Saw VII – The Final Nightmare

Preface: I’ve been a Saw fan since I bought the first two movies on DVD and seen every subsequent movie in the theater and while there were many downturns since the series progressed endlessly, I never stopped defending Saw when people called it idiotic, sick, torture porn or whatever.

That being said: Saw VII made me ashamed of having ever raised my voice to defend this series. Saw VII is everything critics have accused Saw of being, it more or less affirms everyone who has never seen a Saw movie in their (until now) ill-informed prejudice.

First Warning: This fan-rant will make my Expendables outbreak look like kindergarten. It is a wall of text, if you have not seen Saw VII, there is a quick review at the beginning urging you not to see it, please read if you have considered watching Saw VII.

I’ve had a high tolerance for idiotic shit happening in Saw (hell, even after the disastrous Saw V I gave part 6 a chance) and you know that something has to be REALLY wrong when people like me (as well as he majority of Saw fans out there) hate this movie so much.

Second Warning: if you want to see this movie because you want to know what happened to Dr. Gordon – he has a 2 minute cameo, that’s it, don’t waste your money on seeing that on screen, please!

The good:
4 minutes of Tobin Bell
It might be great if you are drunk – but then again Sex and the City 2 was horrible despite being drunk so I’m not sure if that will do the trick.

The bad:

Bad acting even for Saw standards
Gore flying at you (in THREEE DEEE)
No story, just a series of sequences loosely held together
Dream sequences with 3D traps inside!
Hilariously bad/predictable ending
Saw VII is everything the critics have accused the Saw series of being

Rating and Moviequation:

Category: 1
Score: 05%

Edit:
Hilariously true Saw video here:

Let the rant begin!

But why am I wasting so much time on a movie I hate?

Well considering how much time I spent watching previous Saw’s those few more hours won’t change much of the overall amount of time that has been wasted, so bring it on…

Third Warning: I know that Saw is not as great as Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, therefore it would be ridiculous to compare something like the Saw series to a timeless masterpiece that. Similar to Expendables I will base this rant on the expectations and qualities that go hand in hand with a Saw movie, so my references will be Saw I – VI, all right, let’s dive into this.

I just want to write the points to warn people in advance how ridiculously bad this is, so bad that the only reason I would watch this instead of Sex and the City 2 is the fact that Sex and the City 2 has the longer running time.

The opening
The opening has never been a strong point of the Saw series, except for the first one it was afterwards primarily used to kill somebody off.

Saw opened with a guy waking up, having no idea where he was, serving as a narrative help for the audience to immediately connect (like in Buried we can relate to the guy not knowing anything because we neither know what the movie will be about).

Saw II was way more arthouse and innovative by killing of a random guy, but at least he served as a hint for the detective to find Jigsaw.

Saw III probably has the most story-connected opening since it picks up right after Saw II with the protagonist being trapped – but also such a disgusting mutilation that I cannot watch it at all.

Saw IV has a game that at least has a character reappear in the movie.

Saw V kills someone in an Edgar Allan Poe pendulum trap, he has no real value to the plot other than to set up a flashback – do we see a slight downhill trend?

Saw VI pits two people against each other, forcing them to mutilate themselves, chop of their arms and stuff to have one killed – the scene has no further importance than to set up a crime scene and another ridiculously badly acted scene, both have little to none effect on the story.

Saw VII sets a new standard in terms of laziness.

It opens with Dr. Gordon crawling with one foot (he lost the other in Saw I) and cauterizing his bloody wound on a steam pipe – this sequence is there to shut the fanboys up and expect some grand finale.

Followed by a trap set in public space where two men have to fight over a girl who had her way with both of them or any other ridiculous reason, whatever, they have to either kill each other or let the girl die and so starts the gut splashing opening (of course in 3D, because… that… serves… the… story… whatever).

After the trap the gimmick title Saw 3D exposes the hollowness of this installment even more and the opening is off, never to do anything for the plot.

But considering what the rest of this movie is about, an empty plotline is the least of Saw’s problems right now.

It’s in 3D…
… and looks as cheap as it gets.
You remember Avatar 3D, the only 3D that even I, a passionate 3D hater, can say “well it was okay”?

It was good because we didn’t mind it, the Na’vi weren’t pointing at us to remind us that it was in 3D – don’t worry, Saw reminds you. Even a doctor might be amazed of all the body parts that can be thrown at you.

No Tobin Bell or Dr. Gordon for you!
Tobin Bell has been the spine of the Saw series since Saw II.
He’s the best actor in the franchise and brings a gravitas and sincerity to the role that no other actor has had in this series. He continuously rewrote his lines if they did not fit the character and to me he is the best example of an actor taking the craft seriously.

The Saw series might be a joke to many, but not to him. Watch interviews with him either he is a great actor because he is so much in his role or he is a great actor because he can pretend in interviews to be invested in his role.

He was killed off in Saw III which was pretty surprising for a franchise to kill off the glue that held the series together. Realizing this they took the prequel/sequel route with Saw IV and the subsequent sequels tried to incorporate the dead Jigsaw whenever possible.

With Saw VI the backstory was interestingly connected to Jigsaw but we had to ask ourselves: how much time did that guy spend on prerecording messages?

With Saw VII we don’t have to ask since he no longer is in the movie… not for most of the time.

Same goes for Dr. Gordon so if you were trapped by the promise that Gordon would return… he is in there for 2 minutes, which pushes John and Gordon to a total of 5-6 minutes.

So the question: is a cameo between horribly acted, pathetic gore scenes in 3D for 14 euro worth the 5 minute cameo?

Acting
It has never been Saw’s high point. Hell Saw V and VI basically made a sprint for the title “worst acting in a horror movie” which was claimed by this year’s Shocklabyrinth 3D.

But now Saw is back to reclaim the throne and this time they have brought the big guns.

Chad Donella is playing a detective whose lines are just beyond anything you have seen in The Last Airbender, this includes saying crazy 4 times within a minute.

He also explains why a safehouse is called SAFE house (spoiler alert – because it’s safe).

Costas Mandylor returns as emotionless Hoffman… the rest is just not worth mentioning.

Plausibility or suspension of disbelief?
Granted a movie about a cancer patient building a machine that rips people apart has a huge implausible set up we have to accept, but after a certain amount of traps and planning it gets ridiculous. The series has since tried to “explain” the fact that Jigsaw finds empty warehouses, meat factories and all that nice lairs by making him a wealthy civil engineer, the setting up of the traps has been tried to fix by introducing more and more apprentices to provide the muscle power.

With Saw IV we had to accept Jigsaw having an internal atomic clock to calculate events and people even after his death, counting on the detective to figure out the vital clue just at the end of the movie instead of at the beginning and there is a fair share the fans can further accept, but Saw VII just throws all logic out of the window.

How did they set up a trap in the middle of Toronto (or Saw-city)?

Was it a deserted warehouse?

I don’t know, looked pretty neat, maybe John Kramer bought it before his death and nobody bothered to check after he was revealed as the Jigsaw killer if there might be some torture tools inside? Or maybe Hoffman rented the place? Was probably cheap anyway since it’s Canada.

Left alone that the traps have gone so overly elaborate. While rigging people to a carousel was remotely plausible (Saw VI) hanging two people over lawnmowers to slice them apart defies any cost-benefit calculation.

