This was the first comic adaptation film I was actually excited to see and overall I was pretty happy with it.
I loved the beginning and the whole setting up of why they had to go back and change the future. The logic behind it was decent, in fact, for the most part, the storyline was logical (what didn’t make sense comes later).
Coming into this I pretty much had 3 expectations of transcendence:
Now the reality.
To be honest my expectations were pretty spot on with this movie.
The idea of being able to copy the electromagnetic patterns that are unique to every human brain really is pretty cool.
The film poses the question of what it is that makes us human – are we simply a series of electrical impulses that dictate our emotions, thoughts and desires?
There are questions throughout of Will’s humanity. Is it human nature to seek to grow and expand? What I found interesting was the subtle turn towards the end that suggests it was him all along. As easy as it is to blame the evil machines that want to take over the world, the film reminds us that just like Adam was created as an image of God, AI was modelled on humanity itself. Perhaps it isn’t robots that we should be fearing but the people who build them and allow them to exist in the first place.
Now onto my issues with the film.
My biggest problem with it was the lack of character development. The beginning scenes felt a little too rushed and although we are introduced to Will and Evelyn Caster (Rebecca Hall), I struggled to connect with them and to feel like I cared about their fates at all. While the special effects certainly help to convince the audience that this future may not be too far away, the movie just didn’t pull me in via the vehicle of the characters. The completely unnecessary love triangle that was hinted at throughout the story felt like a weak attempt to inject some much needed emotional empathy.
I did feel that the film took the concept of a supercomputer with limitless applications and ran a whole marathon with it. While I get that the supercomputer may be smart enough to revolutionise nano technology which has great implications for medicine, isn’t the whole point of nano technology that it’s umm kind of small? And ok, I also get that it might be slightly challenging to visually represent this amazing development, but black balls – really?! And not only were they being injected out of mechanical arms but the ground just happened to be filled with them, conveniently allowing them to rise up into the air as strings of black beads.
Finally, of all the roles they could’ve offered Morgan freeman, they chose the role of the old man who refused cake?!
Like a nervous date who spills coffee on your shirt, the film had good intentions but it’s hard to remember what those intentions were when all you can see is the coffee stain.
I love end-of-the -world movies to no end (excuse the pun) but they usually let me down by trading off the destruction of the entire world for moments with a few (apparently important) individuals linked somehow to greater knowledge of what is really going on.
Godzilla was no different. I had particularly high hopes in the beginning, and the opening credits were really cool
(watch it and you’ll see what I mean). I could not complain about the nuclear disaster with the young Brody family being caught in the middle and Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) having to courageously put the fate of the world before saving his wife. It was all quite fine.
For those who haven’t read the Divergent series by Veronica Roth, you might be wondering about all the similarities between this film and The Hunger Games – both set in a dystopian future with a very powerful ‘state’ controlling every aspect of life, society divided up into a number of classes and a fearless lead female who’s willing to fight and take on the State. Well, you would have wondered right. But having said that, The Hunger Games turned into a massive box office success for a reason and if it ain’t broke don’t fix it right?
I found the concept quite fascinating – society is divided into 5 different factions based on their personality traits. But, as expected with teenage fiction, it was a little too oversimplified for my liking. Another issue I had with the faction system was the overlap between Abnegation and Amity, as they both value kindness, peacefulness and forgiveness as their core life principles. So isn’t Amity just a less extreme version of Abnegation, disguised as a bunch of barefoot hippies?
“This time travel crap, just fries your brain like an egg…”
The Good:
1. A Director who has made his point very clear in his most celebrated film need not make the point again in a second not-so-celebrated film.
2. Films that don’t follow the typical sequence of action can work quite well as long as they keep us on the edge of our seats (or cowering into the back of them).
3. The scaredy-cats, or people with tattoos always die first.
4. If you’re old, wrinkly and look like you belong in a coffin then don’t spend a trillion dollars trying to not to die, you’ll probably just die quicker.
p r o j e c t r e e l 