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The Hunger Games (2012)
I Am Infinitely Dumber For Having Watched This Movie
You have to read the book! It's all explained in there!
That's the reaction I've experienced when I tell people The Hunger Games is an idiotic, nonsensical and poorly made movie. If I have to read the book to understand the movie, then the movie has been made poorly. I shouldn't HAVE to read the book to understand the movie. If I want to read a book, I'll read a book. If I want to watch a movie, I'll watch a movie. I don't want to watch a movie that requires homework.
I came in to this movie with zero knowledge about it other than A) It's based on a popular book series and B) It is reminiscent of Battle Royale. In response to A) - I haven't read the books. I have nothing against them, they just haven't appealed to me but anything that gets teenagers reading is a-okay in my opinion. In response to B) - No. It's nothing like Battle Royale. Other than "a bunch of kids kill each other" there is literally nothing linking the brilliantly satirical, brutal, intelligent and groundbreaking Battle Royale with the half-hour nothingness that is The Hunger Games.
It's over two hours long and NOTHING happens in this movie. The director chose to focus entirely on the most boring character available as she passively refuses to do anything at all. If I remember correctly, she hates apples and is always trying to kill apples but other than that, she does nothing throughout the entire movie. It's not really her fault though, she isn't given a reason to do anything.
The movie's called The Hunger Games but she doesn't look particularly hungry. Nobody does. There is a totalitarian-lite government that forces teenagers to fight to the death, but in one scene, a bunch of supposedly starving miners decide to revolt and utterly destroy the soldiers that are meant to be keeping them in check. There is no reason for anyone to do anything in this movie. Nothing is explained, no motivations are presented and the section of the audience that hasn't read the books is left without any explanation as to why ANYTHING is happening at all.
It's a badly told story. Every character is forgettable and interchangeable. The CGI sucks balls and the subplot in which the games are to be "rigged" to ensure forgettable jerkwad A wins as opposed to forgettable jerkwad B feels tacked on and irrelevant.
I'm sure the answers to all my questions lie within the books, but if that's the ONLY way I can find out what's going on then I will read the books - which makes the actual film itself pointless and irrelevant.
Garbage.
KM 31: Kilómetro 31 (2006)
A Nothing Movie
Whenever a horror movie proclaims itself to be based on a true story, alarm bells start ringing. This movie proves to be no exception.
Quick rundown of the plot: a woman gets hit by a truck on KM31, goes in to a coma. Her twin sister (they mention the fact they're identical twin sisters at least once every ten minutes) gets psychic powers from somewhere; a little kid ghost turns up, there's some nonsense in the forest and everyone dies.
It's something like that. The plot is incomprehensible and constantly contradicts itself. Not helping is the fact the main actors Iliana Fox (playing both twins, both of whom appear to be a coma), Adria Collado (who looks like he SHOULD be able to act) and Raul Mendez (who also appears to be in a coma) have trouble expressing to the audience exactly what the f*ck is going on at any stage or, more importantly, why we should care. We are given literally no information on the four characters other than their first names and the fact that they're all dating one another - who is dating whom is an afterthought.
An unnecessarily and unrealistically confrontational cop is thrown in to the mix for no other reason than to try and tidy up the plot, but he fails miserably adding yet another unwanted and contradictory subplot. The whole thing ends up in an unintentionally unresolved mess with the audience at a complete loss as to what we have been watching for the past two hours, or indeed, why.
The MAIN failing in this movie, however, are the ghosts themselves. The audience is given no reason to fear them other than the fact they ARE ghosts. Of the five ghosts that appear in the movie, one is an idiot, two are passive to the point of uselessness and two simply could not be more helpful if they tried. It is a lazy tool of screenwriters to just stick a monster in their movie and expect the audience to be scared of them. There has to be a reason for us to be scared. Patrick Swayze was a ghost in that movie (can't remember it's name) as was Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Ghosts aren't necessarily scary - the writer must give us a reason to be scared of them.
There are a few decent shots in this movie which do nothing other than highlight how bad the rest of it is. It's boring, confusing, badly acted and badly directed. The ending is ultimately unsatisfying and the fact that it appears to have spawned a sequel - out in 2014 (maybe) - is beyond baffling. Give this one a miss.
Skyline (2010)
Boring, lazy and unimaginative.
Right from the off, just seeing the opening credits and the "talent" starring in this movie, I knew things were going to get bad.
