roger_for_nntp Reviews

What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? (2004)

Absolutely deceitful and bitterly disappointing

[1/10 · 23 May 2005]

I have never before voted a movie lower than 3, but this one gets a 1. It had, in my opinion, absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever.

Without a doubt, my bitterness was greatly increased because of being misled about the subject of this "documentary". I was told, as no doubt many of you have been, that it is a layman's exposition of quantum mechanics. Since I'm a physics graduate with a strong interest in that subject, and have recently been particularly interested in following developments in quantum computation, I really looked forward to seeing such a film. So you can imagine my annoyance when I discovered I'd been lied to. This isn't a film about quantum mechanics, it's a recruitment drive for a cult. The only QM in it is a very shallow, childishly simplified version of QM presented for about 3 or 4 minutes. The purpose of this presentation--apart from blinding the uninformed with science--is to introduce the idea of quantum superposition (a particle's wave function is a weighted superposition of possible states) so that they can then claim (via a couple of hops of logical legerdemain) that all things are possible if you only believe them enough. This is nonsense, and certainly is not what QM says.

It then goes on to make various extraordinary claims about neurology and neurochemistry. That is not my field and so I cannot pretend to judge much of it, but in those cases where I was familiar with the matter, it was total rubbish. For example, we are shown neurons moving bodily about to lock in negative thoughts or some such. In reality, neurons only move bodily about during creation of the brain in the embryo. As for the ice crystals -- I pray our science education isn't devolved so far that people need to be told why that lot was utterly ridiculous. (Hint: what famous property do snowflakes have?)

We also give a working over some of the standard, long debunked myths of the new age movement, like the "Maharishi Effect". (Hagelin -- one of the talking heads in the film -- really did do this "experiment". But it is false that it reduced the crime rate. Don't believe me, check for yourself--because of the US gun control debate, there are numerous sources for Washington crime statistics.)

Oh, finally, to be fair, there was one speaker who did actually seem to know what he was talking about with respect to QM. Of course, they didn't actually let him say very _much_, though. (I didn't catch his name since, unlike a real documentary, they didn't show speakers' names until right at the end, making it much harder to match up names with comments. Clever. Sneaky, really.) I'm guessing that it was for this guy that they added the disclaimer at the end, about some of their speakers not agreeing with their conclusions.

Say, I wonder what are the chances of organising a class action to get our money back?

King Arthur (2004)

Entertaining as a pseudo-period action movie, but not very historical at all.

[29 July 2004]

Not a bad bit of light entertainment if you forget all about the opening blurb which claims it to be historically based. While there is indeed much research on the subject of the real basis for Arthur, this film matched that research poorly, and compounded it with numerous stereotypes that match the Dark Ages world very poorly.

For a start, the fact that the Empire is withdrawing its last troops from Britain means that this film is set in exactly the year 407 AD, which is approximately a century too early for the other events depicted. And in the fifth century, there were no monks in Britain, the Pope had no authority to command Roman troops, heresy wasn't punishable by death, Pelagius wasn't executed, Artorius Castus and his Sarmatian foederati (who numbered about 2,000 strong) had been dead for two centuries, and I could go on and on but you're probably bored already. The biggest thing though was that by this time, Rome had ruled Britain for 363 years, the Britons considered themselves to BE Romans, and far from wanting to drive Rome out they felt abandoned when the legions left.

Still, if you ignore the claims to being historical, it's OK. The action scenes are fine, Clive Owen's Arthur was nicely acted, and the tactical scenes were unusually good (apart from the modern PC thing of all the female archers).

Minor Spoiler alert:



If everyone was so terrified of travelling north of Hadrian's Wall, what was a noble Roman family doing up there AT ALL, never mind in an unfortified villa with just four guards?

Timeline (2003)

Grrr - let ME make the next time travel swashbuckler

[11 February 2004]

Let me make a few things clear to begin with: I like Michael Crichton movies, I like time travel movies, I like Billy Connolly, I like Richard Donner movies, I was really looking forward to this movie, and I was really, really disappointed. OK, some specific problems:

Note on SPOILER content: There are some very mild spoilers here, and a biggy at the end.

= Plot Although some are deeper, all that's really required of a time travel movie is a rollicking good fantasy adventure. 'Timeline' could have been a reasonable attempt at that except for the repeated cuts back to the present day (to be told, yet again, that they don't know what's going on), the absurd political biases (yes, POLITICS in a fantasy adventure), and the interesting plot diversions that just peter out (so what IS it with De Kere, exactly?). Oh, and the capture, escape, capture, escape thing does get a bit monotonous after a while.

