Super-speed revisited
Posted on | March 11, 2004 at 8:08 am | 1 Comment
Obviously my impassioned e-mail to Charlie E. did the trick and convinced all parties involved in the Dish/Viacom dispute to settle, and as of late last night, I have CBS and the Viacom channels back. Somehow I don’t see this as much of a victory for the little people, but hey, at least I’ve got The Daily Show back. I’m sure this whole mess will teach someone somewhere something.
Last night, in my continuing quest to watch every Japanese B-Movie ever made, I drank in Returner. This is a movie that basically combines the plots from The Terminator and E.T. and filters them through the usual Japanese martial arts grinder. They did a pretty good job with the action scenes (not too much wire work), special effects and CGI – the transforming airplanes especially were a nice touch. They probably could’ve done some very nifty stuff with more money. The characters were interesting: the heroine from the future trying to wipe out her icky timeline, and the hero she recruits to help her in the present. Their dialog was okay and didn’t make me wince too often. I listened to the Japanese soundtrack with English subtitles. It was interesting to me that even when the characters were speaking English, they still subtitled it.
Of course there were the usual plot holes, including too many coincidences – chiefly the convergences of our heroine with the hero and the villain from his past. And whenever you’re dealing with a time travel plot, you gotta just sit back and not get too worked up about the inconsistencies. (For example, I’m not really revealing more here than is obvious from the story setup, but spoiler warning anyway: when the heroine succeeds and apparently wipes out her timeline, she seemingly still exists in the new timeline, and is apparently unaltered and still able to go back in time and all.)
Plot-wise, the thing that irked me worst was that the heroine had a nifty device that gave her temporary super-speed (shades of our discussion here last week), and yet she never really used it to full potential. (And I guess this device wasn’t very useful in the future against the aliens.) She either didn’t use it when she should have, or she used it stupidly to do things like run away instead of disarming the bad guys. Most jaw-droppingly, at one point she uses it to run away fast from the battle scene, leaving the hero in the lurch, just because he tells her to. It’s the old same problem – if she had used this device well, it would be a pretty short movie.
Anyway, I recommend this movie, especially as a rental, just don’t expect Mystic River.
Latre.
Comments
One Response to “Super-speed revisited”
March 11th, 2004 @ 2:48 pm
It said in the paper today that Viacom was expecting Echostar to settle before Thurs night — imagine the clamor if folks hadn’t gotten their weekly dose of Survivor and CSI! Glad you’ll be able to watch TDS and South Park again…