BEFORE: Once again, my progress in decreasing the size of the Watchlist is stymied - and once again, the cause is Turner Classic Movies. They're doing this "Summer Under the Stars" promotion, where every day in August they feature only films starring a particular actor or actress, and that's bad news for my collection. I think that's how I got those extra Jane Fonda films a couple weeks ago. I'm more likely to DVR a film like "Roman Holiday" if there are other Audrey Hepburn films running that day, and I can quickly put that film on a DVD with another Hepburn film, like "Love in the Afternoon". The other day the featured star was Paul Newman, and I picked up "Harper" and "Somebody Up There Likes Me" - and this weekend they devoted a day to Ernest Borgnine, and I realized I don't have a copy of "Marty", which I've already seen, but since they're running it I might as well put it in the collection, and that puts a follow-up film like "The Catered Affair" on the list. So the list is stuck at 153 films, and it's been there for over a week - every night I cross one film off, and add another to the end.
Linking from "Elysium", Matt Damon was also in "The Legend of Bagger Vance" with Will Smith (last seen in "Hitch").
AFTER: For the third time this week, we pick up years after humanity has left the planet for another destination - either a moon of Jupiter, a satellite named Elysium, or tonight's desination, Nova Prime. If I remember correctly, we saw trailers for all three of these films last year when we went to the theater to see "Star Trek Into Darkness". So this was a hot trend last year, assuming that humans would eventually screw up the whole planet, and using this prediction as a jumping-off point.
But they didn't get everyone off the planet in "Elysium", just a select few. And it turned out they didn't get everyone off the planet in "Oblivion", either. So this is the only one of the three stories that assumed that such a thing is even possible, getting every world citizen off the planet in some Noah's Ark-type spaceship - and this story picks up about 1,000 years later, when the humans on Nova Prime are attacked by aliens who use blind vicious creatures called Ursas to hunt and kill humans, tracking them through their pheromones. Through a convoluted series of events, one member of the United Ranger Corps leads his final mission and it goes all kinds of wrong. His ship crash-lands on Earth, and he's injured and needs to rely on his son, who's close to washing out as a Ranger cadet, to find the other half of the wrecked ship and signal for help.
Supposedly, in the last millennium without humans on the planet, Earth has become more dangerous due to changes in the wildlife. I suppose this makes sense, because humans had always been the driving force in causing various species to become endangered in the first place - so without humans to kill and eat animals, it's become a whole new ball game. However, we've always been told that evolution takes place over incredibly long periods of time - so I wouldn't expect the biosphere to be all THAT different.
I'm going to get really nitpicky now - we're told that an "environmental cataclysm" is what forced the humans off the planet in the first place. But what exactly was that? And how come it didn't affect the animals, that seem to be doing just fine? And if humans could develop the technology to get everyone off the planet, why couldn't they develop other technology to fix the environment, or to just endure it better? Something's not adding up. Another problem that the humans encounter on Earth 2.0 is a low amount of oxygen, so they have to use breathing capsules - why doesn't this problem affect the animals either?
For that matter, what's the deal with this Nova Prime? Even if humans had lived there for 1,000 years, they still realize that they used to live on Earth, right? So these aliens they encounter - are they native to Nova Prime or do they come from someone else? Because if they've been on Nova Prime longer, they have more right to that world and the humans are the invaders, which makes me want to root for the aliens.
NITPICK POINT: Then we come to these Ursas, which are blind and track humans based on their fear pheromones - so if a human can remove all of the fear from his mind, then he'll be invisible to the Ursas. Why would the aliens breed these creatures with this weakness? Logically they would create the most efficient killing machines to track humans, and making them only able to do this when humans are afraid seems like a very specific built-in design flaw - especially when humans have other pheromones, and other non-fear related ways of being smelly.
Obviously from a story standpoint, if the Ursa had no weakness, then the best, strongest humans couldn't rise to the occasion, switch off their fear responses and defeat these things. But if the aliens truly wanted to build an efficient hunter animal, the Ursa would not only be able to see, but also track humans through their body odor as well - leaving this ability out when designing a killing machine makes little sense. At one point the Ursa hangs up some dead humans in trees, just as a visual display to trigger the fear response - but why would a blind creature even be concerned with how something looks? How would it even know where the tree is, or the best place to hang the body in the tree?
I have a feeling that the more I pick at the plot, the more everything's going to fall apart. The other main negatives of the film are excessive time-jumping (they flash-forward to the crashs, then go back and explain how it happened, so it's no surprise when it happens again) and similar to what was seen in "Elysium", some strange accent on the lead character, or perhaps just a weird command of line delivery. The actor's an American kid, why does he sound like a foreigner sometimes? When you're breaking in to films, the first priority should be concentrating on delivering the lines so they can be understood - although I guess if your dad is famous, this becomes much less necessary. Still, the director should have said something at some point.
Also starring Jaden Smith (last seen in "The Pursuit of Happyness"), David Denman, Sophie Okonedo, Zoe Kravitz (last seen in "The Brave One"), Glenn Morshower.
RATING: 4 out of 10 drone cameras
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