= Action I can't believe the reviewers describing this as "non-stop action". It can hardly have been possible to include LESS action in a movie which is explicitly set in the middle of a war. Nearly the first third of the movie consists of dialogue and exposition that is frankly DULL. (This isn't to say that exposition is necessarily dull, but this one was.) In the middle half of the movie we finally arrive in mediaeval France and have a few scenes with a very small amount of very unremarkable archery, the world's shortest horse chase and the world's least spectacular stunt (watch our hero dangle 20 ft above soft mud! Oooh! Aaah!). Eventually we get to the widely advertised great battle scene where the archery and pyrotechnics are reasonably spectacular, but the mano-a-mano sword play is wooden, and lasts all of about 3 minutes. Don't get me wrong; the action was OK. But it certainly wasn't non-stop, gripping, spectacular, artfully choreographed, or anything like that.

= No time travel There is no time travel in this time travel movie. Well, strictly speaking there is a teensy little bit; but if you changed the group of modern students pretending to be mediaeval journeymen into actual mediaeval journeymen, almost nothing in the movie would need to change.

= Acting I don't really expect much from acting. I mean, some people can be so snobbish about it. But there were a couple of players in this piece that just did not click. No matter how much I tried to immerse myself in it, every time one of these two spoke I thought "This is a movie, and you are acting - very poorly!".

= Historicity & Anachronisms I expect a bit more from Mr. Crichton. But even from a run-of-the-mill B-movie hack, groans are elicited by:

* A castle tower made from "wattle-and-daub" (i.e., mud);

* Every English common soldier has a horse, while most of the French knights are on foot;

* the great strength of the FRENCH army is its longbowmen;

* even the lowliest peasant has a bath every day, even when their houses are on fire;

* And "night arrows"?! Now come on.

= Exploration A time travel movie is like exploring a new world. You need to make a plan, get together the stuff you need, then go and explore the fascinating differences of this world. Maybe you'll learn some useful phrases, and words or customs to avoid. Get some vaccinations. Take a blood test, to make sure you're not taking anything nasty & history-changing back before its time. Study a map, and pick an emergency rendezvous. You can't take anything that would puzzle archaeologists if you lose it, but how about some silver (not too pure), a lodestone, a good cudgel, a knife, maybe even a crossbow? But not in 'Timeline'. We get straight off a long haul flight, have a five minute briefing, "oh-by-the-way-we-have-a-time-machine-you-really-must-try-it", pick some clothes at random, then off to mediaeval France - without even going to the bathroom, or having a last coffee or cigarette. Then when we arrive in this strange new world - the one most of the characters have devoted their lives to studying - we discover almost nothing whatever about it.

SPOILER - AVERT YOUR EYES:

Doniger told them that he had two full size machines, and a couple of smaller prototypes. So when they damaged the machine, why did they have to struggle to repair it in time? Why not fly the other one back from whatever city it was in? Or use the smaller one to send back some spare tokens, with a bit more time on them?

END SPOILER.

28 Days Later (2002)

Read this slight spoiler if you didn't like the ending

[18 September 2003]

**** teensy, teensy spoiler alert *****

You may have been tricked by a mischievous director.

There were about 200 people in the cinema when I watched "28 days later". But by the end of the credits, only nine remained. At that point, as I was halfway to the door, they showed the real ending. Not just a few frames, but several _minutes_ of extra footage. And I don't know why some people have called it the "alternative ending"; it seemed pretty obvious that it was meant to be the _real_ ending.

So it's quite likely that you don't actually know how this film ends - and I'm not going to tell you!

Dog Soldiers (2002)

Not suitable for Americans, otherwise pretty funny.

[7/10 · 23 March 2003]

Since "The Howling" series there has been something of a tradition that werewolf movies should be cheesy black comedies, and this movie is no exception - which isn't to say there's anything wrong with that, as I quite enjoyed "Dog Soldiers". However, judging from previous American reaction on IMDB to British films, I expect this movie to do badly in America simply because most Americans will understand neither the accents nor the style of black humour. This is a pity because this movie is pretty darn funny.

I have worked with British soldiers, and I have to say that the language and characterisations are spot on, but pretty well everything else military in this movie is completely off beam. To give just one glaring example, in the British Army the small subunit we see is called a 'section' not a 'squad' (or even platoon at one point!), and is led by a corporal, not a sergeant. The reason these sorts of things are significant is that there are, in fact, a number of clues in this movie as to what is going on, but it is difficult to interpret them when each 'clue' could just as easily be a scriptwriter's error.

