In Other Words

AVP and the Bourne Supremacy

Ok, lets do some movie reviews. I saw two movies recently and since I really don’t want to talk about politics, religion or the environment at this moment (just don’t have the energy) I thought I would discuss them. For those that haven’t noticed, I love movies in all shapes in sizes. Some I love to watch and some I love to slash down and rubbish with my friends.

I’ve always enjoyed stories, fictional or fact, of all shapes and sizes. I guess that comes with the territory, me being a dreamer and all. Anyway, I dragged Liana to two movies recently, AVP and the Bourne Supremacy. (Yes, I really should let her choose the next movie.) Both, in my opinion, were quite enjoyable, though for different reasons. Lets start with AVP.

If you want to see a movie with exceptional acting, great stars and genius scripts, don’t go see AVP. The acting is absolutely terrible, the people featured in the movie are pretty B rated (except for the actor of Spud from Train Spotting, he rocks) and the script is restricted to one liners and instinctive leaps of ‘genius’ that make you wonder why archaeology takes so damn long (you’ll understand if you see the movie).

The effects, on the other hand, are pretty nifty and both alien species have been, still are and will be very spiffy. Dark horse comics (the guys that got the rights to both the species and realised that they would work well together) did a great job of working out their universe and adding in new elements to make even a few ideas from the original movies appear in a different light (i.e. the scalping in predator). The fights between the two species took some good programming and will entertain action/fantasy/sci-fi lovers.

The only real problem, really, is that this just won’t do for a movie, unless you have some really good scriptwriters. I think I would advise that somebody, somewhere, suggests that it be written as series with lots of cash, lots of good script writers and lots more sci-i ideas. (half the reason why Alien was so good was the claustrophobic ship tunnels and clunky ‘advanced’ technology). They should have taken their cue from AVP the computer game, me thinks. There the three species were all well done and very interesting. Anyways, enough AVP, next movie.

The Bourne Supremacy was actually surprisingly good. The shaking camera (I don’t know who developed that idea originally, but you can see it in too many movies right now) during action scenes was a bit excessive and made Liana feel sick, though it added to the overall excitement of the movie (and made it hard to see what was actually happening). The methods used by Bourne to discover the information he needed were well thought out (and seemed very plausible).

What I liked about it was that even though it was the same old story (super super agent goes against the machine) they managed to put it in a new jacket and gave it some interesting twists and turns. The way that the Bourne character managed to retain quite a lot of control over what was happening was a nice touch, different from all those annoying movies where the main character constantly survives through luck and chance (and after a while you just wish they wouldn’t).

Yeah, I enjoyed both of them. Not top of the line, but they shouldn’t disappoint as long as you don’t go in expecting too much. I would give them a seven and an eight respectively, that is if you remember to what category they belong.

posted by Symbol @ 30.8.04