Total Recall - The Total Remake

Let's initially give the 2012 remake of Total Recall a pass on being a remake of the 1990 Arnie film and also for the somewhat questionable elements of the premise - namely the ability to construct "The Fall", a tunnel that goes through the CENTRE OF THE EARTH but not create more housing... With that out of the way, let's begin, shall we?

The film starts with textual exposition on the world before we cut to Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell) having a dream about a mysterious woman (Jessica Biel) and him, trying to escape robots from Mass Effect. He wakes up to see his hot wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale) and bemoans his boring life. He's located in the "The Colony" (which is in Australia - but looks like a mix of Bangkok and Hong Kong if they got fused with Blade Runner on steroids and for some reason, has to commute to the United Federation of Britain which is the only other place in the world that is still habitable (because of some kind of nuclear/chemical/biological war at the end of the 21st century). As if living in a post-apocalyptic world wasn't bad enough, trouble is brewing between the UFB and the resistance (led by Bill Nye) - whose goals and motivations are never really explained beyond being there to oppose the UFB.

Quaid continues to express his discontent to his best friend Harry (Bokeem Woodbine) and mentions that he's thinking about going to "Rekall", to have memories implanted. Harry tells him that this is a bad idea but another co-worker says it was super special awesome! He also gets turned down for a promotion - despite having put in lots of extra work and his boss telling him that he's better qualified but the other guy got the job as he's from the UFB.

Quaid wastes some talking to Harry at a bar, where he again gets warned against going to "Rekall" and FINALLY, at the twenty minute mark (after a very random scene paying homage to the infamous three breasted woman in the original), Quaid gets to "Rekall" where we have a John Cho cameo that is pretty much wasted and something ACTUALLY happens.

So, seconds after Quaid is strapped into the chair - a bunch of soldiers burst in and shoot everyone except Quaid. He's able to Jason Bourne them to death (although, with direction and editing that not only doesn't induce seizures but actually allows you to see what's going on!) a second team turns up before he manages to escape and heads home to see his wife... who responds by trying to kill him. Marriage ain't what it used to be... She immediately spills her guts and tells him that their marriage is an implanted memory and she's a secret agent there to keep an eye on him before he runs off again.

A phone in his hand rings and an old friend - called Hammond - tells him that he needs to go check out an old safety deposit box and get rid of the phone. Apparently cutting a hand phone out is easy though, all you need is a piece of broken glass and it comes right out! So, he goes to get the safety deposit box which is full of all kinds of things that help progress the plot - namely a video of himself, telling him to go to his old apartment in the UFB... he doesn't seem to question how the video got to the safety deposit box despite the fact it ends with him GETTING CAPTURED.

As should be obvious, what happens next is another chase sequence (after a joke only people that have watched the original will get) this one feeling very Minority Report influenced with cars moving vertically as well as horizontally. During this long and rather dull sequence, Jessica Biel is able to turn up at JUST the right time to save Quaid but she gets injured (as she is but a weak and feeble woman) and he has to carry her to his old apartment. He activates a message from himself that basically explains that Quaid is actually Hauser, someone in the UFB who defected to the resistance and had a kill-code for the synthetics that Cohagen was going to use to invade the Colony - handy for the rebels!

Police are surrounding the building and Harry tries to convince Quaid that this is all just a delusion brought on by the memory implantation and that to escape, he has to shoot Jessica Biel for uh, some reason - it's not explained... Instead, also for no adequately explained reason, her tearing up leads him to shoot Harry in the face and despite the fact the opening scene of the film shows us that there exists a very effective non-lethal takedown, Quaid and Jessica Biel manage to escape (despite being surrounded) via another - you guessed it! - long and tedious chase scene involving Willy Wonka lifts. YAWN.

To give us a break from this, Quaid gets to see Bill Nye - sporting an American accent but we'll get to that shortly. They try and get the kill-code from Quaid but faster than you can say "IT'S A TRAP!" the storm troopers have busted in and killed everyone and Quaid's faux wife (who has been trying to murder him the whole film despite orders not to) and Chancellor Heisenberg (Bryan Cranston) are there for good measure. Heinsenberg delivers a big dollop of exposition, this was all just a means to kill Bill Nye and launch the invasion of The Colony. Sadly, there is no evil laugh... but he instructs his soldiers to restore Quaid to his original personality and to take Jessica Biel with him on his invasion of The Colony (because all invasions are led by politicians with dangerous rebels along for the ride).

Taking a leaf right out of the Doctor Evil handbook, everyone leaves except for a couple of guys... even though there is NO rush to invade The Colony and it would make a lot more sense to just sit here and make sure they restored Quaid to Hauser... but nope, they all leave and apparently Hammond was one to go above and beyond the call of duty because he's there and loosens Quaid's straps - what a stroke of luck!

