Before I delve into the bulk of this review, i find it incumbent upon myself to establish the fact that half of the Cloverfield story is embedded within the complex, 7 month-long viral marketing framework that was crafted as a hype-generation platform preluding the film’s debut. Since this so-called “Pre-Cloverfield Phenomenon” is essentially quite ancillary to the actual content of the movie, I won’t be extrapolating within this writing; but I have already done that in full in an article posted two months ago. You can find that here, it would be advisable to read that first, as it serves as an adequate backdrop for the whole Cloverfield project. In any case, on to the review.

Its an often proliferated saying that one should always enter the movie theater with a sense of pre-established low expectations, ergo no matter how mediocre or outrightly abhorable a film is, you won’t be disappointed since the benchmarks were already delineated to quite low standards. I usually exercise this preliminary psychological mantra, the last time I was truly anticipating a magnum opus before I had seen a movie was when the lights dimmed and the picture began five years ago, right before The Return of the King. But in that case I think it was well justified to retain a healthy reserve of excited hype, and my expectations, which were already quite high, were exceeded far beyond anything I could have imagined.

Yesterday I walked in to an opening day screening of Cloverfield, a movie I had no knowledge of a mere 8 months prior, a movie that wasn’t even in pre-production a year ago. And yet, to my gross folly, I had afforded it a relatively high preemptive appraisal. Having entrenched myself in the myriad of advertising devices and alternative reality games gravitating around this movie for the last half-year, I was intrigued to find out if the often meandering, superfluously “intricate”, somewhat annoying at times marketing ploys woudl pay off in the end with a grand fulmination masterfully interlaced with the prose of the film. All the hyper-realistic, conspiracy-laden “backstory” framed within the pre-Cloverfield campaign framework, compiled with J.J. Abrams forte for composing media saturated with rich, multi-faceted plotlines and deeply engrossing character archetypes and development, seemed like the ideal recipe for a superb movie.

But even in the midst of all this excitement and heated anticipation, not too far within the recesses of my mind I had the lingering sense that this entire enterprise was largely a facade, that this whole advertising campaign scheme was just too exaggerated and overtly silly at times to be non-duplicitious and that a lot of people were going to be delivered something completely unexpected and disappointing on January 18th. I should have paid higher regard to this intuition, as unfortunately it turned out to be quite right.

It appears that my latent skepticicism and suspicions proved too true. The meticulously engineered marketing campaign that served as an overture to opening day was merely a tool to envisage a false-portrait of reality, an incredibly clever concealment protocol designed with the sole intention of hyperbolizing and sensationalizing what Cloverfield’s far more uuninspiring and non-compelling premise actually was: a generic monster movie framed under a Blair Witch shaky-cam concept. The plot tapestry woven by all the Cloverfield propaganda machine, brimming with ruthless and shadowy corporate juggernauts, bio-research, violent rebel-outfits, and likewise, was completely in absentia from the movie.

What we got instead was a largely cliche-ridden and depthless teen-thriller flick without a trace of plot-composition ingenuity. In fact, at first I thought I had sat in at the wrong movie; the opening was just unforgivably atrocious. For 20 minutes we’re given host to the ghastly, almost literally sickening spectacle of some semi-retarded goon walking about a stereotypical New York young contemporary  ”Facebook-socialite” party, listening in on some of the stupidest and unbelievably non-genuine scripted dialogue I’ve ever heard in a non-comedic movie. It goes on and on, within the first 15 minutes we’ve been introduced to a whole cast of unappealing, uninteresting templatic characters and who they’ve slept with. The whole time I’m thinking, “ok, this is just an over-extended opening, its going to end any moment now, any minute now they’ll cut to the action, come on, any second now, just keep on enduring, it’ll pay off…”.

But no, it didn’t end any time soon, it went on for over a quarter of an hour. I just paid $8 to see what was purportedly the scariest and most innovative monster movie of all time, and isntead I’m subjected to what could have very well been the latest American Pie iteration. I don’t know what the hell they were thinking, was this Abrams’ miserable attempt to paly “hipster” and seem cool for all the teenage prats in the audience? Its noteworthy to point out that theres a line early on that pretty much quintessentially describes the characters at play in this film:

“Rob (the protagaonist), you’re a douchebag.”

