Screenhead

Well, folks, it was really only a matter of time, and I do mean the above sincerely, because we’re going to need all the help we can get to ensure that Resident Evil 4: Afterlife doesn’t suck sour frog ass.

We can take some small comfort in the reported knowledge that both Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter will be reprising their previous roles as psychic Alice and Claire Redfield, and we can take some further consolation in the knowledge that we’re still going to be in the post-apocalyptic desert on this one ensuring us the best possible chance at full-on dystopia.

However, this being the Resident Evil movie leaves every chance that it’s going to suck, especially considering the lousy time we had with the first two, when it was still crystalline clear that the video game really had nothing to do with the movie except to provide a name for the script.

We’ll get to see how this all comes out when it hits theaters next August.

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I walked into Pandorum feeling pretty peppy about the whole affair.  It had been a goodish while since I’d seen an actual space opera in theatres (I seem to remember my last experience with a massive spaceship in theatres as being Event Horizon but that was way back in high school) and so I was definitely looking forward to it.

And then the surprises started.  The interesting thing here, however, is that they did not let up until the very end of the movie, and it is for this reason I’m actually surprised to report that Pandorum kicked a whole lot of ass and I’m actually surprised to BE surprised.

The plot of Pandorum is actually pretty simple–it’s what they DO with it that’ll kill you.  We join a young corporal and his grizzled lieutenant on the flight deck of a massive spaceship that’s probably a few miles long at least.  It’s heading somewhere.  But no one’s sure exactly where because they’ve all been unconscious for who knows how long in hypersleep chambers and they’re just now coming around.  The ship is pitch black, seemingly falling apart…oh, and there’s SOMETHING running around belowdecks.

This bad day in space will only get worse–you may rest entirely assured of that.

And like I said, there will be a whole lot of fantastic surprises, and not just the ones built into the plot, either.  You’ll get an incredible performance from Dennis Quaid who most definitely has still got it.  You’ll discover Cam Gigandet can do more than swishy sparkly vampires.  You’ll discover all sorts of cataclysmic plot twists that will do an excellent job of holding your interest–at least, they held MY interest, and that’s saying something.

But perhaps the most mind-blowing surprise of all is that this really good lump of science fiction glee was brought to us by Paul W.S. Anderson.

You did in fact read that last sentence correctly.  Pandorum, a fantastic sci-fi deep space action flick, is directly connected to Paul “I Turned Resident Evil Into A Slipknot Video” W.S. Anderson.  Of course, he just produced this one, which is awesome as he’s finally found a niche where he can’t ruin perfectly good video games by turning them into godawful movies that are only vaguely related to their original titles.

Of course, the result is that anyone calling this a “Resident Evil in Space” will not be terribly far off, but the combination is surprisingly palatable and plenty of fun.  Call me biased if you must but I’ve always been fond of big ship movies, be they oceanic or interstellar, and Pandorum definitely provided.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands over a full-on nine out of ten for Pandorum, a movie that managed to bring a whole bunch of surprises to the table, defy plenty of expectations, and still managed to let me have  a good time watching.  If you’re even vaguely into science fiction, folks, especially with a little dystopia on the side, well, this one’s definitely for you.

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You know, I really hate TV.  I hate it about the same way I hate, say, Hitler, but more often.  But even I’ve got to admit that there are some good shows on every so often, and when they show up I should talk about them.  So today, you get a TV recap–huzzah!  And today, I’m going to talk about a little show on Discovery Channel (where most of the good shows on TV seem to be migrating these days) called The Colony.

It’s about to have its season finale within the next couple days, so if you get an opportunity to reacquaint yourself (or possibly acquaint for the first time) this really awesome show, take the chance.  See, it’s a really nifty idea for a reality show (and I know reality TV is about eighty percent crap but this qualifies as non-crap) in which about a dozen people from all walks of life are brought together to live in a dilapidated warehouse somewhere in L.A.  Why are they living in a warehouse?  Because it’s the end of the world.

The Colony assumes that the civilized world has finally gone the way of the dodo, whether by nuclear devastation or superflu or whatever (they really don’t say nor do they need to; dystopia comes in many flavors even if they all taste vaguely similar), and left only a handful of people alive.  From there, a group of survivors band together and try to recreate civilization, if only in pocket fashion.  But after some tense encounters with marauders and other hazards, the survivors start to look outside L.A. for places to go.

The great thing about The Colony isn’t so much that it’s accurate (I mean, come on–they’re living in a warehouse and some of these marauders have guns.  But no one ever uses them.) but that it’s a possibility.  There are some really novel ideas in here; I had no idea that wood gave off flammable vapor when heated–I just knew that wood burned.  You will learn a lot while watching this, make no mistake, and even if you don’t learn everything you could, there’ll still be something new and interesting here.  The fact that I can use the words “new and interesting” in connection with a TV show is as unsettling as it is exciting, and that’s a good way to describe The Colony.  Get in touch with this one while you still can–season finale is next week.

