Pitch Black

It all starts here.  And by "all," I mean the current generation of action heroes.  Pitch Black (sometimes retroactively titled The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black) was the first starring role for Vin Diesel after a string of ensemble films, and the first one that showed him doing much of anything that tough guys normally do in movies.  At this point, though, Diesel was an unproven box office draw and action star, so it was a little strange to see him again in Pitch Black, which is much more science fiction-y than I remembered.  But going against expectations can be a good thing, right?  Right...?

In the far-flung future, a passenger spaceship is damaged by the debris from a comet that they passed too close to and is forced to crash land on the closest planet.  The good news is that, among the survivors, the one crew member that survived was the pilot, Carolyn Fry (Radha Mitchell), so they can feasibly fly off the planet if the ship is repaired or a replacement is found.  The bad news is that the planet is a vast desert with no signs of life; the only indications that humans have ever been on this planet are some decades-old machinery and buildings that appear to have been left in a hurry.  This planet also has the distinction of having three suns, so it is never night.  Among the survivors are an Islamic Imam (Keith David), his followers, a snooty rich guy, a kid named Jack (Rhiana Griffith), a random chick, and William Johns (Cole Hauser), who is escorting the dangerous killer Riddick (Vin Diesel) to a prison planet.  Riddick has spent so much time in dank, dark prisons that he paid to have his normal eyes surgically enhanced to give him permanent night vision, which means that he has to wear welding goggles during the day --- or all the time on this three-sunned planet.

An even more distinguishing feature: Diesel hair!

Riddick is the strong, silent type, as well as the type that is intelligent and ruthless.  Of course, not everything is as it seems.  For starters, Johns might not be telling the truth, Jack may be more than he seems, and this daylight planet may have night, after all.  You see, every twenty-two years there is a complete triple eclipse.  It's not a good time to catch up on your sleep, though, because when the night comes, so do these things:

Hammerhead raptor bats?

What are they?  They don't get a proper name in the film, but they eat people completely, they fly, and they operate using something like sonar.  The good news is that they are extremely sensitive to light.  The bad news is that the triple eclipse will last a month and there are enough of those creatures to flood the planet.  I guess everybody better work together and escape this planet, eh?

Grimmest.  Science fair.  Ever.

Before I go any further, there is something I would like to touch on.  How the hell does a planet with near-constant exposure to the sun manage to develop a life form that is deadly sensitive to light?  What kind of ass-backwards evolution is that?  And what do those creatures live on during the twenty-two years they are forced to live underground?  Wouldn't the twenty-two years to one month ratio also tone down things (evolutionary-wise) like enormous heads and wings?   If the only life on this planet for the creatures to feast on are the crash survivors and each other, shouldn't this species be nearly extinct soon?  This isn't a deal-breaker for me, but I like it when science fiction explains things with science.

The acting in Pitch Black isn't great, but is good enough.  Vin Diesel is intimidating and pretty cool as Riddick, and his character is intriguing.  Yes, it's awfully convenient that the guy with night vision eyes lands on a planet on the verge of a month of night, but...well, yeah, it is amusingly convenient to the plot.  Radha Mitchell was adequate as the resident rational thinker in the group.  I liked that her character wasn't entirely altruistic, but I dislike the noise she makes when she's frightened.

Pictured: ugly sounds

Cole Hauser is predictably mean and his acting is not going to impress anyone here.  The "complexity" of his character is laughable and Hauser is still a low-rent version of Josh Lucas. 

...but he has a shotgun.  A space shotgun.

I think my favorite moments in the movie are when Riddick and Hauser's character lock eyes and stare each other down.  Yes, those moments are cheesy and sometimes funny, but I really enjoy the idea of Cole Hauser standing up to Vin Diesel in a physical confrontation.  The rest of the cast was fine; most of the roles were poorly developed because the characters were essentially cannon fodder.

Director and co-writer David Twohy does a surprisingly good job with the suspense in Pitch Black.  He sets up Riddick as a kind of bogeyman, but the character turns out to be cool enough to live up to the bombast.  The set pieces were pretty cool for such a low-budget picture and I don't think the film suffered much for having an obviously low budget.  That said, Twohy sucks as an editor.  The action scenes are not impressive and often confusing, and the rest of the movie has a lot of scenes that do little except stretch the running time.  A lot of story elements are introduced with little to no impact on the characters or central story; Johns' morphine addiction felt tacked on and the fact that a survivor (Zeke) murdered another survivor mistakenly is completely glossed over with a roll of the eyes.  Meanwhile, other things that could have used explanation are completely ignored, such as the evolution of the creatures or exactly how Jack was able to find all the stuff to mimic Riddick.  And the story felt clunky and rushed at times, like the when and how behind the snooty guy dying.  I like the overall feel of this movie, but it is not the product of good direction.

