KrisRennie Reviews

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Some impressive special effects and not much else

[1 June 2004]

Spoiler If you've seen the trailer, you've already seen the best this film has to offer.

Los Angeles being ravaged by multiple tornadoes and New York being literally drowned by the Atlantic Ocean...but you already knew that.

As for the rest of the film...

Well, once the world is laid to waste by the forces of nature or "acts of God" as insurance people like to call them, Jake Gyllenhaal and his mates basically sit around in a library burning books to keep warm and exchange some of the most cheesily-written and downright embarrassing dialogue that i have heard since seeing Gigli, which just like this film was an error born out of curiosity to see "what all the fuss was about".

Dennis Quaid also waltzes his way through this turgid tripe trying to pull the most serious face and decides, after telling everyone "NOT TO GO OUTSIDE OR YOU WILL ALL FREEZE TO DEATH", to go outside into the snow and ice covered world to walk to New York to find his son.

Predictably, two of the companions who heroically decide to travel with Dennis Quaid, die predictably dull and meaningless deaths but the weird thing is that their deaths don't make any difference to this film or Dennis Quaid's character either.

They both die and Dennis Quaid forgets about them and continues to walk to New York, despite the fact that we know that his character has worked closely with these two men for a number of years and for such tragic losses they should be to him - he seems to take their rather tragic deaths extremely well, in that they die and Dennis Quaid doesn't really seem to be heartbroken by the events at all.

Basically those two deaths are desperate plot fillers for a story that already ran out of any heat and steam right after New York has been flushed out by a huge tsunami.

Another desperately sad plot filler is when a ship comes floating spookily past the library Gyllenhaal and his mates and they decide to raid the boat for food, for some reason some wolves that escaped from a nearby zoo have managed to escape being drowned and turned into fishfood in order to chase them through the ships many narrow corridors for a minute before going back into the library to wait for Daddy Quaid to save him.

And its a bit obvious what happens at the end of the film, lots of people survive and everyone smiles cos despite the fact that half our planet has been turned into a series of Haagen Dazs metropolises, the underlying message is that in the face of such tragedy - we all find hope in our hearts and minds to keep perpetuating life, despite the fact that i thought the movie was designed to tell us to start thinking carefully about what we are doing to our own planet.

The worst thing about this entire film, apart from the script, dialogue and acting, was the fictionalised parts of the story - "global cooling" where everything is frozen within one second????.

So in a cheap desperate bid to rush the story forward and save on special effects costs, we are to led to assume that when this global cooling nonsense happens, it turns millions of people from the length and breadth of Canada to Europe and also the Middle East and most of Asia into human popsicles within a matter of seconds despite the fact that the many denizens of Washington and New York don't seem to be affected at all by global cooling and go out walking in the snow as if they're dreaming of a white Christmas.

There was so much Roland Emmerich could've done with this film and such great potential has been wasted on an extremely flimsy and weak script, there is little or no character development and you don't really care for any of the characters at all and after Emmerich has had fun destroying the world yet again, the story literally grinds to a halt and limps painfully toward the finish line.

If you need to know anything about this film, just watch the trailer and save both your money and a couple of hours of your life by not watching this entire film.

The only spectacles to behold are two disaster sequences and nothing more.

Its the end of the world as we know it, and i'm feeling sleepy

Easily the worst film of the year so far.....2 out of 10 for the two special effects sequences alone

Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Pretentious, over-baked, tawdry and trite

[3/10 · 29 May 2004]

After watching this film today, i feel like Bob Dylan and Larry Charles owe me at least two hours of my life back as all the underlying metaphors, ambiguous aphorisms and religious symbolism in their Masked And Anonymous world isn't enough to make me realize any higher truths.

I have never been a big fan of Robert Zimmerman's musical works and i don't think that matters a jot with regard to this film and that argument is nothing more than an arrogant and presumptuous cop-out if you are in favour of this film.

There are a few performances in this film that are adequate but nothing more than haughty and forced - Jessica Lange's cigarettes are more convincing than Jessica Lange herself, John Goodman displays the usual sweaty-browed histrionics as we've become accustomed to in other roles he's acted in, Penelope Cruz gets to light a few candles and turn down a swig of whisky or two from John Goodman, Val Kilmer gets to lay off a speech that sounds like it was rejected from the final cut of Oliver Stone's The Doors, Giovanni Ribisi does nothing more than mumble cynically about what really motivates freedom fighters and insurgents in civil wars, Luke Wilson soliloquises about nothing in particular in order to get John Goodman to disagree with him or Bob Dylan to stare at him, Christian Slater and Christopher Penn look like they need to be somewhere else fast, Jeff Bridges' peripatetic journalist lurches from each scene to bully and goad Bob Dylan into actually saying something any of us can bother to be interested in and Bob Dylan himself is so wooden in this film that his performance needn't be criticised by humans but by Ikea or lumberjacks.

