Saturday, September 5, 2015

It Follows

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3704438&pagenumber=13&#post448458807

This is like the most misinterpreted movie of the year - partly because it's hugely marred by bullshit plot exposition. Everything the characters say is wrong.

The curse was never passed on through sex. It was created through the act of strapping the heroine to a wheelchair. She was thereby forced into a variation on the 'trading places' game, being made to trade places with (what turns out to be) the boy's nude mother. Jay never figures out that the boy was simply using this weird ritual as a means of 'safely' acting out his incestuous fantasies - essentially strapping the devouring-mother itself to a wheelchair. But this standard Oedipal mother stuff was successfully displaced onto Jay, allowing the boy to maintain a comfortable domestic life with mommy.

In a subsequent mirror-image encounter, Jay imagines herself as an exaggeratedly battered rape victim - because that's how everyone has been treating her. This is the logic across the film: 'it' is always an unbearable realization of Jay's latest fantasies, be they fantasies of herself or of her prospective sexual partners.

Greg's death is treated elliptically because he didn't actually die. Jay simply perceives him as a useless mother-fucker, sucked dry of his Lifeforce. Did Jay herself break the window? Signs point to yes.

People have complained about the beach scene for showing too much, but it is showing exactly enough for us to call bullshit on it. Explicitly showing what everyone believes happened makes it all the clearer that Jay simply scratched Paul's abdomen while she was flailing around. That's not to say that "it's all a dream", but it is absolutely a doofy shared fiction that explodes the instant the older, skeptical Greg turns his back.

This is all to say that the film is a fairly boring story of a girl who secretly wants to fuck her dad. The actually-interesting content is in the depiction of the other side of 8-Mile as a 'dark world', where they break into an apocalyptic future version of their own home - stripped bare and dilapidated. And even then, it's just expressing the rudimentary idea that suburbanites are insulated from 'the harsh reality outside'. I didn't like it.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Pacific Rim

Imagine if the first 30-50 minutes of Speed Racer were devoted to explaining what a 'car' is, and why people were racing them. "I was fifteen when I saw the first speed race... They called them automobiles... Driving very quickly... We built them because horses were too slow..." Just interminably. That's Pacific Rim.

Del Toro fans might recall how Hellboy 2 unceremoniously ditches the bland human audience-identification character from the first film, having Hellboy and the other monsters go rogue from their government organization to have wild pagan monster adventures. Imagine if they killed off Hellboy instead. That's also this film.

The grievous sin of Pacific Rim is that both the monsters and robots have no personality. They don't. Gipsy Danger 'should be' a character, displaying a combination of traits from both pilots in its actions and mannerisms. This only occurs, however, in the actually-good sword scene. Mako presses a huge red button labelled SWORD, causing the limp blade to flop out of its sheath. She then yells "for my family!" and her rage causes the flaccid sword to literally grow erect so that she can thrust it into the kaiju. No other scene actually shows the psychological connection between pilot and machine in the same way that Mako's rage sprouts from the machine as a gleaming metallic phallus.

The next closest shot is when hero guy's brother holds a holographic boat gingerly in his hand, establishing that the blue augmented-reality interface represents the 'mind' half of some mind-body dualism. We are never provided with a Jaeger POV shot. What do they see? How do they see? The little blue boat is the closest thing, and the only. There's little other indication that the jagers are powered by psychological health. Since we don't know why they succeed, we don't know why they fail. (Was Cherno Alpha's crew just not vengeful enough?)

Consider the 'soulmate' imagery and the throwaway line about 'angering the gods' in the context of Aristophanes's speech from Plato's Symposium, in which humanity is imagined as a four-legged race of siamese twins:


Symposium posted:

Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, attempted to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods.

Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained. At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way.

He said: 'Methinks I have a plan which will enfeeble their strength and so extinguish their turbulence; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.'

The resulting compulsion in humanity to reunite its halves is called 'love':

Symposium posted:

So ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, seeking to make one of two, and to heal the state of man.

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the tally-half of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men. The women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they have affection for men and embrace them, and these are the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature.

