Movie review: Alien

Alien

---

Great sci-fi movie. They don't make them like this anymore, sadly. Alien tells the story of a mining ship in space that responds to a distress call on a remote world, finds an species of alien, and wacky hijinks ensue. Okay, not hijinks, but some pretty interesting stuff does go down.

I love that there are many angles from which this movie works. The suspense is masterfully done, with just the right pacing; there were points where I was completely startled, even though I knew what was coming. It didn't show too much of the alien, for the most part, which just makes it scarier. (For an example of how to do this completely wrong, see Splice.) The characters are interesting and colourful, in an early 80s way (even though the film came out in 1979, it was ahead of its time). The plot has the alien thing, interwoven with some mysterious and vague military/political agenda, interwoven with ongoing revelations about the aliens and the ship's personnel. Plus, this movie has crazy neat scenes, with the industrial space ship and the stylized alien environments.



My only complaint - there are a few seconds of seeing the full alien that maybe haven't aged that well, where maybe it kind of looks like a guy in a suit...

Modifiers: none

Rating: 9.0 out of 10

Movie review: Melancholia

Melancholia

---

Melancholia was painful to watch. I'm not saying it was badly made, because it had very high production value, strong acting, and a story idea that would usually have me chomping at the bit to watch. (The plot revolves around the appearance of a rogue planet on an apparent collision course with Earth, and the apparently linked melancholy/depression of the lead character.) Melancholia, you pulled me in close with "rogue planet", but then quickly catapulted me several football fields away with your excrutiating viewer experience, and even used that same catapult to fling small rocks at me with your slow motion camera work.

I get that the whole thrust of the movie relied on getting across a sense of depression, of futility, of dragging, weighted-down inability to carry on... And the film definitely made the viewer feel this way, but at some point, you have to stop and ask yourself - does anyone want to feel this way? I certainly didn't, and still don't.



Part of the reason I didn't like this movie was that it set itself up poorly, at least in my mind. The intro is all extreme slow motion, which feels like it will never end, and when it finally does end, it cuts to a scene of such frustrating inanity that I got put in a lousy mood for the rest of the show.

On the plus side, I was so annoyed that I stayed awake for the whole thing.

Ooh! I just found my second scrap of paper with notes on it, so I'm adding a few thoughts as an addendum.

1. I was impressed that Jack Bauer managed to keep his cool. I thought for sure he'd lose it and start blowing people away.

2. It struck me as odd that no one seemed to consider or talk about getting Justine some professional help.

3. I found it inexcusable that any parent would fail to wake their child up to witness something so momentous. It made me want to punch this movie in the face.

Man, that planet could not get there soon enough.

Modifiers: none

Rating: 4.0 out of 10

Movie review: Hop

Hop

---

This was my second viewing of Hop (both times with my daughter Sophia), and I enjoyed it even more the second time around. As far as family friendly, seasonal holiday movies go, this one is up there close to Elf, although not quite as high up as Groundhog Day.

It's a story of living up to (or breaking free from) the expectations of one's father, be he jerkish human or the one-and-only Easter Bunny. It's told in a mostly live action film, with heavy use of integrated CG for the Easter Island inhabitants (bunnies and chicks) and the wonderful candy factory.



All the reasons that this sort of movie usually annoy the heck out of me were happily absent. The main actor (James Marsden, aka Cyclops, aka Liz Lemon's boyfriend) was goofy and charming, and pulled off the grown-up kid bit in a way that at no point made me want to punch him. The main CG character was funny, non-insane, and well-voiced. The CG in general was solid. Not flawless, but solid.

Not much else to report - good story, a few fun cameos, a nice job by all supporting actors. No major black marks.

About half an hour after finishing Hop, Soph had given herself a pom-pom tail (taped to her pants), some paper buck teeth, a paper carrot, a paper Easter basket (strangely enough, no paper ears), and was leading us through a paper Easter egg hunt around the apartment. She also wanted to start playing the drums. It's hard not to let this kind of enthusiasm affect the movie's score, so she probably bumped it up a half or a whole star.

Fun movie fact: I plan on leveraging Sophie's interest in E.B.'s drumming into a perfectly valid reason to buy Rock Band.

Modifiers: none

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Movie review: Splice

Splice

---

Splice attempts to tell the tale of genetic manipulation gone wrong, in an escalating series of events which force two geneticists to make tough moral decisions in a changing landscape of greed, discovery, family, and love.

The tale it actually succeeds in telling is that of the disjointed coming of age of a small, creepy, hyperactive frozen turkey. It runs around, has a dress slapped on it by some lunatics, grows some eyebrows and Wolverine-style retractable wings (because that's a thing), gets a makeover (I kid you not), learns to dance (still not kidding), and then starts seducing/killing stuff.



The rough premise of this movie had some great potential. I think that one place where they fell completely off the rails was in deciding to actually show their creature in plain view, fully lit, for long portions of the movie. This thing was the uncanny valley personified. (Near-personified?) It made me recoil from so much of what was going on, and made sitting through the full length of the movie painful.

I'm trying to think how this movie would have worked if they had kept the CG to a minimum, hidden the creature in the shadows for most of the time, and spent the extra budget on fixing up the flow of the story a bit, maybe giving the scientists some reasonable motivation for their decisions. It could have been decent, when in fact, well... did I mention that there were giant French-kissing slugs?

All that said, there is some fascination to be had in watching such a confused movie. It kept making less and less sense right up until the end, but for some reason, I couldn't take my eyes off it. The fascination of a train wreck, perhaps? Or maybe the underlying premise was interesting enough that the execution of it was secondary to seeing how it ended? Speaking of which, near the end, I thought I had spotted the plot twist they were going to spring on us, and rolled my eyes, as I figured that it was fairly obvious, and it turns out they didn't even take that - they went with an even more obvious, plain vanilla "twist", which was even more disappointing.

Fun movie fact: I couldn't get this out of my head for a good half hour during this movie...

Modifiers: Bad stupidness, and I almost gave Adrien Brody the nod for "actors who annoy me", but it was just one movie, so I'll give him another shot.



Rating: 4.5 out of 10

Movie review: The Campaign

The Campaign

---

Not much to say here. I find both Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis very similar, in that they're quite hit and miss - when they're on, they can be hilarious, but they go to such extremes that they run the constant risk of missing their mark and leaving them in crude/offensive territory with no laughs to back them up. I'm not saying The Campaign was all miss, as I laughed a fair bit at some of the decent dialogue. But more often than not, I was merely mildly amused, or even a bit bored, waiting for the big jokes. But I did add a star purely for the slow-motion punch.

Fun movie fact: I watched this on U.S. election night, and was equally entertained by the real-life voting machine fraud allegations, tampering charges, etc. as I was by the movie.

Modifiers: none

Rating: 6.0 out of 10