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Admittedly, Vin Diesel is definitely one of the first actor’s names that comes to mind when you’re thinking “Sci-fi action” role.  But just because Vin Diesel’s got the background to handle sci-fi action roles, does that necessarily mean that the movie around him is any good?  That’s what we’ll be checking into today with Babylon A.D.

This time, Vin’s going to be playing a guy with the unlikely name of Toorop, a mercenary sent by a crime figure in Russia to retrieve a young lady from a convent and escort her to America.  But of course it’s never so easy, and Toorop’s going to have to deal with a series of doublecrosses and various factions scrapping amongst each other to get their hands on his rather mysterious package.  Can he get the girl where she needs to be?  Or will he even bother once he finds out the incredible secret she’s carrying with her?

Under normal circumstances, I love dystopian fare.  I love the post-apocalyptic, the study of the differences between the normal everyday that we all know so well  and the survival of the fittest lifestyle that we see in the dystopia.  But Babylon A.D. isn’t really all that post-apocalyptic.  In fact, for an apocalypse the world is surprisingly unscathed.  Aside from the fact that Russia looks like a crater-pocked wonderland of irradiation, Canada and the United States both look like brilliantly lit megalopoli with lots of shiny new, well, everything.  Some apocalypse, says I.

Anyway, this movie shows the converse of the low-budget movie beautifully: the effects and such are just fantastic, but the movie itself suffers under a muddled script and really, REALLY confusing plot elements.  Watching the last half hour or so made me wonder if my disc skipped or something, because it feels like a MASSIVE chunk of the narrative just vanished or something.  Seriously–we go from one point to another seemingly years later without any kind of connecting thread in the narrative.

Sure, on a visual level, Babylon A.D. looks just amazing.  There’s this fantastic sequence in which a car flies through the air, dangling from a helicopter with a magnet for support.  It looks amazing.  It looks so amazing that it’s featured in the box art.  The cityscapes are amazing and laden with neon.  Everything in here is just BEAUTIFUL.  Even the Russian slum districts are exemplars of their gritty condition.

The problem, of course, is that this movie is well on its way to full-bore incomprehensibility and has about as much regard for a decent narrative storyline as a fish has for a newspaper.  Which is to say, of course, none at all.

This is one of those movies that it’s hard to trash because, frankly, it was fun to watch.  There were plenty of explosions and lots of gunplay and some absolutely beautiful scenery.  On a visual level this thing is AMAZING.  It’s only too bad that they couldn’t be bothered to actually make this wreck make sense.

Babylon A.D. proves unquestionably that beauty will only get you so far–in fact, all it’ll get you around here is a four out of ten.

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No one really sees a movie like Terminator: Salvation coming.

I know, that’s a baffler—who didn’t see this one coming? Hollywood’s frantic and desperate for cash in the worst economy since the seventies, quite possibly since the Great Depression itself. Of COURSE they’re going to exploit every single property they have in their arsenal in the insane search for More Money.

But where the unexpected part is when one of these insane cash grabs actually turns out to be good. That’s just unaccountable. Downright unfathomable, even.

In this installment, we’ve gone ahead to the not-too-distant future (nine years away, folks!) of 2018. A military installation called Skynet, an artificial intelligence designed to run the military has become self-aware and decided that humanity may be the greatest threat to its existence. So, with its control of the vast American nuclear arsenal, Skynet took care of the problem the only way it knew how—it enacted the Bush Doctrine and freed the hell out of us.

Now, a ragtag human resistance wages a continuous war against the machines, Skynet’s android soldiers, each a part of Skynet’s vast network. A series of time travel efforts and such have put us to the ultimate position where Skynet’s out to kill a thirteen year old boy before he can be sent back in time to have sex with a waitress in the 1980s so that she can give birth to the greatest military figure the world has ever known. Yeah, I know—it’s a bit confusing, but factor out the time travel and things work out a LOT better, trust me. To that end, Skynet’s out to kill both John Connor, the greatest military figure guy, and Kyle Reese, the thirteen year old time traveler and Connor’s daddy by using an android so sophisticated that it seems to leapfrog all of Skynet’s current advances (the prototype is the superior model? Huh?) that it manages to even keep its android nature a secret from itself.

