, or NetFlix might. Or there are always other means. ;)
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Re: CX Reviews

Postby enterprikayak » Mon Apr 18, 2011 9:30 pm

*cough* TORrentz *cough* *cough* :evillol:

:tears:
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We do it because the tits are big and the bat'leths are sharp and the ships are fast!"

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Re: CX Reviews

Postby CX » Mon Apr 18, 2011 9:37 pm

Well, that's one way, but there are others that don't involve possibly getting nailed for sharing due to the seeding that always takes place when you use torrents. Not that I'm officially endorsing anything, or anything... :nerd:
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Re: CX Reviews

Postby CX » Sat Jun 04, 2011 10:01 pm

Ikarie XB-1
(1963 movie)

Well, this movie was definitely ... different. Sort of. It's very representative of sci-fi from the 1960s, which is to say it's all about the wonders of space and how awesome it would be to explore it. Actually comparisons to Star Trek would be fairly apt, but I'll get into that later. The reason I'm writing this review isn't because I especially liked or disliked it, but because I feel it's important more people should know about this movie. Why? Because it was made in Czechoslovakia back in the 1960s, and it's a movie not many people seem to know about. I sure as hell had never heard of it, and it's only by chance that I happened to see it on a list of obscure sci-fi.

As I said, as far as sci-fis in the 1960s went, this is fairly representative of other movies of that decade. Much like Star Trek, it follows a crew of explorers from many different countries on the most advanced ship Earth has developed, the starship Ikarie XB-1. Their mission – head to the Alpha Centauri system and check out a mysterious "white planet" which they suspect might have intelligent life on it. The ship is fairly small, so its crew is rather small, though they seem to enjoy rather spacious interiors in which they can partake in rather quaint recreation (by today's standards) of ballroom dancing. Of note is the inclusion of women, but since this was still the '60s, they didn't do a whole lot outside of being romantic interests and/or serving as a moral voice of reason at times. The voyage itself is supposed to take 28 months with the ship travelling at nearly the speed of light, which also means that relatively speaking, 15 years will have gone by on Earth when they finally reach their destination. I can't verify off-hand if that figure is correct or not because I'm kind of lazy and don’t feel like it, but I was rather impressed that the writers remembered that it would be no small task to decelerate the ship to more normal speeds when the ship comes across something the crew decides to check out.

As for the actual story, it's fairly good for the time, but as far as my tastes go, I found it kind of boring and preachy. You know, like a lot of episodes of Star Trek. ;) It had some pretty high ideals, and there was plenty in there about anti-militarism and how humanity should all just get along and peacefully explore space and the like. The crew is pretty much just excited to be doing what they're doing, and the movie makes sure that they never really let up about it for most of the movie. Not all of the crew members feel the same way, thankfully, but unfortunately the majority of them meet bad fates, and mostly this seems to be to reinforce certain things the movie was preaching. For instance, the Ikarie comes across an unknown derelict vessel that looks like a flying saucer. It's actually a little amusing at first, because the crew keeps referring to it as being antiquated. To be fair, the movie is supposed to take place in 2163 (exactly 200 years in the future), and they determine this ship to be from the 20th century, but still. I guess this is just an example of zeerust or something, because the closest 20th century Earth came to was the Avrocar, and that little project died before this movie was even made.

Anyway, two members of the crew go over to check out the derelict, and they able to determine that the ship actually is from Earth in addition to being so obviously antiquated next to the vaguely iron-shaped Ikarie. What's more amusing is that to press home how old this derelict is supposed to be, the people inside are all dressed up in 19th century western clothes and appear to be playing poker in an old style saloon. The only difference is that this saloon's second level has a control room in it, and it's here that they find the main stash of these strangely named gas canisters like the one that they believe is responsible for killing the entire crew of this ship. Why they'd have them like this is a mystery, but really this ship is just a thinly veiled slap at the United States. I say this because it's really obvious that the ship is supposed to be American, and the people on board are described as being paranoid and savage, which, let's face it, this movie was made in a Soviet satellite country. The bit with the nuclear arsenal on board was just the icing on the cake, though it also serves to kill off probably my two favorite characters and leaves the Ikarie without its chief engineer (I think).

Oh, and speaking of taking shots at the US, one of the older members of the crew has a robot not unlike the one from Forbidden Planet, and it's made fun of by the rest of the crew for being old and quaint.