The so-called plot
Maybe most of this review will sound like this:

Traps traps traps traps traps traps

I will dissect the traps so thoroughly (and frankly there is still a lot ground to cover) because there is almost no story to dissect, so the traps are the only element from the original Saws that remains, but let’s go to the “plot”.

Bobby Dagen gets put into a series of 4 traps (like in Saw III, IV, V, VI, damn really original) until he fails his final test – oh, wait that should be a surprise.

Meanwhile Hoffman wants to kill Jill for putting him into the reverse beartrap… that’s about it, really I can’t spend more time on this subject because there is nothing else happening.

Oh yeah and Bobby’s story is as much connected to Hoffman’s story as the opening trap is to anything.

Police incompetence
Jigsaw is now like Godzilla (not King Ghidorah), when he is doing a trap, time stands still, people, friends, entire families get abducted and put into elaborate traps and the police force can’t make any progress until the plot allows it.

Basically this is a repetition of the already atrocious Saw V (which compared to Saw VII now looks like Konga Godzilla King Kong) with nothing happening.

Wasting the only good storylines
There are many ways to write oneself into a corner, one is by dropping a character’s entire arc for a generic storyline that has to drag thorough the entire movie until we get the resolution we already know.

Interestingly both Saw V and VII make the same mistakes starting by said dragging storyline. In Saw IV we were introduced to Agent Strahm who albeit generic and stereotypical did everything in his power to find Jigsaw as fast as possible, trying to get the clues correct. Saw IV ending with Strahm being locked up in the sickroom and Hoffman being revealed as the antagonist there was potential for a big mind game as a sidestory in Saw V.

But don’t worry, the writers knew how to screw up a story that would write itself: they made Strahm walk around to serve as a plotdevice for flashbacks that didn’t add anything to the story (sadly more on that later), commenting on the things we had just seen, resulting in the worst scenes of Saw (until Saw VII) only to get killed off in a dissatisfying way.

With Saw VII Jigsaw’s wife Jill loses all her motivation. She went from mysterious and distant (Saw IV) to not present (Saw V) to not quite an apprentice but someone who understands John (Saw VI) to crying woman (Saw VII).

With Jill being the closest person to Jigsaw and his philosophy she could have provided a counterforce. Especially given the fact that Hoffman has almost no character and does not seem to care that much about the job (and we all love our serial killers in fanatic mode more than in opportunistic mode) it could have been a symbolic battle about John’s legacy and methods… coulda woulda shoulda…

Speaking of Jill…

Women in Saw

Serial killers are white males…

As quoted by Scream 2 when they discuss the likeliness of a female killer.

Women in horror movies are many times objectified, degraded or used as shrieking whining stereotypes.

Surprisingly Saw was the exception to this rule. I am personally not fond of Saw III (the fan favorite) but at least it was a horror movie featuring two pretty good actresses in big parts on both sides of the spectrum: Amanda as the serial killer/Jigsaw apprentice and Dr. Lynn who had to perform surgery on Jigsaw. It was a battle between wills and interesting that women were portrayed as strong as well – especially considering that Amanda had a physical confrontation with a blood thirsty Donnie Wahlberg and held her ground.
With Jill there would have been another way to combat the woman stereotype (there are already enough crying women when it comes to the random traps), but her story is basically she’s panicking and is no match for Hoffman. Additionally there is a sequence where Hoffman smashes her head onto a table which is done in a brutally and sadistic way that made me cringe more than any CGI blood that gets thrown onto the screen despite featuring no gore or anything.

The rest of the women is equally panicky/useless and Tanendra Howard from Saw VI returns to remind us how bad of an actress she is.

Flashbacks that do nothing
A flashback is a narrative technique that can be used to give us insight into the storylines, the characters motivations or they let us see a previous scene in a new light (notably Atonement, a movie I hate, but there are some great usages of flashbacks to enhance the different point of views).

Having said this, none of the flashbacks have anything to say about the story.

Saw V’s flashbacks might have been disconnected to the main plot and not helped the story at all, but at least they were semi-interesting to watch if you cared about Jigsaw and why Hoffman became the new killer.

Saw VII’s flashbacks have NO justification for being there, they neither enhance the story nor tell us something we didn’t already know:

We have Bobby Dagen having a flashback where he watches a Jigsaw survivor and gets the idea that he could fake that. Wow, who would have thought about that! I never realized that Bobby got the idea of exploiting people after he had seen some of them talking abou it!!! This changes my world!

Then there is a book signing for a Tobin Bell cameo which tells us… that Jigsaw knew Bobby was lying…. No shit, probably that’s the reason he got tested like we were told previously.

The newer Saws have been suffering from a very soap-opera narrative style that introduced new characters and pretended via flashbacks that they had been there all along, but nothing comes close to the insulting scene, where the new officer Gibson has a flashback when he met Hoffman.

Why? Is it important? Does it change his motivation? Does it provide him with some insight to track down Hoffman?

Not to speak that Hoffman shoots a hobo in cold blood in this scene and we all know how much Jigsaw loves people who do those things. He probably  thought: hey that Hoffman guy, he can shoot the shit out of junkies, I’ll hire him as a new apprentice after all he can built a really nice pendulum.

Thankfully the flashbacks are basically non-existent, more of them would have spiraled this movie even further down.

The horror is not seeing!
Saw has become known as a gore franchise, people who have never seen Saw will immediately tell you how disgusting it is, how sick and disturbing and that anyone watching these movies is a natural born killer, but looking just at the original Saw it is quite indeed remarkable how little we have actually seen.

The goriest scene in Saw, where Dr. Gordon cuts off his own foot – sounds horrible, I know, but actually we never saw the sawing (lame pun I know), all we saw (get it?) was the Saw (it gets old but I’m too lazy to get my thesaurus) on the foot and then some blood, quick cut back to Gordon’s and Adam’s faces. One of the most horrific scenes was almost entirely in our minds.

Saw VII knows about this power and shows us Dr. Gordon’s severed limb! Isn’t that great, but then again at least they attempt to “rationalize” how he did not die of massive blood loss.

But Saw VII takes it up a notch.

When speaking of horrible traps that make the public cringe and one trap that literally defines Saw:

THE REVERSE BEARTRAP

This is a trap preying on claustrophobia, having to make horrible decisions and putting the audience on the edge of their seat. Amanda has to find the key to the trap before it rips her jaws open… brrr… just thinking about this makes me cringe.

The trap was used for promoting the idea of a Saw movie via a short film featuring the writer Leigh Whannell in the trap:

We never saw the trap working, we (or at least I) were relieved when Amanda made it out in time (even if we knew she survived the way the movie was cut/shot was just damn exciting) and the possible outcome of the trap remained in the part of our brain that plagues us with irrational scary images.

With Saw VI the beartrap featured a return, which was actually quite an interesting way to make the movie come full circle like the tagline suggested by putting the second apprentice into the same trap the first apprentice was tested, storywise it was really “symbolic”. Also the set up was different: Hoffman was put into this situation without getting any chance to escape from, but he managed to get out of the chair he was strapped to and had to find a way to prevent the thing from killing him – the suspense in the scene (which considering it was the fifth sequel was a pretty good finale) came from the fact that there was no given plan how he would escape and we were unsure if he would survive of not  – then again with Saw VII being planned you could kinda guess what would happen.
So we had two instances with the reverse beartrap – separated by FIVE years, which allowed for a huge kind of morbid nostalgia when we saw it again. Now why not repeat the same trick again? One year later you can still cash in on the same nostalgia – in fact why didn’t all Saw movies have a reverse beartrap in them? Way better than coming up with something new.

