I’ve seen a few of the ‘found footage’ movies (Blair Witch,
Cloverfield, and the Fourth Kind [that counts, right?]) but have mostly avoided
them on the whole. Mostly I find them to be disappointing. I think it has a lot
to do with the ending or typically a lack of.
This movie was no different. What
sucks is that I love paragraphs at the end of anything. Seriously.
I have this weird attachment to paragraphs and you get those a lot with
‘found footage’ movies. There were
some sentences at the end of Apollo 18 and instead of wrapping it up for me I
think the very last sentence was so cheesy it took away from the whole thing.
Anyway, on to the good stuff.
It really wasn’t *that* bad. It wasn't great but it really wasn't awful. I went in
with basement-level expectations but was surprised that I didn’t hate it.
One thing that I liked was that I jumped way more than I thought I
would. Even though I knew something was
coming they still managed to make me jump.
And that’s what I want from a scary(ish) movie.
The rest of the movie was adequate. The acting was so-so. The one actor who is currently on Alphas and used to be on October Road (I'm still bummed we never got an ending to that show) is really cute. I didn’t really even notice dialog so that's neither good or bad. There was a
plot and a story and it had a solid beginning and end.
The strangest part of the movie was the song they used over the
credits, an instrumental version of “We Three Kings.” It’s like they said, “well
it’s a movie about three guys so let’s use a song about three guys.” In fact I can't even remember anything about the rest of the music and I usually have some sort of opinion on it. Huh.
I do agree with Tracy on all her points but especially her first
one:
1.
Spend some time establishing
the personalities of your characters.
The movie came in at a brusk 86 minutes and there could have been
14 minutes of time spent showing us more of the astronauts lives. They could have used pictures of them
graduating from the Naval Academy (or wherever astronauts matriculate), footage of them getting
married, more footage of their wives and children actually speaking to a camera, and so on. But no, all we have is the footage that was ‘found’
and then loaded onto some website which I will never visit.
Disagree with me? Then you should read Tracy’s review which is rooted in more reality.
Hey, it was better than Conan!
So was it just me, or did the little space spiders sort of remind you of Tribbles?
ReplyDeleteWe three kings? Really? What the hell?
ReplyDelete