I’m personally glad to see a Terminator that’s actually set in the future. Usually all we get to see of the future war is brief, and dark (like at night dark) before they jump back to present-day Los Angeles. Though looking at the movie leaves me with a whole lot of questions—why the massive technological disparity between Skynet’s forces and human forces, for one? Humans are basically using twentieth century tech whilst Skynet’s running around with superhuman vertol aircraft with hover capabilities, giant robotic soldiers easily four times the height of a Seven-Eleven, and plasma cannons. Meanwhile, humans have…um…machine guns? Unusually small grenade launchers? Nothing that wouldn’t have already been found in the Gulf War?

Wow…we SUCK. Seriously, didn’t anyone even think to grab one of those Terminators they shut down and try and at least figure out how they’re so clearly bulletproof?

And don’t even get me started on how Marcus Wright is the first significant Terminator infiltrator, but he’s clearly superior to even Skynet’s latest version despite the fact he was made BEFORE SKYNET ITSELF.

But when I ignore the massive array of downright impossibilities that this movie represents, and all the weird plot holes, what I get is a fun little action movie / popcorn romp that’s fairly watchable when taken by itself. This is downright tailor-made for summer movie season, and even though it represents a canon-wrecker on par with anything we’ve ever seen, it does at least prove entertaining.

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Here’s one from the “It was never so relevant” files–it’s a lesser-known title from the depths of 1995 called The Trigger Effect.

What with all the goings-on and such in the wider world; Israel looking seriously like it’s going to tear holy hell out of Iran, the world’s economies continuing their slide with each passing day, lootings, shootings, stabbings and more make the whole planet look like it’s starting a descent into either a bad horror flick or Mad Max on an epic scale.  And so, The Trigger Effect offers one simple premise–what happens to our seemingly civilized world when the greatest impetus to that civility, electricity, suddenly goes out?  We follow a young married couple with a baby who’s just come home from a fairly unsuccessful night at the movies.  Later that night, the power goes out across the city.  And thus begins a descent into looting and barbarism and downright incivility that only takes a couple hours.

If The Trigger Effect, and it’s all too likely scenario of a world without electricity collapsing into savagery within hours isn’t enough to get you to buy a generator, a gun, and stocks of food post-haste then it’s hard to imagine just what will.  Okay, sure…maybe even without electricity it still would take a whole lot longer than overnight for the world to finally collapse.

Seriously–I remember one particularly bad thunderstorm, it involved tornadoes, that’s how bad it was.  And the power was out for THREE SOLID DAYS.  But we didn’t descend into barbarism and looting and such.  But I suppose when you live out in the middle of nowhere, things are a bit different.

That may be the biggest failing with The Trigger Effect: the pacing is all off.  Oh, I don’t doubt that if their kids had ear infections and a pharmacist wouldn’t hand over a dose of antibiotic because his computer was down someone would steal a bottle, even the morning after a power outage.  But seriously–watching the progression of events in The Trigger Effect is like someone jammed down on the fast-forward button.  The power goes out that night, and the next day you’re hearing rumors of lootings that involve MULTIPLE DEATHS.  It’s like in that particular city, everyone’s got their crowbars by the front door and they’re all sitting at their window, muttering to themselves, “Man, if the power goes out tonight, I’m gonna go get me a TV!”
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Doomsday is one of those movies that you can never accuse of lacking truth in its advertising.

This is indeed the end of the world as we know it, and no one is left feeling fine after this one.  The problem here is that you won’t be left feeling fine after the movie ends, either.

The plot is fairly simple enough—there’s some kind of supervirus roaming Scotland, and apparently only Scotland.  For a movie that deals with something as big as a supervirus they’re not going to be hugely clear and leave a whole bunch of gaping plotholes—more on those in a minute.  Anyway, the supervirus, called the Reaper Virus (and shame on you if you thought it was the Rage Virus), does horribly nasty things to people’s complexions and also leaves them coughing up enormous wads of what may be mucus or what may be blood, I’m not all that sure.  The British government, in response, rebuilds Hadrian’s Wall and seals off Scotland from England.

The rest of the world doesn’t take this well, and thus Great Britain is left to descend into a morass of poverty, chaos and white slavery.  Until it’s discovered that there are survivors living in Scotland, despite the Reaper Virus’ worst, and a team is sent to find the cure keeping all these people alive.

Inevitable comparisons between this and Escape from New York / Escape From L.A. are as founded as they are certain to happen.  Seriously—Rhona Mitra is the new Snake Plissken, and I can’t help but find that pretty solidly awesome.  Yes, Doomsday is a spectacular ripoff of pretty much everything that came before it—even the bad guys in this one favor the Mohawk haircut just like the baddies in Mad Max, and I meant it about Rhona Mitra being the new Snake Plissken.  This doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie, however, and one thing is abundantly clear.  This is a fun movie to watch, even if it’s shoddily built and shoddily done.

