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lameplanet
Reviews
2012 (2009)
When is a movie over the top? When it's so stupid it undermines itself.
I like a disaster movie as much as the next person, but this one is too much. The scenes involving the John Cusack character escaping from California and later Yellowstone are so absurd that suspension of disbelief is impossible. I could pick any number of things in this movie that are absurd beyond belief. Driving his limo *through* a collapsing skyscraper as it falls? Oh, come on!
For any movie to really work, you have to be able to believe what is happening on some level. But Emmerich has gone too far in the pursuit of the "Wow!" factor and the whole thing almost seems like a spoof at time.
And the sad thing is, it didn't need to be so over-the-top and it still could have worked.
Gwoemul (2006)
Not sure what all the fuss is about
I saw this movie having seen all the hype and I'm not sure where it drew all its great reviews from.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad movie, but it's not terribly great. I had that vague sense of relief at the end you get when a movie has outstayed its welcome.
To be fair, I saw a version that was over-dubbed rather than subtitled and I think that affected the mood quite a bit. A number of the overdubbed voices were sort of gross, cartoonish, caricatured voices that really seemed calculated for farce value. Along with some of the more ridiculous comedy scenes, this left it with a strange sense of not really knowing whether I should be laughing or crying when various characters got killed. The dumb father character, for instance, was so stupid as to be unsympathetic - which is tough because it was his daughter who was missing.
I think though, the mood is exactly what the makers were aiming for - it felt early Godzilla-esquire in its mix of solid if garish creature-feature fare and slightly off balance humour. I don't think I really *got* it, but I expect I might get more out of it after a few beers.
One thing I really did like were the visuals. Although the monster manages most of the time to look like a guy in a rubber suit, even thought its CGI, it works pretty well against the urban landscape, which often looked stunning. The director showed a lot of style and certainly wasn't afraid to try some interesting angles. I bet this would be great on a big screen.
Overall, kind of dumb, but certainly worth watching on an off night.
Next (2007)
A great idea let down by a mediocre script
I really wanted to like this movie, and was prepared to cut it some slack despite the negative reviews, but I have to say that after 45 minutes I found it hard to carry on watching. The idea had a lot of merit but the script really sunk the movie.
The story could have and should have been handled much better. From the beginning you could feel that the writers were letting the plot boss the script to the point where it had become an ugly patchwork of one-dimensional dialogue, expositional lumps and jarring dynamics. Within the first 15 minutes so much has happened, so many characters introduced and so many key elements of the plot have been forced onto the screen that there's no time for pacing or allowing the characters to develop naturally. The whole time I could feel the writers thinking "we're running out of time, how do we get *this* plot point or *that* character on screen and into the mix asap". Ugh. It was horrible to watch. Every scene seemed to be engineered purely to get some point across - from the FBI bossing telling the agent (why? she obviously knows.) all about the bomb and how and when it got lost and how crucial it is to find it, so NO they don't have the time to waste chasing magicians (and then in the next sentence, barely drawing a breath, giving her 5 days to find him), to the stupid scene where the Cage's love interest visits some kids and there's the swelling of violins and one of the kids says something like "i think that man you're with really likes you.." (cue more violins). Okay, we've checked off the love interest now BANG onto the next scene.
Well, you can tell I'm ranting now - but essentially everything is so clunky, so rushed, so darn *obvious*. The characters never get a chance to really live and the believability breaks down as you feel the artifice of the script squeezing everything.
It's a shame because Cage tries his best with the little his given, and there's good moments where the sense of reality shifts between the *real* events and the *about to be* events in Cage's clairvoyant mind. But whenever I started to get into the movie, within a few moments, there was the CLUNK of some awful dialogue, or nonsensical plot development, and the spell was broken.
It's not really a terrible movie, so much as a frustrating one, but with the premise they could have done better.