On the minus side, the werewolves looked pretty good but the werewolf transformations (via a couple of scene cuts!) were 1950's standard. "Werewolf-night-vision-cam" effect was nice, but why did they have to keep reusing the same footage - surely this effect could not have been expensive.

Finally a couple of quick rebuttals: Superglue really is used as an emergency wound suture. I have no idea if it was used in Vietnam, but at the local emergency clinic they use it especially on small children and the elderly, to avoid suturing very soft skin.

Secondly, the dog was not tugging on Wells' intestines: it's a bandage. The director has had to come out to explain this but frankly I thought it was obvious, since it looks like cloth. It's amazing how many people jump to conclusions.

Howling II: ... Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985)

How to fight werewolves - erm, vampires - er, whatever

[3/10 · 23 March 2003]

OK, as everyone has pointed out, this film is a complete dog. To some degree this is because it was a gory sexploitation film that had a lot of material excised (or darkened down to near invisibility) to escape the censor's X-rating; but the film has many other flaws as well.

To begin with, the scriptwriter seems to have got his werewolves and vampires mixed up. The baddies in this film are furry and don't like silver but in every other respect they behave like vampires. Now you just can't do that with a crappy genre flick, you've got to stick to the rules of the genre or the fans get all confused and annoyed by suspending disbelief in the wrong thing. In fact the whole (confusing and poorly presented) plot is something that has already been done for vampires, but doesn't make any sense in a werewolf movie.

Secondly, the werewolf costumes are the lamest you have ever seen. Anybody in the werewolf movie business ought to know that the werewolf costumes and transformations are something the fans assess critically, yet some of these werewolves are just plain goofy.

There are a couple of slightly good bits. I actually quite liked the score. Others have mentioned Sybil Danning's tits. And...

(***SPOILER***, if such a thing can exist)



I also quite liked the plan for attacking the werewolves' stronghold. There are so many horror movies that rely on characters behaving stupidly, but in this case they first acquire a very sensible and effective anti-werewolf arsenal and go slaughter the monsters. I mean, you can kill werewolves with silver bullets, and we have some pretty powerful firearms these days. Shouldn't be too hard to put two and two together, hmm? But in typical style this movie goes over the top and adds some other very zany and amusing anti-lycanthrope weapons.

Reign of Fire (2002)

Some glimpses of acting and snatches of effects, but not much meat on the bones

[5/10 · 5 October 2002]

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** It is true that this script was very carelessly written, and contains so many blatant self contradictions, massive plot holes and obvious non sequiturs that you could create an entertaining reality game show called "The Mistakes of RoF". But at least you may miss the more subtle of these errors if you get well and truly lagered up before attending.

It is also true that the CGI - which you might expect to be spectacular in a twenty-first century movie about dragons - is mediocre, being often blurred, mist-shrouded, badly proportioned, moving unnaturally, and rarely showing live dragons in the same scene as men, animals etc. Once again, the beer goggles should sort that out.

It is also true that despite some reasonable and occasionally good bits of acting from Christopher Bale and Matthew McConaughey, most of the characters are so two dimensional you have to read the credits to discover that they had names. This is not a problem for a beer-and-pretzels movie.

Despite all the above, my problem is that this film had the feel of a very cheap, hastily made production which is hoping to make enough money to fund the (rather blatantly telegraphed) prequel and sequel. At 100 min it is quite a short movie which literally skips most of its suggested beginning with a quick voiceover, and then wraps up with numerous problems unanswered! (An example of the cheapness is that the voiceover near the start is accompanied by shots of prop _magazine covers_, without moving pictures or even close-up stills.)

There just isn't that much that _happens_ in this movie. There is a brief intro, the somewhat odd attack on the veggie patch, the killing of the veggie patch dragon with an over-elaborate scheme that is never re-used, the attack on the castle shown mostly from a distance, and the climax. Each of these major 'Acts' is interspersed with some human interaction, but except for the arrival of the American militiamen and a fist fight these are brief dialogues with perhaps one line of stage direction. Trying not to give too much away, the total number of dragons slain in this movie is small, and all dragons successfully slain are killed instantaneously when struck by fairly small, low tech weapons.

For example, for the climactic battle they are instantaneously transported to dragon central, briefly watch a bit of draconian disunity in the distance, scurry along a short tunnel Quinn just happens to know about, and voila, they are in the (rather uninteresting) lair of the beast. Couldn't they have at least one setback along the way? How about a few charred bones in the lair? Since the train carriage was presumably dropped there by the dragon, how about a few more signs of things he's snacked on in his lair, like a torn open double-decker bus, another dragon, or a colliery barge (mmm, tasty ash!) ?

