icemann on 5/1/2008 at 06:36
Saw the movie yesterday and I really enjoyed it. It was very sad when the dog went into zombie mode, even though I had a strong suspicion that either that was going to happen or the dog would die after the first time the dog nearly got killed by the zombies.
Wil going completely bonkers after 3 years and talking to Mannequins is totally believeable. Everyone needs some kind of companion to talk to, and if you dont have that for extended periods of time then you start talking to yourself etc.
The zombies managing to track him down when they hadn`t all those other times he`d captured zombies to experiment on, made no sense at all to me. If you remember how many photos he had on his wall of the faces of the various zombies he`d tested things on, he`d have had to have done many many hunting trips to have tested on so many. And for zombies to not have hunted him down any of those times, compared to the last time made no sense at all to me.
Besides that I really enjoyed it. The movie had a very "28 days later" feel to it, but I loved that movie back when it was released so that was a good thing.
Morte on 5/1/2008 at 09:55
I quite liked it. The third act is pretty awful and renders the title of the movie utterly pointless, but I knew that would be the case going in so I set my expectations suitably low. The preceding two acts where Will Smith is Castaway on Manhattan still made it worth seeing though, and his performance is more than servicable.
EDIT: The CGI zombies were a bit crap though. What's wrong with people in make up?
Scots Taffer on 5/1/2008 at 12:14
You're all forgetting that "Will going bonkers and talking to mannequins" has the prerequisite that he was bonkers enough to go fish out mannequins from stores and place them around in a way that he could then interact with in the first place... which is a step beyond the batshit crazy of anthromorphically personifying a basketball a la Wilson in Castaway. That worked.
Plus, if good acting is basically Will acting like he always does and then shooting a mannequin and doing the requisite OHSHITDIDIJUSTDOTHAT face plus the reciting Shrek lines like it's somehow funny is jesus fuck what is wrong with you people this movie was so irredeemably horrible, sucky CG, terrible plot, horrifically cliched and the only thing that was decent was how fucked up NYC looked. I fucking hate you all these are the reasons we cant have nice things I'm off to watch No Country For Old Men.
REAL TIME EDITING: okay 1h20m into THIS movie and this is what cinema is about you bunch of slackjawed faggots. jesus even a rudimentary dvd rip is making me go a big rubbery one.
icemann on 5/1/2008 at 14:22
Him reciting the lines from Shrek was funny. Had the whole cinema I was in laughing also. It gave a good indication of how many times he must have watched the movie over the last 3 years.
And he set up the mannequins the way he did because he`d had no human interaction whatsoever in 3 years, and that was his only way to keep his sanity together as well as he could. The companionship he had with his dog filled in the rest, as much as we all tend to relate to our pets. Made perfect sense to me.
Morte on 5/1/2008 at 14:24
Quote Posted by Scots Taffer
Plus, if good acting is basically Will acting like he always does and then shooting a mannequin and doing the requisite OHSHITDIDIJUSTDOTHAT face plus the reciting Shrek lines like it's somehow funny is jesus fuck what is wrong with you people this movie was so irredeemably horrible, sucky CG, terrible plot, horrifically cliched and the only thing that was decent was how fucked up NYC looked. I fucking hate you all these are the reasons we cant have nice things I'm off to watch
No Country For Old Men.
Says the massive fagcock who loved RotS. :D
And no shit it's a step beyond athropomorphic basketballs, but his situation's a lot worse so that's entirely fair. I won't claim it's high cinema or anything, it's just an above average genre flick that derails in the third act. And honestly, are people no longer able to see the performance for the persona with Smith? I'm not saying it's an oscar worthy performance or anything, but he did do significantly more than just show up and mug for the camera while going AW HELL NO.
Scots Taffer on 5/1/2008 at 14:30
He was a totally uncompelling character and a totally nonsensical character, so maybe if there was something more to him other than his hyper-fortified super-kitted-out lab-in-a-mansion even though he's a geneticist, no wait, colonel in the army, wait, he's a firearms/survival expert, ummm, wait, what the fuck is he exactly? Who cares, he's just the dude with the dog that talks to mannequins and knows all the words to Shrek. Give me a fucking break. It's all so horrifically Hollywood.
The only non-Hollywood thing about this movie was the lack of over-the-top action scenes, yet even then we already had the zombie dogs but not the zombies themselves going after him at sundown and his terrible showdown on the docks where - for no apparent reason - the zombies attacked a mannequin and somehow passed him in his jeep as he waited to mow them down, only to get screwed by alpha zombie and saved by eurotrash latino chick with a healthy understanding of the enemy that super geneticist colonel Will Smith didn't in the nick of time... No actually, JUST BEFORE THE ALPHA ZOMBIE BITES HIM. LIKE, THE SECOND BEFORE. GOD! THAT WAS TENSE!
The whole film is a big sloppy mess and it stupifies me that anyone thinks that this movie is anything beyond braindead entertainment at best at its most mediocre. Everything about the movie is so horribly and overtly telegraphed before it happens: he has a dog, they show you there are demon dogs and that they can get bit/infect, SO WE KNOW HIS DOG IS GOING, he is working on a cure, he's getting close but no dice, WE KNOW HIS CURE WILL WORK ON THAT LAST SUBJECT JUST AT THE LAST MINUTE, and yeah, there's the stuff that RBJ mentions and all the stuff I've just said. Jesus. This isn't rocket science, just don't bloody telegraph every major plot point ten minutes before it's going to happen.... OH WAIT, THEY'RE RELEASING THE DEMON DOGS... NO DOGGIE CMON LETS GET IN THE CAR... WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE GOING TO SACRIFICE YOURSELF FOR ME .... NOOOO ... YOU'LL GET INFECTED AND I'LL BE ALONE. NOOOOOOOOO.
Ugh. Terrible fucking movie.
EDIT: Morte, that was addressing icemann, but as for your last comment - sure, he didn't mug for the camera and do his HELL NAW routine as I said, he's done his solemn jaw clenched concerned black man parts before too. It's just that it's the same thing again and again, his eyes are dead and there's no emotional spectrum apparent in his acting whatsoever. That combined with the fact that his character is so bloody bizarre just makes for uncompelling viewing.
I was really impressed with how dingy, jungle-overrun and worn-out NYC looked though. I guess they spent all their budget on that hence the ropey zombies, zombie dogs and deer CG.
And yeah, a bit of fandom does wonders for movie ratings, Revenge of the Sith is a horrible movie but at least managed to do one or two things well enough to please me.
catbarf on 5/1/2008 at 16:33
Scots wins the prize. Great review, reminded me of Yahtzee :cheeky:
By the way, how is No Country for Old Men?
Scots Taffer on 6/1/2008 at 00:31
ZeroPunctuation for movies... hmmm, I may have found my calling in life. A less smug Mark Kermode.
No Country For Old Men is basically a masterpiece of atmosphere, storytelling, direction and unrelenting tension. One of the best movies I've seen in a long time for its sheer mastery of the medium.
SlyFoxx on 6/1/2008 at 00:33
I thought it had a decent beat. I'll give it a 6.5/10.
icemann on 6/1/2008 at 04:20
Revenge of the sith kicked ass as far as the newer Star Wars movies are concerned. And the zombies ran at the mannequin because it had uninfected blood on it. If you remember back to when he set up the trap to bag a zombie, he used uninfected blood to lure them over to it.
I went into the movie expecting Wil to be the one and only human left alive on the whole planet and for it to be that way for the whole movie. Thats the way the movie was marketed afterall.
The movie would make a excellent survival horror style FPS game (ala Stalker style).
