Ex Machina

     I was told to watch Ex Machina with the person I'd seen Her with. The movies are similar, both feature AI women portrayed beautifully. However tonally the movies could not be farther apart.  Ex Machina is a powerful film that plays with audience expectation and creates a setting that is striking and unique. 

     Alex Garland, of 28 Days Later and Dredd, wrote and directed the psychological sci-fi thriller. The film is a blend of thought provoking cultural importance and visual storytelling. The main characters are Caleb, a sympathetic hard worker, who has won the lottery to meet his boss Nathan, who Caleb describes as a Mozart of programming. The last of the major players is Ava, an AI created by Nathan that Caleb is to give a Turing test. A test to see if Ava truly has consciousness. 

     The cast does a phenomenal job. Domnhall Gleeson, who actually played an AI himself in Black Mirror, is believably tepid and Oscar Isaac is brutally intimidating, both physically and mentally, as Nathan. This is the first major role for Alicia Vikander, who plays Ava, who creates a strong dissonance between the humans. 

     The film is heady. All the major players are hyperintelligent. In a moment in the film Nathan and Caleb are sitting under a hut on Nathan's beautiful estate. The colors are constantly blue and green outside and inside, when the power cuts out especially, the walls are red. This is an ode to RGB color. Nathan and Caleb are sitting under the awning and Caleb says "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Nathan says Caleb is quotable. Caleb responds that it's a quote by Oppenheimer the inventor of the atomic bomb. Nathan says he nows.

     Ex Machina is masterfully rendered futuristic space with a plot that is created by characters working off each other in unfamiliar spaces. The film is powerful and wants it starts moving it can't be stopped.

Black Mirror

     Black Mirror is terrifying. Not in a slasher movie or even Psycho kind of way, but in a very hyper reality sort of way. The show has brought on comparisons from fans and critics alike to the Twilight Zone. The reasoning is justified, Black Mirror, is a sci-fi anthology series, much like Twilight Zone, in which each episode has a different conflict, different characters and actors, different worlds, and a different tone. 

     Created by Charlie Booker, a British satirist and broadcaster, the show aired on Britain's Channel 4. The cast includes many popular British actors. Popularity in the US increased when the series was placed on Netflix. The shows main theme is how technology is shaping the not so distant future. While the technology is different in every episode its still the driving force behind the characters and their motivations. The third episode, "Be Right Back" was picked up by Robert Downey Jr. to produce.           

                                                                            There are currently six episodes, three each for two seasons, and a third season in production. The plots include: a man who rides a bike for points and spends those points on an avatar, a society in which the chips in people's brains record everything they see and allow for playback, a comedian who uses an electronic bear to run for political office.                                                                                                         

                                                  

    The production quality is phenomenal. The worlds, which are so unique and distant, feel familiar and tangible. The lighting, in "Fifteen Million Merits" puts the viewer inside the glass rooms which the characters live. The walls are all LED displays and the lighting work that goes into this affect is astonishing. "Fifteen Million Merits" is the most dystopic setting and yet still strikes a visual nerve that is believable.

     Why the show is so terrifying, so gut wrenchingly horrible, is that each episode plays with our expectations and rooting interests. They establish the world, get the viewer comfortable as the characters are, and the shake the world violently. Often we are rooting for immoral actions but they are the best possible result in this strange dystopic future we've found ourselves. 

    It's believable. That's the scary part. It's so real. Each episode could happen; you can see it. The moral implications and the themes leave you silent at the end. Plot twists aside it's scary what humans can do to each other. It's even more horrifying when we look at the technology that the worlds use are not that far off. The camera angles tell the story, the colors tell the story, the extras are perfectly in sync.

        We are going crazy with the characters because of the production and the writing and the acting. It's a show that has accomplished and exceeded all it set out to achieve. It's truly a modern anthology.

                    

Snowpiercer

Over the winter vacation, I was scrolling through Netflix and decided to watch Snowpiercer without any prior information to what the plot of it was or how it was received by critics and audiences. To say the least, I was pleasantly surprised to find a movie filled with gritty and captivating action sequences as well as an interesting plot and premise. Snowpiercer does a great job of keeping the story and action interesting and, as long as you don't take it to seriously, it is a lot of fun throughout the entire feature.

Snowpiercer takes place in a desolate future where the Earth has been frozen over due to a failed attempt to stop the effects of global warming. The surface is now completely uninhabitable and most of the world's population has been eradicated. The only surviving humans left on the planet now live on a train that is constantly moving and never stops under any circumstance. A man named Curtis (Chris Evans) lives in the back of the train with other survivors in harsh living conditions where they must work to survive. Meanwhile at the front sections of the train, wealthy aristocrats live lives of luxury and relaxation. Tired of the oppressive upper class, Curtis leads a revolt in order to take control of the train by fighting his way to the front and taking the engine room by force. 

