Skyline (2010)

First of all, if you start in with the alien-action, don't jump backwards to tell the story behind the characters who will just end up as fodder if you can't at least make the audience give a shit about those characters.

You're fighting an uphill battle with this group

Thankfully, I am not a completionist, so watching the movie at home let me skip through the part where it's a story about a movie effects guy from Kansas, or someplace, and his successful LA-buddy wants him to move to LA.You are supposed to care. His LA-buddy is unfaithful. You are supposed to care.  Kansas-guy's girlfriend is pregnant. You are supposed to care. Kansas-guy isn't quite ready for the responsibility. You are supposed to care.

This part lasts about twenty minutes, and it feels like it runs for three sleepless days. Not just a regular three days and nights without sleep though. Three sleepless nights spent wearing those things from A Clockwork Orange on your eyes.

This is not how I want to feel when I watch a film.  Not even a bad one.

It might be something straight out an early Bret Easton Ellis novel.  Except this story absolutely terrible and only similar because they're both about rich people in LA.

Moments before the Sentinels from The Matrix attack by shining blue lights into people's eyes

The middle thirty minutes of this film is spent on showing the reactions of people to things happening to them. We see their reaction to an earthquake. We watch their grimacing faces as they see pictures of the alien ships. And finally, we see their best attempts to look worried.

"Did you just feel that? The ground shook. In LA. Weird."

"Holy crap! There is something baffling happening off-screen!"

"There's something scary over there. You'd be scared too if you could see it. Just trust me."

Maybe this was all a strategy.  This might have been some elaborate strategy to get the general public to spend an inordinate amount of their movie-going money on a Roger Corman movie. Like some sort of studio proof that if even the crappiest movie has fairly decent special effects and a HUGE amount of money spent on the advertising campaign, it will pull in a number one box-office spot and a hundred million dollars.

If only Corman had been able to put a trailer on one of those Summer Blockbusters.

Unfortunately, it is painfully obvious that the movie takes itself way too seriously for this theory to hold water. Much like Season of the Witch, I could have gotten behind the film if it had decided it was going to be more Mars Attacks and less Independence Day.

Still the only time Sarah Jessica Parker was funny

Deep down, the movie is really about being a spectator (maybe a spectator of spectators?). It is more generally about the ultimate choice we all have to either sit back where we can watch safely and it's boring but we're alive or to go out of the parking deck and possibly get stepped on and eaten in the process.

He chose poorly.

But what is it trying to say about us, the audience, that we end up sitting in a chair, watching a group of people wait until the last twenty-five minutes to finally decide to get out of the hotel room and actually contribute to the movie they're in.


Original title of this movie: "Watching People Who are Looking at Things"

Once they finally get out of that hotel room, the film moves on to the old "false ending" trope. You know the type. It started back in the 80's when the bad guy just had to be shot somewhere to die the first time. But you had to shoot him in the head to kill him for real and end the movie. It's a cheap trick when you do it once. It's just plain sloppy when you put five of them in a single movie like this one did.

Or maybe it was six. I lost count.

Ultimately, it's a glaring irony that the aliens in this movie eat brains because the movie doesn't have any.

Season of the Witch (2011)

Yeah.  So that Nicolas Cage guy...

...he's certainly giving me plenty to work with lately.

Anyway, Season of the Witch (no relation to that Halloween movie) begins by establishing its main characters with a little light banter. This way, we can see them as just a couple of average guys...who just happen to be fighting in the Crusades. And killing people.



No, not these two Crusaders.



These two.

After a few years of carousing drunkenly by night and kicking ass by day, these fellas (Nic Cage and Ron Perlman) figure they've had enough and rebel against "the Man" by roaming the earth like Caine from Kung Fu.

Nic Cage doesn't like to be called "grasshopper"

And of course, straight from a D&D player's cliche-ridden playbook, these two wandering warriors are quickly grouped-up with a Preist and another Knight to take on an important quest that they are reluctant to take up.



Now, where...




...have I seen this...



...before?

From the almost intentionally bad special effects to the terrible acting, the cards are stacked against this one. Maybe if they would have at least had a decent story to tell (they don't, and they seem to know it too) or if they could just decide what they wanted to do with the film. Sadly, this particular version of the cookie-cutter "adventurer" storyline ends up as a bit less Lord of the Rings and a bit more Uwe Boll.


Not so much this.



More like this.

So while our brave band of strapping lads are travelling with the witch to some important place (the quest they're given), there's a serious lull in the action. This is the point where the movie takes the opportunity to throw in some business about the politics of the church's view of the witches as scapegoats for any pertinent evil.


At least they don't do THAT anymore.

We may start to wonder if some lesson about fundamentalism might be buried in there, but the film will eventually reveal this depth to be like most of the scares that it tries to generate - the cinematic equivalent of a "head fake".