I have to repeat, the beartrap was scary because we did NOT see how it worked, not that I am spoiling anything, but with the thing not doing its job two times before, I leave it to your imagination if there is a gloriously 3D jawripping beartrap.

Boring! Let’s get some traps rolling!
Wow this rant is getting long, you must be bored right now…

You know what would cheer you up? A trap!

Not that kind of trap!

Saw VII knows that the target demographic is represented by an impatient blood hungry male (the stereotype the Saw series has always been accused of catering towards to) who can’t focus on more than five minutes of dialogue, so thankfully they  have included as many traps as possible, they even go as far as to include a ridiculous go-kart dream sequence where Jill gets torn apart in the cheapest possible way, right after she wakes up we cut to four skinheads getting smashed/torn/ripped apart in a gory way (arms and jaws flying away from the body) that just makes you laugh and if that was too much story for you we cut to a survivor meeting where someone we never say talks – TRAP! While the woman talks we cut to a GIANT HUMAN BLENDER MADE OF LAWNMOWERS and see a man killed before we cut back to the meeting – isn’t that great?

Traps for maximum gore!
So we have come to terms with the fact that this ridiculous piece of trash is bad and full of traps, but we need to realize how bad these traps are or to be more precise: how they are deliberately constructed to give us the maximum gore experience.
I have written in my previous Saw article that the thing about the traps that makes them interesting is that they can be overcome and theoretically they could be overcome in Saw VII as well.

But we very soon realize how they work:

Person A finds him/herself in a trap with hopefully more than him/herself so we can up the bodycount.

Insert Jigsaw-tape offering a ridiculous reason for the test and how this all is symbolic and stuff.

Insert way to mutilate Person A or Person B (best way both).

There is a 60 second counter until the trap snaps and kills person A or B (preferably both or more)

Mutilation begins and until second 5 is displayed everything might work.

Shortly before the timer runs out person A fails, which results in the death of A/B/C/the world.

I’m not kidding you EVERY trap is constructed this way, it is so pathetic and cheap it made me shout out loud when the third trap again did not work, where is the suspense if it is always the same formula that gets them killed?
And while we are at the subject…

Bobby’s game and Saw’s philosophy
So the main game is about a guy who pretended to be a Jigsaw survivor (and no one questioned where the trap was etc.?), he goes through the four rooms watching people die and serves no purpose to the story.

We could say the same thing about Saw VI’s game. It was not really connected to Hoffman’s actions at all, but here we arrive at the crucial point: William’s story and character was interesting.

He was an insurance guy, who was tested because he denied Jigsaw health insurance (thus tying him naturally to one of John’s reasons for starting his insane killing machines). Also the way his tests were made basically showed how to do it properly.
To me Saw works best when it is about choices that are morally not acceptable. Jigsaw would place many victims into traps where for example William had to choose which person he would allow to survive. The trap “reflected” William’s policy in the way that by denying insurance he “chose” who would live or die.

Now we would all agree that killing is wrong (I seriously hope) and the fact that you can only save one person means that he decides which one dies – there is no right and wrong in this. It is putting us out of our safety zones into an extreme situation, psychological horror, which is the reason I liked Saw.
When Amanda had to kill a man to save her own life she was put out of our norms of society into a brutal, wild, unfriendly situation, where she acted out of impulse. The idea of killing a person for one’s own survival is disgusting and unsettling – and it leaves the audience with the question “What would I do?”

We may not ponder for  a long time on these questions but for a few seconds the movie rattles on our cages of morality, which is why I have “enjoyed” the Saw movies up until now.

Is there ANYTHING like this in Saw VII? Nope, the traps Bobby faces are one person in a trap getting killed because Bobby fails. Unlike William who had a near breakdown Bobby has no change of character. William was a despicable guy, a sleazy suit-wearing smartass but he showed remorse, regret. While he was getting pushed to the limits of his mental and physical capabilities he exposed his human side and we even felt genuinely sorry when the past caught up with him and condemned him for his previous choices.
With Bobby… well he walks, then he comes to the end.

Killing innocents
With the years the excuses for trapping people have become more and more ridiculous. The series started out with drug dealers, addicts, voyeurs, the sort of people you wouldn’t want on your Star Trek convention.

Then there were people like a police officer who was killed because she spends too much time with dead people (really as a police officer who investigates in MURDERS she is probably bound to spend a lot of time with the case especially if the case is Jigsaw)
Then there was an officer who was killed for not trusting the killer…

And Saw VI topped that by killing a guy for smoking, that’s right you read it.

But NEVER has Jigsaw killed people he himself considered innocent. In Saw VII a woman is killed with no “excuse” Jigsaw more or less states that she didn’t commit any crimes and still she is in there, wow…

But we could argue that this was the case with abducting and threatening Dr. Gordon’s family in the very first Saw – then again it was not until Saw II when Jigsaw claimed that he never killed anyone etc.
In Saw I he was fed up with the world and wanted to “teach” people, he never said about everyone can survive it, the angle about “everyone has a choice” was introduced later on.

The way the woman is killed in Saw VII just trumps every cruelty that has come before.

The big fanboy ending
Yep, so we get to the ending.

And after suffering through two stories that were connected through an automatic machinegun we ask ourselves “hey wasn’t Dr. Gordon supposed to be in this?”

And the writers reveal the final “twist”

It’s Dr. Gordon, oh my god! He worked for Jigsaw since Saw!!!!!

And he is locking up Hoffman in the bathroom!!!!

And he throws the SAW into the camera… in THREE DEEE!!!!

This is wrong on so many levels and would warrant an entire article but if you have suffered through all of this then I guess you won’t mind a little bit more or to say it with the words of Jigsaw

“Suffering, you haven’t seen anything yet!”

The Gordon story:

Since Dr. Gordon did not return to Saw II (money), there was the obvious question “What happened to him?”

When he did not return to Saw III most people gave up on him, there have been hints thorough the series, but nobody except delusional fanboys took them seriously. In Saw II there even was a scene where a hooded figure performed surgery on a video and since Tobin Bell was not around that day they used a double, the unintentional hair of the actor under the hood that was seen was not Tobin Bell’s hair (just a glitch during movie making) which sparked conspiracies that this was Dr. Gordon.

After five sequels nobody cared anymore for Dr. Gordon and every time someone used “It was Dr. Gordon” as an explanation it got more and more ridiculous and worst of all: predictabke.
It was probably the most predictable storyline and with a series that was keen on having a final revelation at the end of (almost) every movie, choosing the most obvious theory is not the way to go.

Besides…

Saw and the twists
If there was any sense to Saw VII one might argue that it might have been about survivors learning from Jigsaw to appreciate their life and Gordon becoming the new accomplice/whatever is symbolizing this change.

But we should also look at the only information we got about Gordon: he was put into a room forced to saw his foot of and kill the man trapped with him otherwise he would lose his family. Thinking that his family has been shot/wounded he sawed of his foot shot Adam (who survived the shot) watched Adam beat the guy from Lost to a pulp and then left promising Adam he would return.

