Cutting to the chase.
- I have not seen the original, and all I know about it is that Arnold Schwarzenegger was there and the Colony was on Mars and not in Australia. (Still trying to figure out how that would work, but I also don’t care enough to try to figure it out.)
- Why do post-apocalyptic city scenes always involve people with paper-styled umbrellas? (I clarify, because they aren’t always actually made of paper, but they look like.)
- I spent a disproportionate amount of time during this movie thinking about my Mission Impossible action film alt-casting trick. Since this movie was guy-girl-girl and not guy-guy-girl like that one, I was trying to decide which of the women would appear alongside Dichen and Enver, and then I got it in my head that I should genderswap the lead of this film, so suddenly it was trying to decide which of the women would be there alongside Dichen and Amy Acker, and I think I settled on Janina Gavankar because why the hell not, she counts even if she was in half of one episode and I like her. So.
- I was told by the one of my people who was present that “you don’t go in expecting Total Shakespeare,” and I rolled my eyes. Why is it so unthinkable to expect an action movie to have interesting, decently developed characters? (As I explained it, evil is not a fully-drawn character. Evil is a character trait that cannot stand alone as a personality. Evil still needs motivation and additional traits surrounding it. Etcetera.) And yes, I love Shakespeare, but that kind of rationale is silly too.
- I also spent way too much of this movie trying to think of things it reminded me of, and the list is gigantically long, but aesthetically, the two biggest ones were The Fifth Element and Repo!, again because I haven’t seen the original. Both of which films are more interesting, both of which I like better, and the latter of which I’m listening to the soundtrack for as I write this because I’ve been thinking about it for three hours.
- Oh, and plot holes. There were many. Too much exposition can be dangerous (though I love it anyway) but not enough exposition just makes me twitch and sigh and facepalm.
–your fangirl heroine.