Hammond gets shot when Quaid is freeing himself - too bad, so sad - and then rushes off to The Fall to rescue Jessica Biel and stop Chancellor Heinsenberg from invading The Colony. How best to achieve this? BOMBS! Lots of bombs. Shame no one in the resistance was clever enough to come up with such an ingenuous plan before... so predictable as ever, Quaid frees Jessica Biel and after a pointless fight scene to pad the already overly long run time - we get a fake-out where Quaid is unconscious and wakes up to Lori pretending to be Jessica Biel... no explanation as to why she didn't just kill him while he was asleep but that's it.

This film has a lot of problems but most of it comes down to the pacing and the flat characters. The chase sequences are quite often quite visually impressive but as the characters are so unengaging, there's just no real reason to care what happens. Farrell phones in his performance - spending most of the film looking surprised but neither Biel nor Beckinsale do much better, struggling to muster two facial expressions between them. Given that we take a full twenty minutes to get to the action part, this is especially inexcusable.

The pacing is also very off, this film is only two hours long but it feels a lot longer. Some scenes - such as when Quaid goes to Rekall - feel as if they're too short and the action scenes almost all feel overly long, becoming rather numbing... On top of this, there's no real sense of scale or anything at stake. We've no real idea who the resistance are or what they want, we just know the UFB are the cartoonish bad guys and that the invasion is bad... for some reason.

About all you can say is that it looks nice and even that is somewhat backhanded as the visual style is really just a collage of designs out right lifted from other better films. Even without comparison to the original, this is a subpar action film that just falls flat.

World War Z Trailer

Any fan of the zombie genre worth their salt will at least know of World War Z.. in a world where zombies are now an overused and somewhat tired (but still tremendously popular) monster, it actually offered an interesting take on the zombie apocalypse both in its scope and its narrative style. Rather than the usual, struggling-to-stop-the-infection or ragtag-group-of-survivors-must-reach-safety that have been done a hundred times a piece, it took the perspective of a writer chronicling the tales of people AFTER humanity had survived the catastrophic effect of the titular zombie war.

It's really the logical conclusion of the Romero ideal, where the slow moving zombies are merely an external means by which to expedite internal conflict. Except that this story plays out on a global setting and we're perceiving the world through a number of very different individual (and at times, unreliable) perspectives. In a genre which has inexorably moved toward the more immediately threatening running zombies since 28 Days Later, World War Z was a good way of showing a (relatively) realistic scenario for the way the slow mving undead might be able to almost destroy mankind.

So, naturally the film adaptation was ALWAYS going to be fraught with problems and the production seems to have done little but lurch from one disaster to another, enduring serious amounts of rewriting and reshooting - something that would almost certainly have sunk a film with a lower budget or less star power. Regardless of these problems, the trailer has just been released!

And while trailers are by no means a good way to judge a film, this seems judged to systematically disabuse anyone of the notion that this is based on the source material in anything but name alone. First of all, this is set  at the BEGINNING of a zombie apocalypse - not at its end. Secondly, these zombies are not the slow shambling kind - they're track and field zombies ON STEROIDS. Hell, these zombies look like they could outrun a car! Thirdly, from the looks of things... this isn't going to be a multi-faceted narrative, it's going to be a vehicle for Brad Pitt single handedly saving the world. That's not exactly surprising and is one of the reasons why an A-lister was always going to be a bad idea.

The most notable thing is how TERRIBLE the special effects in the trailer are - for a film with a budget of $125m you'd expect something good. If these are actual effects in the cut that is released... just, wow. We're talking about the kind of effects people cringed at in The Mummy and those looked better AND had the excuse of being from 1999. We're talking about zombies behaving like some kind of gigantic kind of giant ball that has properties of a liquid and a gas... it's truly bizarre and sticks out like a sore thumb. All the WORST excesses, everything that people complain about when it comes to CGI... this trailer seems to almost perfectly sum it up.

It's hard to know exactly what this film will be like but if this is the best it has to offer then it looks as if Paul W.S. Anderson is in for some stiff competition as regards bad big budget zombie films...

Forward Unto Dawn

With Halo 4 out this month, now is as good a time as any to mention the Forward Unto Dawn... part of the rather considerable pre-release hype... it's somewhere between a mini-series and a short film, covering events preceding any of the games right at the start of the human-covenant war with short interludes that show the increasingly rampant Cortana (stuck on the eponymous ship - or rather, half ship - with Master Chief following the end of Halo 3) at the start of each episode.

