Nilsosmar Reviews

Spiders II: Breeding Ground (2001)

Ummmm..... not the best movie :)

[2/10 · 26 August 2007]

let's see now... Spiders 2... ummm.... the special effects are just silly..... the dialogue is wooden, weird, and hard to take seriously... the mad scientist acts and talks and looks like a Saturday morning cartoon character... the story has lots of plot and logic loopholes, verging on the ridiculous....

the story is predictable and is very very very slow moving -- we can all see where it's going, so why can't the characters?

actually you could save this movie by taking out virtually all of the dialogue -- not a word of it is necessary --- then taking out redundant and unnecessary scenes -- and bringing in a better cinematographer with more knowledge about dramatic lighting. It would work okay as a silent movie, about ten or fifteen minutes long.

Millennium (1989)

A mixed bag

[6/10 · 11 August 2007]

Millennium is mixed bag. The script is reasonably good - not too exciting, but thoughtful and well constructed. But there are some problems that drag the movie down.

The romance/relationship at the heart of the story is not bad, and has been unfairly panned. It's actually one of the strengths of the story. Kristofferson does a good job of playing a rather dull character without a lot going for him... a working stiff without much of a life, who wakes up a bit when he meets Cheryl Ladd's character.

Ladd underplays her part nicely, with a nice understanding of the nuances and double meanings of some of her dialogue. The directing is fine, low key, and the editing is good (apart from the ending, which I doubt was the editor's choice). The script sparkles most when it deals with Ladd's character, her difficulties in communicating across a profound cultural barrier, her inadvertently humorous faux pas when interacting with a world very different from her own. The "cigarette scene" in the restaurant is a classic.

There are some problems, mainly around the ending, some of the acting on the part of the minor characters, and the character of Sherman. I won't reveal the ending, but I will say it was disappointing, and probably responsible for the cool reception the film received. The robot Sherman is poorly designed and conceptualized, and drags down the rest of the story. It's not a question of budget, in Sherman's case, but of someone without a good intuitive feeling for science fiction concepts, making decisions about that character. He's not campy, to my mind, he's an embarrassment.

Some people posting here have complained about the dialogue. I think they may be missing the profound reason for Ladd's character's odd choices of words, and what the words reveal about her. Others have complained about the scenes that are shown twice, telling the same story from different points of view. I can understand that people looking for a more action packed movie could have been bored by these scenes, but they do reveal key information; they're not just reruns of the first, they're revelations. They're an effective device for showing the parallel but very different points of view of the key characters.

In sum, Millennium is a reasonably good but not great movie. It's frustrating because a genuinely good movie could be made from the existing footage if the robot was redone (redesigned digitally after the fact and given a better voice and better dialogue), and if the final voice-over was omitted. But I still like watching it and appreciate the elements that are successful in the movie.