It is the job of the (oddly vindictive and gleefully zealous for purely logical folk) Grammaton Clerics to discover and root out those who refuse to medically suppress emotion. One can only assume that they do not get a lot of practice, as Bale, being a Cleric himself is surrounded by them daily, expressing like a man on fire. You can sort of see the problem they had here: "How do we portray convincing conflict between characters when none of them have emotions?", the films makers no doubt said to themselves. "Lets just pretend they don't when they do" was apparently the response.
Quite aside from this problem, the premise isn't really used to say anything about the nature of emotion or humanity, it's just used as the stick the central authority uses on the populous, a crime for which they clearly must be punished. It's not very satisfying sci fi. It's not especially strong action either. While the fictional "Gun Kata" martial art was an interesting (if silly) idea, and there are several good sequences (that inevitably compare unfavourably to The Matrix), it's all ever so slightly too stylised, the precision of the Kata making it all cold and mechanical and heartless.
I get the distinct impression that it is a film attempting to serve two masters and neither can be especially happy with the service. It's a sloppy but curious action film and by Hollywood standards a reasonable attempt at fairly high concept science fiction. It's just unfortunate that that's such a low bar.
Oh you're too mean Ziggy.
ReplyDeleteIt's a fun film and I loved the fight sequences. Yes this is all about style over content.. the premise is there as nothing more than to provide a narrative over which there can be some decent fighting and nice swordplay and bullet-time style effects.
For that i loved it in exactly the same way I loved the matrix. I care little for the plot itself.. but rather I just want to see some great action. It's for those that like to watch kung-fu movies.. we're not there to see a 'plot' we're there to see super-cool people kicking ass.. and ESPECIALLY kicking 'the mans' ass.
Well, you see, The Matrix annoys me in a similar way. Not to the same extent though, because it spends less time pretending it's straight science fiction and gets quickly to the business of swanning about in black and punching dudes.
ReplyDeleteAn awful lot of this film is devoted to exploring strong ideas in fairly clumsy ways. Certainly if you ignore them there's a thin but watchable action movie there, but I just saw it as failed potential.
And yes, mean is my default position!