This is what the film is about, but this imagery of humanity being punished by the gods 'for a reason' is absent from the film. There is a line about global warming, but there is no imagery of global warming (outside of a quick-and-easy reference to Blade Runner in the design of the bone slums). We are told the apocalypse is coming, but there is little apocalyptic imagery because the film is already basically post-apocalyptic). The kaiju don't have the weight of a monster from Revelations - they aren't awesome in the original sense of the word. They're already commonplace - evoking malaise, not catastrophe.

Someone joked earlier about the kaiju being all female, but it's true. Being clones, the kaiju lack sexual difference - and there is an obvious theme of things squeezing in and out of yonic slits. The rift itself is a 'throat' that 'dilates' at regular intervals. A baby kaiju is birthed by Cesarian section, then Ron Perlman crawls out of a wound in its belly, covered in fluids. One kaiju gets Mako's erect sword rammed so hard down its throat that it's bisected. This is all Very Obvious.

But the kaiju, besides being gooey and female, don't do anything. There is maybe five minutes total of monsters attacking cities in the movie, and most of it takes place in a dream sequence. With a kaiju, what they destroy and how they destroy it is characterization. Consider how Clover decapitates the statue of liberty while screeching with wide-eyed terror in his film. I defy anyone to describe the actions of any kaiju here in even such basic terms.

What unsettles me in the film is that we open with the quick WWII montage - people used to believe in the fight (Rosie the Riveter!), but that iconography has been reduced to cliched fodder for action figures and videogames. You get the additional scene of the kid complaining about the old, crappy robot toy to cement this. But the message isn't that crass consumerism is bad. It's that we need new and better products to consume. The scene on the beach is a very obvious statement of 'this ain't your daddy's giant robot movie!' - which is definitely crass, no? It reminds of the mean-spirited scene in the Clash of the Titans remake where toy robot Bubo is thrown away, declared worthless now. Clash Of The Titans and Pacific Rim have the same screenwriter.

While I don't doubt Del Toro's genre intelligence (see the above reference to Plato), the end product seems mostly for the kind of 'fan' who says "of course I love star wars; I own all the actions figures!" and "of course I love kaiju films; I devoured that stupid shit when I was 12 years old!" You see this in the praise the film's unabashedness but not its quality. In cartoons, long scenes of characters back in base describing what's going on are a product of budgetary limitations. It's expensive to animate an expressive robot battle that conveys all the themes via punching. When Del Toro uses that 'anime style' here, it's like when deviantart people draw characters with anime side-mouths. It's an unnecessary compromise.

The fact is that Man of Steel deals with near-identical themes, but they show the ID4-hivemind terraforming laser, and they show humanity staring up in confusion as it looms over them. They show the mind-meld dream sequence where the apocalyptic plan is made visual. When Charlie Day has his encounter with the kaiju brain, he sits in a chair and tells us how cinematic it was - describing a zoetrope effect, 'like blinking your eyes really fast.' Thanks, Charlie! But why couldn't we see the kaijus battling T-Rexes on the cinema screen?

And when you really get down to it, Superman isn't a PMC.

(Now, watch as people use my demand for kaiju v. dinosaur big battels as evidence that I 'hate fun'.)

Saturday, July 6, 2013

Act of Valor

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3525872&pagenumber=63&perpage=40#post411496993

On this note, Act of Valor is some next-level shit. It's a fascist film far superior to The Dark Knight Rises. It's pretty good!

Here's the trick: Act of Valor presents the terrorists as cool dudes, and the only characters with, well, characterization. The scene where the terrorist leader is shown the hi-tech suicide vests is deliberately modelled after the 'Q' scenes in 007 films. "You could hide this under a tuxedo." Act of valor is more successfully anti-Bond than most of these recent Craig films. It's primarily anti-cynicism.

A scene of a hostage rescue in the Costa Rican jungle is frequently intercut with 'insect vs. spider' imagery. Except it soon becomes clear that the navy seals constitute the web - the collection of weak threads that are strong when grouped together. (The fasces is literally referenced at one point.) So: what is the spider?

