It was only drizzling tonight, but the clouds had opened up this afternoon and dumped forth upon us a bunch of rain with a whole lot of rumbling thunder. So it was vaguely appropriate that we watched The day after tomorrow tonight.
Well, I needed a good laugh anyway. Jessica's a weather nut and a closet disaster movie junkie, so it was pretty much tailor-made for her. I thought it was a bit heavy-handed and preachy, though the effects were rather impressive.
The wolves, though, just weren't convincing.
Overall though the movie felt somehow lacking. It had some good actors in good performances but the plot seemed to exist merely to justify the spectacle. And that wasn't enough. I cannot imagine that in twenty or thirty years we'll look back as lovingly on this as other spectacle movies (e.g. 2001).
A while back I watched another effects-heavy movie, Resident evil. I thought it wasn't too bad, given what it was. I've never played any of the video games on which it was based (except for a couple minutes of the aborted PS1 lightgame disaster Resident Evil: Outbreak, once) so I can't really say how close it was to the source material but it certainly looked like it could be. The mission overview bits with their 3D-rendered flythough of the complex looked particularly video-gameish and in fact reminded me of the loading screens between levels of Die Hard Arcade (Dynamite Deka to those in the know) but more animated and high tech.
Boy, I miss Die Hard Arcade. Now why doesn't somebody make that into a movie? Oh yeah, they did, but the other way around, you could say.
Back to Resident evil, though. It was silly and light, but had some really nice bits in between the cumbersome and distractingly annoying scenes of flashback (that did have their reason for being there; I just didn't like them). In particular I enjoyed the laughable hallway of doom sequence with its razor-sharp laser beams (the culmination of which is pretty much ripped directly from Cube, though Cube's budget and production constraints necessitated less high-tech special effects for the cutting-into-tiny-bits 'gag'.
I also liked the somewhat unique attempt to explain the zombies, the so-called T-virus that undoubtedly belongs to the video game.
The rest was pretty cheesy. Okay, it was quite cheesy--but I enjoyed it much more than Brainscan. Will I borrow the sequel from the library sometime? Sure. I'll just keep my expectations low.
Once again, though, it was a movie with a secondary plot. In this case the effects and production design didn't drive the movie completely, but the film couldn't have been made without them. I much preferred 28 days later... as a film with zombies, more for its fleshing out of the characters than its flashy effects.
Flashy effects accounted for most of the thrust of Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, and I liked it. Sure, a lot of it was old school trickery of forced perspective and the like, but it stands that this is a movie heavier on effects than plot. Again, I liked it for the same reasons that I couldn't really like the former two movies. Does that make me a hypocrite, an integrity-free man? I think not. In general, I think that special effects should serve the plot, not the other way around--but I am willing to make exceptions.