This is also the point where the movie got a little more interesting for me, and not just because I was laughing at the attempt to bash my country, either. The derelict actually was the first clue in a mystery that makes the movie slightly less boring. It seems that two crew members who had gone outside to replace some component of the ship developed a strange kind of sickness, which also seems to have infected the rest of the crew. One of these two crew members dies and the second kind of freaks out and goes running around the ship, damaging equipment and injuring crew members. This is actually the in media res start of the movie, and it finally comes full circle at what's almost the end of the movie. The crew member is eventually talked down by one of his friends, and the crew can finally go back to the problem at hand, which is that all of them are being exposed to a strange kind of radiation, which is the actual cause of the sickness the first two had come down with. They can only speculate about a "dark star" that is invisible to them as the source of this radiation, and given the paranoia the second crew member displayed, they theorize that this is the actual cause of the derelict's crew killing each other.

Unfortunately for them, they can't think of anything to really do about it, as the ship's hull is only delaying the inevitable, and members of the crew are already starting to sweat profusely and act paranoid (in somewhat comical ways). The best they can think of is to knock the entire crew out because being unconscious slows down the effect of the radiation (somehow). The catch is, they might not wake up and might miss the mysterious white planet they now see as their only hope. Some of them also want to just go back to Earth, and there's almost a mutiny over this decision. In the end they go through with it, and naturally everything turns out all right.

Sorry for the spoiler, but whatever. Speaking of spoilers, it turns out there was life on the white planet and it protected them from the dark star by creating some kind of shield around the Ikarie. The crew cheers, a shiny white city appears and the movie just kind of ends.

I've seen this movie described by some as being "intelligent" and "subtle." I'd agree to the first part, though mostly in light of the particulars of the Ikarie's travel being consistent with actual physics as best as I can determine without breaking out the calculator and doing some math, which is kind of pointless anyway since it's just a movie. As for "subtle," I can't really see any evidence of that. For the most part I just found the movie and its characters boring and clichéd, so much so that I couldn't even keep track of who was who among the crew. Much like Gene Roddenberry's revised ideal humanity from the TNG days, the crew was pretty much uniform in characteristics and in how boring they were. Probably the most interesting among them were the crabby chief engineer and the old guy with the robot the crew made fun of.

As for the movie itself, I have to admit that the interior sets are pretty impressive considering when and where this movie was made. The exterior shots, not so much, though I suppose they might have also been impressive for when and where the movie was made. It's just that the "space" parts of the movie looked very unimpressive to me, and in fact "space" looked more like a black cloth with something like Christmas lights on or behind it. I'm not going to bash the models too much, but it was painfully obvious that the establishing shots of the ship flying through space were made by keeping the camera stationary while some stage hand pushed the model along a wire that it was hanging from. It actually made me wonder when the people making these movies first thought of keeping the model stationary and moving the camera to simulate motion.

While I am kind of down on this movie, though, I still have to admit that it's kind of impressive for when and where it was made, and that's actually why I'd recommend that you check this movie out if you're a sci-fi fan. It may not be among the best sci-fi movies as far as I'm concerned, but it's okay, and at the very least it'd give you a chance to see something from another country and another time. I'm also going to go against my usual standard of saying that if it has an English dub, you might as well watch it in that, because from what I understand the version of the movie with a dub not only cuts out quite a bit (which isn't necessarily a loss), but changes other aspects of the movie for the hell of it. One of the things it apparently changed was to change the name of the planet the crew was trying to visit to being the "green planet" with the lame twist being that this was actually Earth and that we'd actually been watching aliens. So if you're going to check this movie out to see what it was all about, you might as well see it in its original form with subtitles.

It's actually a little hard for me to rate this, so we'll just call the 4/10 rating a ball-park figure.
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Re: CX Reviews

Postby Distracted » Sat Jun 04, 2011 10:14 pm

Where did you find this movie?
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Re: CX Reviews

Postby CX » Sat Jun 04, 2011 11:22 pm

Same place I found the last one. ;)
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Re: CX Reviews

Postby CX » Sun Jun 05, 2011 9:42 pm

Enemy Mine
(1985 movie)

This is a highly influential movie that I've been meaning to see for quite a while now, and I finally got to see it. Of course here "influential" means that everyone and his uncle has ripped this movie off in some form or other. Some are a lot better at it and actually comes off as homage rather than a rip off, but most of them are exactly that and frankly aren't much better than the original.