Crude, but adequate. New York City is under the merciless onslaught of a gargantuan monstrocity, and we’re stuck tagging along with a group that’s for the most part made up of stock, transparent losers, attempting to sympathize with their precarious situation whilst enduring their at times extraordinarily idiotic conversations. Seriously now, couldn’t we have come up with a more swashbuckling, or at least serious entourage of heroes? Manhattan is on the brink of absolute annihilation, and we have to observe the escapades of emotionally-insecure 20-somethings?

There finally is a conceptual transition from a trainwreck romantic teen comedy to a monster thriller, but the story simply doesn’t cross over. By the end of the movie virtually all of the questions anyone wants answers in this sort of an affair (what exactly is the monster? where did it come from? what impelled it? was it ever truly destroyed?) were left completely unanswered. By the time the credits start rolling, you’ll know more about the sex-lives of the banal and by-the-book two-dimensional characters than you’ll know about the nature of the only character anyone gives a damn about, the monster. This, above all else, testifies to the absolute synoptical bankruptcy of this film, which is a serious betrayal on the production’s part to the legions of fans who had rightfully set their bars as high as Bad Robot had touted this picture.

Where Cloverfield does succeed is in the core intensity of the action. Abrams seemed it prudent to compensate really any semblance of a seriously-crafted storyline with adrenaline-pumped filmographic overdrive. This is a pretty exhilarating movie, and it boasts arguably the best FX in any film produced in this style; granted thats not saying that much, but put that aside for now. Some scenes are pretty shocking, and one generally won’t be bored whilst watching.

Analagously, Cloverfield is perfectly tantamount to a roller-coaster. Its bumpy, exciting and far too short. Its fun while it lasted, yet leaves people with a distinct sense of a lot to be desired, even motion-sickness. If taken at face value, as simply a cookie-cutter Holywood thriller with lots of bangs, explosions, blood and a big monster, coupled with stupid and artificially constructed characters, seasoned with ridiculously lame dialogue and a pathetically facile romantic plot device, you’ve got yourself an average action flick. Fork out the $8, watch it in the cinemas with your friends, have fun for the ride. Don’t expect much and don’t bother with the DVD.

It saddens me that the above paragraph is ultimately what my final verdict of this, a movie I had thought was going to be and am still convinced could have been much more. J.J. Abrams can be fully implicated in this regard, and I’m quite certain that the general consensus from the filmgoing community of overall dissatisfaction and disappointment over this project will be of serious detriment to his credibility. Let this be a lesson to all filmmakers: if you’re going to make just an average, unastonishing movie, have the damn sense to not disperse flagrantly false advertising, it’ll give you a Cloverfield-sized monster bite in the ass in the long run.

Score:

I know I may be sounding like a two-thousand year old Persian nationalist whilst writing this review of a movie-adaptation of Frank Miller’s infamous graphic novel depicting the derelict and by in large long-forgotten Batle of Thermopylae; and I know that might sound comically absurd….but I don’t care. Persia Forever. On to the review.

I must say like most nerds I was avidly anticipating this movie, even from the initial teaser trailers months ago the movie looked jaw-droppingly amazing, and make no mistake, this movie will make your senses surrender to almost orgasmic bliss.

Fantastic, gritty comic-book style animation, gore (lots and lots of gore) exhilirating soundtrack, and as an added bonus no mediocre voice-overs by pompous Hollywood arseholes eating at thefilm’s credibility or mood.

No intro monologue by Morgan Freeman either, thank god.

However, if your mind is adept enough to be on par with that of a 5th grade history student, you might just be reeling from nausea at times. But we’ll examine that later.

First, the positives, starting with the most glaringly apparent. The animation in this movie boasted the single most exemplary non-CGI production values I’ve ever seen. The character models were so expertly designed that they looked as if they were rotoscoped, the landscapes were eerily surreal and organic, a perfect reflection of reality with a dreamlike flavour. The world Zack Snyder has conceived here breathes, from every slight swaying of strands of hair, to the morbid spectacle of eviscerated limbs and flesh.