Now, for the plotholes: somehow, this movie involves a supervirus that ONLY affects one continent.  It’s apparently not airborne, nor was there any air travel in and out of the continent during that time span that would cause the virus to spread.  The British government is apparently also capable of building an eighteen mile long wall made of foot-thick steel in a matter of days because no one actually saw this coming in advance.  This and many other horrifying plot holes literally infest the screenplay for Doomsday, but this really doesn’t matter as we’re too busy watching things go boom and things get set on fire.

It’s a fun movie, Doomsday is.  Just don’t expect anything in the way of coherent narratives and you and it will both get along fine.  The cast is gleefully over the top, the effects are as flamey and splattery as you could like—there’s one great sequence in which a disembodied head flies, screaming, at the camera.  And for those of you who really liked this sucker, take heart—based on the ending, sequel possibility is easy like Sunday morning.  If Rhona’s not back blasting bikers within the next three years I’m gonna be patently amazed.

So really, there’s plenty of reason to not enjoy Doomsday—especially if you’re a plot snob like I tend to be.  But if you’re looking for a gun-crazed romp that feels all too likely, especially THESE days, then Doomsday is going to make your calendar.

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If you’re into dystopian fare like I am, you know that, most of the time, looking at a shattered future in which the basest urges and instincts of man come to the fore can be a little, well, depressing.  Doesn’t matter if it’s the next-Sunday-AD style collapse predicted by The Trigger Effect, in which we lose power for a few days and the next thing you know civilization collapses around us or the slow death and rebirth and redeath of the various zombie movies out there.  It doesn’t even matter if it’s a nuclear sort of affair, as was the case with The Day After, Jericho, and countless other movies and games.

But what if the cause of the downfall of mankind…is mankind’s own stupidity?  If you were watching Comedy Central recently, you might’ve caught a glimpse of Idiocracy, one of my personal favorite movies.  And despite the sheer amount of humor involved, it’s no less dystopian.

Idiocracy takes a central premise that’s surprisingly plausible and ramps it up to the Nth degree.  See, maybe you’ve seen a daytime talk show lately–Jerry Springer, Steve Wilkos, Dr. Phil, Maury, what have you–and maybe you’ve noticed that the people who show up on those shows with a passel of kids aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed.  Idiocracy displays this very well, by showing a couple with genius level IQs–both in the 140 range–and shows how they continually put off having kids until one of them dies in a tragic accident involving in vitro fertilization.  The union has no children.  Meanwhile, a man of much more modest intelligence–in the high eighties–continually spawns youngin after youngin with the various ladies of his trailer park. This carries on until his oldest son, a football jock, assures a watching Friday night football audience that he was going to, following a significant win, have lots and lots of sex with high school girls.  His father looked on proudly from the stands, assuring us that that was “his boy”.

Idiocracy takes this central premise, that the dumber you are the more children you have, and advances it forward five hundred years.  The result is that intelligence, by this point, is essentially selectively bred out of the population, leaving behind a crumbling future run by idiots.  Garbage is piling up with no solution, health care is a disaster, the language has been reduced to urban slang and assorted grunting noises, and the most popular movie in theatres is called Ass.  And that’s all it is, for two hours.

Introduced into this horrible future is a young man from the twentieth century, an Army soldier selected for a special suspended animation project due to his extreme averageness.  Left in suspended animation for those five hundred years, he now emerges to a future in crisis.  The interesting thing?  Now, he’s the smartest man alive.  A nation of dullards turns its hopeful gaze to the most average man the twentieth century has to offer.  Will he solve the nation’s problems, or be put to death by idiots who can’t understand him?

It’s this combination of idiots in charge of high technology that’s downright unsettling, and yet funny beyond all words.  You have to remember that the crash was gradual, so technology continued to advance even as the population dumbed down. But despite this advance in scientific knowledge and reason, the culture rapidly began to crash.  Imagine a world where Jackass is considered mainstream.  Now imagine a world where it’s considered inaccessibly high art.  If you didn’t just get a cold chill, then you’re a braver man than I am.

But it’s not all disaster, mayhem, and idiot-fuelled panic in Idiocracy–no, not at all.  There’s some great jokes, and lots of interesting looks at the future.  Imagine a big box store so large it encompasses the equivalent of a city and the greeters welcome you with a vaguely mechanical repetition of “Welcome to CostCo.  I love you.” and you’ll get the idea of the kinds of funny stuff that’s just waiting for you here.

Dystopia may always be just a little depressing–even here, imagine what could be saved if we all just read a book every so often–but perhaps for the first time, Idiocracy shows us that the end of the world can be a little funny, too.  And that gives us all just a little extra reason to hope.

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