Here's the opening voiceover, presented as a letter written from a father to his son:

"Before my father died, he said the worst thing about growing old was that other men stopped seeing you as dangerous. I've always remembered that, how being dangerous was sacred, a badge of honor. You live your life by a code, an ethos. Every man does. It's your shoreline. It's what guides you home. And trust me, you're always trying to get home."

The way it's dropped right in there, it's a big dump of abstract information, and then you parse it: being perceived as dangerous creates the feeling of stability. That is what constitutes the titular 'acts of valor'. The film is about the act of storytelling.


http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3525872&pagenumber=65&perpage=40#post411505324


The opening scene of Act of Valor, after the voiceover'd prologue, shows the SEALs leaping from an aeroplane during a training exercise in San Diego. The cameraman pulls back and films the parachutists from above as they descend on a town of some sort. SMASH CUT to a street scene in the Phillipines. The camera glides precariously over the motorbikes. WHIP-PAN to a passing van and CUT to the interior, to show that it is being driven by a shifty terrorist.

Note that the scene of SEALs parachuting has absolutely no plot function. It's aesthetic. The SEALs travel in swift, synchronized motion, faces obscured and anonymous. They look downwards, with clear vision, onto the 'abstract' grid of houses. This grid view is then overlaid with simulated computer graphics with GPS coordinates. The smash cut carries their swift, forward motion into an entirely different scene, establishing that this is metaphorically what they will descend into. But, importantly, the POV is now moving independent of our supposed protagonists. The camera darts between cars and bikes, now fully 'disembodied' but subjective and unstable. This gliding motion is then violently interrupted by the terrorist, suddenly 'popping out of' the scene.

I think, earlier in this thread, that someone found it risible that one of the SEALs would get shot in the head and then suddenly regain consciousness, screaming obscenities, 15 minutes later. Really though, (beyond this being an actual Act of Valor (as they say in the commentary) (read: threatening story)) imagery of undeath is all over the film. Characters continually prepare for death, act as if they are dead already, or are literally half-dead - leading to the chilling scene where a torture victim is told 'it wasn't for nothing' by a SEAL showing her a crucial smartphone he retrieved during her rescue. In other words: the mutilation of your body was 'worth' the preservation of this data. Even the scenes of the heroes lovably interacting with their families are inappropriately superimposed with those onscreen graphics taken from Quantum of Solace (though far less obnoxiously overdesigned). In Quantum, this data is manipulated 'from above' by godlike experts. Here, the 'M' figure is simply a woman in a headset reading what she's shown. Everyone is subordinate to, and devoted to the maintenance of, the network of intelligence and information-gathering.

The villains of the film are differentiated from the heroes by way of their self-centeredness. "Die for us," they say, as opposed to the SEALS' "we will die for you". Implicitly, then, the terrorists and druglords stand in for the American government, conspicuously absent from the film, who are themselves ordering the SEALS to die for 'the cause' from afar. Paired sequences late in the film directly equate an American soldier to a suicide bomber. This is entirely in keeping with how the film destabilizes the protagonist/antagonist dynamic. The 'jihadist' is simultaneously a James Bond and Blofeld figure. The SEAL protagonists are both noble heroes and the faceless SWAT ciphers from a Chris Nolan film. I'm liking this one a lot.


http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3525872&pagenumber=93&perpage=40#post411767416

First of all, watch it. Yes, it is propaganda - but no more so than a given Marvel Studios production. I actually find it less objectionable because it is both upfront about its funding and so genuinely well-made that it has the nuance and subversive qualities of a John Milius or Michael Bay film (I'd actually place it somewhere between those two, aesthetically).

But as I said, it's basically a remake of Plan 9, touching on most of the same themes and plot points. It's just presented through the lens of millennial war films instead of 50's scifi, and told from the perspective of the 'humans'.

As in Plan 9, the narrative centers around a flawed, egoistic terrorist/artist/alien and his determination to succeed in spite of cuts to his already too-small budget and the general ignorance and indifference of the public he's trying to sway. On the other side are a group of blank ideologues, ostensibly the protagonists, defined more by their uniforms than anything else. Neither side is presented as terribly sympathetic thanks to this dynamic of banal, stupid good guys fighting an unapologetically evil underdog.

