Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Movie Review - Dredd (2012)

I some serious love for Judge Dredd. I've been reading the comics on and off since the mid-80s. I always found the violent, satirical stories and over-the-top action to be very appealing...at least to my inner 13-year-old.

When Canny Cannon and a team of writers (something like 57 of them) unleashed Judge Dredd on the world, I was one of the few people to actually see it in the theaters. While I liked some of the design work (it did capture the look of the city as presented in the comics) nothing else really worked. Acting, story, direction, music...it was an exercise in tedium more than anything else.

When Dredd was released, I didn't bother to throw my hard-earned dollars at the box office. Too bad, because if I (as well as a few hundred thousand people) had, we might be getting a sequel to this awesome film.

On every level, this is much better adaptation of the Judge Dredd comics. Karl Urban has the look, the voice and, most improtantly, the attitude down. The design of the cityscape is not like that of the comics or the first film; it is an improvement. The anchoring the massive block towers and superhighways in a more realistic urban environment. The acting is uniformly good and the direction is taut, the non-stop action never getting boring (and yes, action can be boring...see Expendables 2).

Although there is no character arc for Judge Dredd, Olivia Thirlby's Anderson has a rookie-to-Judge development that, while expected, is well done. Thirlby manages to bring just the right amount of vulnerability to the character, balancing out the almost non-stop violence. Taking place in the halls and rooms of a massive apartment tower (200 floors, 75,000 inhabitants) from the opening rain of skinned bodies to drug King...ummm...queenpin Ma-Ma's (Lena Heady) end (a floor point-of-view shot of her head coming apart on impact, after being thrown from the top floor by Dredd) there is a continuous torrent of bullet hits, heads being blown apart, people being set on fire, dismembement and general bloody mayhem.

The story, thankfully, is not one of the typical "if we fail to do x, the world will end." Instead, while the stakes are high (control of part of the city drug trade, the lives of the protagonists) this really is just a normal day for Judge Dredd, trying to bring law and order to a city on the edge of chaos.

Setting Dredd in a more realistic, gritty, hyper-violent future works, making it a grimmer and more believable setting. Definitely worth seeing.

Get Your CGI On: Blender

Wow. Blender, where have you been all my life? An opensource, CGI modelling and animation program...awesome!

Okay, so I'm just learning how to use this, but I'm already seeing how I can enhance my films and start to make some more interesting images. Now, if only I could find actors...

Anyway, check it out at www.blender.org.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Pacific Rim Review: Your Godzilla Is In My Anime...No, Your Anime Is In My Godzilla...

In the near-future, giant monsters (kaiju) spill out of a dimensional rift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and start destroying cities. Mankind fights back by building enormous, humanoid war-machines (jaegers). The jaegers require two pilots who plug their brains into the machines and into each other (through a process called "the Drift"), sharing thoughts and memories. For a while, this works...but more powerful kaiju start to come through the rift and the "Powers-That-Be" decide to replace the jaegers with a big wall along the entire Pacific coastline. Of course, this isn't going to work, but it does provide an excuse to have only four jaegers left for the final series of battles. The head (Idris Elba) of the soon-to-be-demobilized jaeger program wants to drop a massive nuclear bomb into the rift, collapsing the dimensional tunnel. He recruits a burnt out pilot (Charlie Hunnam in full "reluctant hero" mode) to help pilot one of the jaegers. Stuff happens, robots get smashed, kaiju get cut in half, and our hero and heroine (Rinko Kikuchi) save the day, vaporizing the evil aliens who are sending the kaiju to Earth in order to soften us up for conquest. The End.

Most of the characters are one-dimensional archetypes you've seen in a million other movies. Reluctant hero, disagreeable rival, gruff guy-in-charge...it's like watching Sands of Iwo Jima with giant robots. Hey, I'm going to take any opportunity to reference a movie with both John Wayne and John Agar. There is a linear plot that offers no surprises and a story that is very reminiscent of Neon Genesis Evangelion - which is not a surprise, since Pacific Rim is an homage to Godzilla (and other kaiju) movies and anime. Still, Evangelion shows how you can take a similar story and create a rich, challenging plot and three-dimensional characters.

There is an annoying comedic subplot involving a pair of scientists (at least, I think it's suppose to be comedic; I didn't actually laugh at anything in this subplot...but, it has odor of comedy about it) that just eats up time - and exposes the audience to toxic levels of over-acting - that could have been spent developing other, more interesting characters, some clunky exposition (the Drift seems like it is explained every five minutes) and what appear to be dropped plotlines (the biggest one being why the jaeger program is being ended, since the wall being built is easily destroyed; there is a hint of a darker, more conspiratorial story that was dropped in favor of...well, scenery chewing scientist sub-plot).

But, hey, giant robots beating up monsters!

Anyway...the film looks great. The action sequences are well done and memorable. The world that Guillermo del Toro and the rest of the creative team have made is interesting and believable. Some of the acting (particularly scenes between Idris Elba and Rinko Kikuchi, as well as every moment that Ron Perlman is on-screen) rises above the workmanlike. The sound design and the score by Ramin Djawadi fits the scope of the movie. In short, it is an enjoyable, big-budget, bombastic summer movie...even if there are obvious missed opportunities to have created a more complex, nuanced story with more interesting, well-developed characters.

Still, giant robots beating up enormous monsters...what's not to like?