On that note, the film was almost entirely comprised of combat, and it didn’t disappoint at all. Any martial arts or otherwise fighting movie afficianado will be impressed by the legions of the Persian horde descending upon isolated Spartan soldiers and the ensuing swordfighting chaos, its a real popcorn movie.

The soundtrack can only be described as something like Mediterranean techno-rock, the kind of thing you might here in some trippin’ nightclub in Tehran or Tel Aviv (yes, such things do exist). Ambient soundscapes fused with modest metal riffs, fashioned with a distinctly exotic Indo-European vibe. Regardless what you want to call it though, the music is definitely really cool and perfectly accompanies the movie; I’d definitely buy the soundtrack for this movie if they ever made one.

Now its time for a little criticism, again beginning with the most obvious. This is an astonishingly cliched movie, theres nothing in the plot you’ve never seen before. Outnumbered vigilantes crusading for freedom against the forces of a monolithic tyrant. Heroes perish, memory lives on, etc. Epic lines like “We fight for freedom!” and “tonight we dine in Hell!” are scattered throughout, classic Braveheart and Hero-esque conventions that we’ve all seen before. Normally this would kill the movie, but in this case its acceptable because its just done so damn well. Its like 300 is how the epic war movie should be. Certainly it could have been a bit more innovative or daring with the writing style, but whatever, we’ll let it pass.

One rather interesting plot-device that definitely deserves mention though is this: I’m almost absolutely certain 300 was produced as an allegory of America’s current war on terror. Throughout there are lines of “freedom isn’t free”, “we must die for our freedoms if we must” “this threat isn’t our doing, they want to annihilate freedom” “we must combat the forces of intolerance and mysticism, freedom is stronger”. It isn’t over-analyzing to suggest Snyder’s political affiliations here; and don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad thing. I completely agree, I’m glad someone finally injected pro-American sentiments into a movie of this kind, almost entirely Hollywood-crapfests are anti-American propaganda hitjobs, and Snyder should be commended for seperating himself from the norm.

Really the one area of true criticism I have on 300 is its almost manic historical innaccuracy. This isn’t even nit-picking, this is just pointing out the blindingly obvious. First of all, the notion that Spartans had no slaves and were men of freedom is absolutely absurd. On the contrary, Spartans had many slaves, how do you think this “warrior nation” functioned? But you don’t hear about that in 300.

Furthermore, I must say I’m almost insulted by the depiction of the Persians as barbarian, literally demonic monsters. Xerxes is portrayed as some sort of 10 foot-tall Satanic tyrant, surrounded by horrible orc-like creatures called “immortals”, and operating only on the hard-labor of slaves. This is an outlandish perversion of history, the Persians were a highly-advanced, sophisistiacted, and I would argue benevolent empire. Sure they conquered other peoples, but what Snyder neglects to mention is that they were unique amongst other imperial powers in that they allowed the provinces they conquered to retain their culture and kingdom. No religious massacres, no intellectual impositions, all they did was improve their technology, infrastructure, and economies, assimilating them into the grand hegemony of Persian brotherhood.

Everyone agrees on this, even a Israeli scholar will concede that their now arch-enemy of Iran (who are of Persian lineage) liberated the Jews from Babylonian tyranny. So evading all this historical precedent and depicting Persians as vile warlords was intellectually dishonest in my opinion. As a matter of fact, if you wanted to see barbarians look no further than Sparta, the true warrior-tribe leeching off of slave labor. Anti-intellectualism and anti-democracy, one wonders if Snyder has ever heard of the Peloponesian War?

As a matter of fact, it has been archived in the history of America’s inception that one of Jefferson’s primary influences on composing the Constitution was Xenophanes’ treatise on the philosophy of Cyrus the Great. I would ask for an apology from Mr. Snyder, but I won’t; us Persians are modest that way.