The shift in perspective and aesthetic from low to high budget allows the film to operate as a companion piece rather than a retread. It's 'politically incorrect' in a valuable way, refusing to go the tolerant, liberal Avatar route. It doesn't present terrorists as a bunch of sad poors who happened to stumble across some bombs. And a lot of the good qualities it finds in The Troops are sincerely good, though they are ultimately fighting to maintain the status quo of their (conspicuously offscreen, mostly unmentioned) superiors.

Sequences blurring fiction and documentary footage, though seamlessly integrated, play a role roughly analogous to Plan 9's stock footage. There's an essay to be written here.

But it's overall just a well-made, challenging film. Parts of it genuinely evoke Michael Mann, Kathryn Bigelow and even Terrence Malick. No joke.


http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3525872&pagenumber=183&perpage=40#post412454852

That's the feel of VALOR. Clearly you're not used to it!

But for real though, I thought the film was remarkably even-handed - along the lines of Red Dawn. It's no more 'propagandic' than Battleship or Iron Man, which likewise featured the involvement and support of the US military.

Iron Man is actually far worse for being a kid-movie pean to liberalism with one-dimensional terrorists and a token 'good Arab'.

Act of Valor is R-Rated, obviously political film with a nuanced presentation of both sides - arguably presenting them as 'both worse'. They overtly put the head terrorist in a Darth Vader role, not unaware that Darth was a uniquely powerful and somewhat sympathetic character in an uncomfortable alliance with the Empire. Darth Vader took being 'evil' extremely seriously - as an ethical commitment.

One thing that Batman 3 got right was in making Bane a similar Darth Vader figure, until reduced to a 'mere human'. Act of Valor does the same thing in making the terrorist a weirdly sympathetic figure who, contrary to what you'd expect, fails because he doesn't go far enough - succumbing to cowardice, megalomania and other human failings.

The good guys, on the other hand, are merely drones, filling the same role as the aliens from Aliens or Battle: Los Angeles. The film has no Ripley or Sgt. Nantz figure - unless you count the terrorist, who fails to be their equal.

It's in a conversation with these other films, and frankly up there with them,

Saturday, June 29, 2013

World War Z

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3552888&userid=118075#post416843041

The second shot of World War Z, if I recall, is Brad Pitt and wife lying in bed til their kids burst into the room. Anyone watching the film again (although, god, why would you?) should pay attention to the painting over their bed; it seems to depict a trail of blood leading to a black table. The wife then calls the kids 'little creatures', in an unsubtle metaphor.

What does this mean, though? Professor Clumsy's reading is that the film is kind of a dream of Brad Pitt throwing off the shackles of domesticity to feel like a big zombie-killer. Though he says he doesn't want to, his unconscious desire is to leave his family behind.

I'd argue the opposite: The opening scenes equate zombie combat with doing the dishes. The whole world war barely seems apocalyptic because it represents status quo. This, more than anything else, explains the frequent returns to the family on the boat. Brad Pitt going off to fight is an everyday occurrence that puts bread on the table. There was already blood over their bed from the beginning.

This is where the film gets questionable, because although we're told in expository dialogue that the zombies are all about the deterritorializing effects of capitalism and abstract stuff like that, the more concrete imagery is of infested slum tenements, their implicit truce with a homeless man, and their upsetting a lame multiculturalism parade in Israel.

Yep, these zombies are the downtrodden poor, the social abject. The inhuman excluded. What does it mean when [spoiler]the Latino family becomes bitten, absorbed by their tenement, and only their son escapes by following Brad Pitt?[/spoiler] There's something very wrong with the film, and it reaches a head with an entire segment of Israel and Palestine joining forces against... Palestine. The liberal, multiculturalism imagery is extremely on-point. Everyone is everyone is equal - so long as they fit in, act nice and sing happy songs. That's the message.

