Author: Morgan Avery

Will Smith is the titular character in this most recent superhero movie – a superhero movie that, just for once, doesn’t come from those over-rated fucks at DC or Marvel.

We seem to have had super hero movies coming out of our ears lately.  I’m wondering if it has something to do with the War on Freedom Sanity Terror?  With the mouth-breathing public subconsciously wanting a magical super being to come and take the scary-boo-boo away.

Well I’ve got bad news for you, the scary-boo-boo isn’t a dude sitting in a cave somewhere, the scary-boo-boo is Corporate Interests who print money using your fear for ink – they have no reason to take away your fear, because your fear stinks of profit to these fuckers, whether it’s re-election, or selling advertisers your eyeballs, or big guns to large militaries (the kind of military that is completely unsuited to fighting a small highly mobile “enemy” that doesn’t even fucking exist except in the very rarest of instances).

Sorry, got a bit sidetracked there.  Awkward.

Ok, so Will Smith.  Superhero.  Movie.

Hancock isn’t like other heroes. Sure, he has some pretty familiar Incredible Powers, and is generally a good guy, but after years of being taken completely for granted – and reviled when he isn’t as… careful… as he could be – he’s now a terribly lonely alcoholic misanthrope, who only flies in to save the day when he’s shaken to consciousness from his alcoholic stupor on whatever park bench he fell asleep on most recently. (The thing about being utterly impervious to harm is that you probably don’t give a shit about the state of your diet or accommodation.  Or that the bad guys have guns.  Or that you shouldn’t fly through things in your way rather than around them.)

Regardless of the boozing, Hancock is a hero, he kicks arse and saves lives.  Unfortunately a lot of people aren’t able to look past the destroyed freeways and derailed freight trains.  Oops.

I can’t go much further here with verging into spoiler territory, as the film takes a turn in the middle – after which some critics say it turns into a stinker, but I say it really hits its stride, and gives you the bonus of, more-or-less two movies for the price of one.

Suffice to say that Hancock’s vulnerability (unbeknownst to him as it is) turns out to be far more heartbreaking than kryptonite could ever be.

This is one of the best superhero movies I’ve ever seen, right behind the likes of Iron Man and Batman Begins (better than Batman Begins in some ways, partly because Hancock doesn’t have Ra’s Al Ghul), and the film’s lack of popularity with the critics doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me.

If you haven’t already seen it, I urge you to get down to your local theatre and check it out before it’s too late.

Sequel to classic hacker movie War Games (1983) – Matthew Broderick’s first big movie.  (If you haven’t seen The Road to Wellville (1994) you should, it’s probably his best movie.  I don’t know why IMDB hates it so much – but then I haven’t seen it for 10 years or more.)

This time up, instead of JOSHUA (an AI) controlling 1983 America’s nuclear arsenal, we have RIPLEY (an AI) in control of 2008 America’s computer & utility networks (and some well armed unmanned aerial vehicles, for good measure).  RIPLEY is tasked with hunting down and killing terrorists, without the shackles of human interference.

What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, the way RIPLEY finds terrorists is by hosting an internet gaming site, it turns out that if you’re good at some crappy computer game, you’re probably a terrorist.  Do too well and the AI sends in the dogs.

What could possibly… Wait. What?

It turns out that ‘who is good at computer games’ is surprise, surprise, ‘some clean cut white American teenager (Matt Lanter, doing a pretty good job, all things considered), who loves his mum, and runs errands for his elderly neighbour, and has a hot girlfriend (the completely adorable Amanda Walsh), who also happens to be a hacker geek who makes cantennas and cellphone interceptors for a hobby’, that’s who.

I’m more annoyed when movies have potential, and completely fail to live up to it, and this movie does.  There are opportunities to give the Fear Industry a good kick in the ribs, and the movie does seem to hint at taking advantage of them, before devolving back into a completely ludicrous stinkfest where you DDOS the most powerful AI in the world by getting all of your friends to log into it and challenge it to computer games…

What could possibly… Ahhh, fuck it.  Fuck this fucking movie.

The actors are all just fine, the problems with this movie are everything else.

Whoever is responsible (Art Director?) for deciding that RIPLEY should look like a handful of exposed motherboards in a glass walled room, with dangly bits of ribbon cable, strobe lights and cold cathode tubes, should be shot in the reproductive organs.  With a gun.  A big one.