And for the record, this whole tableau of “300 brave renegades warding untold legions to the death” is warped completely out of proportion. In reality it was actually 8,000 and they weren’t bravely standing off against anyone; they were hiding in a little crevice picking off the onslaught at a minimal rate, tactical cowardice at best. Once the Persians figured out how to circumvent this defense, they annihilated every last Spartan. Doesn’t sound so epic now does it?

But all in all, it was a movie. Snyder was trying to tell a good story, and so he did; most people won’t know the difference anyway. I just wish he had picked a more compatible context to weave this tale from, how about next time its the crusades eh? Portraying Arabs as the villainous anti-democratic Sharia fiends that they are?

Now that I wouldn’t mind.

Score:

There are three kinds of movies in this world:

a. Genuine works of art, either being truly awe-inspiring or exceptionally entertaniing, a byproduct of diligent work and storytelling, e.g. The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

b. Movies that make bold attempts at attaining landmark achievement status, undertaking respectable amounts of work and financing, but fail miserably, e.g. Alexander.

c. Low-budget B movies that don’t take themselves seriously and were never aiming for anything higher than an obscure direct-to-dvd release, or at best a lackluster theatrical run, e.g. Open Water.

Or at least, I thought these were the three tiers that all movies fell into. That is, untill I made the decision to go see Snakes on a Plane with some friends yesterday, a decision that has forever morphed my perception of movie anatomy. Yes, because I now see a fourth category:

d. Movies that have huge budgets, all-star casts, and are widely hyped, yet marketed as and are essentially B movies, e.g. Snakes on a Plane.

Yes, yes Snakes on a Plane. I must say I’ve been anticipating it since April, when an internet craze surrounding its release with a magnitude not seen since such classics as All Your Base erupted. Bogus audition tapes, music, fanmade trailers, blogs, all about Snakes on a Plane. And nearly every single one of these SoaP spoofs were painting the movie as something completely absurd and the worst thing to hit Hollywood in years. It was widely being ridiculed as a film devoid of plot, substance, entertainment, or any redeeming value whatsoever. All based on little more than a few soundclips from the movie (“I’ve had enough of these muthafucking snakes on this muthafucking plane!”).

In a way this was an unintended viral advertising campaign for the film, and undoubtedly created a massive aura of hype and a cult fanbase for the film, proving quite advantageous for the box-office.

However, all this hype, as alluded above, was generally in resounding mockery of the movie. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that most people watched it simply in sheer curiosity and astonishment, I mean, how good could a movie called “Snakes on a Plane” possibly be?

But as I was sitting through the previews, there was always a nagging thought in the back of my mind…this couldn’t possibly be as outrageous as all the hypewas suggesting. Maybe it wouldn’t be that insane of a movie after all? Maybe just some generic action movie with Samuel L. Jackson, nothing special, nothing outrageous, nothing to talk about.

And I was wrong. The hype was right. Snakes on a Plane was exactly what it was intending to be, a movie with membrane-thin plot depth, appalingly extreme and depraved action scenes, and a nonstop ride till the end.

And it rocked. In a juvenile, sick way.

Snakes doesn’t pull any punches, at all. Basically the entire film consits of huge, violent snakes wreaking havoc through a plane. The action scenes are extremely gory, with people being torn to pieces by the creatures, down to every bloody detail. Samuel L. Jackson plays his part well as the “badass muthafucka”, the only real hero in the movie who ultimately saves the day, not without a lot of casualties though.

But Snakes isn’t just an action movie, its also a comedy, albeit an exceedingly crude one. Perverse jokes are scattered throughout, among them a snake entering the area where a couple is having sex, chaos ensuing, and a snake biting off a guy’s penis.

It may not sound funny here, but you’ll laugh when watching the movie. Probably. Its supposed to be funny, ok?

The effects are all solid, the plane, snakes, and other assorted aspects are all very realistic, at one point Jackson breaks out a flamethrower and starts incinerating all the snakes in sight, the effects are pulled off without a hitch. Everything besides the actual premise of the movie is fully believable.

