SPOILERS

The movie was pretty good. I am both excited to see another original science fiction movie this year, and disappointed that it used one of my ideas (humans as the evil invaders). I am sure may people are going to dissuaded by the length of the film (161 minutes), but it really doesn’t feel that long. And, the length allowed for a proper exposition.

Unfortunately, as you probably know from all the ads for the movie (vanberge has informed me that there are many of them) that the movie has a strong CGI look. This is pretty consistent throughout the entire film. I would say it looks kind of like the next generation of the visuals used in Final Fantasy the Spirit(s) Within.

Initially, the visuals are quite impressive. And, its is clear that a lot of effort and planning went into making this project. The awe of the visuals wears off pretty quickly. After you are done being distracted by all the “purdy colors” you start to get to the core mechanics of the film. At its core, the film is pretty humdrum. It has many formulaic elements, such as the “tough” old mercenary. The money driven corporate director. The scientist without any respect for “jar heads.” The star crossed lovers, etc, etc, etc… So, despite being an original idea, there is not a whole lot about it that is original.

There are also some weird mixed messages in the film. Some people have been talking about topics of imperialism, and biodiversity. However, these topics are only addressed in the most superficial sense. Sure, you have the more advanced race coming in to dominate the backwards civilization. However this whole theme breaks down in the end when the primitive tribal people win.

That’s right. The blue people, with bows and arrows defeat mechanized infantry, air ships, and all kinds of things. It shatters the suspensions of the disbelief for the film. I do not care if you are supposed to be rooting for the blue people, they would have been crushed, without question.

However, I will concede the that tactics the humans used were incredibly stupid. I guess in this new space age of 2154 the human race has forgotten rocket science. Seems to me that it would made a lot more sense to bombard the stick people with artillery/missiles from a safe distance. Instead, they decided to fly in low so they were completely vulnerable. And, yes I remember in the film when they tried to explain this all away with “magical” interference from whatever. But, you don’t need a GPS / laser guided missile. Lets use math people.

The whole romance angle of the film didn’t do anything for me. I suppose it was pretty convenient that they happened upon a planet with a humanoid race that has such similar social norms as humanity. Granted, they are animist beliefs, but there are humans who believe in that crap. I did not really relate to the transformation of the main character. He seemed to have developed some kind of dissociative disorder, and allowed his fantasy world to supersede reality. Unfortunately, this problem had dire consequences.

Sure, he saved hundreds of sentient life forms, but I cannot even imagine the economic harm that was wrought when the company was forced to leave the planet. After loosing access to such a rich supply of a valuable resource must have sent their stock into a downward spiral. Think of the poor investors!

Granted the way the company handled the situation was also flawed. The Na’vi (blue people) just happened to have built an entire tribe over top of a huge mineral deposit. They should have known better, perhaps if they were so dedicated to living like savages they could have done something about it.

Speaking of savages…the Na’vi worship some kind of organic neural network. This network allows them to store and retrieve memories at certain data port trees. It seems to me that if you were able to build such a wealth of generational knowledge you would be able to develop a pretty advanced civilization. Instead the system just seems to re-enforce their ignorance.

I found myself quite conflicted during the final battle. I wanted to root for the humans, since I am a human. But, the movie tried hard to make the humans unlikeable, and the Na’vi the scrappy underdogs. So, I ended up just watching the sequence on the screen wondering if the unintelligent humans, or the valiant savages were going to win the day, not caring one way or the other.

Ultimately, the movie had an entirely too saccharine sweet ending. Their only real loses were the annoying scientist that at one time hated Jake Sully, and then liked him later one without any on screen explanation why. And, the pilot played by the dreadful Michelle Rodriguez, so once again no big loss.

There is a big “happy ending” sequence, where the “hero” has his human body killed, and all his memories transferred into his Avatar. I guess this is good because it means he doesn’t need to use the machines to connect to the Avatar anymore. And, he doesn’t have to go back to his human life that he has abandoned. Unfortunately, all he had to do was die to achieve the goal. Lovely.

His teacher, become lover survived. And, the once tribal leader in waiting was killed in the battle with the humans, so that took care of a nasty issue, since he was supposed to mate with Neytiri before Jake cockblocked him. The company personnel were forced to the leave the planet, but if they’re smart they would just come back with some orbital payloads and wipe out the Na’vi. But, they proved without a doubt in this film that they are not smart.

While I think the film was pretty average, I do support original science fiction, and I do think the visuals are worth seeing on the big screen, so I am going to give this movie a 2. Feel free to see it.

