Love Conquers

Rating: Null/10 (22 September 2010)

Of course the story is vapid. That's what kids demand. But this has two things that appeal to me.
One is the dimensionality of the thing. I saw it in three D and was very impressed. There is nothing new in terms of the effects. We have your zooming and your stuff coming out of the screen. We have slomo, bullet time and an impressive freeze and pan in the midst of a plane crash. Nothing new but extremely competent. The best equipment must have been used.
Some sense was given to depth in the back. For instance, Milla lands a plane in Alaska and we see the foreground crisply and the plane out of focus in the distance. There are many scenes like this where even the CG is appropriately blurred or unfocused. It was thrill and competent. (A water scene must have been largely cut, because it seems unnecessary.)
All the situations are ridiculous until you imagine that they must have been that way in order to have the sets and effects.
The second thing that just makes me melt is when you have a filmmaker who is filming his lover. There is a tenderness and familiarity to this. Milla knows how to appear appealing, but Anderson does some particularly affecting cinematic caresses. Consider just the opening action scene where multiple Alices, all with superpowers, are attacking the evil group. (They call it a corporation, but there is no indication of corporate qualities.)
Her gymnastics are more than what we need for kickass woman action; they are created out of imaginary Millas and imposed on her to make her seem more alluringly graceful than she really is. Some subtle changes in her shape are visible in the CG Alice, especially that superAlice we meet initially. Interestingly, Anderson teases us with his very first sequence where we see a woman's legs. We think they must be those of the starlet. They are — we later know — a quite different shape than Milla's legs, but identical to the ones we see on the simulacrum that follows. Those legs dance, made so by how her lover imagines they would.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.