Then the guy who put him into the trap appears, the guy who just made his life horrible and footless because his relationship was not working at all – then the Jigsaw killer makes him a foot prosthesis… and that’s it?

A twist only works if the picture afterwards makes sense. That is one of the reasons why Saw IV was not that beloved since the revelation of the killer did not grant us a bigger understanding. The best twists work when we look back and say “oh that’s how they did it, yeah I can see that he has been a double agent all along, how stupid of me to miss that”.

With Saw IV they withheld information about Hoffman, so it was surprising that he was the new Jigsaw, but his motivations did not make sense, we did not know why Hoffman was the killer, that was a cliffhanger for the sequel.

Compare this to the original Saw where it was pretty surprising who the killer was but once you knew it you were “Oh this is kinda interesting, he has cancer so he knows he’s gonna die and that’s why he’s sick of people who throw their life away.”

See how you can piece together everything in a “plausible” way?

With Dr. Gordon there is NO explanation other than fanfiction, there is no hint why Gordon became what he is, he just became it. Maybe they didn’t give us the explanation because that would ruin the twist… that had been guessed since Saw II…

For a supposed finale (that feels more like a cliffhanger if you don’t know that this is supposed to be the last Saw) this is just not doable, everything should fit together, but that’s probably a byproduct of making the story up as you go, remember this is not Harry Potter where everything was more or less planned out even though the writers act as if this was planned since Saw II.

The Gordon story could have worked. He could have been forced to become a new apprentice but secretly planned to not only cross Jigsaw but after his death destroy the only thing (established in Saw II) that Jigsaw saw as his goal: his legacy.

Jigsaw lived on in the traps that continued despite his death so Gordon destroying his legacy, corrupting everything about what Jigsaw thought he was telling the people, hell you could justify every plot/trap inconsistency with Gordon manipulating Hoffman into a wild killer that would bring the downfall of the “help yourself” Jigsaw mantra….

It’s not the best story I’ve just written, but come on, everything is better than locking Hoffman in the bathroom, seriously, this was the nr.1 theory… that’s worse than Lost!

O.k. I’ll take it back… it’s not worse than the flash-sideways in Lost…

Seeing this ending, especially considering that Hoffman got abducted by not only Gordon but two other pigmasks whose identity was not revealed (so much for tying up plotlines), everything just turned into a laughable comedy. The fact that they have recycled ideas (more pigmasks at the end, tooth pulling trap, human blender) from the original (and terrible) Saw IV script speaks volumes for the barren river of inspiration for these movies.

Afterword:
Sadly this movie has already passed 100 million worldwide and will surpass both Saw VI and Saw I, therefore turning it into a success, affirming the producers that Saw: In Space, the new beginning 3D will feature even more gore and traps!
Because if Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare has taught us everything, it’s that sadly none of these franchises stays dead and keeps reminding us that they were beloved way back in the days… in a way Saw now truly is the Nightmare on Elm Street of my generation.

The title of generic: another legend of something

Is it bad when you can tell exactly how a movie is going to end when you look at the first picture of two brothers ?

Well at least there’s something wrong with that, it mustn’t necessarily be a total disaster, just look at Karate Kid 2010, generic, predictable yet funny.

So we are watching a movie by Zack Snyder.
Know this director? Yeah, that slow motion guy.
The director of Dawn of the Dead (remake), 300 and Watchmen – notice what they got in common? They are no children’s movies.

But hey, a director should do something new!
I mean we all need a break between making a rated-R blue penis comedy and directing the reboot of the biggest Superhero (Godzilla not counting as a superhero), so why not retell Star Wars?

Wait there was one movie who tried to do this, it was with John Malkovich, so it’s probably good…

How about trying to conceal the rip-off by making it about Owls?

Yeah that could work, it’s not really important that they are in fact Owls, none of their actions is different than the action in a generic fantasy-movie.

So we have a gimmick to sell it?

No two gimmicks: it’s 3D!

There is not much more to say about this movie, you saw it, you saw Star Wars: A New Hope and Empire Strikes back, just replace “Use the force” with “Trust your gizzard” and voila!

The movie is based on a series of books that might or might not feature some interesting tones, but if there was a deeper meaning to this story it didn’t survive the transition to the movie.

You have everything that is preachy even when you judge it as a children’s movie – which is kind of insulting to children since with Ponyo, How to train your dragon and Toy Story 3 we got tremendous movies for children

There is the obvious “You’re a dreamer” that will be forced upon us in the ending.

There is a hilarious attempt to be serious and teach children that war is nothing to be proud of… except of course if the main character does it.

There are characters randomly meeting each other that makes Star Trek 11’s plot look like it’s actually possible to meet the future self of your ship’s commander on a deserted Iceplanet.

There are characters so shallow that they need to constantly do funny stuff to distinguish each other.

And of course there’s the Nazi-villain with no other motivation except being evil.

It is actually very sad since a lot of attention went into tiny details, the animation is gorgeous, lovingly crafted, very impressive… but with a story so uninspired this feels like Final Fantasy: beautiful to look at, but to tedious to watch the whole thing.

Rating and Moviequation:

Category: 1
Score: 42%

Resident Evil – Afterlife (in THREEE DEEE)

Everyone knows: Resident Evil 1-3 are bad movies
So the only question is: Is Resident Evil 4 worse?
Answer: yes

Reviewing this movie seemed a bit pointless and I thought it was more interesting to ponder about the marketing decisions behind this movie, the outcome of this pondering can be found as a PDF-file here.

Rating and Moviequation:

Resident Evil: Afterlife
Category: 1
Score: 30%

14 things wrong with The Expendables

Originally this article should have been titled « Everything that’s wrong with The A-Team »  but yesterday’s Expendables manage to underwhelm even more.

Let me start this with one important notice: I did not expect the Godfather when watching Expendables. All I wanted was some good old school testosterone action. To watch some of the coolest guys in the business shoot the shit out of a random stereotype dictator, you know… old school. I don’t have a problem with dumb action movies, man I wanted Expendables to be one of those dumb action movies and boy was I wrong.

So right now I’m gonna break down The Expendables point by point to expose this failure that should have been the manliest movie of all time.

Number 1: Blatantly false advertisement

Don’t let the advertisements fool you, basically the movie could have been called “Stallone and Statham doing some stuff” since the other Expendables (Jet Li, Gary Daniels, Randy Couture and Dolph Lundgren) just pop up at the beginning and near the end.
And the three names besides Stallone, Statham and Li we actually give a damn about (Schwarzenegger, Willis and Rourke) are nothing more than useless cameos.

So if you expected Arnie, Bruce, Mickey, Stallone, Statham in a movie, like way too many ads imply, then don’t get your hopes up, it is just a cheap marketing gimmick to get our hopes up.

A similar thing happened with Inglourious Basterds last year, which was advertised as a Nazi-slaughtering Dirty Dozen movie, the ad-campaign deliberately avoided to tell us that half of the movie would be a revenge story about a french cinema and eating strudel.

Why didn’t we care? Because Shosanna’s story was compelling, well- acted and well written and there was Nazi-killing put in thorough the movie.
With that warning we can now look at the actual movie, starting with

Number 2: The movie is not sure what it is
This is probably the worst mistake of Expendables.

The movie is definitely modelled after those great 80s movies (*cough* Commando *cough*)  but it can’t decide if it is a tribute to those movie (ergo reflecting back to the days) or if it is a movie made today but with an intention as if it was planned and produced back then.