Part 1: Before the Movie Began

Midnight showings are the best time to see a film generally speaking. For the most part, you avoid crowds this way, unless the film is expected to be really big, like Transformers, or Batman. So, I first did a drive by the other theater at 11:45 to make sure that it wasn’t packed to the brim. No movie is worth sitting in a packed theater. Luckily there were not to many people there. They filled about half the capacity.

Normally, I do not get concessions at the theater because they are so expensive, but tonight I made an exception. If figured if the movie was boring I might need the caffeine to stay awake through it (wish I would have done that for King Kong). Goodrich theaters gives out coupons if you subscribe to their spam, so I printed one out before I left. Unfortunately, you have to use it on a combo (soft drink and popcorn), but it is cheaper than just buying a soft drink at full price.

So, I walked into the theater with my concessions. I normally sit towards the front at the far side directly behind the rail. Its a good spot, because few people sit that far from the center, and I can just climb directly over the rail. Typically, this isn’t a problem because my hands are empty. Getting over the rail was a little more difficult with my hands full. I stepped up to the base of the rails (the seating is elevated about 18″ off the ground), and when I leaned over to set down my stuff my feet slipped. Apparently, they were still wet from walking in on the snow.

My fall was brief, but a bit embarrassing. I went down and slammed my chest into the rail, which in turn caused me to loose my cup and popcorn. The soft drink exploded into a fountain in the air covering me while popcorn rained down on me. So, before the movie even started I got to sit in my seat wet, sticky and covered in popcorn. I got a few stares, but no one said anything.

The trailers I saw of the film made it look like it was going to be a comedy with zombies in. Kind of like how Resident Evil is an action movie with zombies in it. This was not the case. The movie opened with a strong horror element, as it was plagued with cheap shock scenes. This set a bad tone for the film, as the shock scenes never came back, but the threat was there.

There were comedy elements throughout the film, but they didn’t feel right for the setting. And, quite frankly, most of the jokes really weren’t very funny. I cannot remember laughing once throughout the entire film. Part of the problem was that that film took itself too seriously, inconsistently.

Mixed into the horror/comedy was coming of age drama. At the end they tried to force a lame moral to the story: “if you don’t spend time with people, you might as well be a zombie” or something like that. I guess it had something to do with the main character, and the world coming to an end to finally force him “out of his shell.” It was like they were trying to make the film something more, but it didn’t really work.

Much ado was made of the cameo in the film. I had my fingers crossed for Bruce Campbell, but that was too much to ask. The cameo was actually just Bill Murry. Granted, I like Bill, and I guess that is a big deal for a random zombie movie, but it didn’t really do it for me. Like pretty much everything else in the filme, it just didn’t feel right.

As you may have guested, my biggest problem with the film was the identify crisis. Is it a horror movie? Not really. Is it a comedy? Sort of. Is it a drama? I guess. It is good? Not really.

So, while there were interesting points in the movie, it was mostly disappointing, and run of the mill. I will give the film a 0 on my Undecim scoring system.

When I hoped on my xbox to try out Shadow Complex, vanberge sent me a party invite. So, I joined in to watch “The Union: The Business Behind Getting High” which was painfully slow, and not a group film. However, after that vanlandw queued up “Double Team” with JCVD, which is a much better party film.

Unfortunately, during the viewing vanberge and vanlandw had to take off, and when the party was disbanded it booted me from the theater ending the film. Bah.

While it is unfortunate that the Halo project fell through, it is nice to see some of the assets get reused, even though the good guys from Halo end up being the bad guys in D9. It was a treat to see the twist on the assets that would have been used, such as MNU battle rifles, the pelican that was the prawn command module, the modified warthogs, etc… Granted the movie in no way was billed as a recycled Halo. And, knowing nothing about it would not have hurt the movie. D9 is excellent in its own right.

There is an interesting mix of story elements, and gory violence. It works well without going too far in any particular direction. So, by the end of the film you feel full without leaving a bad taste in your mouth. All of the roles were played fairly well. It was nice to see some fresh faces that capably covered their characters. And, while this movie takes many queues from other scifi fair, it was relatively original.

One of the main reasons I really enjoyed this film is because it was not a sequel, prequel, or remake. I am so sick of the modern mentality of just remaking things. And not just good things, anything, so long as it isn’t original. And, to make things worse these shit films are being pushed by popular actors in order to pad the box office receipts. The era of the nostalgia film really needs to come to an end. But, I am not going to hold my breath, because these shit movies continue to rake in the cash. But, I digress.

