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Reviews
Virus (1999)
Don't judge a movie by its profit margin
Virus (1999) cost $75 million to make but only grossed $30 million. Compare that to The Thing (1982), which had a somewhat similar theme of an alien entity isolated in a hostile environment, at $15 million production and only grossed $20 million. Runaway (1984) with big names like Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons that had little robots similar to the gatherers in Virus, cost $8 million but only grossed $7 million. And Robocop (1987) cost $14 million and grossed $53 million. The amount Virus grossed shows that people actually liked the movie. The only real failure was the massive production cost.
The plot? It's an action movie. If you want romance and character development go watch a chick flick. There were no lulls where people discussed their previous lives or philosophized over the meaning of life and the validity of AI as a life form. The only thing near that was when the alien described humans as a virus, which was seen again in The Matrix which came out only 2 months later. Technically Virus beat Agent Smith to the punch on that one.
And there were no sex scenes, which was really nice. As an older man I always appreciated when the monster in some horror movie interrupted teenagers following their primal urges. If I want to see that there's a massive selection of movies I can watch. This isn't the pre-VHS age where the only time many men got to see a nipple was when they flashed one in a horror or action movie.
The robots were realistic, considering the only resources available were the robotics on the ship. The alien wasn't Skynet with all sorts of massive factories to make custom robotics. This thing is piecing together what it has available, which isn't much, and led to it trying to re-purpose human body parts. The one guy even points out that there's still blood flowing to the brain of the cyborg, which is an attempt to keep those organic systems functioning. Like Chopped on Food Network, you make the best of what you have available.
And a brief rant about "nanotech". The little nanobots that build more nanobots run off AI. A computer program capable of that is going to be at least a gigabyte. That's 1 billion bytes, or 8 billion bits. It takes at least 1 atom to store an electric charge to register as a 1 or 0, and then there's the conductors leading to memory and logic circuits. So a nanobot with enough AI to do what they do in many scifi movies would be the size of several billion atoms and could not easily go around rearranging molecular structures. That's always bothered me and it's nice to see robot building that doesn't involve nanotech. An alien made of, as Spock would put it, pure energy, is more acceptable than the ludicrous idea of nanotech. End rant.
The acting was good. Captain Everton's desperation after losing cargo, willingness to kill innocent people to claim salvage to cover his losses, and his later betrayal, Foster going from strong female fighter to trying to instinctively mother people after nearly dying a few times, shock does that to people, Nadia grabbing for a granola bar instead of a gun, Richie's excitement over seeing robotics and explosives, and Woods's dazed dissociation like he was trying to think about anything but what was going on around him, except for occasionally complaining about the nails still in his shoulder and people ignoring him, were all very believable characters.
I'd love to see a sequel to this, just not with cheesy CGI.
Isle of the Dead (2016)
I've seen worse
The actors did a good job with the script they were given. The scientist wants to preserve scientific data, the soldiers want to kill everything and get out, and the mad scientist wants to continue his work. The usual stuff.
It's the video editing that I had the biggest problem with. There's one scene where Lawrence is running through the "jungle" and we see a highway behind him and a car zip by. I assume they were supposed to CGI that out, or maybe put CGI zombies in the car, but they must have spent the entire CGI budget on the bugs, which had nothing to do with the main plot. Either the director had to limit the bugs plot device due to time and budget constraints or added it as an afterthought. That scene could have been fixed by simply cutting it just before the highway comes into view. And another scene shows an attack helicopter flying in instead of a transport. I was wondering if the military had sent that one to give them cover fire, but no, it was just an amateur mistake. Maybe it was a placeholder scene that was supposed to be replaced by the CGI transport chopper that brought them in.
The director had a serious problem with continuity. The guy leading the soldiers gets ambushed but nobody can find him, despite him pointing out seconds earlier that they all had transmitters so they could be found. The mad scientist has a horde of zombies eating him, but apparently he regenerated his eaten flesh so he could run off and fight the lead uber zombie. Since the infected don't normally eat other infected in these types of movies, it would have made more sense for the rest of the zombies to have ignored him and just had the fight scene. That would also have explained how he was able to move around the island without being swarmed and he had told them he used a special path to cover up his condition at the time. People finding a small device that was dropped during a fight on a large island. And while it is actually possible to fit a nuclear device into something as small as a tank shell or shoulder fired rocket, using one at that close a range is usually suicide. It was done purely for the "put us out of our misery" drama.
There were some good scenes. One soldier trying to pull a zombie off another pulls the zombie's arms off. The infected screaming in agony instead of the typical staggering around going "I don't feel so good" and then poof, zombie. Zombies with machine guns. Could have done so much more with that. Zombie vs zombie fist fights. And the touching zombie daddy loves his zombie daughter and is sorry for what happened, while zombie daughter gives him "get away from me" looks.
Not a bad movie overall, but an occasional "woah" from Lawrence would have made it better.