'If you do one thing this weekend. Please watch the movie "Breach" on Amazon prime. I need someone to talk to about this absolute BEAST of cinematic guano'
Alex sent me that text two Fridays ago. At 1:30 in the morning. So I watched it the following evening. Hoped for a palette cleanser from Operation Petticoat. Ha! Not likely.
Some of humanity - 50 million people or so - have fled Earth on vast ships for "New Earth", leaving the rest of humanity to die. Initially it sounds like it's due to environmental collapse, but people mention a plague, so I'm not sure. This guy Noah - get it, because the ship is like an ark? - is illegally snuck on board by the mother of his child, who is also the daughter of the Admiral piloting the ship (Thomas Jane, doing his best to look like Mel Gibson in the original Mad Max.) Those two, and most of the passengers, are put into Cryo, but Noah is a janitor, so he and a skeleton crew, including Clay (Bruce Willis), are still awake maintaining the ship.
Noah doesn't actually know how to do his job, something Clay spots immediately, but there's also the highest ranking officer still awake, who Clay describes as a 'Space Nazi', who tells Noah to be alert to any signs of sabotage or weirdness. So there's an opportunity for paranoia when things start going wrong. What goes wrong is someone unleashed something on the ship that looks like a big leech that gets inside people, liquefies their organs, and then pilots their bodies. As the crew quickly learn, if there's any of the body left, the things can still control it. Meaning bullets (space bullets!) aren't much good. Well now what?
When exactly did Bruce Willis settle in the Nic Cage lane of just taking any garbage role in any movie that comes along? I know it was several years ago, maybe even a decade, but it seems like it's gotten worse. The guy cannot need the money that badly. Needs some hobbies, like Harrison Ford. Safe hobbies, as opposed to Harrison Ford, who apparently likes crashing planes.
For the first thirty minutes or so, I didn't really see what bothered Alex so much. It wasn't a good movie, but there was potential there. A cat-and-mouse game, with the creature slowly picking crew off as it moves towards its objective, while the crew scramble around and waste time arguing and blaming each other. Sure, the solution to killing the creature is painfully obvious extremely early in the movie, as is what the creature is after. But that's not necessarily a deal-breaker.
(Why it's after that is never sufficiently explained. There's mention of experiments, but also that it may have existed before the universe, and it just hates us. Extremely vague, handwavey bullshit all around.)
Then all that gets thrown out the window in the hail of pointless gunfights, confused trips through boring corridors and air vents, and lousy CGI. If you took a shot every time Bruce Willis takes a drink from his flask, you'd die before the shooting started. Noah talks so much about how he's doing this for his family, I thought I'd stumbled into a really shitty Fast and the Furious movie. The end of the movie is ludicrous in the exact same way as the ending to Ghosts of Mars. Holy crap, did I really watch that movie less than 6 months ago?
3 comments:
Wow.
I just watched this, on your, uh, recommendation? It's called Anti-Life here, for some reason.
I have seen worse films. The Michael Bay Transformers films, for example. At least it's not aggressively bad like those are. Instead it's sort of half-heartedly bad, which is probably a limitation of budget.
The most notable thing for me is that the sets appear to be from Red Dwarf, except they somehow seem cheaper here. It may even be a homage, given the protagonist of both is a space-janitor.
Anyway, part of me is happy it exists, because I feared this sort of film died out with the extinction of video shops, but the part of me that watched the film disagrees.
I would say, as a general guideline, if I watched a movie because of Alex, you should probably not watch it, since he really likes the Michael Bay Transformers, and thinks Zack Snyder's Batman is a good Batman because he shoots people with guns. Remarkably, he is not a 16-year-old.
I'd agree about the cheap sets, although for me it was really the guns that looked ridiculous. Like they bought a bunch of $1 squirt guns. And I would side with the part of you that isn't happy this exists.
Oh yes, the guns! Which, for some reason, were colour coded. I think I had more fun wondering what the behind-the-scenes production reasons were for the colours than I did watching the film.
(My guess is it was for the cgi people so they knew which effect to have coming out of the barrels.)
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