Welcome to the Jungle

Welcome to the Jungle

I just reviewed a film where the hand held camera works really well creating an atmosphere and this film tries to do the same thing (as Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield) only while failing miserably, at best.  The only good thing about this film would have been if they has Guns ‘n’ Roses version of Welcome to the Jungle, but that might have ruined that song for ever.

The story has a little promise when it starts out, or more likely when you read the back of the case.  A group of young adults head into the jungles of New Guinea in search of Michael Rockefeller (a real Rockefeller) who went missing in New Guinea in 1961 where he was presumed dead, but never proven.  The story is based on the legends that have come out of the area that he didn’t actually die but instead was living with the indigenous people and people have claimed to see him from time to time.  The group of young adults leave to try and find him after one of the alleged sightings.  That is all that is good about the story.  It just becomes insanely bad with a bunch of bitching and whining by the characters and them doing lots of stupid things.  And that is before getting to the dialog which is among the worst that I’ve ever heard.  Imagine the semi-scripted MTV reality shows and how bad that dialog is, and then imagine something five or six times worse.  Literally, twenty seconds into the film I was waiting for the end when I knew all the characters would die, which they did thankfully.  If you insist in watching this film, I recommend the first twenty seconds, so you get proper hatred for the characters, and then the last two minutes when the last couple of characters are killed.  That is all that you need to see to enjoy the film.

The acting is simply atrocious.  Of all the main characters, I can’t come up with a single one that even does a decent job.  They over act all the time and while the dialog doesn’t help at all in giving them anything to act with, it wouldn’t have mattered if Charlie Kaufman, screenwriter of Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, had written it, the acting is simply that bad.  I have a very good reason for hoping that all the main characters would die.

The direction is terrible as well.  Jonathan Hensleigh, who did direct a somewhat underrated film in The Punisher, probably shouldn’t be allowed to direct again after this travesty.  Visually this film is just annoying.  They try and give it more of a real feel by using the hand held camera, but it is a film, and even when you want it to look real, it has to have some merit, which this film has none.  It is just nauseatingly bad.  And not because it shakes so much, it just doesn’t help the story at all shooting it this way.

When you hope that the characters die, you know the film is bad.  Some films can be so bad that they are great, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus or Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, but this one is simply bad with no laughably redeemable qualities.  I’d never suggest you watch this film and don’t even recommend it to your enemies, this is a punishment that no one should have to sit through.

Entertainment Grade: F

Critical Grade: F

Overall Grade: F

Cloverfield

Cloverfield

*IF YOU HAVEN”T SEEN IT YET AND WANT TO, DON’T READ THIS OR ANY REVIEW, GO, RENT, WATCH, THEN READ THIS*

An interesting film, not great in and of itself, but brilliant in how it was marketed and created.  J.J. Abrams, creator of Lost and Fringe, does an amazing job with this film by keeping it a complete secret and dominating the viral marketing scene unlike any other film in history.  This film has historical value, not for anything in the film, but the insane amount of buzz that was generated for this film.

The story is a pretty simple story.  A monster comes out of the sky, we think, and attacks New York City and wreaks havoc on the city.  There is a group of good looking teens who instead of trying to escape try and work their way back into the city to rescue on of their friends.  The story of this film is told in the style of a Blair Witch Project with a hand held camera.  It might seem like a fairly typical creature feature, but because of the buzz and a few tweaks in the story structure this film had so much more hype going into it.  They didn’t develop the back story like you see in most creature features.  There is no history of the creature, there is no planning of how to stop the creature, there is only a little interaction with the military.

Visually the Blair Witch Project style of shooting really works.  The point of using that type of shooting is to show exactly what and how the characters are seeing what is going on.  And this helps build the intensity of the film.  It works with the fact that the audience, when the film came out, didn’t know much more about the film then that it was going to be a creature feature.  So we gain the knowledge at the same speed as the characters in the film and only get bits of pieces of information.  This also helps draw the audience into the film and into the emotions of the characters.  There is only one notable break from this style of shooting, which isn’t supposed to be intentional.  Towards the end when they meet up with the military and the creature comes to crush a military vehicle it is a perfectly still pan, which isn’t really all that possible normally, and in the moment that it is supposed to be showing would be completely impossible.  However, the rest of the filming works wonderfully with the emotion and the story.  The director, Matt Reeves, does a great job with consistency throughout the film visually, though.

The acting is average at best.  Abrams went out of his way to pick relative unknowns to that point, which he also had to do because when they were casting for the film, they didn’t even reveal the whole story and how it was going to work to the talent that they brought in.  In terms of names in the cast, Lizzy Caplan is the notable name with some acting before, mostly on TV for Freaks and Geeks prior to Cloverfield and True Blood after.  The other main characters really had little notable performances prior to this film, and most have stayed relatively unknown simply because the performances are so over shadowed by the experience in this film that you get visually.

When it comes down to it, the acting isn’t all that great and the story isn’t all that impressive, but the experience that is created is simply stunning.  When this film came out in theaters there was a roar of anticipation that I’ve never seen for any film and no film has even bothered trying to duplicate the viral noise that this film had.  When watching this you have to simply let yourself get sucked into what is happening.  If you haven’t watched it, don’t read this review and don’t look up the plot, just go into this film and enjoy the experience.

Entertainment Grade: B+

Critical Grade: C

Overall Grade: B