If you want to see how menacing an AI-gone-bad in a movie with a colon in the title should look, see 2001 : A Space Odyssey (1968).  Did HAL have dangly bits of ribbon and nightclub style strobe lights?  No, he had an unblinking one-eyed gaze, his face a simple rectangle adorned with little more than enigmatic inscrutability.  (I bring HAL up for a variety of reasons, one is that they referenced/ripped-off the lip reading scene in this movie.)

Don’t see The Dead Code, it suuuuuuuuuucks. (The movie, you see, is what went wrong.)

I guess I first read Prince Caspian when I was about 9 or 10, and far too young to read the subtext.  But of course later on I realised, and the movie is swimming in the same brand of thick & syrupy propaganda.

You already know the story, a whiny little shit (the heir to the throne) is targeted for death by his evil prick uncle (next in line, and newly become a father), and makes his escape, quickly stumbling onto the fact that myths & legends are true, and the land they’re in is full of magical beasties.  The kids from TLTWATW are called back to Narnia, and things go from there.

The CG is really good – the trees are far more realistic than the Ent’s in Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy, and the small animals all move incredibly well…  The smaller cats and dogs in particular are wonderfully executed.  Whoever did them should be brought onto the team for the Hulk sequels, because they’re waaaaay better at nailing realism than whatever cackhanded arsehole is currently doing it.

The boys are all fucking morons (actually, all of the humans are morons, either vicious nasty scum, or vacuous simpletons), the animals are all awesome.

It’s just too bad about the religious propaganda being forced into the story with all the subtlety of a Jarvis HBD-1 Bung Dropper, because it would do a great deal better without it – or with it, but included more sympathetically to the rest of the story.

Remember, way back in like 1995 or 1996 when the totality of mainstream media coverage of “The Internet” was pretty much that it was for bomb making recipes and pedos?  Well that really seems like forever ago now, particularly given that they’ve all embraced what we already knew was a great thing, so things are pretty much as they should be.

(The next battle is “them” trying, increasingly desperately, to take it over from us.  But they’ll fail in the end – because they’re stupid and greedy and closed minded, and we’re smart and greedy and free.  Their greed is for money, ours is for information – and information wants to be free on The Great Big Planetary Copying Machine that we all take such delight in plugging our brains into every day.)

So to have a movie like Untraceable come out, in two thousand and fucking eight, all about the dangers of the Evil Immoral Internet…  It just seems like some sort of bizarre, anachronistic joke.

Evil Genius sets up an untraceable video stream, plumps a victim down in front of the camera, and sets the pace of their death to the number of viewers of the stream – more people watching means faster murder.  So of course the stream goes crazy.  It’s grim as hell.  And utterly ridiculous.  But I tolerate these things for the sake of movies.

But what I don’t necessarily tolerate is dialog in my movies that is serving the interests of the corporate owners of the movie producer.  For instance there’s an interaction at one point, completely out of left field, about network neutrality, and how the killer is in favour of it – because obviously only insane killers want the free, open, level playing field that made the internet the incredible outlet of artistic & technical innovation (and kitten photos) that it is.

This is just dropped into a scene, for no obvious reason.

Not long before that, there’s a brief discussion of a file sharing site  – but if you download the free music, you’ll be infected with a backdoor that steals your bank records and passwords.  Oh, obviously.  That must be why no one downloads TV, movies, or music online – because they’re all instantly pwned by The Evil Blackhats.  Or, millions of people do in fact download exactly such things every single day with only the very occasional piss-weak little virus to be seen, and this is all just complete scaremongering bullshit.

Occams razor comes to our rescue once again.

All of which leads me to believe that the whole damn movie is a nasty stinking piece of vile PR oozed from the backroom of a smokey private club, produced as part of the marketing campaign for a cabal of Big Media Companies, probably written by people who usually provide spin and damage control for the RIAA and MPAA, when they sue solo mothers, crippled children, and laser printers.  (I’m not kidding about that last one, these fucking tools served notice on a laser printer for downloading music.)

Some of the performances are ok, but I just cannot tolerate this kind of bald-faced, anti-individual freedom, pro-Corporate… rhetoric.

(The pro-corporate stuff is only present “between the lines”, the other side of it isn’t nearly as subtle though – it’s a simple rhetorical device, find something that everyone can agree is bad, i.e. torturing a kitten to death, and then pretend that you need to take away everyone’s freedom to vote or fly in an aeroplane, or more kittens will be killed.)

Please, just let this movie, and any others that follow it, die.