The film was good, and I am recommending it to people. I am keeping this commentary short, because there are thousands of detailed reviews of the film, so this is just a general recommendation for my viewers. On my special undecim punctum scale, I have decided to give this film a solid 3. This means it was a pretty good film, but it is not one that I will frequently watch again in the future. Everyone reading this should go out and see the film and support something half way original.

Last Tuesday night, at 23:15 I venture out to witness Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. I had one of my brothers go to the theater and get us some tickets earlier in the day, since they had already sold out four theaters at that point. By the time I got to the theater, they had sold out all six theaters showing midnight premiere. Now, please bear in mind that Grand Haven (GH) is a pretty small tourist town, and our theater only has nine screens total.

Typically, the GH theater will only open one theater for a midnight showing (some times two if the first theater sells out prior to the evening). I have witnessed a range of light to pretty full (the King Kong premiere only had a handful of people). But, I had never before seen the horror of six theater’s worth of people all cram packed into the lobby. It simply was not meant for that.

Sadly, their seating plan was rather shitty. Since the lobby could not possibly hold all the people, they opened up the last couple theaters for early seating. Basically, they rewarded people who didn’t show up until the last minute to get a ticket. Beyond that, they seemed to randomly let people into the other theaters one by one starting at 23:35. Since everyone was just packed in there, there was nothing resembling a line so when people finally realized that a theater was open few people actually started to flow in. I seized one of these opportunities to cut through a large group of immobile teens in order to get a good seat.

Once my brother and I finally got in the theater the waiting game began. We were in theater five, which was being chained to theaters six and seven. This means that three theaters were all being shown from the same film. So, it took forever for them to get setup and sync’d. They even had to stop everything and reset once during the previews while they worked the bugs out. The movie finally began a little after 0:30.

I was quite pleased that the movie started right out with the Autobots taking out a few rouge Decipticons. Based on the previews, I was afraid we are going to be stuck with forty five minutes of lame college setup before we even saw a transformer. Granted, the college scene did immediately follow, and it was long and tenuous. I’m glad that is was at least forgettable so you weren’t leave feeling annoyed once the action got started.

The story of the movie really was quite horrible. But, not so horrible it was revolting. It was basically just enough to keep pulling together the action sequences, and confuse long time transformers fans. It might be a little better than I am describing, as I am told that I missed a rather important part that explained the nonsense.

I would say roughly half way through the film, at the scene in the museum I started feeling quite sick from the heat. It would appear that the theater’s HVAC system was not designed to accommodate such a large mass of people for a long period of time. My guess is that the theater itself was in the mid 90’s, and the air was stagnant and humid. When I got out into the lobby I saw that I wasn’t the only one wilting. Several people were milling around mumbling about how hot the theaters were. After a few minutes of splashing cold water over my arms and face I was able to return to the theater.

There were not a lot of surprises in the film. It was pretty clear that Megatron was going to be resurrected. I believe everybody thought that they were going to kill Optimus Prime (I still don’t like that decision). And, as expected there were more transformers, lebouf, and fox. However, a few things weren’t as I expected.

Based on the name, and the way things were setup I assumed that they were going to do a blatant rip off if Star Wars: Revenge of the Empire. But, the film really did not bare much resemblance. However, they did do an incredibly lame “master / apprentice” relationship among the Decipticons. Additionally, I did not expect Megatron to kill lebouf. So, that was a really nice surprise. The only other really different thing was the story. I was expecting the story of the film to be something like the first one, which they spent too much time on in the first film (since it wasn’t very good anyway). In this film its like they knew the story wasn’t worth the effort so they just put everything into giant robots fighting each other. And, really, what more can you expect from a film based on action figures made by Hasbro?

Since, missed a chunk of the film, I am going to try to see it again while its in theaters. I’d love to see it at the IMAX, but I am pretty sure I would get some violent motion sickness from all the action going on, on the screen. But, at the very listed I would like to see it in a high quality DLP theater. Regardless, I did see most of the film, and feel that I can render a verdict on it.

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, as a film fails miserably. However, as a work of entertainment it is a wild success. As I mentioned in a previous post, it really hits the important parts of a summer blockbuster: PG-13, mass appeal, little story, lots of action, and sex appeal. I have recommended the film to anyone on the fence about it, and I expect it to make tons of money in an otherwise slow movie season.

Using my special rating system, as a “film” I rank Transformers 2 as -3. However, as a summer blockbuster, I rate the film a 5.

For anyone planning on seeing the film, and not caring about all my spoilers: enjoy!