The first route usually lets our hero reflect the path that he has come until today. There will be a convenient plotdevice that will bring the man back from retirement to show us again why he is the biggest badass in town (see the last Rambo movie).
But that’s not the case with Expendables, except for the one minute cameo of Schwarzenegger where they more or less break the fourth wall and talk about their movie pasts and political future. The scene while pointless was probably the funniest scene because it was written with the audience in mind and they just have fun playing “who’s the bigger badass”, but then the scene ends and we are back to a wannabe serious action movie until the next punch hits us:

Number 3: The movie is missing the point
If you want to make a serious action movie and not break the fourth wall too much, that’s fine, but the makers should realize while the characters don’t know what is going on outside of the movie, we know.

We know that this should not be a mediocre/lazy movie, this is a movie where the heavyweights gather to make the biggest man-fest of all time.
So if you have a big calibre cast with a reputation like this, you better make sure that you show us why the Expendables are the best of the best. This translates in giving them the hardest task imaginable, because let’s face it: some task like infiltrating a palace of a dictator is something even Topper Harley can do.

Give us an Alcatraz so fortified that can withstand the waves of thousands of soldiers and the only way to destroy it is to send the five best guys on the most epic infiltration mission that ends with the biggest shootout in cinema history, but instead we are screaming:

Number 4: Just get the plot out of the way!

What is the beauty of Commando (1985)?
It gets to the point as fast as possible:

5 minutes are dedicated to show us the bad guys.
6 minutes to show Schwarzenegger
12 minutes into the movie and he gets attacked – bang bang!
17 minutes and we know the plot: They have his daughter and he needs to work for them.
20 minutes we find ourselves sitting with Arnold on the plane, guarded by a bad guy and we know that if their boss finds out that Arnold is not cooperating they will kill his daughter
And after 24 minutes Arnold kills the bodyguard and escapes the plane – let’s get to da choppah!

This is all the story we need: we have a goal for the protagonist (save daughter), we have a villain for the final fight (former friend of hero), we have an impossible task that only Schwarzenegger can fulfil (kill all the people to get to his daughter) and we have a time window to increase tension (if he can’t make it before the plane lands they will find out he killed the bodyguard and will execute his daughter).

The great thing is the simplicity. After 25 minutes there is just action after action, some sideplot to get a girl in the end, but the primary target never changes, nor do morals or motivations, everything is laid out and we enjoy the slaughter.

Expendables decides to waste the time the movie has got with exposition nobody needs. The epic mission they have to make really takes off about 30 minutes towards the end of the movie before that there is an on and off. They get a job, they bitch around, they find a girl, they leave the island again (which really helps the tension if your heroes can get away so easily), they whine a little more until they finally get the team together and we can have our not even remotely satisfying shootout.

Just like A-Team Expendables spends more time with what we don’t care about and like A-Team you can remove entire segments of the movie without hurting the “story”.
For example there is a subplot about Dolph Lundgren where Stallone and Lundgren quarrel over their modus operandi which leads to Lundgren leaving the team and becoming the inevitable traitor. But instead of making good use of that fact the traitor storyline is not affecting the main story at all and is killed of before the final mission starts… big mistake.

Just show the team breaking up at the beginning, then Lundgren becomes the right hand man of Eric Roberts and the Expendables have to kill everything in their path which builds up to a match between Lundgren and Stallone.

But the worst offender is Statham’s story about his (ex-)(or not)girlfriend. So laughably pointless that I forgot to mention it when I was writing this article the first time.

Number 5: Trying to make a point when there is no point to make
Like mentioned above The Expendables is no reflection on past action movies, but a movie made in the style of the 80s. Yet the movie desperately tries to shove some morals down our throats which are pathetic at best. Some convoluted tale about a girl Mickey Rourke (just a reminder he is not really in this movie) didn’t save or something, I don’t really care. This serves as an excuse to get back to the bad guys and slaughter all of them, but seriously?
This is not Rocky, this is no character drama where the heroes have to overcome their problems. The obstacle to overcome is the job they are assigned which has to be hard enough that it dominates the entire plot, not something that you decide lightly in the third act.
Maybe there could have been some drama about the heroes, but not the way it was executed, it was just sad to watch an actor like Rourke delivering an unbelievable sad excuse.
Why did Stallone forget the best thing about action movies:

Number 6: Stereotypes
When it comes to action movies stereotypes are the best thing you can fall back to get the story going as fast as possible. Since we have seen how well drama works for a movie like The Expendables you can just use stereotypes to get the same job done in half the time.
They are easily understandable and get the point across:

Let a guy in a suit smoke a cigar – he’s greedy and evil
Have someone betray a friend – he’s definitely evil
Kill the wife of the hero – motivation

Again Commando is a good example of fast stereotypes because the movie is aware that it’s just a fun ride: we have a traitor, which gets our hatred pumped up so that we root for Arnold and we have his daughter. Saving your abducted daughter from terrorists needs no justification, everyone understands why the hero would do it and it saves us from a terrible monolog by Rourke.

Number 7: Something’s wrong when your men bitch around
In a movie that is here to celebrate the manliness of the cast the last thing we want to see is having them talk about their relationship problems. That’s missing the point so much, it feels as wrong as watching the girls from Sex and the City talking about Greek philosophy.

As mentioned before the main conflict we want to see in those movies is THE JOB. So most of the conflicts should be related to THE JOB (getting captured, losing a teammate, having only 20 minutes until the U.S. army decides to nuke the fortress but your leader is still captured in the dungeons… pick your number).

Inglourious Basterds while featuring a team full of bland, indistinguishable Basterds was aware of that fact so the spotlight was never in the internal conflicts, but on the situation.

For example the bar scene establishes that they might blow their cover so the entire scene is a suspense scene about the question “will they blow their cover or won’t they?” which works so well despite your protagonists being mere caricatures.

Number 8: Who needs geography…
“What the hell is going on?” – Is one of the questions you should never ask when watching an action movie. The beauty of an action scene is the simplicity of the task.

James Cameron knows this all too well like he showed us in Avatar.
The final battle of Avatar gets the point across within a few moments: the humans have a BIG WHITE SHIP and the Na’vi have a BIG WHITE TREE. If those two things meet – boom!

That’s it. We see the entire army of the humans flying past a valley, the ground troops are sent out and a camera-pan reveals the strength of the Na’vi’s army.
Now we know who is where and now let’s start!

The tension arises from the stakes! With Expendables we might have heard that there are 200 men against the Expendables, but who remembers that when wave after wave of men get killed? After the 1000th guy is killed we are not sure – is the battle over or not?
Then we go to the big court where Eric Roberts has to get to da choppah, but we never quite know the most important things: how far away is that chopper, how many men are between the Expendables and the chopper, how many miles are between them, how well equipped are the bad guys?
All that is beyond our knowledge so we are left to watch explosion after explosion, then we see Eric Roberts running but we don’t know if he is close to his escape vehicle or not, so the only thing that remains to judge the time until he gets to the chopper wait until Stallone is finished killing the people (again, we don’t know how many there are) in his way. Roberts won’t reach his goal before Stallone is finished.

