Flamed

Rating: Null/10 (29 May 2009)

With these kinds of movies, if you get the world wrong, then the whole thing falls apart. You need the definition of the alternative world, because the differences between it and what we know is where the agency of the story comes from. "Fifth Element" was basically banal, but it worked well because we knew the world, we saw the differences and we saw how they were leveraged in the story and cinematic elements.
The world in this thing is all wrong. Whoever imagined it thought that piles of rubble, with predictably spaced fires (fires?) would do it. For the long shots, you had to have fire as well, so just use the same sorts of flares Ridley Scott used in "Bladerunner," because — so he says — he simply had no money. They thought that an oblique allusion to Jesus would substitute for the more powerful notion of entangled causality and plastic time from the earlier installments.
Since it is simply a loud, boring rehash of old bits, the viewer is free to ramble.
The overlaps with real life? As it happens, the reference to robots that look like humans but which are mechanical "inside" is already something that has moved outside the movie imagination and is accepted as real by most. Add in the face of a governor and there is a sort of folding here. Not directed, not effective, but clearly engineered.
Its the notion of the conspiracy that intrigues me. Usually in this brand of science fiction some large part of the permanent world is determined to mess up the lives of the players we focus on. This interests me because it extends and leverages that peculiar cinematic trend of noir: that the existence of what we see as a film, literally creates the dynamics we see, shaped not because they make sense in the world, but that they make sense for a cinematic narrative. Coincidences happen. Forces arrange themselves. Knowledge is sculpted.
It helps when the world of the conspiracy is complex. Here, it is not. There are machines. They do what appears to be nothing at all except hunt humans. There is no world- creation, no cosmic urge other than that. Even Marvel comics does better than that.
The only elaboration is the apparent plot to trick a man-machine into believing he is a man with free will, only to discover that — initially at least — he is not. But he gains his humanity in such an uninteresting tin man sort of way, you will cringe.
McG usually has a lighter, more complex touch. He does have one scene in the beginning where Connor's fight in a helicopter has the camera affixed to the frame of the copter. It is buffeted, and inverted. It seems to have been planned a s cue that an intelligent framing will unfold. It doesn't.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.