Based on what I saw of the movie (I missed a few minutes, but more on that in the follow up post) I would say it is the perfect summer blockbuster. It hit all the primary criteria:

• Popular with teenagers (six theaters sold out in Grand Haven for the midnight showing)
• Ample humor spread throughout
• Over the top drama
• Tons of action
• Attractive protagonists
• A bad story that manages to pull together action sequences

There are a few things that will seem a little wacky to old Transformers faithful, but this is made up for but Optimus Prime kicking some serious ass.

I’ll post more thoughts on the film tomorrow when I am actually awake.

The local theater finally got around to announcing that they will be doing a midnight showing of Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, Tuesday at midnight. This is excellent news, as it will save me a trip to Muskegon.

However, even though I am going to see this early in a crappy theater, I do want to see it on IMAX since they’re doing special IMAX scenes for this film. However, I am not very interested in the prospect of being crammed into one of those little IMAX seats when the theater is filled to the brim with people. So, for those people that frequent the IMAX in Grand Rapids, what are the best “off hours” that has a chance of not being sold out.

Also, as you can see at the top of this post, I decided to include the de facto “transformers 2″ marketing photo. However, in the interest of limited originality, I decided to crop it down and toy with saturation and blur to make the only important part “pop.”

That’s all for now. I plan on writing up a proper post after having viewed the film.

Termination Salvation takes the Terminator to franchise to the next level. The previous movies were set in modern day where robots from the future came back into the past to assassinate future leaders of the resistance. These movies worked fairly well in their narrow scope, and remained grounded in the real world. The new movie kicks us a few years into the future, 2018. By this time the war between humanity and Skynet has been raging for years. Things are looking bleak for humanity.

The movie turns out to be somewhat of a mix between survival horror, drama, and action flick (in that order). As a whole it was entertaining, and paced well. There are not really any memorably good or bad parts in the film. Christian Bale was good as always. Unfortunately, this film plays second fiddle to Star Trek in much the same was that Hulk was second to Iron Man early into last year.

Based on my initial impression I will be ranking this movie a 3, which makes its a recommended title. However, having said that, if you haven’t seen Star Trek yet you should probably see that first. Both are good movies, but this isn’t quite a good.

Update 22 May 2009:

The more I think about it, the more I dislike the discontinuity between the different acts of the movie and the ending is just miserable. So I am down grading this film to a 1.5.

I am going to refer to all Star Trek prior to the new movie as Classic Star Trek (CST), and everything based on the new movie as Modern Star Trek (MST).

CST is an idealistic view of the future that is used to demonstrate a world where everybody comes together and loves each other under a malevolent socialist government that is weakly separated from a powerful military body known as the federation. Everything is nice and neat, people act in unnatural ways and everyone has plenty of time to sit around and talk about things. The pacing of CST has always been very slow as the central themes are all contemplative and real action sequences are far and few in between. It actually works pretty well, because the action isn’t done very well so you don’t really feel like your missing anything. And, the contemplative parts are somewhat interesting even though the underlying philosophies driving much of the CST universe is unworkable in reality. MST takes all these factors into account, and rips CST’s fucking heart out.

While MST is not nearly as developed, since it obviously only has the one movie so far, I can still make a general assessment. The characters in CST never really had a lot of depth (except for DS9) but MST makes them look as deep as the ocean. Essentially the characters have all become formulaic caricature of the originals. There is enough of them so that people that are familiar with the originals will recognize them, but it doesn’t go much further. Where CST was slow and contemplative, MST is fast and action oriented. Where CST was bright, clean, and bland looking, MST is darker, grittier, and more realistic looking. Where the actions of people in CST were stilted, idealistic and a little “off”, the people in MST are fluid, natural though a bit melodramatic. In fact MST is so different from CST you probably think that as a “fan” of CST I don’t care much for MST. But, this isn’t the case.

Anyone that keeps up with my site should know that I use a ranking scale of -5 to 5, where 0 is “average.” On this scale, I typically rank CST in the 0-4 range (Voyager being a 0, and DS9 being a 4). After my initial impression I think that MST is going to sit in the 3-4 range. I’ll probably see it one or two more times in the theater to get a better feel for how it holds up. When all is said and done, I will probably add this movie to my paltry ST collection currently consisting of only DS9.

2009-05-09: I forgot to make an important observation in this post. It is difficult to put into words how relieved I was to find out that they did not do a BSG treatment to Star Trek. Originally, I was just thinking about how I hated the “one step forward, ten steps back” soap opera nature of the new BSG series but it later occurred to me how awful it would have been had they recast characters as different genders, races, or even removed characters all together. I mean seriously, can you imagine Bones or Spock being recast as some emo girl?

2009-08-15: Since I finally saw another good movie this year, I have a better idea of what this movie should be rated. So, I am going to go with a solid 3.