Yes, thankful was I that I managed to see it without having to suffer the indignity of having to pay directly for the privilege. There was very little to to amuse the audience in Cronenberg's latest work. Luckily for us it was relatively early in the day and the volume was quite loud or I may well have dozed off before Law got his plug fitted. I haven't fallen asleep in the cinema since Super Mario Bros.
Firstly, it broke the golden rule of cinema, which is to avoid mentioning the name of the film in corny circumstances if at all possible. It broke this one as soon as the shoddy (and boring) title sequence had ended. To exacerbate this already dire situation, the title was uttered by someone who desperately needed to blow their nose.
Secondly, the heist pulled by the chap with the organic gun was as predictable as it was uninteresting. We all knew that something would happen, and when it did, it wasn't particularly exhilarating. It must also go down as one of the lamest assassination attempts in recent memory.
Thirdly, after the "excitement" in the beginning we are treated to late night made-for-TV acting for at least half an hour before anything else happens. An empty car journey, filled with banal dialogue and some less-than-clever moves by Law's flawed character. We very nearly walked out. Which would have left the cinema empty.
Oh, then eventually, after we are sick to death of these two sappy weaklings we get introduced to another "character" who seems to be based on a certain long running playstation advert theme. Nothing original there. Oh, so in the future we go to garages in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night to get cattle prodded in the back by some meat head with a penchant for amateur surgery. Oh really. And meanwhile outside there are silly little bird type latex hybrid reptiles. Are these supposed to help us to become emersed in an imaginary world? I don't know, perhaps this film is just too clever for me.
Finally, we get to the part of the film that this hectic introduction had been building up to. THE GAME. She doesn't know what it is, and she made it, he doesn't know what it is, and he's a moron, and we don't know what it is, and we don't care. Great, another computer game, but this one is the basis of a film that has had audiences across America baffled. They obviously never saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. They go into game A, get put into game B, they come out of that one and go into another, then they kill everyone and go into another game and win it by killing everyone else. But was that last one a game or real life? Neither, it is a film. And we were well aware of that, so we didn't much care whether they were in it or out of it because either way they were in a film. Something that we were made painfully aware of throughout. If you can't work out whether they were in a game or not is because you weren't supposed to be able to work it out because that was the aim of the film. This movie doesn't answer any questions, as has been suggested, it merely prompts another one: "why am i watching this?"
Put simply, this is the poor mans remake of CCBB but without the intrigue or the cunning story line, without any real empathy, or attempt to make an involving film leading up to a reality-questioning end. The parallels between the two films are many: from the way it puts us into the fantasy world; the way it takes us out; the way that there is a moment of helplessness for the main characters as they are taken over; the way that characters and events from the supposed real beginning are reused in the make-believe world; and the way that we are shocked when we find out that what we witnessed may or may not be "real".
I was one of the first in England to see this film, and have actively voiced the following advice to friends ever since: to avoid seeing it as it is merely a cheap and unconvincing attempt to fool the audience into caring about whether or not what they are seeing is inthe actual world. At the end of the day it is not real, and there has to be more point in seeing a film than to simply desipher whether or not the end is in an "imaginary" world.
Firstly, it broke the golden rule of cinema, which is to avoid mentioning the name of the film in corny circumstances if at all possible. It broke this one as soon as the shoddy (and boring) title sequence had ended. To exacerbate this already dire situation, the title was uttered by someone who desperately needed to blow their nose.
Secondly, the heist pulled by the chap with the organic gun was as predictable as it was uninteresting. We all knew that something would happen, and when it did, it wasn't particularly exhilarating. It must also go down as one of the lamest assassination attempts in recent memory.
Thirdly, after the "excitement" in the beginning we are treated to late night made-for-TV acting for at least half an hour before anything else happens. An empty car journey, filled with banal dialogue and some less-than-clever moves by Law's flawed character. We very nearly walked out. Which would have left the cinema empty.
Oh, then eventually, after we are sick to death of these two sappy weaklings we get introduced to another "character" who seems to be based on a certain long running playstation advert theme. Nothing original there. Oh, so in the future we go to garages in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night to get cattle prodded in the back by some meat head with a penchant for amateur surgery. Oh really. And meanwhile outside there are silly little bird type latex hybrid reptiles. Are these supposed to help us to become emersed in an imaginary world? I don't know, perhaps this film is just too clever for me.
Finally, we get to the part of the film that this hectic introduction had been building up to. THE GAME. She doesn't know what it is, and she made it, he doesn't know what it is, and he's a moron, and we don't know what it is, and we don't care. Great, another computer game, but this one is the basis of a film that has had audiences across America baffled. They obviously never saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. They go into game A, get put into game B, they come out of that one and go into another, then they kill everyone and go into another game and win it by killing everyone else. But was that last one a game or real life? Neither, it is a film. And we were well aware of that, so we didn't much care whether they were in it or out of it because either way they were in a film. Something that we were made painfully aware of throughout. If you can't work out whether they were in a game or not is because you weren't supposed to be able to work it out because that was the aim of the film. This movie doesn't answer any questions, as has been suggested, it merely prompts another one: "why am i watching this?"
Put simply, this is the poor mans remake of CCBB but without the intrigue or the cunning story line, without any real empathy, or attempt to make an involving film leading up to a reality-questioning end. The parallels between the two films are many: from the way it puts us into the fantasy world; the way it takes us out; the way that there is a moment of helplessness for the main characters as they are taken over; the way that characters and events from the supposed real beginning are reused in the make-believe world; and the way that we are shocked when we find out that what we witnessed may or may not be "real".
I was one of the first in England to see this film, and have actively voiced the following advice to friends ever since: to avoid seeing it as it is merely a cheap and unconvincing attempt to fool the audience into caring about whether or not what they are seeing is inthe actual world. At the end of the day it is not real, and there has to be more point in seeing a film than to simply desipher whether or not the end is in an "imaginary" world.