Oh, don't get me wrong, at its heart this is a good story. I actually kind of want to read the book this was based on now. It's all about enemies going from just working together to ensure their own survival to adopting one another as family. It's the kind of story that's been told plenty of times, even before this movie came out, so really it's like an old WWII movie that's given a sci-fi setting. That in itself isn't bad, and in fact most of the good sci-fis are stories that could be told without the sci-fi elements. The main problems that really hurt this movie are the extremely slow pacing, the focus on the wrong part of the story, and that the story is lost part-way through the movie in favor of a white guilt film.

We follow pilot Willis E. Davidge of the Bilateral Terran Alliance as he narrates the majority of this movie for us. He informs us that humanity has continued to expand thanks to its space-going technology, and that just like the wars of the past, humanity has always found something to fight over. In this case humanity is after resources, and an alien species known as the Drac already lays claim to the systems with those resources in them. So on the distant future of July 11, 2092 (yes they give an exact date), Davidge sets out on another battle, this time to defend the station from a Drac attack. He gets a bit of target fixation after one of these Drac fighters successfully destroys a human fighter and pursues it into the atmosphere of a nearby planet. He successfully manages to shoot it down, but the Drac pilot just ejects and its wounded fighter collides with Davidge's, mortally wounding his radar officer (somehow) and causing him to crash land on the rocky planet surface, which fortunately for him turns out to have a breathable atmosphere. Unfortunately his fighter was made of explodium, so all he got out of the fighter aside from his dying radar officer was what he happened to have on his suit. This includes a shiny chrome lighter pistol, so he goes out in search of the Drac pilot for a little payback, as he's convinced he saw the ejection pod land not far from where he crashed.

This is how we get our introduction to the Drac pilot, Jeriba Shigan, as he skinny-dips for no apparent reason in a nearby green pond. There was a definite attempt to make the Drac alien here, from their reptilian appearance to the fact that they apparently only have one gender. As an aside, the make-up was actually pretty good in that parts of it were made to move to give off that alien and reptilian vibe, but unfortunately it also looked kind of funny and my friends and I couldn't help but laugh at it. Davidge's first impulse is to shoot Jeriba, but there's a storm coming and he ends up dropping his lighter pistol. Undaunted in his mission to kill Jeriba, Davidge gets some fuel from Jeriba's crashed fighter and lights the surface of the pond on fire while he laughs like a maniac. When this fails to kill Jeriba, he next tries to grab a pistol from the Drac's escape pod, only to get electrocuted. Fortunately for him, Jeriba apparently feels sorry for him, so rather than kill him he just takes him prisoner. A meteor shower is what first causes the two of them to temporarily put their differences aside so they can look after their immediate survival by sharing a cave.

From this point on, the two slowly learn each other's language as they work together to survive on this hostile planet, though to begin with it's a case of Davidge doing all the work as Drac's prisoner. They eventually lose this confrontational relationship and grow to be friends, as saving each other can do that for people. Of course there are a few hick-ups here and there caused by random fighting that almost leads Davidge to kill Jeriba, only stopping himself just short of doing so. This is what would theoretically be the good part of the movie, except that this takes up so much of the movie and the pacing is set so slow, it just ends up being damn boring. Another negative point for me is that there's the suggestion made that the two of them are able to befriend one another because the Drac have a very similar religion to Christianity. Being agnostic, the suggestion that everyone can get along as long as we're all the same religion just causes me to roll my eyes. Oh well, at least the Drac bible is a lot more condensed than the Christian version.

After their initial misadventures, the two of them apparently get really close, because Jeriba is pregnant. By this point, it's been a couple of years or so, so this kind of makes one wonder, and brings up some thoughts of "The Left Hand of Darkness."
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The make-up sex was apparently pretty fantastic.

I'm sure plenty of fan fiction has been written about this, and I'm sure plenty of people would like the idea of these two bumping uglies, but even setting aside my personal revulsion at the idea, it kind of ruins the theme of two enemies becoming loyal friends to one another through mutual adversity by taking it way too far. The movie even plays this up, because Jeriba is portrayed as a lot more feminine from this point on, and Davidge acts a lot like a proud papa. However, the movie cheats a bit even on that, as once Jeriba dies in childbirth, the kid, Zammis, refers to him as Uncle. We are then bored to death with a long montage of Zammis growing up over the course of another year or so. It's at this point that the white guilt film starts.

