ORBzine - 1999.09 Video Reviews

ORBzine - Video Reviews September 1999

Armageddon

The film begins with a not-so-subtle attack on the previous year's Godzilla , akin to the X-Files Movie's attack on Independence Day. As a plastic model of the big lizard gets chewed on by a small furry dog, large sections of the Big Apple are flattened by a meteor shower.
As in Deep Impact [released the same year] and the 1970s blockbuster Meteor, a giant meteor is hurtling towards the Earth - and when it hits it will destroy all life, even microbes [!!!]. Yes, that is what little regard the writers of this drivel had for scientific realities. And no, this reviewer was not surprised either.
The only one who can save the world is Bruce Willis, in his trademark sweaty vest. He leads a dirty dozen [okay, 8] of hard-ass deep-core drillers who volunteer to be flown to the meteor where they can drill holes deep enough to plant the essential nuclear devices and thus deflect the danger.
As a subplot, Willis' screen daughter Liv Tyler embarks on a forbidden affair with his sidekick, Ben Affleck. Yes, this piece of cinematic garbage has pretensions of being a love story!
This film is so completely inferior to Deep Impact it is hardly worth making the comparison!

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Small Soldiers

With the end of the Cold War, the so-called Peace Dividend came into action and hi-tech armaments firms had to re-employ their assets in different markets in order to survive. One such company bought up a toy manufacturer, and decided to make their mark in the marketplace with a new set of toy soldiers.
The toys are more than they appear; they have an ultra-modern Artificial Intelligence microprocessor, and decide to take their assigned roles seriously. The ugly-looking aliens are actually pacifists with instructions to learn everything they can about planet Earth. The heroic human commandoes are actually gung-ho maniacs who will destroy the alien scum [and any human collaborators] by any means necessary.
The toys wind up in a small-town toy store, where a couple of teenagers get caught up in the ensuing chaos. The girl was in Interview with a Vampire , if anyone's interested, and these days she's a babe.
The film pulls up a lot of macho cliches, and may look like a namby-pamby anti-war treatise. However, the moral of the story is that you should always stand up for yourself, and that sometimes violence is necessary.

eXistenZ

This takes off where Videodrome ended - at the exhibition of a new mass-media product an apparent madman jumps up, shouts death to whatever and goes on a kill-crazy rampage.
The product is a Virtual reality game called eXistenZ,and its designer [Jennifer Jason Leigh] goes on the run with her bodyguard [Jude Gattaca Law]. A $5 million bounty has been placed on her head by an anti-game faction, who want her dead and the eXistenZ game destroyed.
Familiar faces [Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm] pop up as the duo travel through growingly surreal surroundings, and the story gets more and more complex. Eventually everything is resolved, and the anti-game plot revealed ... Or is it?
Back in the 1970s cronenberg made a couple of cheapo Canadian horror flicks. One told of a woman who had experimental plastic surgery which left her with a taste for human blood and a tendency to infect her victims with an uncurable form of rabies. The second featured a parasite developed to help the human body heal faster, but which took over the host and turned them into mindless sex-crazed zombies.
Now, if one were to watch those films in the suggested order, the second film would fill in the blanks left by the first. They were not intended to be linked, but they are based around the same idea and one can see how Cronenberg intended the first film to be interpreted.
However, while eXistenZ follows on from Videodrome in spirit, there is no real correlation between the two. Videodrome is a masterpiece; eXistenZ is the kind of VR-related crud you see in bad episodes of Outer Limits. To be fair, Cronenberg has the budget and flair to employ some wonderful actors and SPFX, but beyond that it is not worth watching.

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