Tag: Pilou Asbæk

Ghost in the Shell came out a whole year ago, March in 2017. The oldest film on my list of things I should have totally seen last year. And reviewed. And this time there are just no excuses.

I mean, it came out on DVD and Redbox in the summer. Plenty of time to catch up to it. The only reason I didn’t see it was straight up apathy.

I didn’t see the original anime, but the controversy behind it makes sense. Good old white girl playing an incredibly Japanese role. Well, she is a robot, but that barely makes it okay. I went into this film not too stoked, but hey, maybe it is pretty.

This is the strange robot nakedness that gets certain jollies off.

In the future (!), humans have started to add robot parts to their bodies. Or special programs. Things to make them stronger, smarter, better eye sight, whatever. Normal helpful things. But one corporation decided to go further. They made an entirely awesome robot body, all the strongest best technologies. They just need a human brain to put inside of it to make it work.

Mira Killian (Scarlett Johansson) is almost killed in some cyber terrorist attack, her body mangled beyond repair, but she is still alive. Heck, her parents were killed in the same attack. So Dr. Ouelet (Juliette Binoche) think she is a perfect subject to put into the shell, to keep her alive.

And they can’t just let anyone be in this fucking amazing body. They decide to make her part of the counter-terrorism force. To hunt down crime and put a stop to it with her sexy robotic body. Basically, a sexy RoboCop.

Anyways, Mira doesn’t remember a lot about her past. But she is now going against a hacker with her small team, so you know she is totally going to get mind fucked.

Also starring Pilou Asbæk, Takeshi Kitano, Michael Pitt, Chin Han, and Peter Ferdinando.

Sort of hard to find an actual Japanese element in this film at times.

Sure, yeah, Ghost in the Shell is a pretty film. Not like gorgeous as fuck, like Blade Runner 2049, but not ugly either. Instead, it is mostly just a mass of CGI and lights and technology. It is technically pretty, but it feels empty. Like…like a shell of a movie.

In terms of plot, it is very hard to follow and specific. It is certainly not entertaining. It feels like a goddamn chore to get through it. I obviously watched it in the comfort of my home, so I was able to pause it and do other things multiple times, because I didn’t want to just pass out throughout the whole film.

I wanted to sleep during the movie, but I knew I needed to know how bad and pointless it was.

Another film that wants to be deep, most likely shitting on the source material all the way through it, and just feeling like a waste of time. How much of a waste of time? Well, less than two hours thankfully. But this film is a travesty to science fiction.

I don’t inherently hate remakes. There should be a reason for them though. Maybe technology has advanced to tell the story in a better way. Maybe the original copies are crap. Maybe the original films are crap. Maybe there is a good way to do a modern update. Just have a reason. A scene for scene remake usually feels like a waste of time.

When people heard about the Ben-Hur remake, they went ballistic. And it is hard to blame them. It should be noted that the “original” Ben-Hur was actually a remake itself. That’s right, we got Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ in 1929! But the reason it was remade is because they wanted to go balls to the wall crazy with it. The director William Wyler wanted authenticity, real chariot scenes, and shit, they got Charlton Heston!

It is a technological epic film that is still watched and enjoyed today. So yes, there seems little reason to remake it outside of a potential cash grab, which is what the studio was hoping for with an over $100 million budget.

They really just wanted to nail the chariot scenes. That would have made it ideal.

Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) has a ridiculous name, but hey, he is made up so it is okay I guess. He is Jewish and a prince, and his family is awesome. They adopted a Roman boy too into their family, Messala (Toby Kebbell), about the same age and they are great friends. They chariot race and all that shit. The mother is played by Ayelet Zurer, and sister by Sofia Black-D’Elia. Messala feels weird though and leaves the family to join the Roman army, while Judah decides to marry a slave (Nazanin Boniadi).

Years later he returns, a great soldier now and Judah wants him to be an informant. A lot of people hate the Roman rule now in Jerusalem and want to rise up. He lets Judah know that a new governor, Pontius Pilate (Pilou Asbæk) is on the way. And when he shows up, a guy Dismas (Moises Arias) tries to kill him and fails.

This causes their palace to get overrun and Judah takes the fall for Dismas. His mom and sister are crucified, and Judah is sent to be on a ship to be a rower in the wars. Fuck. Also he meets Jesus (Rodrigo Santoro) when getting walked and whipped down the street. Needless to say, the brothers get mad at each other, a lot more shit happens, and some people get hurt in the process.

Also starring Morgan Freeman, Marwan Kenzari, and James Cosmo.

Et tu, Morgan Freeman?

Eyuuch. Oh man. There is bad, and then there is this Ben-Hur remake. This film tried to recreate an epic, but in a modern way. And despite going for an epic, it made it only 2 hours long to tell the same story, in 90 minutes less time. The original was slower, but it moved at a pace very deliberate to make sure everything was clear, motives and other wise.