I'm not knocking Pitch Black, though.  It is entertaining, mildly suspenseful and Diesel makes a pretty good tough guy lead.  The idea behind the plot is fairly unconventional and the sci-fi elements didn't distract from making this a decent survival flick.  It is lacking that extra something to make it definitely cool, though.  I liked Riddick as a mysterious bad-ass, and I liked how he had presence in the film even when he was not on-screen, but I think Pitch Black could have used a couple more scenes of him doing something awesome.

Surrogates

I'm a dork. No, really, you can pick your jaw up off the floor. It's shocking, but true. Even with my near-encyclopedic knowledge of all things geeky in the movie world, I was surprised to find out that Surrogates was based on a comic book series for the same name. Even more shocking, I had never heard of the people that made this comic. Hell, I'd never even heard of the comic's publisher. Are those good signs or bad signs, I wonder?

Surrogates takes place in the future. Well, maybe. A year isn't given, but the introductory scenes give us several news reports with "Fourteen years ago" and the like given for reference, counting down until we have reached the present day. Congratulations, everybody! The present day has android robot things! Just like 1957 predicted! Let's just say that this takes place in an alternate reality and leave the question of time for another day. In the present day, people don't interact face-to-face (hey, you're reading a blog, so you know that), they use a robotic proxy called a surrogate to live their lives. These surrogates look like people, but have android insides, so you can drink ranch dressing all day, e'er day at home and the person that everyone sees is your perfect bodied surrogate. Basically, you lie down in a tanning bed (with scientific things touching your head) and you project your consciousness into the surrogate. That means there is now no violent crime or sexually transmitted diseases. Best of all, overweight male internet perverts who like to pose as naughty schoolgirls in chatrooms can now have a naughty schoolgirl surrogate --- your surrogate doesn't have to look anything like you.  Hooray!

And that's a key point. The movie begins with a surrogate being destroyed by a weapon wielded by a non-robotic person. Ordinarily, that would just be an inconvenience for the user. This time, though, the weapon somehow killed the user, miles away. Obviously, a weapon that can kill someone through their supposedly risk-proof surrogate is a big deal, so the FBI take the case. Agent Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) and Agent Jennifer Peters (Radha Mitchell) begin by following the clues. The only surrogate-unfriendly folks around are in the Dread Reservation (named, I hope, because they don't wash their hair) and are lead by the charismatic (and humbly) titled Prophet (Ving Rhames). The possible motive for the crime gets a little more complicated when Agent Greer learns that the dead surrogate is the son of the creator of surrogates, Lionel Canter (James Cromwell), and the son was using one of Lionel's usual surrogates that night. So, was the murder due to philosophical and religious reasons, or was it an attempt for a rival to eliminate Lionel from the business world? Or was it something completely different?

Okay, I have to ask. Shouldn't this movie have been named "Avatar"? Sure, I understand why that might have been a copyright issue, but the concepts behind this and that Smurf movie are pretty similar. In both cases, people get hooked up to a machine and live their lives through an artificially made creature. I would have thought that, with the obvious social commentary in this movie, that they would have chosen "Avatar" as a nod to the digital age. To be fair, this is an adaptation of a comic book, so I guess it should be the writers of the comic that are criticized for their vocabulary. Why do I care? I just enjoy when obviously different movies share identical titles, like The Patriot --- one had Mel Gibson (accent-free Aussie), while another had Steven Seagal (charisma-free lawman). You would think that Seagal was riding on Gibson's coattails here, releasing some straight-to-DVD crap in the hopes that someone would rent his movie by accident, but no. SS beat MG to the punch by two years. The more you know...!

Back to the movie at hand. I wasn't terribly impressed by the parts that made up Surrogates. Yes, Bruce Willis is a pretty solid actor, but he is no guarantee of a good movie (does The Jackal ring any bells?). I'm not quite sure why Radha Mitchell keeps getting cast in so many movies as a female lead. She's not super attractive and she has the kind of range you usually need to be smoking hot to get away with. At least here, she has an excuse for being disconnected from her character, since it's a surrogate. The rest of the cast spends relatively little time onscreen. Ving Rhames, who is often able to salvage a bad movie by being completely awesome, wasn't able to deliver here; perhaps his power is derived from his baldness and his huge dread-locked wig and cotton candy-sized beard acted as an awesomeness buffer between him and the camera. James Cromwell is fine, even if his character is the source of so much of this movie's stupidity. Rosamund Pike, who plays Agent Greer's wife, is supposed to act as the story's emotional anchor, but instead supplies the film with most of its sappiness.