The acting is decent, nothing remarkable, just what you would come to expect from an action movie. The only real gripe I had with Jackson’s role was that he really didn’t do as much “ass-kicking” as I had hoped, most of the movie was just the snakes killing everything in sight, a lot of scenes didn’t even feature Jackson at all. In this way the movie grew a bit repetitive, but it was allright, there was a decent payoff in the final scene on the plane, which I don’t have the liberty to spoil.

All in all the movie is exactly what I had dreamt it would be, a chaotic romp completely absent of a coherent plot. It was incessantly violent and immature, but thats exactly what it was intending, a fun little action flick that didn’t take itself seriously. The aesthetics of a B movie gore-fest with the budget of a high-proflile Hollywood flick.

Sure, it could have been more innovative, it didn’t have to be as repetitive as it was, but whatever, who really cares? If you have an appetite for a rollercoaster of a movie, ride this one, its a real bitch.

Oh, and we finally learn the answer to the elusive question, “Why the hell did they call it Snakes on a Plane?”. And the answer is very simple. Because there was nothing else to call it, thats all that happened. The only other thing they could have named it was Pacific Flight 121, and what the hell kind of a name is that anyway?

Score:

Well, its a bit late, but hell here it is, my review of World Trade Center.

Going into the film, I wasn’t expecting much, to be quite frank. United 93 was a complete joke, a boring, soulless, unmoving, and unentertaining piece of garbage with a bizarre pro al-Qaida twist at the end. A laughable attempt to pay homage to the poor souls that perished on 9/11, and a pathetic way to reap profits off of the emotions of a society still haunted with the nearly fresh memories of the attacks.

Thankfully, I can say World Trade Center was not a carbon copy of United 93.

Unfortunately, I can’t say World Trade Center was a very good movie either in its own right. As a matter of fact, although it was certainly a more noble attempt that United 93, by the end it came off as little more than Ladder 49 II: Escape from World Trade Center. And that isn’t a compliment by any stretch of the word.

Lets begin with the production values of the movie. They were truly spectacular, everything looked very real, tangible a great recreation of the event, the music was fitting, the effects were great, the horror of 9/11 was painted into every set and flowed flawlessly, Oliver Stone has never been one to shy away from an epic scale, and this movie is no different, the movie breathed 9/11.

Now the real soul of a film like this, the acting. Nicholas Cage has always been one of my most admired actors, and sure enough he dazzled again, his scenes were the most moving and genuine sounding in the entire film, bar none. But Michael Pena’s performance is not to be overlooked, also quite stunning and commendable.

However, beyond these two frontmen, the acting ranged from average to downright mediocre, particularly some of the scenes with the kids and the wives, it was almost obnoxiously fake and cliched. There would be scenes of people walking aimlessly into drug stores for no reason, then walking back out, getting out of the car, going back in, as if to emulate anxiety. Give me a break.

Again returning to the analogy of Ladder 49, a very similar movie in many respects, the movie was very, very cliched, and even religious at times. Hallucinations of Jesus telling them to escape, shots of the Cross inspiring people to go help, etc. Whatever happened on 9/11, it wasn’t as black and white as the movie made it seem.

Stone is a guy with the heart in the right place. This wasn’t a film produced to ignite anger, or to support the wars abroad. At the end of the film, a marine says “we need to avenge this.” Stone is a critic of the Bush administration, he, like all true patriots, wants the people behind 9/11 brought to justice, he doesn’t want the brave people who risked their lives used as a pretext for completely unrelated wars. He made this film as a testament to the remarkable bravery of mankind that was revealed on 9/11.

However, as Hollywood usually does, it missed the mark. Besides the lead actors, most everything else was unexceptional, and the film was marred by cliches and religious connotations. Moreover, I sincerely hope that movies like this won’t revitalize that “blind patriotic support” that emerged in the years directly succeding 9/11. As people were sobbing in the theater, I thought that events like this were just happening in Lebanon, unnoticed by most Americans.

Human bravery. That is the real message of World Trade Center, if nothing else, remember that. Many people around the world are demonstrating extraordinary bravery everyday, this was a noble attempt, but Hollywood can never truly illustrate that.

Score: