To be honest, I have watched lots of zombie movies. I love some and I loathe some. This movie directed by Marc Forster and starring Brad Pitt, who also owns the movie production company Plan B Entertainment, is one that I happened to love very much because of the fantastic original storyline and pacing. By the way, Matthew Fox had only a split second cameo as the pilot of a helicopter, if I didn't see wrongly.
Compared to the "Man of Steel" which is almost of the same length in terms of duration, this movie has a very good pace and sets the tone for the audience to grip their seats in suspense. There were quiet moments and there were high-strung ones. It was a good mix of both so the audience have time to feel the highs and lows. On the other hand, the former superhero movie was kind of slow in the first hour before plunging full length into a series of action packed sequences involving the complete decimation of the city. It was a blurry mess that made me insensitized to the fight and wondered when the battle would end.
The zombies in this movie were really scary and it only took about a mere 15 seconds to transform a normal human who was bitten and infected into a zombie. Someone who was a kin could potentially turned into a living dead with nary a recognition of their loved ones, as witnessed by many such scenes in the movie. The zombies attacked the living with a vengeance and ferocity like no other. They studied the behaviour of animals and applied what they learnt into the movie with many zombies possessing incredible speed and lunging towards their prey. When there was no sound, these zombies became inactive. However, any loud enough sounds would trigger their immediate response to attack. Even a solid wall at least 20 m high at a refugee camp in Jerusalem could not stop the zombies as they clamoured and climbed onto each other before scaling over the high wall and created havoc by transforming a safe haven that protected the survivors from the infected into a living hell.
Brad Pitt delivered a credible performance as a former United Nations personnel Gerry Lane who was forced, in order to ensure the safety of his family, to escort a virologist to find the source of the infection in order to develop a vaccine but eventually became the hero who found the "cure" to protect humanity against the infected zombies.
I was definitely entertained throughout the entire movie.
The much anticipated DC comics superhero movie "Man of Steel" produced by the Christopher Nolan of the well-known "Dark Knight Triology" did not live up to my expectations. It spent many years in its conception and casting before the movie was finally made. Heavily shrouded in secrecy and hyped to be a different and darker take as a departure from the earlier movie failure "Superman Returns", there were some hits and as many misses for this latest remake.
Starring Henry Cavill as the new leading man, Amy Adams as Lois Lane, and other actors such as Russell Crowe, Kevin Costner, this over two hour long movie was so packed in cation in the later part of the movie that it was a blurry mess for me. It was so deja vu watching the movie because the scenes of the city's mass destruction and alien space crafts resembled many recent action packed movies like "Transformers" or that involved alien invasions etc as the Man of Steel battled the evil Zod and his henchmen from Krypton.
The movie deliberately detracted from the comics and earlier movies in some ways in an attempt to inject some freshness into a superhero character that we all know too well and to create some mystery behind the Man of Steel. First of all, there was a radical change in the superhero's outfit to keep in time with the new age and gone was his embarrassing red underwear worn on the outside. They tried hard not to refer to the superhero as Superman and inferred that the famous S insignia was just a symbol of hope.
I have never seen a scruffy, bearded Superman but here he was looking more like the hairy Wolverine than the clean cut Superman that we all know of. The first hour of the movie was spent exploring how the troubled and confused young boy with superpowers tried to cope with his unusual and extraordinary abilities by hiding who he really was from everyone and subsequently was lost and ran from place to place after he failed to save his human father Jonathan Kent from a tornado. He only found his calling after he discovered a Kryptonian spaceship in the arctic, communicated with his birth father Jor-El through a hologram and learnt about his true identity and destiny.
I guess Henry Cavill fits the bill as the darker superhero with a lot of baggage but I am not used to his constant frown on his forehead. I did not like Amy Adams as Lois Lane and felt there was something missing about her. In my mind, Lois Lane is much more feisty than what was portrayed. In fact, I found her annoying as she was superhero's main distraction from saving the world. Never mind if many military men and civilians were killed, saving Lois seemed to be the order of the day when it came to the Man of Steel. Smooching was fine even though there was mass destruction and death around.
Unfortunately, I feel there was so much potential to this movie which was not tapped. For instance, they was a lot of inference to Lex Luthor with his name on buildings but there were no cameos of him or other superheroes like Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern etc from the Justice League, which was a formula that the Marvel Comics used to great success in the other superhero movies involving the Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and so on. There was also no suspense created in crafting a character in the movie as a possible upcoming superhero like Robin in the Dark Knight series.
I guess movie making is getting more and more difficult by the day. When the audience is used to see something in several movies, the formula loses its freshness and appeal. Unless the directors and producers come up with something new, movies with age old formulas become run of the mill and will soon descend into boredom.
Having said that, if they make a sequel, I will still catch it no matter how bad it is. A superhero will always be an extraordinary being with the limitless ability to do what the common lay person cannot do. That in itself, is the allure of a superhero movie.
Today's weather - sunny
I didn't have much high hopes of this movie but after watching it, I was pleasantly impressed. Directed by Christopher Nolan, this is the last of a 3-part trilogy on the DC comic superhero character Batman. The first two movies Batman Begins and The Dark Knight were released in 2005 and 2008 respectively.
Hemmed by a cast which included Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne and Batman, Michael Caine as the butler Alfred, Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon, as well as new characters Selina cum Cat Burglar played by Anne Hathaway, Bane by Tom Hardy, John by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, other cameos included Cillian Murphy and Morgan Freeman. I am happy that this new installment wasn't a disappointment in the making and it was worth the wait for four whole years before it came to the big screen.
I shan't dwell on the storyline but I am very glad that the movie-makers introduced new twists or surprises to an otherwise mundane plot. One of my favourite character actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt really came a long way since his days on the TV series "Third Rock from the Sun". As John Blake, the audience was treated to a surprise at the end when it hinted that he could be the new Robin, who is the other half of the well-known Batman-Robin pairing portrayed in the comics. Interestingly, in one of the scenes, Joseph's police uniform spotted the familiar initial GC on his sleeves, which I suppose stood for Gotham City. Anne provided a different girlish portrayal of the Cat Burglar, which was a fresh take that bore absolutely no resemblance to the classic Cat Woman played by Michelle Pfeiffer in the late 80s. Then there was Tom Hardy, whom I last remembered as one of the characters in the movie "Inception" of recent years. Just take a look at the photos below on how much he bulked up in a matter of months to play the role of Bane. Sadly, he was almost unrecognizable with the mask on this face and there was only one blink and you will missed it scene of his actual face in the entire movie. Such ballooning in body weight must have a toll on a person's health, I guess? What a sacrifice actors have to make!
And yes, I am looking forward to see the new movie "Man of Steel" on the most well-known DC comic superhero Superman in 2013, which is a year away, after watching the short trailer played before the movie started.