I think it's pretty clear that I wasn't a fan of director Jonathan Mostow's work with his cast. I did like the look and pace of the movie, though. In fact, I really liked the first forty minutes or so, to the point where I was starting to think that I had discovered an under-appreciated gem. In that time span, the movie introduces a murder mystery, dipped deep inside of a sci-fi world, that did not appear to have anything in particular to say about that robot world. The technology introduced was pretty cool and it is a logical extension of what we already do as a society. I found it interesting that all of the main characters (except for Lionel) use surrogates that look very much like themselves. It's a little weird that Greer's surrogate has a head of blond hair on Bruce Willis' noggin, but I find it hilarious that Greer would choose a haircut and hairline that resemble no haircut Bruce Willis has had in the past thirty years. Some of the little touches are pretty cool, too, like police officers getting night vision upgrades.

And then...something dumb happened. Have you ever watched a movie where the bad guy is ridiculously stupid? I'm not talking about the normal James Bond-esque monologuing (although there is a bit of that), I'm talking about a villain taking steps early in the movie to ensure that the hero would end up foiling his evil plot. Do you want to know stupid? Here's stupid --- the villain, at one point, tells Agent Greer that he is too late, and that nothing can halt his evil plan now. That ignores the fact that there is plenty of time for Agent Greer to halt the evil plan, and he can thank the villain for committing suicide and forcing him to not waste precious seconds in witty hero-villain banter.

That's some stupid stuff, but I would have been more forgiving if the film had stayed on its hard-boiled crime route. Instead, the second half of the film spends a lot of time focusing on Greer's marriage and the difficulty they are having dealing with the death of their young son. Boo! Screw that noise! If I wanted to watch a movie about grieving parents, I wouldn't have selected the movie with androids. Detective stories are, almost by definition, all about the mystery. This movie starts out as a detective yarn, but then starts worrying about feelings, about the least detective-y things imaginable. And to make it worse, it was a clumsy and painfully transparent subplot.

The imagination shown in the film's first half ends up coming back to haunt it in the second half.  I liked that workaholics just leave their surrogates to charge at work; why waste time bringing them home, if your next move in the morning will be back at work?  That cleverness just got my mind working, which helped me notice a lot of failed opportunities for similar future design.  Riddle me this: why would surrogates need to drive cars? Why not build models with rocket-propelled roller blades in their feet? Or design some sort of tube technology; if personal safety is no longer an issue, public transportation has a lot of fresh opportunities. They could even ride in buses that treat the surrogates like luggage. In short, having a robot drive an SUV in the city seems like a waste of fuel and space.

The absolute worst thing about this movie is that it could have been so cool. Before it settled for a B-movie plot at the forty-minute mark, this movie was full of ideas and felt like a robotic noir. From what I understand, the film takes several severe liberties with the source material, so this could be blames on the writers, John Brancato and Michael Ferris, who worked with Mostow on Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Bad screenplays are nothing new to Brancato and Ferris; they share partial screenwriting and story credits for Catwoman. Still, the movie, like a hillbilly child, had potential until it got involved with the wrong sort of people, so I will be generous and give it

Silent Hill

The adaptation of video games into movies does not usually go well.  In fact, it's almost always a guarantee for a bad movie.  Silent Hill is different from most of these adaptations; the series is not an action series, but a horror series, where characters are supposed to navigate a complex, disturbing world to discover a horrible crime at its center.  That certainly sounds like some of the key ingredients in a good spooky thriller, right?

Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) is the adopted daughter of Rose (Radha Mitchell) and Christopher (Sean Bean).  Sharon has been freaking her new parents out by sleepwalking and having extreme nightmares; she often shrieks the phrase "Silent Hill" in her sleep.  After deducing that Silent Hill is a town, Rose decides (against Christopher's strong and logical advice) to pack up Sharon and drive to the town that has been giving her nightmares.  I used to have nightmares about falling; do you think Rose would have taken me base jumping?  Sadly, the Parent of the Year nominee doesn't quite make it to her destination.  On the way, Rose sees a little girl in the road, which causes her to swerve off the road and crash the car.  When Rose awakes, she is in Silent Hill, although it bears little resemblance to the real world.  This is a misty place where ash is continuously drifting down from the overcast skies and there are few inhabitants to be seen.  At least, friendly ones.  Oh, and Sharon is now missing.  Now, to save Sharon, Rose has to uncover the horrible truth behind what has happened to Silent Hill.