This logic spills over into the airplane sequence. Brad Pitt escapes with the few remaining Israelis in the first class seats of a jet liner, beating the zombie Palestinians in coach to death with the carry-on luggage. The first class vs coach imagery was not unintentional - see the stupid purse-dog thrown in for easy satire.

This is the point where Lindelof jumped in to rewrite the film, which should be fairly overt from the sudden appearance of his trademark [spoiler]Christ imagery. The whole system fucked, Brad Pitt blows a hole in the plane (intertextuality with Man Of Steel) and emerges with a spear through his side, having given up his phone and left his family without their meal ticket. Lindelof also wrote the opening scenes of domestic bliss sustained with blood, so Clumsy is right that the film is 'anti-family' in that sense. But this only occurs after the plane explodes, and is totally divorced from the globetrotting zombie-shooting antics.

And even then, it's not quite enough. Despite Lindelof's best efforts, this is a liberal Brad Pitt Jesus, sitting in a first-class seat. By the end of the film, he'll be helping the UN distribute little humanitarian care packages while massacring the inhumans and piling them into mass graves. It's the Israel sequence all over again. Instead of being an authentic Jesus figure, Brad comes across as a poverty tourist, 'slumming it' so that he can blend in with 'the other half' - before immediately heading back to scrub his hands. Compare with, say, Land of the Dead and its zombie-proletarian revolution.

The film doesn't follow through on its own logic of joining the zombies through infirmity - crippling alcoholism, loss of limbs. Not this quick-fix stuff. Things return to normal extremely quickly, with the images of mass graves intercut with Brad hugging his wife again. Blood hanging over the bed. It's extremely cynical.

But even overlooking that, this film is incredibly, distractingly poorly-made. Things stick out, like the random, pointless flashback to the Korean doctor getting bit. I really enjoyed the stump-bandaging sequence because, during the entire dramatic actors' showcase, the extra in the seat beside them is just sitting there not interacting with them in any way. There's the dumb shot where the camera zooms down into the zombie's eyeball for some reason. A suicide is presented so elliptically that the dude may as well have walked offscreen to take a shit, were it not for the badly-looped dialogue.

As anyone who's seen The Dark Knight knows, having characters narrate what's going on is a sign of their mediocrity. It's a surefire way to make them seem comically dumb compared to the real heroes, who are on top of things. The problem, in this film, is that every character is the 'is that a bazooka?' guy. The monologue about North Korea and the 'tenth man' thing have little to do with anything, are a supreme example of 'tell don't show', and aren't even well-written.

As pointed out before, there's not one great shot in the entire movie. The zombies aren't threatening at all, and PG-13 has nothing to do with it. It's okay that they never figure out what the zombies are. The problem is we have no idea what they do. The opening sequence shows ants swarming over a corpse, slowly eroding it. Why can't you have the imagery of people being engulfed by the swarm and vanishing? It's easy to convey thst sort of threat without gore. See the cow being fed to the velociraptors in Jurassic park, for example!

In the entire first attack scene, the zombies just kinda pounce at people and hit their heads on windows. There's no sense of the geometry of the swarm, when the opening credits show imagery of animals flocking and herding (intertextuality with After Earth). There's no clear pattern to their movement, except in the handful of CGI wave shots that are so badly-integrated as to seem like non sequiturs. This is the most obvious gulf in style between a film's all-CG and live-action shots since The Avengers.

Earlier, I predicted that the film would resemble Inception, with the flood of zombies representing the breakdown of symbolic reality and the capitalist dreamstate. I was close, except the dream doesn't break down. The zombies are banal, and so is fighting them. Everything goes as planned, and there's surprisingly little surrealism. In fact we only see the monsters clearly when they're failing to attack anyone - which makes Pitt's revelatory flashbacks even more ridiculous. The zombies are such non-entities that it's like reading those 'Garfield Without Garfield' comic-strip edits. This movie is such a shameful trainwreck-style debacle that would've been a great camp joke it were fun to watch at all.

Prometheus


http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3428948&userid=118075&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post404490457

Well let's get down to brass tacks: this film is hilarious.

