Month: December 2020

Max Cloud

Check out my interview with Martin Owen, the director, here!

What would you do if your son was at home, crying all alone on the bedroom floor because he’s hungry? And the the only way to feed him is to escape from a video game you got sucked into playing the part of one of the weaker side characters and really hoping you don’t die?

Alright, only some of that is relevant to Max Cloud. Max Cloud is a space hero. But he is also a video game character. And someone does get sucked into the video game. But don’t worry, no sons will be hungry tonight.

fight
Ah yes, heroes, ready to fight, and to eliminate evil.

Sarah (Isabelle Allen) is just a teenage girl living at home with her dad in the 1980’s. She loves video games and he (Sam Hazeldine) doesn’t love her spending too much time on them. He constantly has to tell her to get off of them to do something else. Sarah would rather play the space game all day, and try to win. She wishes should could play it all day! Enter game based space witch (Jason Maza). And sure enough, Sarah gets whisked away into the game! But she doesn’t get to be Max Cloud (Scott Adkins). She has to play Jake (Elliot James Langridge), the cook, one of the few survivors at the start of the game, with no skill set.

Being placed in a game is cool, but how is she eventually going to get out? The space witch was like an Easter Egg and she has no idea how to activate it. And what if she dies in the game?!

Sarah has some help in the game, with other NPCs, and her best friend (Franz Drameh) in her room to navigate her character closer and closer to the end game. But what happens if they win? Would it just reset?

Too much afoot for Sarah to figure out. Just have to hope that Max Cloud is as good as his box says he is!

Also starring John Hannah, Lashana Lynch, and Tommy Flanagan.

evil
You know you are a bad guy if you sit and laugh in the dark.

Max Cloud isn’t the first movie or book about being sucked into a video game and having to deal with the consequences, and it certainly won’t be the last. It is, however, a film that is incredibly uninspired and doesn’t offer much new into the “getting sucked into games” genre.

It takes place in the UK, and in the late 80’s, so maybe that is supposed to be enough of a reason to differentiate it? Not really. Most of Allen in this movie is just her voice, speaking through the TV to her her friend and dad. The scenes inside the game don’t feel like a game, just like a sci-fi broken ship. It was going for realism for the characters inside the game, but it also never felt really like a game at all, which is what I as a viewer would hope for. Outside of a few jokes or occasional reference, she could have also just been sucked into a campy sci-fi show and there wouldn’t be much difference.

The real world plot is simple, they are hoping to beat the game for her so that maybe she can escape. The plot of the Max Cloud video game is very bad though, and technically, most of the plot in the video game. If it was intentionally bad on purpose, for a campy reason, they should have made it more obvious, but it just drags the whole film down with it since it maintains a slightly serious tone for a comedy film.

I guess one of the biggest problems with the movie is it isn’t clear what it wants to be. It is a “Getting sucked into a game” movie that really would probably rather just be a straight sci-fi movie. It isn’t sure if it would rather be serious or a comedy, so it tries for both, giving the viewer not much of either. It had the potential to do more with its side characters and villains to make them interesting, but everything felt two-dimensional (heh). That could be the goal, if it was going for the bad video game vibe, but that goal can’t be achieved if the main real characters only talk about how awesome the game is. The bad video game plot just becomes bad movie plot, and the whole film suffers from it.

Max Cloud is messy, but not in a good way, and forgettable, in the worst way.

0 out of 4.

Sound of Metal

Screeching, loud, the most awful noises you have often heard, that is likely the Sound of Metal. Oh, this movie means metal music? Fine.

Screeching, loud, the most awful noises you have often heard. Har har har. Okay, I don’t like Metal, but in reality, I just don’t like screamo-metal, it does nothing to me, but it does put me to sleep which is strange given how intense it is.

In this film, the Sound of Metal it turns out will mean more than one thing as well, but I won’t get into that fact. I will say that it definitely feels like a combination of The Sound of Music and The Sound of Silence, which are famous “sound of” things. I think by the end of all of this, Sound of Metal will and should be as famous as those two as well.

drum
The sound of drums go buhbuhbuhbam.

Ruben (Riz Ahmed) is a metal man, not a robot, just a guy who plays metal. He is a drummer, he goes into clubs, he plays it loud. He is in a band with his girlfriend (Olivia Cooke) of a few years. They live their life in an RV, traveling the US, playing gigs, getting money, and moving on. They are working on making a big name for themselves, and eventually, it might work.

But one day, Ruben wakes up with ear problems that don’t seem to go away. He can’t hear well. He tries to perform a gig, and it goes like shit, and so he sees a doctor. Apparently his hearing loss is so bad, and getting worse, they suggest he quits rock altogether. He needs to rest his ears before they can properly diagnose it, and stop it from going even lower, before even considering things like cochlear implants.

Another note about Ruben? He is a former addict. Basically all drugs were his drugs, and he has been clean for four years, but this is the type of thing that will cause a man to break, and his normal sponsor can’t do much if he can’t really hear. So he gets set up in this little out of nowhere place, for addicts, who yes, also happen to be deaf. Joe (Paul Raci) takes him in, to start his process into the deaf community, to learn sign language, even though Ruben doesn’t want any aspect of it. He wants the implants. He wants to continue his rock journey with his love (who cannot stay with him for these weeks).

What is a potential rock star to do? Also starring Mathieu Amalric.

sing
Congrats to the make up team for making Olivia Cooke look extremely homeless.

Sound of Metal is incredible. It gives us a story that isn’t done much, if at all, and really drives into the implications of the events around it. Obviously one person losing their hearing, and trying to cope with it, doesn’t affect a lot of people besides their band mates and friends/family, but there is a lot going on in Ruben’s life and lifestyle that is being uplifted. It is a scary situation for anyone to be in, despite the deaf community being very open and loving community.

In the deaf community, things like cochlear implants have a lot of divisiveness amongst it members, for plenty of fine reasons. This movie doesn’t say one choice is good and the other is bad, because that is clearly up to individuals, but the discussions are still heard and the problems that arise from these decisions are still important.

Ahmed gives a wonderful performance, wearing a lot on his face. We still get to hear him speak, but going through his trauma and potentially career ending injury, either caused by his career or something genetic, can change a lot of people. I also enjoyed Cooke, in the limited screen time she was given, and watching her own transformation. Raci was wonderful, and was a great person to lead the commune given his own real life experiences and deaf traits.

I also have to give it up to the sound editing/mixing teams. They let us go through Ahmed’s journey with him, more or less, and I love that for the most part sign language when used was not given subtitles.

Sound of Metal is hardcore, well acted, and surely one of the better movies of this year.

4 out of 4.