I recently renewed my Netflix account after having it on hold for a number of months, and have thus watched a fair number of movies in the past few weeks. A few thoughts on each:
Night of the Living Dead
The game Left 4 Dead was actually the reason I watched this movie; I bought the game a few months ago, and it sparked my interest in zombie-stuff. I figured watching one of the classic zombie films would be a Good Thing.
I was rather let down by it, really. There were a few scenes that were shockers (such as when the zombies are shown eating body parts), but overall, I was mostly bored by it. There just wasn’t much suspense. The zombies looked bored, not bloodthirsty, and their super-slow movements made it seem as if the heroes could easily take out all of them with baseball bats and crowbars.
It didn’t help that I was actually wanting half of the survivors to not make it. The blonde woman particularly got on my nerves; I realize they were trying to portray her fear and panic, but after a while, I felt like the other folks should have been throwing her out the door. The guy who was holed up in the basement and was trying to boss everyone around also deserved to be tossed to the horde.
Favorite line from the movie, coming from the sheriff on a news broadcast: “They’re dead, they’re all messed up.”
28 Weeks Later
Again, I watched this one mostly because I’ve been playing Left 4 Dead. I did however see the original movie, 28 Days Later, and liked it a lot.
While I enjoyed the sequel, I didn’t think it was as good as the first one. Perhaps I’ve simply forgotten, but I don’t remember the infected from 28 Days Later regularly throwing up blood in the faces of their victims. They did this constantly in this movie, and after once or twice, it basically came across for what it really is: hey, look, a way to get more blood and gore into the scene, wow!
It’s also not clear what function it has. I felt that it was implied that some of the infected were eating victims, but it’s also pretty clear that the infected don’t attack / eat one another (for whatever reason). To go out of one’s way to infect victims by spewing blood at them seems rather counterproductive.
Then again, it’s a zombie flick, and I’m overthinking things. For a zombie flick, it was decent.
The Hunt for Red October
Not a whole lot to say about this one. I quite enjoyed it, and smiled a lot at the fact that a Lithuanian, Russian-speaking skipper (Sean Connery) had a thick Scottish accent. I wonder, has any director ever asked him to lose the accent for a role?
Star Trek
I’ve never been much of a trekkie, but I figured I would give this a go. It was a fun two hours, but… wow, it had problems.
Black holes do not equal time travel. You don’t sky dive onto a planet from space. What is red matter, exactly, and why does it make black holes? If it just takes one drop, why do you need 50 gallons of the stuff? If a black hole has just formed in the middle of a ship, why in the world would you feel the need to zap it with photons? Wait, did Nimoy just say that a supernova threatened to destroy the galaxy? Also, did I mention that black holes do not equal time travel?
Okay, so perhaps I was bothered by a lot more in Star Trek than I initially thought. I can think of more things that irked me, but I’ll leave it at that. Hey, at least William Shatner wasn’t in it…