You know what I mean: those moments in a horror movie when the music either drops out completely (usually so that you can be blasted out of your seat when the "reveal" comes) and the big scare is only some fake switcheroo nonsense, like a cat that's scratching at the front door instead of the axe-weilding murderer you were expecting.

But all this build-up is halted when some witchcraft stuff goes down. Nothing interesting, mind you. Just enough to build a little mystery.

Maybe I'm a witch. Maybe not. You won't care either way.

The movie takes every opportunity to put our heroes into perilous situations ("oh no! a dangerous rope-bridge!", "uh oh! we've come upon some wolves that wish to eat upon our flesh!!"). The problem is, we don't really care what happens to the characters. The only thing that builds any suspense is waiting for the film to decide who the bad guy is. See, it tries to build its earlier teeter-tottering about fundamentalism into some audience anxiety about whether the girl is really a witch or if it's actually the priest who is the "evil one".

I won't ruin the surprise ending. What's far more important here is that one of the characters gets to deliver the Exorcism equivalent of Jaws' "we're gonna need a bigger boat" line. At least the final battle with the big, bad demon follows mercifully soon after that.


I'll swallow your....oh wait, wrong movie.

Thankfully, the audience is vindicated in the final moments of the movie when the filmmakers seemingly recognize the half-assed cheese they've created.  We finally know for sure that we weren't supposed to take this movie any more seriously than Mega Shark vs. Octopus.


Well, maybe just a little more seriously...

Just before the screen dims to black, we get the penultimately cheesy lines: "They don't know the darkness that almost was. The sacrifices made. The heroes lost. I will tell their story. I was there. I know."

How's that for some ambiguous nonsense? 

It's just too bad that the filmmakers couldn't have decided from the start that the tone of the film should be.  For once, maybe Uwe Boll would have made a better movie than what we ended up with. At least he puts all his eggs in one basket.

Tron: Legacy (2010)

Somewhere along the way, the folks who own the rights to that first Tron movie from the 80's (the same ones who almost single-handedly destroyed the idea of public domain) figured out that The Matrix did the whole "people living inside a computer" thing way better.  These folks thought they'd take a little of the "polish" of The Matrix and mix in a little of their "spit" leftover from their original masterpiece  - out comes Tron: Legacy.

The film starts with an introduction to Flynn (Jesus) and his son. Don't worry if you haven't seen the original. This Flynn guy is quickly explained as the Socialist Bill Gates who wants to create computer software and give it away for free to everyone.

Socialist Bill Gates is a little disappointed in your Capitalist ways, but he hides it well

He disappears though and his kid becomes a young James T. Kirk who disapproves of the Capitalist tendencies of his dad's old company. Thus he becomes: the cliche'd young guy who really wants to impress his father into retroactively not abandoning him.

Seriously, didn't we see this before?

Yep, pretty much.

Once the kid (now 27 year-old Sam) gets inside the computer (The Grid), we see the director's knack for Barbarella-like costuming.

They wore more mustaches in Barbarella, though.

Mostly, other than a fair amount of nonsensical action, visual design is really all we get for most of the film.  Much like a gold-plated hand grenade: it's pretty and goes boom.

I'm pretty.

I go boom.

I'm not sure why so many films that deal with living inside computers go about it with some type of vaguely religious motif, but this one is no exception. Sure, the original clearly did it too. But the story here is essentially some yin-yang, Eastern Mind vs. Western Body type of thing. It will suffice to say that old Flynn gets trapped in the computer with his Mirror, Mirror version and there can be only one...or something.

Pretty close, right?

Of course, there's some other stuff about a new species with "digital DNA" getting totally  (almost) wiped out because the Mirror, Mirror dude (Clu) is a Hitler-minded guy who thinks they're an "imperfection" in the system. All of this is related to the audience in a solid chunk of 20 minutes worth of exposition right smack-dab in the middle of the movie.

Even if you look good when you're "telling" instead of "showing", you're still "telling" instead of "showing".

The whole thing's like a big video game, and we're supposed to think, "I play video games, so this is a movie that's right up my alley!" But the filmmakers have forgotten that even video games have to rely on a good story. Hell, they had to rely on it even more back when Tron was just a baby of an idea. Otherwise, how else could anyone have gotten away with making "games" out of one square chasing another square that's a different color.

But we were never talking Shakespeare with this franchise (can you call it that after only two movies?). So we can't really expect too much (I don't think it's too much to ask for a story from a story-based medium, but that's for another conversation), and I didn't. But this movie is just a series of hobbled-together ideas that lead to action set-pieces about as logically as any sequence of events in a Troma film.

I'm a cop...

...who eventually turns into this.

For the record, there's something in there about sacrifice (or, as they oddly call it in the film, "removing yourself from the equation"), maybe a bit about the nature of technology and the human condition, and possibly a healthy bit of the Biblical Rapture in the spine of the film somewhere.

Megiddo: The Director's Cut

The fact that I can't really discern much of it is a testament to how absurdly thick all the spit and polish really is.