Number 9: … or suspsense?
Another example for setting up the stakes can be found in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Batman is in the skyscraper, he looks through his bat lenses and we see where the clowns are holding the hostages (establishing Batman’s goal). Then we pan to the SWAT team that is coming up the stairs or from the roof. Everything is intercut with real life shots of SWATs preparing stuff like their weapons or explosives. Also we know that there is a bunch of snipers ready to shoot.
We might forget where everyone is exactly, but in those brief seconds we get the sense of the clockwork-like operation that is about to happen, we get a feeling how many SWATs there are and so forth….
Until….
Batman unmasks a clown and we see…. (gasp) that it’s a hostage!
And with this simple turn of events we get a sense of danger, our blood is rushing, because we know where the police is, we know they will strike in a few seconds and we know that they are professional enough that they will probably shoot all the hostages.
“Red team go!” the Batman score kicks in and come on… it’s impossible to stop, them, the only person to stop those professionals would be… a goddamn hero!

That’s what we want to see, no mundane tasks, a hero is here to make the impossible possible, to defy the odds and turn out victorious. The scene in Dark Knight is so beautifully orchestrated, it gets us and makes us even oversee the fact that Batman could just call the SWATs and warn them, because at that point we are pumped to see if he succeeds.

But… sigh I have to return to The Expendables. What shall I say? There is nothing like it. Their “plan” at the end eludes the audience, we just watch stuff happen and since we are not really sure if everything goes as planned or if something isn’t working, so we can assume everything is going as planned. It really helps the tension if your heroes are never in any form of danger and it really helps that:

Number 10: everything is so dark you can’t see!
Stallone might have taken advice from M. Night: both The Last Airbender and The Expendables feature dark indistinguishable characters fighting in a dark surrounding, so your guess who has the upper hand is as good as mine. Occasionally an explosion will light the scene up, but you won’t see what’s going on, but there is one more thing that makes the tensionless darkness even more exciting.

Number 11: Screw you Jason Bourne!
I never had a problem with the Bourne movies. I don’t love them but they are cool entertainment except for the fact that you just wish that the chase scene in Bourne Supremacy will finally end so you can see what the hell is going on.

Then the Bourne movie-style infected James Bond and the headache inducing camera shakes opened one of the worst Bonds. And now this “style” has ruined The Expendables as well.
Once again I cite James Cameron or Inception or The first Matrix: LOOONG slow shots, so that we can enjoy the action. Shaky frenetic camera is only good to get us into the characters head to feel his confusion etc. It is of no use in a movie that needs to celebrate and glorify violence whenever possible.

Be honest, if you had the choice between the Neo and Trinity hallway shootout or the shaking camera dark people battling other dark people in darkness… which one would you watch?

Number 12: Criminally underusing Jet Li
This should be a general “Wasting potential” but Jet Li is such a joke in this movie he deserves the spotlight even though many problems are combined with aforementioned numbers. But seriously, you have a guy that is a martial artist, so the best thing would to show us wide shots of Li jumping around making awesome moves – instead it is filmed like they had to use a stuntman, everything is dark or we just see their feet or they are fighting underneath a staircase, we can never marvel the beauty of a good old-school martial arts kicking.
And while some 80s movies cut that close during fight scenes, we should know that they only did that when the actor couldn’t do the fighting  – again Li REALLY CAN DO THIS CRAZY SHIT!
Plus his character is being made fun of like hell  – probably because it is the only joke Stallone could think of, so we get about 15 jokes about him being small to a point where we ask ourselves if they just want to hide that they don’t really have any other one-liners.

Number 13: CGI blood
This might be a nitpick, but as an action fan computer generated blood is just horrible. The gore looks cheap and not at all convincing. When your fanbase expects gore and blood, give them real old school blood, not that thing that looks as cheap as the CGI stuff they added for the “unrated” Die Hard 4.0.

Number 14: The hero is only as strong as the villain
Meaning “if your heroes are a bunch of pansies crying over their girlfriends then you have to make the villains equally bitchy so that they are not cooler than the heroes”.

Eric Roberts and the random dictator are probably contending for the worst villain duo in recent movie history.

If your team consists of the biggest meanest heroes of all time you should give them an equally mean antagonist, but nada…. Eric Roberts is just the guy from Dark Knight, a sleazy mobster, that’s it.
Oh… cruel he is yelling at poor farmers, he’s probably Satan’s right hand man.

About an hour into the movie the movie realizes how pathetic those villains are so they throw in a torture scene to get our pulse up, but those scenes should only be used as “icing on the cake”.

The general action villain has to be established as soulless and DEFINITELY EVIL so that we have no moral conflict while watching people getting slaughtered. When he later on attempts to torture/mutilate/rape the love interest this serves as the final straw. Everyone who up till now was for letting that guy live will want to rip his heart out.

For the third time I’ll redirect to James Cameron. Even though Avatar could have been a complex challenging movie about doubtful morals and so on and so forth Cameron decided against it AND WENT WITH IT.

From the very beginning Avatar shows us in a Disney-simplicity good and evil so we can easily relate to the poor innocent villagers who are terrorized by the big evil humans. Simple stereotypes as before mentioned bring you along the way.

Give the military guy a badass scar and let him drink coffee while slaughtering innocents = way more effective than a military leader crying over his daughter.

Puh… finally done…

You know what will give you a better time than Expendables?

The Expendables
Category: 1
Score: 25%

Twilight Triple Feature (part 1 of 3)

An eyewitness testimony

After a near death experience we were able to retrieve our subject from the hospital with only minor brain damage, we are still unsure if this was caused by the alcohol or the video that was shown. After initial doubts about the subject’s wish to attend a triple feature of the Twilight Saga we decided to let the experiment happen for the sake of science. The following transcript is the only information we were able to retrieve out of our test subject before it again completely descended into madness. Patient W volunteered for this project and all medical damages he had to suffer during the course of this experiment were self-inflicted. The patient was neither forced to watch this movie nor did we in any way encourage alcoholism in any way. Here is what we were able to recreate:

00:00:00:00
I can’t believe I am doing this… why exactly am I doing this again? It’s not like I have a girlfriend that forces me to watch it like that other guy who’s sitting in this theatre. Ah whatever, I got my liquor mixed with the cinema’s Fanta, so bring it on girlies.

00:00:04:08
Got in a little too late, movie has already started… as if I care…

00:00:08:15
For the record since that would be a little redundant, please add “why am I watching this?” and “who can take these movies seriously?” at the end of each post.

00:00:12:07
Oh Bella, you are so great, because you are new and totally not shallow, can I get an autograph?

00:00:23:42
This movie is way too serious for a vampire comedy, can he finally start to sparkle?

00:00:30:or so
“This is the skin of a killer!” oh he’s so dangerous and so mighty, that would actually be a nice conflict, but that would be an actual story and not as interesting as… oh wait they are staring at each other, I can feel the drama and also the shot our group just sipped.

00:00:42:19
Now I might already be a little unsober… but from my experience watching New Moon this fall and knowing what is ahead of me the first twilight seems to have an awful amount of story going on. I mean at least this movie has a villain plus he looks like Bob Marley. A toast to Bob Marley… why are you looking at me, Twi-hard sitting next to me? Can’t we all enjoy a little drink now and then?

00:00:49:maybe
By the way, who is that cute girl posing as “Bella’s” friend, I know her from another movie and she looks like she can seriously act.

