Roger-141 Reviews

Antitrust (2001)

About as unrealistic and irrelevant as "All the President's Men".

[9/10 · 29 July 2001]

OK, make no mistake, this movie was made to convey a message. If criticised in terms of, say, similarity to "the Firm", or "yet another cyber thriller", then you really missed the point. The message is pretty blunt, and guaranteed to anger a certain large corporation. (This is not an anti-corporate movie, it is anti- a ~particular~ corporation, and if you can't guess which one, maybe you should go back to exploring the Kalahari or whatever you've been doing for the last ten years.) This corporation has been known to spend extraordinary resources on PR (including, for example, bribing journalists and college professors), so almost certainly some of the comments on this message board will be produced by that corporation and should be read in that light.

Second, while murder is a bit over the top, pretty well all the other crimes committed by the large corporation in this movie are things of which the real corporation has been seriously accused, been found to be planning, or in some cases, convicted; yet in every case managing to escape with fines or compensation payments much smaller than the profits they made from the crime. That is why we hate them so much, and why this movie was made. It's also obvious why the motif of murder was added: some of the technical details of why their actions are pure evil are difficult for a non-techie to understand, so to make the movie accessible to a wider audience, they added a more blatant crime (plus pyrotechnic special effects, a tense chase scene, love interest, etc).

Thirdly, it is not a futuristic movie, it is present day; nothing in this movie is more than about 1 or 2 years in the future, at most, and most of it is happening now or happened several years ago.

Fourthly, technical realism: while some of the tech stuff is rubbish (hey, it's a movie!), the effort put into realism is dramatically good compared to information technology in any other movie I have ever seen. When we see IP's, they are actual IPs, but martian (I guess they don't want geeks going home and whois-ing them!), the code is all real code: some HTML, some C++, real scripting, but mostly VB (a language the certain large corporation is known to use a lot). The algorithms they discuss improving are even algorithms the product would really require! Not only that, the product is frighteningly similar to the large corporation's actual current development path!

So, if you walked away from this movie thinking "just for geeks" or "totally unrealistic", you need to give yourself a good hard slap, wake up and see what is really going on in the world around you. This movie was about as unrealistic and irrelevant as "All the President's Men".

Oh, by the way, I better say that all the above comments are only my personal opinions, in case they try to sue me, because they do do stuff like that.

The Ninth Gate (1999)

Some people don't know what "thriller" means...

[7/10 · 12 October 2000]

I was quite taken aback by some of the highly negative comments about this excellent supernatural thriller. After a bit of reflection, I noticed they seemed to fall into two groups:

1. People who thought that a "thriller" is a similar genre to an "action movie". This movie contains no explosions, only three on-screen deaths, and only one high speed chase which lasts all of about 10 seconds because the chasee gets away. It does have sex, mystery in a very Sam Spade-esque sense, unusual camera techniques to heighten tension, plausible levels of violence, and a very spooky supernatural element. That last deserves some amplification too: with modern CGI, you might be expecting some breathtaking "apparition" effects. And you'd probably be thinking, "Nice CGI, but it's really kind of cheesy". Not in this movie; the supernatural element is so subtle it nearly makes your skin crawl. In fact at quite a few points you nearly start thinking they're all just crackpots and nothing is really happening, but then Seigner's "thing" happens again and makes it clear that All Is Not Well.

2. Some people were annoyed by the lack of an explanatory ending. I admit I am not sure what happened, but I've a couple of theories and enjoyed discussing them with others after the movie. What's wrong with that, for heaven's sake? It's a bit of a sad indictment that people feel cheated if they don't get everything spelled out for them. For those who want my theory, MILD SPOILER ALERT

It's not shown because it's irrelevant. The film is about Corso's journey of discovery and seduction; he is transformed from faithless and selfish to openly embracing evil. Does he gain what he seeks? The question is unimportant, what mattered was his decision, for one way or another he is now surely lost.

END OF SPOILER

My only gripe: I was actually kind of interested in the puzzle, but they never showed it clearly enough or long enough to get to grips with it. Maybe this is to force me to get the DVD 8^(

Hollow Man (2000)

Just a few more reasons to miss this schlock slasher pic

[3/10 · 24 September 2000]

OK, most reviewers have covered the main points already: pathetically cliched plot, pathetically cliched acting, ludicrous nonsequiters, but really quite impressive visual effects (in one or two scenes, anyway). I just felt I had to add one or two points:

SPOILER ALERT: some of the cliches mentioned below will give a bit away. But believe me, you'll see it coming anyway.

1. The cliches: I hardly know where to begin. This movie is just a morass of cliches thinly glued together by a cliched plot. You've got your arrogant scientist turns mad through overwhelming pride. You've got your bad guy who kills anyone with one blow, but himself repeatedly gets up after apparently fatal injury. You've got your chance to finish him off missed when he is assumed to be dead. Then there's your bomb discovered with seconds on the clock, the innocent who is told to stay put (but wanders off alone, into danger), the anxious scene with defibrillation paddles when someone undergoes a medical procedure, the elevator shaft climbing scene, and the anxious dash to escape as the bad guy's lair is destroyed. All in all, there hardly seems to be a single original scene in the movie - oh, except maybe the toilet scene, which is nothing to be proud of.

2. Plot holes, nonsequiters, technical errors, and just plain nonsense. I'm not talking about the whole invisibility thing, all the attendant problems (like blindness), and so on. I'll allow "suspension of disbelief" for that. I'm talking about stuff like: no matter how the guy is marked, he's always invisible again in the next scene. Stuff like, letting rip with a flamethrower doesn't set off the sprinklers unless you aim right at them (not to mention several other fires...). Caine (Bacon) repeatedly comes and goes at a high security facility without any guards noticing his face is different. The victims have goggles that enable them to see Caine, so they leave them off as much as possible, and later forgo them entirely. Less than 200g of nitroglycerine annihilates a massive, reinforced concrete subterranean complex, in a fireball that roils for tens of minutes but doesn't emit any heat upwards. Restraints designed to restrain a panicked gorilla are repeatedly pulled apart by a man. High pressure steam pies are shattered by an air pistol dart. Walk-in freezers have no internal door handle (that would be too safe!) etc, etc etc

3. The sexual assaults that no-one notices are one thing, but the toilet scene is really quite gratuitous. And it doesn't make sense, either: with a bizarre bathroom straight out of a marine bootcamp, there is nowhere for him to hide when she puts the goggles on. (She's looking at the door and cupboards the whole time).

All in all, this is a highly dumbed down movie.