ionford Reviews

I, Robot (2004)

Ira Obot

[3/10 · 5 November 2004]

SPOILERS

I can't remember very much from the collection of short stories that this book takes its title from, but I think they must have taken the detective story concept from Caves of Steel. The plotting has a similarly linear, haphazard feel to that book as well, so it's not really much of a disservice to Asimov. Anyway. This movie contains:

-Will Smith. He's a lame celebrity. He plays a lame cop, so it's not so bad watching him act like a chump this time around.

-Lego Robots. Actually they look pretty much like the droid army in that really dumb Star Wars movie from a few years back (the one with the little kid), only with more anthropomorphic features.

-A utopian robot prophesy.

-A misunderstanding between the senseless cop and robotkind about the evils of robot logic (the three laws) versus human selflessness. It gets resolved in the end, but it hardly matters because the only reason it's here in the first place is to "flesh out" Smith's character and give him an excuse to geek up all his encounters with robots by acting like a jerk. Like every other cog in this claptrap this part is completely cliché but innocuous enough.

-An Evil computer that wants to subjugate humans for our own good. This is the source of the twist at the end. It's not a very clever twist and it comes off as kind of irrelevant to the rest of the movie, but every movie needs to have one so there you go.

-Fight Scenes. One of the few things I remember about the movie is a little bit during the big action scene at the end where the camera tilts and rotates around Will Smith et al using the catwalk they are standing on as an axis. Sort of Matrixy but more three d. A good scene.

Things this movie does not contain:

-A fully realized analogy between the robots-cops relationship and then the race relations between the cops and everyone else. The main cops in this are played by African Americans and there's a seemingly-vestigial attempt to focus on the contradiction between robots as sentient beings and robots as property. The film makers never really go anywhere coherent with it so I'm left wondering at what stage this idea came into the movie and at what stage they dropped it.

Grade: 3/10. At least it's better than Paycheck.

Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Prawn of the Head

[9/10 · 4 November 2004]

Zombies take over London while our hero reacts by walling himself and his closest friends in at the local watering hole, telling fart jokes, sorting his record collection, trying to get back his estranged girlfriend and getting drunk. Along the way we get:

-plenty 'o' references to other zombie movies. -two tearful moments. -human characters immitating zombies. -irony in an averted (?) apocalypse. -finally, zombies imitating humans.

Looking a little closer, we can see: -humans fighting zombies in sync with a Queen song. -humans flinging random household objects at zombies. -zombie-themed gameshows.

So basically, this is the best deliberately funny zombie movie since The Return of the Living Dead. And you should see it.

9/10

Alien vs. Predator (2004)

The Jungle

[5/10 · 5 September 2004]

The idea here is simple and sexy enough to please the fans, I think. Take monsters from two different movie franchises and set them in the frame of another movie franchise (Stargate), use the Stargate to flesh out and give background context to the origins of Alien and Predator. The action and setting seem like the pitch for a video game, which works better than the story (Stargate was pretty lousy too) - if they were going to give background to these things, though, I wish they would have used something truly 'alien' like the egg-ship from the first Alien movie, rather than 'alienating' domestic (Earthy) stuff like pyramids and Aztec mythology. The hieroglyphic alien and predator icons were a gas, though.

5/10.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)

Woof

[8/10 · 5 September 2004]

I took my little brother to see the second movie in this series, was very pleasantly surprised by it (also because it's a great movie to watch with a little kid), and so my family had no trouble getting me out of the house to see this one (which is more than can be said for the books, at least.) This is every bit as good as the second movie and for a blockbuster Hollywood fantasy film I go with it over the recent Lord of the Rings entry. This movie is an improvement in terms of plotting, with some clever mixing of chronology, but a step back in terms of action - the amazing aerial dogfighting of the second movie is unfortunately pared down in this one. But the real winner is again that amazing castle. Forget about the drama and just enjoy being carried through the castle.

I haven't read the books but i cant imagine the experience is as interesting as watching these movies, because the whole appeal is the visual tone of the setting.