00:01:04:08
Oh they are going shopping right now… this for sure is very important and serious, now I wonder why in Memento the guy never had to ask himself what to buy… holy hell booby dress! Erm where was I? Yeah right they are talking about her boobs, I’m not making this up, seriously, watch the movie again, the girl that can act just said she likes this because it accentuates her boobs. Hey, don’t look at me like that, I still have 5 hours of half-naked men ahead of me.

01:15:16:23
Can we finally get to the vampire baseball, I am in the mood for a shot round a la “skin of a killer”, anyway… Edward’s fast, hey there’s Bob Marley vampire! Awesome maybe I have some good old Bob Marley on my mp3… where exactly have I put it?

01:25:25:25
Still looking for my mp3, hopefully I can keep up with the story.

01:33:24:50
Screw that player, the emo vampires are fighting against Sabertooth, where’s my bottle?

01:50:11:00
NO! Don’t turn her into a vampire! That would progress the story, I’m in favour of waiting two more movies!

01:55:30:21
Feeling a little dizzy, but the scene where Bella’s mother thinks her daughter fell down two staircases, through a window, into a strip club driver’s limousine, that was hit by an airplane is just way too hilarious – for the record I believe that at least the first two accidents are not made up by me.

Wait, the movie is already over? It wasn’t that long at all. I guess Sex and the City has prepared me for this, I might not be in complete control over my senses, but I think this movie at least had a beginning, a middle part and an end, I mean, that’s quite a coherent achievement.
What’s that guy from the cinema doing? He’s coming up to our seats.
Apparently some annoying douchebags have constantly laughed thorough the movie even during scenes that aren’t intended to be funny – that’s low, who would do such a thing during such a quality movie? Most be some guy behind me…

Continued in part 2…

Shrek forever after

Shrek the Fourth is in many ways a prime example of what can go wrong with mainstream movies.
After two great entries the third part buried any hope for refreshing entertainment under pop culture jokes and this movie doesn’t even pretend to do anything else (maybe reducing the pop culture jokes a tad).

At the beginning of the movie Shrek seems to wonder the same thing as the writers and subsequently we, the audience, do: what the hell is he supposed to do? We get a montage of Shrek’s redundant everyday life as if we are facing the fact that there is nothing more to gain from this franchise than redundancy but before we can go be driven mad by that fact Shrek does the job for us, wishing to live the life from the first Shrek… you know, the movie we really like.

The antagonist in this movie – Rumpelstiltskin – who in the hands of gifted writers could have been an iconic villain gives Shrek a contract to live the life of an ogre again, but we soon realize that Stiltskin has messed with Shrek’s past and so we have to endure a clipshow of “what if” moments. The whole movie thinks it is funny to see characters we know not acting the way we are used to-

Hey Donkey doesn’t know Shrek!
Hey Fiona is a fighting Ogre dame!
Hey Puss is FAT!
Because that’s funny… right? Riiiight?

If your sole premise is that except for Shrek everyone is a totally different persona it takes away the audience’s interest. This movie is one character away from being tabula rasa for the Shrek franchise so why should we care? This are not the characters we have come to love (at least for two movies) and Shrek is just bland and uninteresting, yes he is in love, we are aware of that fact, let’s move on!
For a franchise that started out as a clever satire of fairy tales, that dissected everything Disney had told us before, Shrek has now become the very thing it initially made fun of.

Of course this movie is presented 3D, because an uninspired sequel makes even more money if are charged extra for nothing. This whole misery is underlined in the Austrian movie world by pitiful fact:
Wes Anderson’s for a lack of a better word fantastic stop motion movie Fantastic Mr. Fox started one week prior to Shrek 4, it is currently playing in only 11 cinemas, across 9 federal states whereas Shrek is promoted everywhere. For some reason Mr. Fox while being worlds above the quality of Shrek doesn’t get any interest and it shows when looking at the financial profits of both movies:

Worldwide grosses:

Shrek forever after: $370,200,099
Fantastic Mr. Fox: $46,257,291

The idealist inside of me is asking himself why quality isn’t rewarded…

Rating and Moviequation

Shrek Forever After
Category: 1
Score: 30%

Fantastic Mr. Fox (review coming)
Category: 1
Score: 87%

Sex and the City 2

An eyewitness testimony

The following transcript is the only information we were able to retrieve out of our test subject before it completely descended into madness. Patient W volunteered for this project and all medical damages he had to suffer during the course of this experiment were self-inflicted. The patient was neither forced to watch this movie nor did we in any way encourage alcoholism in any way. Here is what we were able to recreate:

00:00:00:00
O.k. I haven’t seen the first Sex and the City or any episode of the Television series for that matter, so I am not quite sure if I’ll be able to follow the story. Anyway to prepare myself I’ve already donned a beer and the second one is in my hand right now, so bring it on!

00:04:08:15
So I’m not really sure, why there was a creepy flashback of actor-look-alikes, maybe from a previous season or am I already imagining things?
Second beer half empty.

00:15:23:42
So right now we are visiting a gay wedding and with gay wedding I mean the most stereotypical flamboyant gaylords, because gays can’t be portrayed as normal people right?

00:18:40:30
Left room: people fucking
Right room: children screaming
Middle room: Carrie in the middle room… how symbolic, has anything happened yet?

00:22:some:thing
Feeling way too sober to watch this movie. Hypothetically… not that I am considering it, but IF (much emphasis placed on that if) I would in theory take a shot every time Carrie switches dresses… it might not end well. But of course I wouldn’t drink during any movie because I might miss what really makes this film… where’s the bottle?

00:38:19:09
O.k. if I am understanding this correctly then the main conflict in this movie is that her husband has bought a TV instead of giving her an immensely priced ring or something, now that’s a down to earth conflict we can relate to, if I ever marry I’ll remember this, oh damn she is even changing dresses when she’s at home.

00:42:or:mo:re
Dress change! Isn’t that great? We are together with 4 screaming not at all shallow “women” heading to Abu Dhabi and while not impressed by a TV a box of Pringles (registered Trademark) does the charm apparently. I guess this movie won’t turn into a commentary about the negative sides of endless consumerism and how other people are being exploited so that whoever they are meeting can afford 4 limousines to pick up Carrie and her faceless friends.

00:do:n’t:ca:re
Decided to take a shot only every second time she changes her dress or otherwise I’ll be unlikely to make it until the end. So basically I have already spent an hour with four devils who value their jewellery more than their children.
No seriously: cut out the wedding, if you start 40 minutes into the movie you won’t miss any information that is important for the so-called story, that’s almost New Moon standards.

01:30:or:so
If I weren’t that drunk I’d be really angry right now, seriously why would people watch this movie sober?

01……….
What are they doing?
Why are they doing what they are doing?
And why should I give a damn that they are not aroused by muscle-bound young men?

St:il:lu:nd:er:2h:ou:rs
What is the point of this movie? And I don’t mean that I am not satisfied with what I believe I’m seeing on the screen, I literally don’t understand what this movie attempts to do. All it does is make me want to punch those four preachy, spoiled, egocentric women for being the shallow caricatures they are – not sure if that’s the director’s intention.

Wa:yt:oo:lo:ng
Hey maybe this is some kind of bizarre surreal comedy about female stereotypes and I just don’t realise the clever satire, ah whatever, where’s my drink?

