The Borrowers

Rating: Null/10 (9 September 2002)

Spoilers herein.
Video gaming is bigger business than movies! But movies innovate and create society where games borrow from and reflect elements of society. So its quite an interesting challenge in putting together a film project on a video game.
First: you cannot, must not innovate. To emulate a video game you have to aggressively steal from other projects. You have to exclusively rely on stereotypes. That's because games have to have a passive imagination in the world: you have to not think about what it is or how it is put together so you can focus on the problem at hand. Films are all about creating a world in such a way that the registration of that world is the whole point; it should be engaging work.
So here we have borrowing from `Alice in Wonderland,' `2001,' the zombie films, the Alien films and on and on.
It is about fighting the building like so many haunted house films (and `Cube'). It is also about fighting zombies. No, you have to fight an alien creature (sexy girl losing her military companions). No, that's not right, you have to fight the selfinterested supercomputer. Oops, the real threat is doublecrossed conspiracy. Wrong again: the battle is the `the man.' Another twist: none of that matters since some combination of all the above has destroyed Toronto.
This could have been really, really cool. It could even have been fun as we are buffeted among all these different types of films, each a discrete genre in itself. But no one involved has a smidgin of cleverness. Just one art director would have made all the difference. All we get is a map of the hive that doesn't correlate.
Obviously, all the bucks were put on Milla. But she is as dumb as they come, so what you really need is someone who can photograph her well. She knows how to relate to that. But watch closely: no one did during regular filming. The studio went into remedial mode so added a lot of closeups that are distributed throughout. These are photographed with a fashion magazine sensibility with entirely different makeup and lighting than the surrounding scenes. Gives us good face, but sort of chops things up. That is to say: this was not done in the style of `Fifth Element' and `Joan' which was made by someone who knew how to photograph a face amidst action and who was smitten by that face.
Maybe next time some better talent will be brought in.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 4: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.