I don't really care if Bob Dylan is meant to be enigmatic or aloof or mystical or even Messianic, making the character both religiously and politically ambiguous and his dialogue ambivalent and introverted doesn't make for good plot development and instead makes the entire movie lumpen and entirely meaningless.

To be honest, i'd rather listen to Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin or Blowin In The Wind if i need to know Mr. Zimmerman's choice political rhetoric or personal polemic.

The only performances that are of any noteworthy content are Mickey Rourke, who isn't on screen enough as his performance is without doubt one of the only saving graces as the duplicitous politician, and Ed Harris doing a turn as a eulogising minstrel.

Sorry for all the Dylan fans or art-house lovers who love this movie but this film truly is nothing more than a horror film for all the wrong reasons, its a piece of snuff art-house where we literally watch various talented actors - Lange, Goodman, Bridges, Slater, Penn and Kilmer all dying horribly on screen.

All i can say to anyone about this film is that Bob Dylan is a far better songwriter than he is a scriptwriter.

Don't let the ensemble cast and critical plaudits, the two things that made me rent this movie out, fool you.

It really is a load of pretentious bilge.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Great film but do not view it as a remake

[27 March 2004]

I am a huge fan of the original Dawn Of The Dead to the point where i am obsessed with it, i probably watch the film at least once or twice a month and upon hearing about this "remake"(which i thought it was going to be), i was screaming bloody murder and then even more rage was poured into me by the realisation that the person responsible for scripting the Scooby Doo film had written it.

But then i read a script review on Ain't It Cool News and was surprised to learn that Moriarty(i am sure it was him if my memory serves me correctly) of all people loved the script and it was only then that it dawned on me that this wasn't to be a remake but a totally different film.

Then the next thing was the teaser trailer and from what i saw, the zombies were running after people and the film looked like a bit of an event picture, where the events outside the houses and malls were being reported and the world was literally falling apart in front of our very eyes...and so i became very very very excited about this new film indeed.

And so i waited in anticipation and finally got to see it yesterday....

And what can i say?, i want to see it again immediately!

I didn't see much things to compare with the original, the only similarities are the shopping mall and the title of the film.

There are, however, many other films that i could reference better than the original Dawn Of The Dead - 28 Days Later(infected people sprinting after people and murdering them), Assault On Precinct 13(survivors barricading themselves inside a building while being threatened by whats outside), Aliens(that sewer scene with the zombies reminded a lot of the air duct scene in Aliens), Brain Dead(erm, the zombie baby?) and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers to name but a few but i loved the fact that this wasn't a direct homage to what George Romero did with his original film, James Gunn has put his very own spin on it and come up with something more modern and something more highly-charged and thrilling.

Romero's film is a lot more grim and grimy in both style and content whereas this one is a lot more flashy and thrilling, Gunn's script really delves more into the zombie threat being a global catastrophe and it was great to see more of that in this film with the budget Zack Synder had at his disposal. Literally we see the world falling apart within minutes and people going into a state of panic, chaos and destruction is everywhere and we are just as dazed and confused as the people in the film because it is never explained as to why people have become infected with a disease that makes people become bloodthirsty maniacs that want to bite a chunk out of your windpipe.

There are some strong noteworthy performances in this film. Ving Rhames, Michael Kelly, Sarah Polley and Jake Weber are all superb in this film although i felt Mekhi Phifer wasn't in it enough and i felt his character didn't develop enough. It was predictable who was going to die and who was going to escape the mall but at no point did i feel that the acting was poor or the storyline was slipping away, i felt that Gunn has given us a film that is pure visceral adrenaline-pumping horror from the word go.

From the opening moments, Gunn's script captures that Romero spirit of a creeping fear or dread that something bad has happened and that its going to change our world forever and bring such an immense amount irrepairable damage along with it, and the minute Sarah Polley steps out of her house after her life has been torn apart, we see the world outside has changed to such a crushing apocalyptic effect. The world has gone insane, neighbours are brandishing guns and threatening other neighbours, family members are killing one another and cars are speeding desperately down the roads fleeing the horror thats just hit the world.

