You might be a gourmet who enjoy sophisticated, chosen delicacies but once in a while you might just desire fast food and some nasty, greasy fast food. Same for the movies: as much as I love deep thoughts, universal messages about life & truth, brilliant acting and something mind-boggling, occasionally I am just in the right frame of mind for simply entertaining bite of Pizza. Last night was just perfect, I was enjoying drinks with good friends in relaxed company and we gulped not one, but two movies like this. Just a perfect summer night. Silly movies, mosquito's and beer.
The whole plot of "The Lazarus Effect"(2015) was already shown in a trailer, which prompted me to question the point of watching the movie - instead of intriguing its potential audience, trailer had basically shown everything. WTF? Its kind of science fiction horror film with group of young scientists who experiment on serum that might bring animals from death. One cliché follows another and if you have ever watched any movies in your life, you might recognise zillion ideas stolen from different corners of cinema history, from Frankestein onwards. We simply know what follows next, that reanimated dog will behave strangely, that catholic religion will be involved somehow, that there will be fires and explosions, you name it, its here. I am not even sure this is not a parody. Critics loved to slam this movie with brutal reviews and its easy to poke fun at it but actually I think people take themselves sometimes too seriously - this is good, old-fashioned fun and it needs to be taken as such. How else to approach the movie about mad scientists, revived corpses and so on - you know what you are getting yourself into, the moment when you start watching something like this where group of young and pretty, fresh-faced lab technicians play around with the needles and serums. What probably upset all these critics (and audience) is the missed opportunity to dive into more serious questions of moral issues of such experiments and how right or wrong we might be when playing with nature, however this was not directors intention so all we got was lots of screams in the dark, fires and explosions.
"District 9" (2009) turned out far better than I expected, mainly because the story cleverly plays on parallel with real-life apartheid history of South Africa. When gigantic space ship gets stranded afloat Johannesburg, alien creatures are locked up in a ghetto, treated with cruelty and contempt, local criminal gangs quickly proceed to make business with them and not only humans call them degrading names but at certain points government decides to re-locate them in another place (basically concentration camp) in order to be less visible to our sensitive eyes. This had actually happened in 1960s Cape Town when 60,000 people were forcibly removed from District 6 which was declared "white only" zone. Replace word "aliens" with any ethnic minority and the parallel is all clear. Where movie is original is in presenting how its main character (silly and selfish official Wikus van de Merwe) unwittingly falls into the trap and becomes one of the hunted himself. This sudden turn of perspective, where suddenly he sees and feels how it is to be a victim, is the heart of the movie. The story has certain similarities with "Avatar" in a sense that shows humans as cruel, greedy and easily manipulated with media and I must say it was all very cleverly done until certain point where it became just another big shooting/explosions extravaganza that director just couldn't resist. Special effects are naturally dazzling and the whole story just calls for a sequel.
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