Al:mo:st:2h:ou:rs
Having faced the choice between actually watching this movie or risking a hospital stay I went with the latter and am now back to a shot every time Carrie changes her dress. Tell my family I love them.

Wa:y:ov:er:2h:ou:rs
Is that thing still on? Maybe I am imagining things but it seems like the producers tried to make commentary about different cultures which culminated in a sequence where I’m still not sure if it is more racist than it is shallow or the other way round.

The experiment ended shortly afterwards in a suicide attempt of the test subject. He is now slowly rehabilitating and is now again able to speak in full sentences. He has already volunteered for another field test: The Twilight Triple feature this Sunday.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

The History:
Nine, Ten… Never sleep again.
In 1984 director Wes Craven (Scream Trilogy, The Hills have Eyes, The Last House on the Left) unleashed Freddy Krueger onto the silver screen, a killer who would haunt the children of the title inspiring Elm Street in their dreams. And if you died in your dreams, you died in the real world.
Similar to Friday the 13th the horror movie spawned a load of sequels until the series ran it’s course with it’s sixth movie “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare”.
Surprisingly Wes Craven returned to direct a seventh part set in the real world where Freddy is just a horror icon. A narrative technique he would further expand in his later Scream movies. From a creative standpoint the seventh part is surprisingly bold and innovative and there would have been no better way to end the legacy of Freddy Krueger.
Did it end? Of course not!

We got a Friday the 13th / Nightmare on Elm Street crossover in the form of Freddy vs. Jason which was entertaining in terms of how ridiculous it was. Artistically there was no point in making a sequel and because Robert Englund (the original Freddy actor) didn’t want to return to the role it was just a matter of time until the remake wave (already manifested in movies like Friday the 13th or The Hills have Eyes) would reach Elm Street.
The Potential:
Remaking movies doesn’t automatically imply bad results (see The Departed, A fistful of dollars). And with the original Nightmare on Elm Street looking a tad dated and the near limitless possibilities for surreal dream sequences make Elm Street the only candidate that can profit from a remake. In the hands of a creative team the dreams are reflections of the inner struggles of our characters while still being connected to the master of nightmares: Freddy.
Also the concept of a dreamkiller is not something that gets dated over time, we all have nightmares so this concept will always be scary. Furthermore Academy Award nominee Jackie Earle Haley was cast as Freddy who recently was the exceptional standout in the overall lukewarm Watchmen adaption. And with Freddy it’s not like in the Friday the 13th series that it doesn’t matter who is playing the killer – Krueger has to be a charismatic actor which is the reason why until this movie Robert Englund played the role in every instalment. But with Haley there seemed to be the potential to live up to Englund’s performance.
Also Wes Craven toyed with the thought of making Freddy a paedophile in the original but the concept was deemed too uncomforting for it’s time, so the remake also had the opportunity to explore an unrealized idea of the original.

Moviequation:

What went wrong?
When watching the teaser and trailers for the movie the studio decided to put a public warning message into the trailer so that no one in their right minds would want to see this movie: From Producer Michael Bay.
Since we all know how about Michael Bay’s masterpieces (Transformers 2) or his artistically innovative and bold productions (Friday on 13th – booby town murderer returns) Nightmare being a disappointment is as unexpected as Shocklabyrinth 3D being a bad movie.
Still this movie underwhelms on so many levels it’s not even funny. Like with all our 80s horror remakes we have subpar acting while simultaneously being forced to watch same actors awkwardly re-quoting the original movies (oh I have nightmares…. There is a man… with knifes on his hand… never heard that before). Jackie Earle Haley isn’t bringing anything new to Freddy except repeating quotes from previous movies in a voice that’s somewhere between Rorschach and Robert Englund’s original killer.

So what about the story – or about the few things that survived the bay-saster…
Being a remake this movie apparently has not the advantage of being a new idea. And counting on an uninitiated audience who has never seen the original is a business choice for a quick buck but of course as artistically interesting as Alice in Wonderland. The story is basically the same and while the original had the advantage of being in the prime of slasher movies nowadays those stereotypes are even more uninteresting than back in its days. Yet Heather Langenkamp and Johnny Depp were both charismatic actors – something the main character Nancy (named of course like Langenkamp’s role) is lacking.
Furthermore the aforementioned paedophile storyline is doing the movie more harm than good because it is not used as a clever psychological threat but just as a cheap shock gimmick. The ultimate shortcoming of this remake yet lies in it’s most interesting premise: the dreams. Instead of telling us about the characters and their fears (but to be honest the characters are so bland that they probably don’t provide many interesting dreams) they are just dirty variations of stuff we see in everyday life like a dirty school room.

Imitation – devoid of any emotions

Freddy’s infamous boiler room makes an appearance but without it’s backstory from the original it just becomes another set piece as cold and emotionless as the rest of this production.
Every time the movie tries to “pay homage (or rip off)” the original movie it seems as if the producers never understood the original in the first place. As an example, there’s a scene where Nancy is falling asleep in her bed and we see the shape of Freddy descending down to her.
In the original we had a large section of dark space above Nancy when suddenly the shape of a man is seen slowly reaching down to her… yet he disappears as soon as Nancy wakes up. The scene is not overdone or anything, it’s just a short appearance to hint at a this menace that might strike at any time – and it’s all in one shot.
The remake takes similar elements but decides that it is way creepier to show Freddy from about 3 different angles in bright light. Also it is much more menacing if we see Freddy like a bad special effect that is forming “menacing” expressions.

So what about the new elements?
When it’s not failing in stealing elements from the original what does the movie do with the new ideas? Truth be told… not very much. When I watched the aforementioned paedophile angle being realized on screen it made me appreciate why it wasn’t done in the first place. Not only are Freddy’s motives shrouded in something that pretends to be a mystery, but he works better when we are not sure where his evil comes from – similar to Silence of the Lambs not knowing the exact reasons for why the antagonist is the way he is makes him 1) scarier and 2) more interesting.
Since this movie is not keen on doing anything new there is only one other addition: micro-naps. This concept is another attempt at sacrificing suspension for the cheap scares the producers think we want. Micro-naps occur when someone hasn’t slept in a long time and now he is experiencing seconds of wake-dreams. Now this could have been a nice addition, but like I said before it is just there to “shock” us – oh no, Freddy is standing on the street!
Why would we want to see characters desperately trying not to fall asleep, knowing that no matter what they do, eventually they will fall asleep – isn’t it much more interesting if we get constant Freddyflashes everywhere we go?

So what do we have?

• horrendous acting
• uninspired and rehashed story
• elements from the original sloppily “reimagined”
• additions that further reduce the quality instead of enhancing it
• 32 million dollar opening weekend
• Sequel in 3d

This movie has been critic-proof from the beginning and everyone knew it. Financially it is currently the second highest grossing Nightmare on Elm Street movie because of nostalgia and brand-power and just to give a very motivating comparison: Domestically it has grossed 13 million dollar more than Kick-Ass just because it preyed on our nostalgia and the never dry running “slash ‘em up” genre that we will watch no matter how dumb and uninspired it is.
If you haven’t seen this movie, don’t watch it, if you are a hardcore Elm Street fan rent it on DVD or anything, it is not a worthy remake and I’d even go as far as saying that “Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge” and “Freddy’s dead: The final nightmare” are better movie than this disaster.

Rating
Category: 1
Score: 15%