This is a modern movie, so it is rushing right out of the gate and forcing you to keep up. It has a lot of region specific actors in side roles, and gives us a couple of white British people leads. I felt a bit lost very early on, despite being a little bit familiar with the story and it never really got better.

In fact, for those watching it, they will quickly realize that this is not a movie they should invest their time in. They will either shut it off, or play on games on their phone throughout it. The filters used to give it the old time feel make it actually just a pain to watch.

In addition, it reminded me of other recent bad “Ancient” movies like Immortals or The Legend of Hercules. No, it didn’t have CGI magic or anything, but just that bastardization of the past feel.

Even the chariot scene doesn’t save it. We have laws now that prevent any animals from ever being harmed now, so it doesn’t look as real as it did a long time ago. It feels fake, it feels processed, and it fails to keep any interest.

Ben-Hur is the remake no one wants, done in a way no one cares about, and was apparently a movie no one saw either, for good reason. Big pass.

Sigh.

Look. Accepting alternative realities for movies is easy. Accepting a fantasy movie is great, as long as it follows the rules it set out for itself in the movie. Accepting a movie on Earth is easy too, even if there are non-Earth things like superheroes on it.

But with Lucy? The trailer seemed to highlight, and thus I assume it is a big part of a movie, that it is based on a complete misconception. Humans do not only use 10% of their brain.

Having an incorrect fact in a movie isn’t an issue. It is just that it is based on such a well known misconception. It feels like they are ignoring that fact, telling us to go fuck ourselves, and make the movie anyways. The issue is that most likely, a movie like this could be made with out the misconception at all.

But they’d rather further dumb down America.

That is all the ranting I will do about that dumb ass plot hook, I swear, and all of this intro comes before seeing the movie.

References to the Matrix are still fair game, however.

Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is a mid-twenties student, studying over in Taiwan. She loves to party, but also loves to study. I think. Well, her boyfriend of one week Richard (Pilou Asbæk) is into some shady things. He delivers packages for large fees, no questions, just dangerous men. For whatever reason he is afraid to deliver this next package for $1,000, so he forces Lucy to do it instead. Well, shenanigans!

Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi) is very interested in that package, which contains four bags of a blue, totally not Breaking Bad meth, drugs. And she is forced to become a drug mule for them along with three others, each carrying a bag in their stomach to take to their home cities where it will be removed and spread around to get people addicted. It’s new and it is ready to party.

Well, en route to the plane, the bag gets damaged and leaks into Lucy’s body. This has very strange effects, the extreme large amounts of the drug and it starts to unlock her brains capacity. With this unlocking comes even more powers and ability, including telepathy and time travel. But. But what if she gets 100%?

Morgan Freeman is a brain professor in Paris, Amr Waked a police captain, and Analeigh Tipton has a small role as Lucy’s roommate.

X-Ray vision? Fuck that. She has X-Ray touch.

Fuck Luc Besson. Yeah. I said it. I am going to say that there is not enough hate for him as a director/writer, as he is putting out more useless crap than Michael Bay. He hasn’t directed all of these recent movies, but he was involved with The Family, 3 Days To Kill, Brick Mansions, Taken 2, and Lockout. What do they all have in common? Being terrible. That is literally only 2.5 years of movies. He is not The Fifth Element director anymore.

Unfortunately, the 10% myth wasn’t just a minor part of the movie. It was the entire driving force of Lucy trying to hit 100% brain capacity and the effects of it along the away. They even flashed percentages across the screen as it went along just in case you forgot, so you knew where she was at to. It was very very focused around that, and Freeman’s characters only purpose was to add fake credibility to it all.

Spliced throughout the movie are other scenes, of animals, places, and events, and they are just all completely awkward and detracting. They feel like filler for a movie that isn’t even 90 minutes long.

I will split the film into three parts. Pre Drugs, Yay Drugs, Very Many Drugs.

Pre Drugs is probably the best part of the film, with Scarlett playing a scared woman and freaking out. It is super high energy still and kind of awkward, but it feels like there is some acting.

Yay Drugs starts off cool, but I quickly become annoyed by it. She quickly ascends into some god like entity, and thus, all sorts of drama or fear are taken out of it. She also becomes an asshole. A lot of innocent people get killed or hurt or damaged in this movie as she ignores them going from one task to the next.

The Very Many Drugs section is just a mess. Zero tension, yet a long gun fight, where again, good people die all because Lucy doesn’t do anything. There is no threat though, because of what we saw she could do earlier and it feels completely pointless. During the Very Many Drugs phase, Lucy doesn’t do a whole lot and then the movie ends.

So there you go. A bad science Sci-Fi movie, probably because Luc Besson sucks. The film could have been a lot better if they embraced some of the elements and actually tried to be intellectual about it, instead of fake intellectual. Saying a few philosophy phrases don’t make a film smart. Smartness does.