It took me awhile to understand that the dialogue and circumstances of the movie were supposed to be over the top and ridiculous. That being said, it did take me a good twenty or so minutes into the film to actually start appreciating it for what it was. Once the plot and characters were established, the action started and thats when I really started enjoying it. Most of the characters are pretty one dimensional but there are moments that are very heartfelt and others that will make your stomach churn. The pacing is very good as the progression of the film is marked by the rebellion's advancement through different parts of the train. The ending was very unexpected and there wasn't a lot of clarity in where it was heading after the cliffhanger-esque sequence but I was able to look past it for all the fun I had while watching the entire movie. 

Since my first time watching, I have watched it again and it was great knowing what to expect and reliving all of the awesome fight scenes and emotionally gripping parts all over again. I highly recommend watching this movie if you enjoy science fiction and all of the ridiculousness that stems from the genre.     

   

The Golden Age of Special Effects.

We live in an age of CGI. Hollywood studios have been finding that it is a lot easier to CGI a bunch of enemies or explosions or anything in action and Sci-Fi films. Unfortunately I am one of those people that have not really enjoyed these transitions. Almost all of my favorite action and fantasy films took place in the mid-2000's. Lord of the Rings, Kingdom of Heaven, Mask of Zorro, The Bourne Trilogy. These films had a sense of realism to them that a lot of the more modern action films don't.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed The Hobbit, an Unexpected Journey, the excessive use of animation really took me out of some of the scenes. There were scenes that were exclusively CGI and since I knew it was all CGI, all suspense was immediately taken out of the scene. I think the reason why I enjoyed the big budget action films of the 2000's was because special effects were not good enough at that point to completely shoot a scene, but could only be used to enhance scene. Give them that extra something if you will. For an example I have added two scenes, both from director Peter Jackson, one from the Hobbit done completely in CGI and one from The Fellowship of the Ring, decide for yourself which one has more tension.

Hopefully, you agree with my opinion that the second clip is much better. Mainly because of the lack of frame cluttering. It's almost as if Peter Jackson told the animators to put as much stuff in the frame as possible. This excessive animation really makes it difficult for me at least to get personally involved in the scene. The sad part is, is that a scene shot in a forest with a bunch of guys in costume did so much more for me than and thousands of dollars of animation could.

I am going to bring up a point here that might cause some contention. As some of my classmates have already stated, they really did not like the film Pacific Rim, and while by no means did I think it was a great film. I found it to be very enjoyable and worth the money I spent in the theater (mainly cause I didn't watch it in 3D). Now obviously this film relies on CGI like it is nobody's business, but the thing I found interesting after looking a bit further into the making of the film was that director Benicio Del Toro made a conscious effort to make the cockpits of the Jaegers a real set and the enhance it with CGI. Here is a clip about building the set.

 

 

Now I thought that was pretty amazing. Especially because of the lack of necessity. They were already making an extremely CGI heavy set, Del Toro could have just as easily had the actors put in a green screen environment and done everything in post, but he said no. I want to add a sense of realism in an otherwise unrealistic film. This went as far as to make real functioning pilot suits and helmets. 

Well for those of you who have stuck through this whole post and watched all the videos and listened to all my wild comments I say thank you. I always appreciate a good debate, so if someone has a conflicting idea I'd love to hear their arguments. After all, we're here to learn.

Firefly

Generally when you hear somethings been verified by the acquaintance of a friend you're not exactly willing to believe that the information is true. In this case I was told that John Whedon's TV series "Firefly", was something worth taking a look at. I'm happy to say that once curiosity gnawed at me long enough and I finally watched an episode or two,  I found "Firefly" to actually be pretty interesting.

Basically it seems to be a space western series in the far future. The main plot revolves around the crew of the Firefly Class ship Serenity, their lives as smugglers on the edge of known space and how they interact with each other. There's also this odd mix of Eastern and Western Culture (using chop sticks, knives, and forks to eat, mixing of the English and Chinese languages, ect) that can be  really fascinating to anyone who likes to people watch.

 So far this series seems to be really interesting, but it did have some problems in the beginning. The opening scene to this series seems to be a battle, which doesn't really go anywhere. Another  downside is that it seems that this show was never really finished. "Firefly" first aired in September 2002 and was canceled in December of the same year after airing only eleven episodes out of fourteen.

Despite how short this series seems to be, I look forward to watching more of it.