It was painfully obvious from when we first heard Jeriba speak that he was played by a black actor who was really playing up an African accent. It also didn't take my friends and me long to associate Drac with black. Just to drive this home, every single human you see is white, because much like James Cameron's Avatar the white guilt apparently loses some of its potency if you show the actual minority the aliens are supposed to represent acting as the oppressors. So in the same way Avatar lacked any actual west Indians, this movie lacks any black humans. And since the audience apparently wouldn't understand this idea without Drac people in chains, that's exactly what we got. They called the slavers "scavengers," but really these were the people getting at the resources humanity was apparently after to begin with. Davidge has been looking for a way off this rock since he got there, but apparently no one has thought to come looking for their missing pilot on the planet they were last seen entering the atmosphere of, so the scavengers appear to be the only way Davidge might have at rescue. Unfortunately there's the complication that he has a Drac child he swore to protect and to eventually return to his people, and the scavengers are in fact slavers who love nothing more than to slap shackles on Drac people and whip them while they cackle like the evil white people they are. You can probably guess what happens next.

So Davidge finally gets shipped back to his home station as a corpse by a BTA warship that just happened to be wandering nearby after three years, only naturally he isn't actually dead. Of course the movie feels the need to slap an insult at agnostics before this is revealed. It also doesn't help that the first thing he mumbles after he's magically revived himself is something in Drac after some jerks tried to rip off his tiny Drac bible. He's suspected of being a Drac agent despite having been found on the same planet he disappeared entering the atmosphere of after three years looking like someone who hasn't had a shower, shave, or haircut for three years. His friends, who we only ever saw in the first few minutes of the movie, stick up for him, but he's still grounded. Not that this stops him from immediately stealing a fighter and blasting his way out of the station so he can go same Zammis.

Despite feeling like this could be only the mid-point of the movie, it is finished up in a highly predictable manner, after which the movie suddenly switches narrator's to helpfully explain to us that Davidge not only fulfilled his promise to Jeriba, but that Jeriba went on to name his kid after him. The end. Nothing at all about any consequences of what Davidge did to get back and rescue Zammis, nothing about any politics that might have happened as a result of this little episode. Nope, the end.

Dear god was this a bad movie. No, it wasn't horrible, but it was still bad. Not only is it boring as hell and a white guilt film, it lacks the kind of depth, cleverness, and even subtlety that some of its rip offs manage to have. For all the time we spent with Jeriba and Davidge, we really don't learn all that much about their characters or their cultures beyond some very basic things that they exposit to one another. We also learn nothing about any of the other characters or the politics at play here. It's pretty much just a movie about how white people hate and take advantage of Drac people, and how it takes an enlightened white man to fight for and free them while they don't help at all. I'm hoping the book is better.

If I would "recommend" this movie, it would just be so you can see the influence it had on so many other rip-offs of it. But be prepared to be bored. 2/10.
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Re: CX Reviews

Postby CX » Mon Jun 06, 2011 1:08 pm

Dante 01
(2008 movie)

This is a French sci-fi movie, which is something of a rarity as I understand it, because apparently the general attitude in France is that sci-fi is kid's stuff. Apparently whoever made this movie wanted to make sure people understood that this wasn't a kid's movie because the first thing we see is a montage of a naked man being thawed out followed by a naked Asian woman getting dressed after going through a similar procedure. Honestly the fact that you don't see much French sci-fi is pretty much the only reason I'd ever suggest watching this movie. This is yet another one I found on a list of supposedly "good sci-fi you've never heard of." That isn't to say that this movie is bad, but it isn't what I'd really consider good either, mostly because it just came off as strange and kind of pointless to me.

I'll be the first to admit that there are times I just don't get movies that are too cerebral for even me, even though I tend to like them that way. I also don't begrudge movies for trying to be deep, because as a rule I tend to like that, too. But for me, the key word here is "trying," because while I could tell the movie was trying to make us think and ask questions, unfortunately the kinds of questions I was asking myself were more to do with the plot just not making sense and less to do with the kind of classic existentialist questions most sci-fi that fancies itself to be cerebral tries to get you to ask. Now, this could be because I just didn't get it, but I don't think so.

The movie takes place on a small space station which gives the movie its title. It an orbits aptly named planet, Dante, which is undergoing a perpetual state of lava and/or magma flow on its surface. The station is actually a small research base, which conducts experiments on prisoners who were basically given the choice to be human guinea pigs or face execution. There aren't very many prisoners and there aren't many researchers either. Overall the movie goes for that dark and gritty feel that has been popular with sci-fi since Alien.