If that doesn't sound like a fully developed plot, that's because it isn't.  Sure, there's another layer of weirdness added when Christopher arrives in Silent Hill, to find it an abandoned (but otherwise normal) town; he is able to uncover some hints as to the town's secret past, but he is unable to discover the truth for himself.  Ah, the quest for truth.  I guess, in its way, Silent Hill is an existentialist drama.  In another, more accurate way, it is a spooky movie where you're never quite sure what is going on. 

The acting is surprisingly decent for a movie of this ilk.  Radha Mitchell might only be able to play strung-out characters, but she does a fine job here.  Sean Bean isn't quite as convincing as the concerned husband and father, but his participation is pretty far removed from any action, so I'll cut him some slack.  Laurie Holden is surprisingly unattractive in her supporting role as a motorcycle cop; she plays the tough officer decently well, but the movie is too vague for her to make any definite character choices.  Alice Krige plays the leader of the Silent Hill townsfolk and she does a pretty solid job as the creepy den mother.  And Jodelle Ferland is a creepy child that I would advocate abandoning at a truck stop.  No offense to her, but take a look at her filmography...bad things happen to people around her.

Visually, this is a fantastic film.  Director Christophe Gans did a wonderful job giving the environment a character of its own.  The creatures of Silent Hill were imaginative and visually stunning, at least when they were visible.  I am a fan of visually imaginative filmmakers, and watching Silent Hill makes me want to check out some of Gans' other work (he also directed Brotherhood of the Wolf, starring the Chairman from Iron Chef America).  It's too bad that imagination was wasted on such a lame story.

Silent Hill does provide some unsettling moments and a few gasps, but little else.  It did provide me with one of the few times I have been visually interested in a film, but was still bored out of my skull.  A big part of the problem is the vague plot.  In a video game, it's okay to wander around, slowly uncovering obscure clues and, over the course of twenty or thirty hours, piecing together a rich story tapestry.  Remember how great Myst was?  In a two hour movie, though, that pace has to pick up considerably.  This movie largely consists of Radha Mitchell wandering around a hazy town and...sometimes...seeing something that might or might not be scary.  I appreciate the intent to stay true to the video game, but a more linear plot would have helped keep the story moving and coherent.  As it is, Silent Hill is a pretty mess.  BO.  RING.

The Crazies (2010)

Let's face it: most Hollywood remakes fail to live up to the originals.  It's not always their fault; the films that get remade are oftentimes classics that are beloved by the general public.  Making an interesting remake and staying true enough to the original to please fans is a difficult tightrope to walk.  Well, if Hollywood insists on remaking a classic, it might as well be a cult classic.  The Crazies is a remake of the George A. Romero 1973 film of the same name.  Horror movie remakes usually irritate me, but there are two important differences between this remake and most others.  First, the original film is not very well known, so the new film's creators were probably not under a huge amount of pressure to keep the story exactly the same in the remake.  Second, and more importantly, George A. Romero was involved as a producer and was listed as a writer for coming up with the story.  That makes this a remake of a relatively unknown film that the orignal filmmaker was on board with.  Sounds promising.

Ogden Marsh, Iowa, is about as metropolitan as it sounds.  It's a podunk town in the middle of a podunk state. 

Side note: I hate Iowa.  Nothing good is in Iowa, it's just empty space between wherever I am and where I might want to go.  If I could remove a state from the US map and fill the empty space with some sort of travel tube technology, a la The Jetsons, I would in a heartbeat.  A close second place in that competition goes to Indiana.  End side note.  

It looks peaceful enough and there are no signs of any trouble; even the local law, Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) and Deputy Russell Clank (Joe Anderson), are enjoying a high school baseball game when something strange happens.  Rory, a local resident, quietly walks onto the outfield, holding a shotgun.  Sheriff Dutton hurries out to talk to Rory, assuming that the man has had a relapse with his alcoholism.  Rory does not respond to Dutton's conversation, sporting a far-away look in his eyes and making no movement until he draws his gun on the Sheriff.  Dutton is faster on the draw, and shoots Rory dead.  Sheriff Dutton's wife, Judy (Radha Mitchell), is the town doctor; a local woman brought her husband by that day to be examined for having a far-off look and a failure to respond to others.  The day after Rory was killed, that man locked his wife and child in their home and burned them alive.  When emergency vehicles responded to the fire, they found him a safe distance away, with a far-off look, humming a song.