All I can say is that in the sequel, I hope they have to work a bit harder to get their dragon!

The Scorpion King (2002)

Not a patch on Conan

[4/10 · 21 April 2002]

[The following review contains some mild spoilers, but frankly there's not much to spoil since the whole plot is a rehash of movies you've seen before. If you can't describe all the main points of the plot BEFORE EVEN SEEING ONE SECOND OF FILM, we'd like to know if your Amish friends have any nice quilts to sell.]

With the lead actor coming from the WWF wrestling thing, I don't know what I should have expected really, but I went to see "the Scorpion King" anyway. I suppose basically I have a weakness for Conan - which fascinated me in my youth when I discovered the allusions to the life of Temujin Genghis Khan - and I was hoping to see some Conanesque swashbuckling. However apart from muscular men striking poses with swords in front of scantily clad women, this was no Conan.

True, it throws more than one sop to Conan, with a plotline that is taken almost intact from the second half of "Conan the Barbarian" (and numerous similar movies through the ages); the formation of a remarkably similar party of adventurers; and Mathyas/Conan being wounded, left to die, and saved, in remarkably similar ways. But then, it also has plenty of sops for actual WWF fans. (Well, it even has a bit from Ulysses for those of a more classical bent.)

However Conan, at least, was fairly free of glaring anachronisms, and those anachronisms it did have were subtle enough to offend only the eye of the scholar, and even then could be excused by the fact that Conan is (arguably, possibly) set in a fictitious world at an indefinite time.

Not so Scorpion King. We know roughly where Scorpion King is set, and we know roughly when. In fact, the hero is explicitly stated to be an Akkadian [1] shortly after the fall of that empire (in 1950 BC), and much of the action is set in Gomorrah [2], which is presumably somewhere in the Levant and generally believed to have been destroyed somewhere around the same time. And the anachronisms are absolutely agonising even to one scratching to remember his high school history. Here we are in the Bronze Age, and we have steel. Not just a little bit of meteoric iron here and there, but practically every non-golden metal object is steel, and it's cheap enough to throw away. Swords are not only highly polished steel longswords, but a few are even straight bladed, cross-hilted crusader longswords, some three thousand years before their time. As if that's not enough we have telescopes some three thousand five hundred years before their time (and not just any telescope, but a variable power one), distilled spirits some three thousand two hundred years before distillation, crossbows around twenty nine centuries too early, chainmail similarly, a "scientist" (yes they use that word) busily inventing a Roman catapult only about seventeen centuries too early this time, and finally, God Forbid, gunpowder.

Yes, we are in the ancient Near East, and we have gunpowder. I kid you not. But it's supposed to be ok because we got the recipe from China. Never mind that we are some four hundred years before the first traces of civilisation in China - yes, China is old, but it isn't old enough to make this story work. We also meet some Japanese sword masters giving lessons with a shinai, a mere thousand years before the first vestiges of civilisation reached Japan and once again roughly three thousand years before katana (and presumably shinai) were invented. Oh, and finally (well, finally from what I spotted without even trying) there is nary a chariot to be seen, because everyone (apart from Mathyas on his camel) gets about on horseback - complete with stirrups (and the wagons are drawn by horses, too!). That goes nicely with the crusader longswords, I suppose.

However, it is by no means only the anachronisms that grate in this awful movie. The acting is straight out of "the A-team", and it says something that "the Rock"'s performance is actually one of the better ones. We are even treated to a bout of WWF style wrestling - the sort where men are only lightly stunned after being repeatedly struck over the head by objects hard enough to crack your skull. The characters, by and large, are poorly developed and unsympathetic:

The thief character seems to have been added simply because Conan had a roguish sidekick. But Conan's sidekick was played for comic relief; Mathyas' sidekick is just stupid, getting one interesting scene where he rescues Mathyas from a grisly death, and then ever afterward doing absolutely nothing either for the plot or for laughs. Well, there's a couple of bits that perhaps were meant to be funny, but they are pretty damn weak. Like him standing at the bottom of a shaft as others thrown down bags of gunpowder. Two are thrown at once, knocking him down. "One at a time", he whines. Guffaw. Chortle. Snigger. What a maroon.

