Having just ploughed through all of the BAFTA-nominated films this year (and a great many that weren’t) I’m surprised that so many of them were merely good rather than excellent. ‘Argo’ and ‘Dark Zero Thirty’ both played havoc with the facts to produce decent enough entertainment; the former is leavened by its Hollywood old boys subplot and the latter is more problematic in its embrace of torture as a legitimate tool of warfare, but an awful lot of them left nothing to talk about afterwards.
So, I reasoned that if I have to see films with little substance, let’s go all the way and see films with no substance at all. SF is like Thai food and sex; even when it’s lousy it’s still okay. So I began with ‘Resident Evil: Retribution’. I hadn’t seen the other four (five?) but was assured this did not matter as they were all exactly the same. The first fifteen minutes consisted of recapping the other films, except there was nothing to recap. Basically it consisted of a once-decent actor, Mila Jovovich, slowly somersaulting in black leather while firing guns at zombies, again and again and again in a slight variety of locations. It wasn’t directed but assembled from lots of little shots that slightly mismatched, a Groundhog Day of repetition that would almost have become an art form in itself if it hadn’t been so astoundingly boring – I wanted to see how long they could keep going with no plot at all. The full running time, it turns out.
Then, ‘Grabbers’, a sweetly funny Irish SF movie in which aliens fell to earth and attacked a small island, whose inhabitants soon realised that their only weapon was to stay drunk, as the creatures were allergic to the alcohol content of blood. This resulted in a pub full of paralytically pissed people trying to fend off an alien invasion, the only sober man being the town’s resident alcoholic copper. Watched it eating Thai takeout – double whammy of pleasure.
Next, ‘John Carter’. Ah, right from the outset you could see the problem with this hundred year-old franchise hopeful from Edgar Rice Burroughs – there was no telling the difference between the Thargs, the Therns, the Bargs or the Wargs until, toward the end of the film, someone helpfully pointed out ‘The Thargs are the ones with red flags and their enemies are in blue’ (or the other way around). Where had he been when we needed him earlier?
A wraparound story involved Burroughs and his uncle leads to a flashback, then a story within-a-story about aliens and – there, see, I’ve already lost you. Old pulp fiction can never be groundbreaking now because everything else is built on it, so that ‘John Carter’ (JC – hmm) feels like a distant echo of recent films instead of their original version. Underneath all the seen-it-all-before effects was something that must have started out clever and funny. The princess apologises for the tackiness of her (sub-Xena) outfit and there are some sly jokes amid all the long expository scenes – but it’s not enough to save the enterprise.
Then, finally, the maddest of all – ‘Branded’. Even days after watched it, I still want to scour my brain with wire wool to wipe away its memory. I’m going to go out on a limb here and name this as the most ill-conceived film of all time. Description is futile, so I’ll quote Twitch magazine, who said, under the headline ‘WTF Did I Just Watch?’; ‘Written and directed by newcomers Jamie Bradshaw and Aleksandr Dulerayn, Branded is social commentary and a satire of advertising as written by a pair of first year sociology majors who haven’t taken any film classes yet. The frequent, painful, and endless dialogue sounds like nothing more than a pair of self-important college kids who have just now realized that advertising is an insidious threat.’
The plot; A Russian boy is struck by lightning and sees a cow made of stars. As an adult he becomes a commercials director (his ads are unbelievably bad but everyone thinks they’re brilliant) played by Ed Stoppard, who needs to find another career fast before the rest of his hair falls out, because every time he opens his mouth the film dies. He falls in love with the boss’s daughter and becomes a shepherd. After a dream he builds an altar and sacrifices a glowing red cow before returning to Moscow, where everyone is now fat thanks to a marketing campaign to teach people to consume. They also have giant balloon creatures attached to their necks – symbols of evil advertising. He sells Chinese vegetarian fast-food and his balloon animals fight their balloon animals. Max Von Sydow, no stranger to stinking films, is in there somewhere. I wish I was making this up.
The hilarious part is that the creators have failed to spot that they’ve negated their own storyline by having their guru-hero fight back using the same evil persuasive techniques as the villains. Somewhere inside the mess there was an idea, but even that was a bad one, like ‘How To Get Ahead In Advertising’. This film, together with ‘Where Is Parsival?’ and ‘The Favour, The Watch And The Very Big Fish’ constitute a triumvirate of dreck about consumerism, but ‘Branded’ tops them by adding SF, and so becomes an Ed Wood film with a massive budget.
After this, I won’t complain any more about films like ‘The Master’.
It must have been the little bird chillies in that Thai food that saved you. Each bit of green snapping you back to corporeal reality.
Because what a risky business that was watching such a triple-feature while in a penthouse! The call of the hard street below must have been intense.
Please don’t push your luck, Admin. You have promised us there will be two more Bryant & Mays.
“Can’t say more, Officer. With a bloody great cry, he came off the roof at speed. Came plunging down even faster, if I do say. Just missed striking the wife’s little Mitzy here, who was finally about to do the necessary after nine wet blocks of sniffing. Great shame all around, I’d think.”
I must look out for ‘Grabbers’, it sounds like a scream.
The ‘Resident Evil’ series went down hill like a rocket-assisted bob-sled after number 2.
The first one is quite good, An agent wakes with no memory of who or where she is, before she can regain her bearings a heavily armed military team bursts in and drags her off, to conduct a rescue mission. As they fight their way into the complex, the back story unfolds to reveal what the Umbrella Corperation are upto.
The second is not that bad, and they should have stopped there. It ties up the loose threads from part one, and could have ended the series with the hero riding into the sunset, with the hope of ‘salvation’ left hanging.
But because the first two worked, they decided to milk it for all its worth. And the latter ones are pretty, but just lumber along, from set piece to set piece, leading to an inevitable cliffhanger ending.
[They are available on DVD for little more than the cost of postage and packing].
I attempted to read another review of BRANDED at a wreck of a website called Celebrity Cafe which might easily pass as the creation of the characters in the movie. The review (nothing more than a blow by blow of every scene in the movie) was as incoherent as the visual headache, uh, trailer I watched on YouTube. Thanks for the summary above. (That *was* Max van Sydow! I thought I was hallucinating. I also thought he was dead years ago.) I will most certainly be skipping it.
Like Snowy, Grabbers seems to be one to go and look for.
As for Resident Evil – Did the games come before the films?
John: the Resident Evil games came first. However filmmakers appear to think that because a game was successful a movie adaption will be similarly blessed. This rarely happens. For a start, most narrative based games have a 50hrs plus story arc to draw their audience in, giving games a huge advantage. Perhaps this is something the likes of Peter Jackson and co have caught on to as their epic outputs reach ever greater
proportions?
As a direct result of this topic, I dragged out my copy of Resident Evil to Re:View [© C.Fowler] and even though I had seen a few times before it still stands up.
Believable and empathetic characters, [for the genre], a decent story and plenty of jump out of the skin moments, even for those familiar with this sort of film.
Grabbers sounds great, and JC suffers because all sci-fi that came after it nicked everything from the original, so it now looks like a copy, it was fine for my flight to Brisbane tho