Daniel's Blog

The cinematography was annoying—blurry, weird angles, bad color (no red apart from fruity volcano and workout stock footage) poor film quality all combined to make it very difficult to even tell what was going on. I guess this is part of the point, but I didn’t care for the low-end MTV format at all.

The plot was interesting, if sort of hard to get a grip on. The main character can’t remember much of his past, and then his kid get kidnapped, and then weird mechanical things happen. The story is entertaining, but even the moments of frank elucidation on the part of the arch villain didn’t really reconcile all of the weird threads. This movie was made to be pretty first, and make sense second.

The special effects were quite good, probably seeming better than they were due to the overall poorness of film quality. It’s hard to tell what technique someone is using for a particular effect when it’s hard to tell what effect is going on.

I found the music enjoyable, but as seems to be the norm nowadays, the quiet moments were far too quiet, and the loud moments were pretty damn loud.

Visually, there were many moments I definitely could have lived without seeing (killing a dog, gun/sex play). They will probably stick out in my mind for some time, and I guess the director gets points for making me queasy (it is a horror movie, after all).

I’m having a difficult time putting a rating on it, because it was pretty effective, but at the same time I’m not sure I’m going to want to see it again. Not wanting to see a movie twice generally reduces the score (for example, American History X is a good film, but I don’t recommend it because I don’t want to ever see it again). Hmm.

If you really want to see weird special effects of people having guns and such crawl out of their skin (which I did), you should see it at least once. If you want to see something that will leave you with a generally weird feeling, you should probably see it. Otherwise, you should probably pass on it.