Transcendence - hopefully not my last film of the year

The writing was sort of on the wall for Transcendence before I even watched it.  When I checked out its IMDB entry I discovered that 'people who liked this' also liked such abominations as Lucy and The Tourist.  Sigh.  But of course silly me I never checked that before the physical DVD was in my possession; so what is a film-nerd to do but watch it anyway and prepare to rage?  So here we go.

Johnny Depp is miscast as Will Caster, a socially introverted caricature of a scientist who is obsessed by artificial intelligence (AI) and who wants to create a computer that can think.  His wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) gets to be all weepy and emotional about things (cos she's a women innit) and his mentors & colleagues get to sound all scientific.  Paul Bettany is Evelyn's unemotional foil (cos he's a man innit) while Morgan Freeman stands about sounding like the narrator and getting all the lines the writers think are most profound - cos that's what his career has become.  When Caster is shot by anti-AI terrorists (led by Kara Mara - another good actor who is in this film why?) his team decide to try to save his mind by uploading him to a computer.

This then leads us naturally into familiar science fiction territory - what does it mean to be human, and can a machine ever be so.  Except that the film completely shies away from telling this story.  Instead it turns Johnny Depp's character into some sort of big bad with a huge shoot-out and lots of convenient plot holes that can't be ignored in such a terrible film.

I'm almost more depressed that I've got used to films like this than their actual existence.  Lucy especially is a film very similar to this, a film that never gets deeper than a mere scratch into anything approaching proper science fiction, but somehow thinks itself deeply profound.  It's a film that thinks it's being clever because it asks how a human can prove they are self-aware, but then never goes on to explore that.  It's a film that feels like a marketing opportunity without a script, a collection of famous cast members without any characters for them to play, where the final act of descends into an action shooter because that's what the committee that 'wrote' the script thinks audiences want these days.

In short, this is a very poor attempt at science fiction.  Oh, and Cillian Murphy is also in it for a bit - talk about wasted acting talent.

Some of you might be surprised to find me blogging about Science Fiction trash rather than conducting an in-depth review of the new Star Wars film.  The truth is that I have not seen it yet; I just don't get along very well with insanely packed cinemas of fan-boys.  Probably go and see it between Christmas and the New Year.  Yes I am excited about it, but the crushing failure of the hopefully soon-to-be-retconned prequels leaves me hoping that it simply isn't terrible.  Watch this space for my thoughts.  Merry Xmas all!

Last House on the Left - Horrible Horror

Way back in the day when I was hardly into film at all, my friends were all watching a brand new exciting horror movie called Scream.  Scream took the world by storm, and I was informed by the film-reviewing world that Wes Craven had re-invented the horror genre.  What no-one stopped to tell me though, was that Craven had been here before, creating horror thrillers that inspired a generation of film makes over several decades.  With Craven's recent death, I am taking the time to watch some of his more famous back-catalogue.

Last House on the Left starts innocently enough, but by the end has degenerated into a bloody revenge fantasy in which a nicer-than-nice middle class family shows us how society is only a short step away from violent anarchy.  The plot is that middle class Mary of liberal upbringing and her more worldly-wise friend Phyllis go to see a concert, try to score some drugs, get kidnapped by a gang of sexually violent criminals - and then there's bloody horror.

With this - his first film - Craven set the template for a genre that has now become so ingrained in the minds of the movie-watching public, that it's hard to imagine a time before these tropes existed.  The movie is shot on grainy film stock, often with poor lighting, indifferent cuts and stunted chemistry between the actors - in other words trying not to look like a film, trying to look like real life.  Herein lies the true nastiness of it, rather than trying to tell a horror story or deliberately scare us, Craven is doing something much more animalistic than that.  He's trying to get under our skin by presenting us with youthfulness and innocence, and then ripping it to bloody pieces.

Of course the cleverness here is that even through this, the film is politically charged.  It plays into the fear of every liberal parent, that their liberalism contradicts that animal instinct to protects one's children above all, and that one's civilised exterior is only a front waiting to be washed away to reveal the darkness underneath.  When presented with something of unimaginable horror, such as the people who brutally killed your daughter, where will our civilisation go?  Who are the 'good guys' in the film - do we applaud the revenge of a murdered daughter, or do we shake our heads at the senselessness?

Looking back, it's a film that has been bettered by film-nasties since, but as a piece of film history it's clearly still relevant and seeing the opening shots of a genre that continues to draw huge audience appeal.