Memnon is meant to be the evil bad guy, and Mathyas is the hero. But the moral distinction between their characters is so slight it is difficult to see why we are supposed to see any difference between them. Indeed, it seems to me there are just two incidents, without which it would be just as easy to "root" for Memnon and think the climax was a tragedy. You see, Mathyas is a king who is conquering the quarrelling neighbouring tribes. This is supposed to be the black mark against his name, even though he believes he is ultimately creating a better world by suppressing the chaos and internecine strife that has plagued the land. Mathyas, on the other hand, is an assassin, a cold blooded killer who murders for money. He's the good guy, y'see? Now I actually got halfway through the movie repeatedly thinking "Isn't 'the Rock' meant to be the good guy?" before something occurred to (very mildly) differentiate their characters: Mathyas misses a shot at his target to save a boy who helped him, and who is in trouble because of Mathyas, while Memnon casually kills a lieutenant who is undermining his authority. Oh, and Memnon also accepts the service of a patricide. That's about the limit of their moral distinction; otherwise they are both cruel men of violence, with Memnon's motivation arguably slightly nobler! Oh, and then there's the princess who wants to flee a life of luxury with Memnon to the wilderness, but why? At one point, Memnon says "you think I'm cruel, don't you?", but no explanation is given for her holding this belief. Then she meets Mathyas, who is scarcely less cruel, and jumps in the sack with him.

Next on the list of gripes are plot holes and non sequiturs. For example, at one point Mathyas is captured and many hours afterward escapes - and immediately, mere feet away, finds his camel with all his (numerous) weapons untouched and complete with a treasure he was to be paid for the assassination. Umm, how come the guards didn't take this stuff? Then there's the fighting prowess of the princess. We are given to understand that she has led a cosseted life, so it is no surprise when, with a dagger, she is barely able to nick Mathyas' arm. But only a few days later she is wielding a longsword nearly as long as herself, and effortlessly cutting down the elite personal bodyguard of the greatest swordsman on earth! When we require a deus-ex-machina to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, we blow up the foundations of the palace (conveniently accessible from the street) with the scientist's gunpowder - creating a rolling Hollywood fireball which incinerates every bad guy in its path whilst missing good guys only twenty feet from ground zero, and happily causing Memnon to fall to his death. But the next day the palace is apparently undamaged! Then there's Mathyas' wound. SOMEWHAT STRONGER SPOILER He gets a high lung shot in the back with a broadhead arrow, and quite reasonably drops like a rock (the Rock?). He should be flopping about like a gutted fish, with two or three minutes till he dies. Even if someone in 2000 BC knows enough first aid to stop that lung collapsing, without access to a major surgical hospital and heaps of antibiotics, he will be dead in a day. But - and you KNOW there's a but! - after lying on the verge of death for a few seconds, he decides it isn't so bad after all, gets up, reaches behind his back to pull out the arrow (how the hell does that work!?), and proceeds to slay his foes, etc . The next day he's up bright and early, full of smiles. No explanation, no justification, no dunking in the River Styx, no "oh, I don't have a lung on that side; born without it, and it's never bothered me!". Nope; he's just plain immortal. What a load of horse puckey. END SPOILER

A couple of miscellaneous bits: You're a king commanding vast armies, and your bride-to-be - who happens also to be instrumental in your military and political power - has just been abducted by a skilled assassin, and taken who knows where. How many guys would you send after her? Five hundred? Ten thousand? No, how about _twelve_?

Scorpion venom just isn't that toxic. For an adult, it's very painful, but not life threatening. Some very large scorpions have occasionally killed a very small child, but even that's unusual.

The Amazon warriors. For no apparent reason or explanation we suddenly get a cartload of amazons who easily slaughter the elite bodyguard once again. Maybe their marketing people told them they'd be getting a few Xena fans along.

The gunpowder seems to have been a deus-ex-machina to justify the good guys winning, since they were basically royally screwed (even if the king was dead, if you pardon the imagery), when the vastly superior opposition just surrenders and declares the outlaw bandit to be their king. Huh? Why?

Footnotes: ==========>1. Well, actually he's somewhat black - Samoan ISTR - which Akkadians weren't, but we can just gloss over that bit. And the bit about his "brother" being an Amerindian who bears him as much resemblance as chalk does to cheese. But then the Gomorran princess appears to be Chinese, so it seems to be the politically correct thing to totally disregard human phenotypes. 2. Although they do seem to flit around quite a bit with remarkable Jet Age speed, ranging from snow covered pine forests (Turkey?) to a desert much harsher than any in the Levant. (Since Mathyas rides an Arabian camel - unknown outside Arabia until the Romans started importing them for service in North Africa - and describes this desert as "home", it is presumably Arabia. Odd that an Arabian should have been comfortable shirtless in the snow... Incidentally, this desert is named "Death Valley", and it appears to me that it in fact actually _is_ Death Valley, Mojave Desert, California...)