The movie begins when a strange man who ends up being called Saint Georges is brought on board along with a new researcher with secret orders. Georges is put in with the general prisoner population and is almost immediately killed by one of his fellow prisoners who is quite insane, because he actually thinks he's doing Georges a favor by relieving his pain. Its understandable why Elisa, the new researcher, might want to study Georges, because apparently he was supposed to be the sole survivor of an alien encounter, which would explain why Georges seems to be in a perpetual state of drunkenness (we get plenty of POV shots). It just makes no sense at all why she'd go about it this way, especially in light of her secret orders being that she can kill all the prisoners with the experiments she's conducting with nanotechnology.

There's a lot of strife amongst both the researchers and the prisoners, who don't like or trust the newcomers. Mostly this strife, which usually takes the form of the prisoners trying to kill each other, just serves as a means of showing Georges's unique gift, which seems to be that he can heal people by eating some strange little tentacle monster that's latched on to people and only he can see. This is kind of weird, because these little monsters apparently represent everything from psychological problems, to the nanoprobes Elisa injects into the prisoners, to s slit throat. Unfortunately there were no little anime girls for them to rape. ;)

This comes off a little as something right out of Scientology, but these creatures and Georges's ability are never really explored that much because ironically the movie is kind of on the short side. Since one of the other research scientists suspected Elisa's motives and wanted to know what her secret orders were, he had one of the prisoners hack into her files. Problem is, as soon as he found out, he went nuts and hacked the station, screwing up its orbit so it would crash into Dante. The prisoner than kills himself, and as he was the only hacker among them, there is no way to restore control of the station. Around the same time, the head midget amongst the prisoners, César, has his goons stab Georges to death, which I guess is what Elisa was waiting for, because no sooner does this happen then she has him on a table and is ready to carve him up to try to "learn" about him. The other scientists giver her grief about this and everything else she's doing, but she has the authority to override them. Of course in the time they take to argue, Georges is apparently able to heal himself and comes back to life. He takes Elisa as a hostage, but only so he can return to the prisoner's quarters and heal the little prick that tried to have him killed, as Elisa had injected him with her little nanorobots.

It's about this time that everyone realizes they're screwed. The researchers who have been there for a while want to cooperate with the prisoners to save the station, as the only place they can restore control of the station is under the prisoner's quarters. This is a completely transparent device to get everyone to work together for their mutual survival, and as an added bonus César gets a chance to redeem himself in the process. Also completely transparent is the problem this causes them, because even though none of them trusts Elisa even a little bit, they leave her in the control room to look after things while everyone else gathers in the prisoner's quarters. Naturally, she betrays them, even though there was no reason at all for her to do so. Basically she knocks everyone out using the same gas system that was usually used on the prisoners to control them and to knock them out for them to conduct their experiments. Unfortunately for her, one of the prisoners whom the audience was not meant to sympathize with was conveniently able to train himself to hold his breath long enough to not get knocked out by the gas, and tries to take Elisa hostage with him so he can escape along with her on the station's only escape shuttle. The movie then punishes both of them for being bad people as it turns out the hacker had sabotaged the shuttle along with the station.

Speaking of dying, redemption is death, so César volunteers to save the station by going down into the manual control room because he's smallest. The already small passage leading to there is flooded with scalding hot water, which means anyone attempting to make the swim will be bulked up with protection. So they go about a lot of trouble wrapping him up in insulation and the like that's supposed to protect him and tell him the secret code he has to punch in, only for all of his protective gear to disintegrate right after he jumps in the water. Then he makes it to the room only to die before he can actually do anything. So basically the point was to watch him die a horrible death after being boiled alive.

None of that matters, though, because Georges saves them all. I'm not sure how exactly, but it had something to do with the little tentacle monsters and him turning into energy, or something. He just kind of goes out in a space suit between the station and the planet, turns into energy, and magically transforms Dante into something livable. I'm not sure how this saved the station or the people on it, because I'm pretty sure there weren't any escape pods or anything. The movie just says he "changed the context" by terraforming the planet because he couldn't save the station. But wouldn't have magically returning the station to its orbit been easier than terraforming an entire planet?