It does start out feeling a little bit generic but given the time they have, they actually do a pretty decent job with the characters and this definitely has the feel of the Halo universe. Also, for a fairly small production it's actually quite impressive. Not only do we get to see Elites and Hunters but also Master Chief himself in an actual Warthog.

This does somewhat highlight that it would be difficult to build a film around Master Chief - what makes him work as a protagonist of an FPS (being a bad ass of few words), makes him rather uninteresting as a character. There's no doubting his bad ass credentials here but as usual, he's just a big ol' power armour wearing glass of water, all of the interest really coming from the students.

A must for any Halo or sci-fi fan.

The End Of Dire Spy Schlock Hunted

And so, Hunted ends not with a bang but a "wow, that's eight hours wasted." You can't blame the hacks that wrote this drivel though - actually, you can and should - they did their best (which would have to work hard and buck up its ideas to aspire to be mediocre)  in this last episode to make this try and seem like it was all terribly clever.

The attempt to make Hunted look like some intelligent interweaving story is truly laughable as an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach would be underselling the desperation apparent here. The gangsta's son (Steve) wife didn't commit suicide - SHE WAS MURDERED! But wait! THERE'S MORE! She was murdered BY HIS HALF-BROTHER! Tyrone - the nefarious black guy that worked for Dave. At his father's behest, of course.

Still not sold on how clever this is?! What if they explain why gangsta dad is hellbent on getting this dam? Because his son (the one that got murdered) was murdered by Polyhedrous - one of the evil multi-national corporations - twenty years ago and he wants his revenge! Except that his plan is upset by the fact the blackmail material he had on Polyhedrous (who killed over six hundred people) is fake!

Luckily for our heroine, being drugged and then drowned isn't a serious setback to her, so she activates her Jesus powers to resurrect herself and murder gangsta dad - just in time for her boyfriend(ish) to come in and inject her with the antidote because obviously for her to shake off drowning AND poison THAT would break the suspension of disbelief! Oh and being drowned let her remember the pivotal(?) event from her childhood that links in to the whole Hourglass thing. Handy that!

Oh and Sam gets shot. Again but shockingly - DOESN'T DIE! AND SHE GETS HANDED A BABY! What a twist?

Starship Troopers: Invasion

The latest adaptation of the hugely influential Heinlein novel, Starship Troopers: Invasion is a bit of a mix of the various different adaptations that have been made over the years... perhaps the most notable difference from the best known iteration of the franchise - the 1997 Paul Verhoeven film - is that this is fully CGI and that the titular Starship Troopers are indeed wearing at least some kind of power armour.

This particular outing returns to main the characters from the 1997 movie, although several years on with the Federation still at war with the Bugs. The first thing to note about this film is that it's very limited in its visuals. If you feel that too many sci-fi films end up us as endless succession of identical corridors, this film will do little to disabuse you of that notion. We start out on a space station, move to a spaceship and then on to another spaceship and that's pretty much it. It's almost certainly due to budgetary constraints but it makes the  whole thing feel very limited - granted, the 1997 film was mostly set on a series of big ol' sandy planets but we had a number of different locations there... ravines, a fort and tunnels. Enough to give variety... and of course in the 1999 CGI TV show we had a number of substantially different places in each campaign.

Starship Troopers: Invasion offers us little more than the same metallic hallways and bland rooms every step of the way and while that isn't something that makes it inherently bad - it's very limiting and when you've got the ability to make any kind of world you want inside a computer it just feels a little disappointing.

Storywise, this runs with Carl being a creepy black ops type who steals Carmen's ship to run experiments that naturally pertain to Bugs and end up goin awry, killing everyone and leading to the eponymous invasion... there's not really anything remarkable in terms of story or character. It doesn't rely entirely upon the cookie cutter military cliches but it really doesn't matter as the power armour does precious little good and the weapons remain as useless as ever, so most of these characters are just meat for the grinder.

It's enjoyable as a standard sci-fi action piece, the CGI animation is actually fairly impressive (if lacking in variety) but it lacks the satirical kick that made the original film stand out from the crowd. You'd have thought someone would want to bring back the tongue-in-cheek propaganda stuff but admittedly, they'd probably feel somewhat out of place here as this is far more serious in tone than the often cartoonish Verhoeven film.

All-in-all, it's a good effort and not a bad way to spend ninety minutes and definitely something fans of the franchise (or sci-fi or creature feature fans for that matter) but there's nothing particularly iconic here... so, while even years on people will probably still remember some of the stuff from Verhoeven's gloriously over the top film, Invasion is something that is unlikely to be anything more than a series of long, grey corridors...