Guy Pearce in an old man suit appears out of nowhere, says "i want immortality," and then gets bludgeoned to death with Michael Fassbender's still-conscious severed head. This is funny. No, it's the funniest film I've seen in theatres since District 9.

Weyland's death is a stock ironic comeuppance played for extreme camp. The film glosses over it because it know that this is a trope. The glib speed with which it dismisses the search for immortality is the same with which it dismisses all the other characters' motivations. Dude say he wants money? DIES. Dude says he wants friendship? DIES. These aren't random deaths. They are equated by this same tone and attitude. Humans are stupid and die because they're stupid.

David reads Liz Shaw's dreams and then tells her straight up: you are a shallow character. Her dream looks like a hallmark card. "Your entire motivation is that you're infertile and your dad died of Ebola. I just summarized it in two sentences." The moral: robots don't have souls, and neither do people. But the robot is smarter because he understands this. If you've seen Blade Runner, you know what the warm-toned recording of the dream of a happy family means. It means she's a replicant.

"It's a quote from a movie I like."

Look at the specific quote from Lawrence of Arabia: 'the trick is not minding that it hurts'. David's character feels everything the humans feel, but he doesn't mind it. He's built up his ironic distance, he constructs his own identity and puts on an incredibly campy performance. The whole film aligns with his POV. As I said in general chat, Prometheus is a masterpiece of straight-faced camp.

The very first shot is quoted from 2001 (it's a quote from a movie I like). Prometheus is transparently Scott's grand statement on Science Fiction as a genre. It's not 'hard' science fiction. It's "Science Fiction", deeply embedded in quotation marks. The Prometheus/Pandora myth is like Scifi 101, first day of class. It's THE example of mythological proto-scifi. It's referenced in Frankenstein, the first piece of Science-Fiction literature. Alien references it. The films that Alien references reference it. The films that reference Alien reference it.

So the characters fly into space seeking all the answers to their questions, and what do they find? A rational, promethan man locked in an unending struggle against a irrational, pandoric vagina monster. Just slapping against eachother until there is a literal, onscreen shuddering climax and postcoital release. Again: this is funny! You can imagine people staring at this scene and saying "hmm... what does this all mean?" Or, better yet: "how did the squid monster grow so big without a food source?" - just angrily looking for logical clues in this prolonged sequence of a vagina and penis locked in combat.

Scott's grand statement on sci-fi is to issue a moratorium. The point of Prometheus is that these stories pretty much always boil down to the same basic archetypal conflict. The humans are painfully mundane - they are all artificial. Only David sees through the guise and understands that he's a character in a movie. This is a loving ode to gleefully bad sci-fi.

Important scene: Naomi Rapace looks at some bleeps and bloops on a screen. Two bar graphs allign. "This is it," she cries. "This is everything!" We cut back to the bar graph, and watch it bleep and bloop a while longer. Wow, what an impressive bar graph. Next scene, it turns out she just wants to get fucked.

There are two distinct scenes in the film of wacky dames who just need a good deep-dicking. One gets an abortion, the other crushed by a huge black protuberance. A guy smokes pot and then dies instantly. This is Friday the 13th logic. The class conflict in Alien is notably absent. All these people are rich idiots, so we're not supposed to cheer for them. Idris Elba, the closest thing to a 'lower class' character puts on a Southern Accent, says YEEHAW! and rockets his ship into a wall to save the day. Michael Bay would give an approving nod.

Why is there a zombie scene? Because it's wonderful slapstick. He gets shot like fifty times and his head gets run over. I couldn't stop laughing. But more importantly, the 'zombie' exists to shows us what Charlie was turning into. For a second, I though it was Charlie, back from the dead. Again, this treats the characters as slightly interchangable.

There are at least two shots lifted straight from Luigi Cozzi's (in)famous Italian Alien ripoff Contamination.

Prometheus owns.