I had no idea just how bad however. The movie starts with a young couple being awoken by a bright light outside (a la Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET etc.). The woman gets out of bed an throws up in the toilet, which is Hollywood shorthand for "pregnant". She wakes up the man who goes to see what the light is and then SPECIAL EFFECTS HAPPEN.
The audience is then treated to a fifteen-hour flashback in which we learn that, not only is this young couple utterly unlikeable, they also know a bunch of unlikeable people. Most of these new characters are shoe-horned in solely for the purpose of being killed, quickly and pointlessly, later in the movie.
Having established an atmosphere in which you are actively rooting for the bad guys (the aliens) to kill these jerks as quickly as possible, we are introduced to some of the most unimaginative extra terrestrials in recent history. An uneasy mix of the sentinels from The Matrix and some of the more boring Transformers. The next hour is par for the course, aliens blowing stuff up, idiot humans running back and forth from one room to the next, arguing about absolutely nothing important.
When the script writers realised that they didn't start off with enough alien-fodder, they recklessly and haphazardly introduce new characters only to kill them off moments later. Not only are we specifically instructed not to care about the main characters, we aren't given any time or reason to care for anyone else who turns up.
Again, pointlessly, Homeland Security turn up and blow a whole bunch of stuff up which, by this stage in the movie, is impossible to care about. With a plot twist that would made Ed Wood blush, it turns out THE HUMANS ARE THE GREATEST ALIEN INVASION FORCE OF ALL. Also, the main character turns in to Jack from Jack and Daxter 2 for no discernible reason.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, and with a huge spoiler warning, the aliens wipe everyone off the face of the Earth and the movie ends. Except it doesn't.
We are treated to an extra, even more boring scene onboard one of the alien spaceships, ripped straight out of War of the Worlds. Another plot point is stolen from Futurama and yet another from District 9. Only then do the movie makers mercifully let the final credits roll.
This is a stupid movie full of boring characters, boring aliens and full of boring, terrible sci-fi clichés. I advise you all to avoid it.
Battleship (2012)
Bafflingly enjoyable fluff.
I must admit I was not expecting much as I slid yet another movie from toy-makers HASBRO in to my DVD player and the first few minutes of jaw- clinchingly inaccurate science and clichéd characters plucked right from the Action Movie 101 bin did nothing to change my opinion.
Then something odd happened. Apropos of nothing, the movie included a scene of protagonist Alex Hopper breaking in to a convenience store to steal a chicken burrito for a woman he had just met. The odd thing about this was the scene was a shot-for-shot remake of an actual, hilariously inept robbery caught on CCTV which went viral thanks to sites like YouTube. It was such a bizarre decision to include this scene that I started paying more attention the movie, and that's when I discovered something:
Virtually every scene, line of dialogue and plot point in this movie is a direct reference to something else. I actually lost count of the references in this movie, which I now realise was written with an Edgar Wright-level attention to detail. Armageddon, Under Siege, Titanic, The X-Files, The Office, Dr. Who: not just the number but the sheer range of other movies, computer games, comics, TV shows and internet memes is staggering and makes turns the movie in to a great game of hide-and- seek. How many references can YOU spot? Battleship, the board game, is referenced itself (obviously) but so ridiculously it is obviously done tongue-in-cheek. The camera keeps panning out so you can see how all the players are arranged on the "board" and the aliens literally shoot little plastic pegs at the humans, just like in the board game.
The self-awareness of the movie almost made me skip over what a bizarre decision it was to cast Rihanna in the movie. I mean, she's not an actor. Why is she in the movie? Was Liam Neeson not a big enough selling point? You could argue that Neeson is hardly in the movie, but here's the thing: neither is Rihanna. She's practically an extra. She had no memorable lines and does absolutely nothing a jobbing actor couldn't have done just as well. I don't know why she wanted to be in the movie, I don't know why the producers wanted her in the movie and I can only feel sorry for the writers who were obviously forced to crowbar in things for her to do. At one stage, she opens a door. I think that's the most impressive thing she does.
This movie is silly, but knows it. The "science" is so far off correct that I had to ignore it completely and the aliens are forgettable and uninspired. It's respectful to actual, real-life serving members of the Navy and the characters, as shallow as they are, are pretty likable. My biggest complaint about the movie is that the humans didn't even consider cheating and stacking all their battleships on top of each other.