8/10

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001 Video Game)

Phantom of Liberty - SPOILERS

[4 September 2004]

As someone who used to play a lot of videogames and remembered the previous game in this series quite fondly, but doesn't really have as much time to devote to them anymore due to other pursuits, I borrowed this game (and console) from my younger brother with some expectations. I came away from it with mixed reflections.

On the one hand, the novelty of a video game with real political themes has somewhat worn off and what passed as intelligent commentary for me when I was 18 now seemed pretty juvenile to this 24 year old. The 'everything-as-a-corporate-American-conspiracy' plot of this game is pretty atrocious, the sci fi elements border on self-parody, and much of the dialog is unbearable, as a couple other people have noted here.

On the other hand, as with the first game, the people who crafted this had some unique vision and really did a number on dickering with their form of choice. Most games (at least, most well crafted games) these days try to make the experience as fluid and sublime as possible. The idea is to become immersed in a model world by making interactions and interface between player and avatar as simple on a narrative level as possible. In essence you become a nonentity or uncritical floating perspective in this model world. Other games (like say, the Resident Evil series) have real stories and try to give depth to their characters but it's mostly relegated to the cutscenes.

Not so here. Instead this game turns that first notion on it's head. The creators of this game went to great lenghts to define the boundary between the player and the avatar, the avatar and the gameworld and the player and the gameworld. Not just that but they do it through some really clever gimmicks that could only be achieved by a video game. the bit towards the end where you have to make the character run around nude in the cold while gripping his virile member and avoiding futuristic ninjas, all the while being bombarded with short bursts of nonsensical input from your codec is really something that will stick with me. Pity it took so long to get there. Or the fake game over screen? The progressively more and more absurd interactions with secondary characters (Snake's "infinite ammo") set this later portion of the game in relief to the rest of the game and had a very jarring effect on me. Similar to the excellent "psychic battle" in the first game. But then it descends back into the petty moralizing and postmodernist nightmare storytelling that the rest of the game is mired in. Which is really a mixed indictment, for what better medium for a postmodern nightmare than videogames?

There's also some solid gameplay here (similar to the first but more intuitive and diverse) hidden under the endless hours of tedious dialog and "movie" sequences. The swordplay and underwater portions of the game are particularly noteworthy here.

Ian's score - 3/4, for those serious about videogames, this game can get really tedious but is essential to understanding the modern form. It took me some 15 hours to complete, most of which seems a waste of time, If they cut the cut scenes down a bit it might help.

Conspirators of Pleasure (1996)

Flight of the Humbletree.

[9/10 · 31 August 2004]

8/10

This is my favorite full-length Svankmajer film, and not just because the lack of dialogue leaves no room for poor casting decisions in the dub for the American release (see Alice).

Besides the fact that fetish films are better or worse depending on the level of weirdness in the fetishes portrayed, this subject compliments Svankmajer's style perfectly.

The Kino DVD release comes with a bonus short film, Food, which illustrates what I'm talking about perfectly. Food is typical Svankmajer in how meticulously the temporal details are. If we see one man eating a full breakfast out of another man's vending-organs, the next man in line's breakfast has to be given the same time and detailed effort in portraying.

Likewise, Conspirators of Pleasure leaves nothing to the imagination but the story. But that's what fetishes are all about. Perverse in their contortion of sexual mores but perverse also in their slavery to the mundane details and meticulous planning.

This is a very worthwhile study in perversity that doubles as pretty straightforward and blunt surrealism.

Food (1992)

Fountain of Corpulence

[7/10 · 31 August 2004]

This is an okay Svankmajer short that comes with Conspirators of Pleasure on the Kino DVD release.

It's worth seeing for that movie but seems much longer than it actually it is.

What's interesting is how each chapter seems to deliberately pare itself down in the level of detail given each chapter. The first segment, "Breakfast" is uniform in it's depiction of each actor's "meal". "Lunch" (the most obviously meaningful of the three) moves along a bit faster and "Dinner" just crams as many brief encounters into a couple minutes as possible.

Svankmajer, it would seem, is pretty serious about breakfast and pretty lazy by dinnertime, but I like Dinner the best.

7 out of 10