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Chernobyl Diaries

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3030395&pagenumber=383&perpage=40#post416074216

I wrote a couple posts about it in the old Gen. Chat thread:

"Chernobyl Diaries is actually one of the better films I've seen this year. It's not an uncompromised revelation like Area 407, but it's a good one - very similar in theme and tone to The Ruins, for fans of that film (like me). I was mildly disconcerted by the rather theatrical acting in the first half (before the screaming starts), but that can be read as a positive trait. The kids look and act like they're in a commercial for coffee, or life insurance. As in The Ruins, this will change. It's all about the inevitability of decay, and it's really effective. It's very Texas Chainsaw.

The objections some people have are understandable. The plot is generic, and the acting takes some getting used to, as noted. The film is also loaded with redundant or unnecessary exposition, which betrays a lack of faith in the audience (my one major gripe). But as I'd expected, folks overlooked the cinematography. It's really great cinematography, approximating the style of Children of Men. The handheld camera will often float around the characters before lingering on some interesting tableau. This creates some good tension between the POVs of the cameraman and the characters, while also seamlessly bridging them. The film is remarkably good at drawing tension from frames-within-frames, like empty doorways and clouded windows. It frequently just looks great. Perhaps it's too naturalistic for its own good, because they pull off some really neat stuff.

Why it's a good film: there's a lengthy, slowly-paced montage of the characters silently experiencing their environments, and documenting them.

The special effects are flawless, but also not at all show-offy. This is post-spectacular cinema, in the style of Battle: Los Angeles, where everything is presented matter-of-factly and you don't get any 'money shots' of the monsters posing. And about the monsters: I liked them. They're not 'scary', no. People have complained about that, but they don't appreciate the nuance. With their rubbery makeup and clumsiness, they approach Zaat's mixture of pity and revulsion towards a mutated creature. It's exploitative of the tragedy, yes - but very self-conciously about that exploitation. These are vengeful ghosts from a disaster reduced to a historical trivia and a cool thing you may have seen on the internet. That it feels skeevier than countless pop-cult stuff about nazi experiments is a testament to its success. Consider it a response to that video game. It's the important distinction between mere fodder to be killed and humans reduced to inhumanity, as covered in Peter Jackson's films. You can almost hear them lament how they've been reduced to movie mutants. But consider how easy it would have been to make them 'cool' mutants, and you can admire the restraint of making them appear almost fragile.

I liked how they subvert the 'glimpse of the monster in a photo' scene by having that information be totally useless to the characters and irrelevant to the plot. I like how it opens with an iPad screen and closes with a metal shutter covering a darkened window. I like the understated moment where these young photographers find find a destroyed photograph lying in the dirt and then forget about it (again, with no relevance to the plot).

In general, the film is just plain bleak and discomfiting. It's not discovered-footage, but obviously borrows a lot from that style. There's barely any score, and the takes are looong, lingering on 'empty' spaces. The shot choices are often very unconventional, playing with the lightweight camera like a subdued Crank. The production design is utterly fantastic as well, and it's all subtle and downbeat. Everything Bordwell wrote about Paranormal Activity [...] applies here, although in a film that's significantly better. They use the aesthetic to smuggle a lot of art-film in there. The film isn't as bold and confident as Area 407, but I'd still rank it higher than many on my 'runners up' list for last year.

[...]

It's a generic horror plot retold with extreme subtlety and understatement. Like you don't even realize, til the end, how it effortlessly shifted between protagonists. You don't get the subtextual importance of the one girl having trouble walking with heels on cobblestone. That just hit me now.

It seems condescending to say it's a film that rewards attention, because I'm sure folks paid attention. More accurately, it's a film without any of the usual conventional payoffs, so it's only rewarding for people willing to put up with that. There are no 'holy shit!' moments whatsoever.

It's just a sad, quiet film about how everyone you love will die and there's little you can do about it but try and forget. It's my kind of film because I'm a firm believer that cinema exists at the point where mere plot description fails to be adequate. Plot provides structure and context, but the little details are what's vital to me. Wikipedia isn't going to note the part where the girl has trouble walking in heels. It's not going to note the part where she just stands there and feels the world around her. And it's not going to cover the gradual, satisfying realization that [spoiler]she was the protagonist all along.[/spoiler]

Nuance is more vital than complexity, which is why I love Area 407."