This is just one of many questions the plot made me ask myself. Other questions included:
  • If they know nothing about Georges and his only "crime" seems to be surviving, why is he being treated like a violent prisoner? All the other prisoners were only there in lieu of being executed, why is Georges being treated like them when they don't even know anything about him?
  • If this station is so special, why is Elisa allowed to kill all of them just so she can do a little research with her nanoprobes? If Georges is so special, why is he among those to be killed? Since Georges was so special and despite all the evidence, why does she not believe the conclusion the other scientists have come to about Georges being able to heal the sick or mortally wounded prisoners? What point was there in bringing him there if she wasn't even going to study him for whatever might've happened to him as a result of his supposed alien encounter?
  • Why don’t any of the scientists try to confirm Elisa's orders and authority? None of them trust her from the start because she's obviously underhanded in what she's doing. Then they left her in a position to betray all of them. Why?
  • What was this movie even about?

That last one may be a bit harsh, but to be honest the movie doesn't seem to be about a whole lot other than playing through a bunch of sci-fi tropes to have Georges turn into energy after he terraforms a planet. I will admit though, that for not being about a lot, it is a little interesting. It helps that the pacing isn't too slow even if it's clearly attempting to be more cerebral than 99% of modern sci-fi. I'll also give it some credit for that, even if it didn't really succeed all that well at it. Either way, it's more interesting and less boring than Enemy Mine, so it has that going for it. 3/10.
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Re: CX Reviews

Postby Distracted » Tue Jun 07, 2011 1:25 am

You need to read the story "Enemy Mine" by Barry Longyear, CX, because you completely missed the point of the story. Dracs reproduce spontaneously at a certain point in their lives via parthenogenesis, like monitor lizards. They don't have sex. Willis is the child's adopted "uncle", not his father. And Willis is an agnostic before he meets Jerry. He's kept sane by Jerry's philosophy, and comes to believe in a higher power because of it. It's not "Christianity" at all. The point of the story is that intelligent beings all have something in common by virtue of their common existence in a universe full of adversity. Every individual has something in common with every other, so we shouldn't be killing each other.
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Re: CX Reviews

Postby CX » Tue Jun 07, 2011 3:09 am

It still comes down to "we can all get along as long as we're the same religion" though, as the movie made a point in highlighting the similarities with Christianity, which was apparently supposed to be the default human religion. As for the other things, I guess that's a failure in the movie. It seemed more interested in being a white guilt film anyway. It also doesn't surprise me that the book is probably better than the movie, and I think I mentioned I'd like to read it at some point.
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Re: CX Reviews

Postby Distracted » Tue Jun 07, 2011 12:05 pm

*shrug* You're certainly entitled to your opinion. Jerry's religion always struck me as more like Judaism than Christianity with all of its recitation of lineages. The point, I think, is that before he met Jerry, Davitch believed in nothing (remember his joke about "Mickey Mouse"?). That belief didn't work for him to keep him sane in his isolation. He needed something apart from himself, apart from the secular self-centeredness symbolized by "Mickey Mouse". And that, in my eyes, is the unifying principle. Not that we must all be the "same religion" to get along, but that intelligent beings possess an innate need to be part of something greater than themselves, and in satisfying that need they become aware of the needs of other intelligent beings and less focused on themselves. Because focusing on the needs of another person is the only way you can get along with them. If we're always focused on our own needs and never on anyone else's, that's when the fighting starts. I want MY stuff and YOU can't have it. Nothing could possibly be more important than that if I am the center of my universe.
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Re: CX Reviews

Postby Cogito » Tue Jun 07, 2011 12:10 pm

Distracted wrote:*shrug* You're certainly entitled to your opinion. Jerry's religion always struck me as more like Judaism than Christianity with all of its recitation of lineages. The point, I think, is that before he met Jerry, Davitch believed in nothing (remember his joke about "Mickey Mouse"?). That belief didn't work for him to keep him sane in his isolation. He needed something apart from himself, apart from the secular self-centeredness symbolized by "Mickey Mouse". And that, in my eyes, is the unifying principle. Not that we must all be the "same religion" to get along, but that intelligent beings possess an innate need to be part of something greater than themselves, and in satisfying that need they become aware of the needs of other intelligent beings and less focused on themselves. Because focusing on the needs of another person is the only way you can get along with them. If we're always focused on our own needs and never on anyone else's, that's when the fighting starts. I want MY stuff and YOU can't have it. Nothing could possibly be more important than that if I am the center of my universe.


Well said.


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