That's some weird stuff, man.  What's weirder is that the first man lived in the house furthest to the north, and the second man lived next door to him...and the guy who lives in the next house has been acting kind of funny.  When a pilot's body is found in the local swamp, Sheriff Dutton recalls the town liar claiming that he saw a plane crash in the area.  Dutton and Clark head to the swamp and discover a large cargo plane submerged in the water, which is also the water supply for Ogden Marsh.  And the water is supplied throughout the town, north to south.  Hmm.  You know, there have been no news stories about a plane crash or missing planes or pilots in the area...probably not a good sign for the citizens of Ogden Marsh.

Whoa, I'm psychic.  The next thing you know, dozens of troops and workers, armed and wearing hazmat suits, descend on the town.  They tell the townsfolk nothing, they just separate the town into a group that is running fevers and a group that is not.  The fevered folk (including Doctor Judy Dutton) are taken into a tented area, and the others (including Sheriff Dutton) are bused to a truck stop out of town, where they will presumably be regrouped and relocated.  I don't know what kind of a person you are, but Sheriff Dutton loves his wife enough to go back and help her escape treatment for what appears to be a virus that makes people homicidal.  That's love, people.  It's also stupid, but that's what love is sometimes.  Of course, what's the next step after saving Judy?  There are still troops trying to contain this whatever-it-is, and they are willing to use lethal force.  Where do they go?  Who do they trust?  And how do they know that they're not sick, too?  In order, the answers are somewhere else, their friends, and um.

This may start out as a bit of a mystery movie, but it quickly becomes one of survival.  Most survival movies involve a horrific accident or outbreak, like a plane crash or a zombie uprising; The Crazies is certainly more subtle than that, but that is part of this film's charm.  As a viewer, you know, because you saw the previews or looked at the movie poster, that something bad is going to happen, but there really isn't much of a reason for the townsfolk to.  This isn't one of those stupid horror movies where the lead actress has her late boyfriend's blood all over her clothes and is crying in the dark, "Is anybody there?" There isn't even a dam bursting of horror in this movie; the government intervenes before the infected start to attack the rest of the town en masse.

For that reason, this could also be seen as a political fairytale; the government that failed to act decisively with Katrina and the BP oil spill are able to contain an town-wide epidemic before anything truly horrific happens to draw attention to the town?  Man, I have seen some dark humor before, but this is just vicious!

The acting and directing in this movie are appropriate, but nothing spectacular.  Director Breck Eisner does a good job with the movie's pacing and manages to put together a pretty suspenseful film.  I thought the action sequences were good, too; I just got stitches in my hand from a knife cut, so when one of the characters gets a big knife thrust through his hand...well, that got to me.  Timothy Olyphant has played strong Sheriffs in the past, and he turns in another solid performance here.  His actions seem reasonable (except breaking his wife out of the quarantined area) and he is sympathetic.  He's not infallible, which leads him into some trouble, but I never felt that he was acting stupid, which is a huge plus in a movie like this.  Radha Mitchell was fine as his wife, but I'm tired of her playing a "woman on the brink" of something; seriously, I've seen her in Man On Fire, Finding Neverland, Silent Hill and now this.  Can't she play a happy person?  I liked Joe Anderson as the Deputy; it wasn't a complex role, but I thought he did a good job with what he had to work with.  Danielle Panabaker has a small role that requires her to scream and look moderately attractive.  That might not sound difficult, but that's because it's not.

I really enjoyed this movie.  Maybe I just wasn't expecting much, but I was definitely pleased with what I saw.  Any movie where you are fighting both an infected group and a government group can easily turn into a dumb action movie.  That wouldn't have been bad, either, but this just felt smarter than that.  There's a point where the Sheriff realizes that the local redneck hunting buddies are infected and chooses not to attack them.  That robs the audience of gratuitous violence (for a while --- it's a movie, so you know they'll be back), but that was definitely the smart thing to do in a live-or-die situation.  The movie is not flawless --- there is no need to begin the movie two days in the future, to show Ogden Marsh in flames, and then flash back for the rest of the film --- but there were a lot of nice touches.  I thought that the car wash and nursery scenes were two of the better horror scenes I've watched in a while.  The Crazies is not a movie that is trying to be inventive, it is just a well-crafted thriller with some horror elements.