BEFORE: OK, this one wasn't part of the plan, but as "Black Widow" goes, so goes "Hellboy". And if "Hellboy" is going to get watched, this one might as well come along for the ride, even though there's still about six weeks before the horror chain, and this sure looks like some kind of horror movie. BUT, it's my delayed Comic-Con week, and this one looks like it will fit thematically with that, even though it's based on a video-game rather than a comic book. Eh, who even cares about that?
The truth is, I had a link between "Hellboy" and tomorrow's film, but it's not a great one. It's the guy who played the Mexican wrestler in "Hellboy", which was a notable role, but I think in tomorrow's film he just plays "Cop #1", and that's been bugging me, as linking goes it's some pretty weak sauce. Then this movie comes along, I just saw it in the TV listings a couple weeks ago, and when I went through the cast list, I realized it could fit in here, with Milla Jovovich carrying over from "Hellboy", and there's a link to a more prominent actor in tomorrow's film. So I've already dropped a film from the November line-up to make up for adding this one at the last minute, I just can't do that too many more times, with just 83 films left in the (hopefully perfect) year.
As a bonus, this one also has the actor who played Hellboy before, that's another odd coincidence. Now, this film DOES link to one of my October films, but one link isn't good enough, I need both an intro link and an outro link - so even though it feels like maybe this film should go THERE, it can't, it has to go HERE. We good?
THE PLOT: When Lt. Artemis and her loyal soldiers are transported to a new world, they engage in a desperate battle for survival against enormous enemies with incredible powers.
AFTER: I'm not going to say that I regret watching this movie, because I can learn something from any movie, even if that little piece of knowledge was that this one maybe wasn't so urgent to get to in the first place. There just doesn't seem to be much TO this one, it's maybe five minutes of story expanded out to 100 minutes of movie. Maybe that's a good enough ratio for a video-game, I'm not sure.
There's this squad of soldiers investigating the disappearance of another squad of soldiers, and when a giant storm cloud rolls in and whisks them away to another...planet? dimension? - then I guess you could say that Alpha Team fulfilled their mission, they figured out what happened to Bravo Team. Unfortunately it's a dimension filled with giant monsters, and very few people. For some reason, the giant rib cage that the team drives through isn't enough of a warning sign that they're in a very dangerous place, so they have to learn that lesson the hard way, there's a giant creature that tunnels through the sand of this desert world, a bit like the big worms in "Dune", only a lot meaner, and hungrier. Oh, and with more legs. And horns.
The team relocates to a mountain cave, only to find themselves in a nest of giant spider-like creatures, Nerscyllas. Captain Artemis is bitten by a monster and appears to be dead, and her squad is forced to flee and leave her behind. But she's only mostly dead, and she wakes up covered in webbing, surrounded by webbed-up members of her squad. She tries to free them, but it's too late for some, they've already got little (big) baby spiders hatching inside of them.
Artemis manages to escape, and teams up with the only human she's seen on this world, who she calls Hunter. Hunter had did what he could to help save her squad, but as strangers to this world, they really didn't know what they were getting in to. The scenes where Artemis fights Hunter, then teams up with him, are based on basic comic-book plot points, which state that any two heroes that meet have to fight at first. This also calls to mind the "Me Tarzan, You Jane" struggles two characters often have if they don't speak the same language - but even accounting for this, the middle part with them sharing a couple English words and training together still feels like it goes on much too long. Let's face it, you came here to see people take down some big-ass monsters, they really shouldn't make you wait so long for that.
Eventually they find Hunter's old crew, which has been sailing a ship across the desert somehow, in order to reach the Sky Tower, which might control the portal that can take people between the Old World and the New World, or something along those lines. Whoever built the portal in the Sky Tower put all these monsters around it to protect it, because God forbid anybody should be able to easily use it in order to get home. There's a fire-breathing dragon like character protecting the Tower, and somehow the best advice for defeating it is that it's "vulnerable right before it breathes fire". Yeah, thanks for the tip, genius, but you can't tell that it's about to breathe fire until it, you know, breathes fire. So that's not really much help.
The good news is that Artemis makes it back through the portal, only she doesn't come back alone, and that's a big problem. But hey, at least now maybe people on Earth will believe her story. Then, just before the biggest battle of all, the movie just stops. How frustrating, we don't get to see the big boss battle, assuming that there WAS one? I can't tell if this is just lazy storytelling, or a cheap attempt to set up a sequel, perhaps it's both.
Also starring Tony Jaa (last seen in "xXx: Return of Xander Cage"), Ron Perlman (last heard in "Tarzan 2: The Legend Begins"), Tip "T.I." Harris (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), Diego Boneta (last seen in "Rock of Ages"), Meagan Good (last seen in "Brick"), Josh Helman (last seen in "Mad Max: Fury Road"), Jin Au-Yeung, Hirona Yamazaki, Jannik Schümann, Nanda Costa, Nic Rasenti, Aaron Beelner (last seen in "The House with a Clock in Its Walls"), Clyde Berning, Paul Hampshire (last seen in "Chappie"), Schelaine Bennett, Bart Fouche, Pope Jerrod.
RATING: 4 out of 10 spider-holes
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