This is one of the movies where the idea sounds great but everything else fall below satisfactory. Where TOTAL RECALL's acting was decent, JOHNNY MNEMONIC's was too much to slide by. Keanu Reeves needed to do a lot of movies like this to make his acting satisfactory in THE MATRIX (coming soon).
In a world where corporations are the rulers of the world, and a brain disorder (NAS) infects most of the world, JOHNNY MNEMONIC is about a hacker who had a hard drive implanted in his brain but has a secret file, the cure to NAS, that was too much for his brain to take. Soon everyone is after what is in his brain, the corporation Pharmakon, and the rebels, the Loteks.
This cybernetic underground world states how we sacrifice our humanity to be a part of technology. And that corporation believes in this motto: "What is right isn't as important as what is profitable". In fact so do people.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Monday, March 5, 2007
Total Recall
In Total Recall Quaid decides to have a memory implant about being a secret agent on Mars. But then Quaid goes berserk and the implant wasn't installed yet. Then when Quaid wakes, everything changes, his whole life was fake, and apparently he was told by himself (you'll see) to go to Mars to find rebel Kuato.
A Schwarzenegger film, first thing I thought was that it will be a cheap action flick. And in many ways it was (Arnold's acting, a chick with three breasts, and a midget firing a machine gun on a bar table). But surprisingly all that was held up with a very intriguing story. A story that leads the question not just to Quaid (Arnold) but to the audience as well, was it all just a dream? The memory implant is seen as a virtual reality, or maybe even an artificial reality that can screw up the mind wondering what is real. Like Mark Dery said, in comparison to the Internet, people are staring a computer screen but feel like they are somewhere else.
The best thing about this movie is that the audience is fooled as well. It brings up all sorts of questions like, was the berserk scene all part of the dream? There seems to be a clue to that when the final second of the movie showed a dissolve to a white screen, symbolizing maybe the ending of a dream.
This movie certainly surprised me, an action flick that still has the visual effects and gun violence and explosions, yet it is balanced nicely with a story that makes the audience think hard. They really don't make movies that these days. Maybe I should writing a script like this, see what happens.
A Schwarzenegger film, first thing I thought was that it will be a cheap action flick. And in many ways it was (Arnold's acting, a chick with three breasts, and a midget firing a machine gun on a bar table). But surprisingly all that was held up with a very intriguing story. A story that leads the question not just to Quaid (Arnold) but to the audience as well, was it all just a dream? The memory implant is seen as a virtual reality, or maybe even an artificial reality that can screw up the mind wondering what is real. Like Mark Dery said, in comparison to the Internet, people are staring a computer screen but feel like they are somewhere else.
The best thing about this movie is that the audience is fooled as well. It brings up all sorts of questions like, was the berserk scene all part of the dream? There seems to be a clue to that when the final second of the movie showed a dissolve to a white screen, symbolizing maybe the ending of a dream.
This movie certainly surprised me, an action flick that still has the visual effects and gun violence and explosions, yet it is balanced nicely with a story that makes the audience think hard. They really don't make movies that these days. Maybe I should writing a script like this, see what happens.
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