And it never lets up for a second, we know these characters aren't safe from the threat outside, every situation they're in has a sense of dangerous desperation about it and we're shocked and scared at what they have to do just to stay alive.

A few noteworthy things for me was the emotional storylines within Gunn's script, i felt saddened for Matt Frewer's character and his daughter where a bite on his arm calls for his immediate execution and his acceptance of his fate to save his daughter's life and the people who can help save her's lives is quite a heartbreaking moment.

I also thought Mekhi Phifer's character trying to come to terms with keeping his baby alive and trying to save his infected girlfriend from a similar execution was perhaps the most disturbing thing about the movie but his obsession with keeping life going for himself and for the love of his girlfriend was also a moment where i felt could've come straight out of one of Romero's films...if he had thought of it.

As for the zombies themselves...well, they're not really zombies per se, these are more like the Infected in 28 Days Later. They sprint after people like Ben Johnson on an elephant's sized dosage of steroids and are far more lethal than the sluggish zombies depicted in Romero's movie and this is what makes Snyder's movie more fast-moving and makes the characters more nerve-struck and edgy and probably more unpredictable and dangerous.

Whereas in Romero's original, the fact that the zombies in it were so slow and sluggish in movement, the situation in that mall and outside could be somewhat controlled, the situation in this movie seems uncontrollable and far more potentially desperate and dangerous because of the crazedness and speed of the infected zombies and i felt this was something that made the film far more interesting, the need to stay alive involved more desperately insane life-or-death situations.

However, there wasn't much room for humour or gore as it was so fast-moving, two attributes that are something very much evident in Romero's work, there were no custard pie in zombies faces scenes or zombies' heads being lopped off by the whirring rotor blades of a helicopter, there wasn't any zombies dressed as nurses or Hare Krishnas either but one of the funniest scenes in this one involved the characters inside the mall standing on top of the roof holding cards up to Andy, a character who had barricaded himself on top of the roof above his gun store, to tell him to shoot zombies who look liked celebrities i.e Jay Leno, Burt Reynolds etc

Andy is another character we feel some emotion for, Ving Rhames' character begins to develop a friendship for him as they hold up cards to one another to communicate with each other from building to building, and then when Andy tells him he is hungry we realise that the friendship between the two of them isn't going to last much longer and that the situation in the world is going to become hopeless, bleak and desperate again.

I'm trying to be as ambivalent with this review of the film as possible so not to spoil anything at all for anyone wanting to see this film, its a movie i'd rather leave people to judge by themselves and the only thing i can say to anyone going to see this movie is to not compare it in any way to the original George A. Romero masterpiece.

I could never understand why purists are comparing it anyway or making disparaging remarks about this movie existing, the original film hasn't been erased from memory, it is still readily available on VHS and DVD so the existence of this movie isn't going to cancel out the original nor is it going to replace it in the history books, basically all this version of Dawn Of The Dead is pure adrenalised horror with plenty of shocks and plenty of action and plenty of blood and great setpieces.

There's been a lot of things talked about the ending to this film, which i actually liked but what i felt was somewhat missing from some of Romero's films. I remember the original Dawn Of The Dead script had a different ending where Ken Foree did commit suicide and where Gaylen Ross' character also committed suicide by thrusting her body into the rotor blades of the helicopter and the last thing we would've saw had that ending been left in and filmed would've been the zombies feasting on her body and Ken Foree's, thus leaving a sense of shock and dread to us all...which is something i think James Gunn and Zack Snyder have tried to do here and its one of those moments where you've gone on this huge emotional rollercoaster with these people and suddenly the bloodsoaked carpet has been pulled from under your feet...lets just say that there won't be a sequel or a Dawn Of The Dead 2 - Mid-Morning Brunch Of The Living Dead or whatever.

If i have to mark this movie out of 10, i will give it a 9, it ups the ante where 28 Days Later is concerned and broadens the spectrum of the original Dawn Of The Dead to looking more like the globalised catastrophe some of the emergency channel news reports alluded to in that film and shows it all in living(and living dead) colour through news reports and various setpieces through the film and i think Gunn and Synder have managed to pull off that apocalyptic feel to the movie perfectly. Very impressive indeed.

What can i add other than all i have said?...just don't view it as a remake because it isn't a shot-by-shot remake nor is it a homage to Romero's film, its a different film with a different story by a totally different director. If you watch the film with that in mind, you will like it as much as i did.

Hope this review has been helpful and i would be welcome to read any of your comments in future, thanks for your time and patience if you've read my words and hope you enjoy the film as much as i did.