If there was ever a genre of film that was overly saturated with bad movies it has to be the zombie survival genre. For every good movie, you have about twenty bad ones. Sadly, as a big fan of this genre I tend to watch just about all the films that come down the pipe (and that pipe is usually a sewer pipe).
So last night I decided to watch the film "Carriers" which is loosely tied to the zombie genre, in that they have one 'kinda-zombie' in it and a disease that starts to erradicate the population of the planet. I'm sure the filmmakers would tend to disagree with it being a zombie flick, but that just begs the question why they included one. I'm guessing to grab the crowd that loves zombies.
Basically the story follows four uninfected survivors of this disease who are trying to make it to a beach that the two main protagonists went to as children. Supposedly this beach is still safe and hospitable.
Well along the way they encounter more sick people, crazy people, and for some reason a dead Asian guy with the sign "Chinks brought it" tied to his corpse. Is that a nod towards the bird flu epidemic? Some people die, some live, but that's not important, because you never really feel anything towards the characters.
The directors (yes, there are two directors) don't seem to understand the human psyche, instead of showing the characters having real human emotions and struggling to survive in this new barren world (we never once see them eat, yet they seem perfectly fine) they choose to show odd scenes of joviality where they are playing golf or joking around in the car they're driving.
I found this to be the strangest thing, why play golf when you can forage for food, or weapons? I know if something like this happened to me, I'd be grabbing guns, tins of food an going somewhere incredibly isolated, not heading to the beach.
The biggest problem, aside from the detachment to the characters, is how incredibly off balance this movie is. The directors go from incredibly high moments to dark, deep moments without any idea of what a meaningful transition is. It feels like they take quick and easy cuts to jump around emotionally but with no real affect to the viewer.
I wanted to like this movie, I really did, it had some promising things going for it. The story was interesting, but the way it is told here is just too detached from any real emotions. I felt like I was waiting for something, anything, to happen and when it did. I just didn't care.
Score:
Acting = Pretty good, the actors do their best with what they're given, but the directing really shoots this one down.
Directing = The vistas look incredible, everything is wonderfully bleak, but when it comes to capturing any kind of actual human emotion - or getting the viewers to become attached to the characters they fail. Perhaps it's because there is just one too many directors here...
Final Thought = It's a decent flick, I wouldn't go so far as to recommend it to anyone for an evening of post-apocalyptic thrills. Instead go watch the much better directed, "28 Days Later", there you actually feel something for the characters and care what happens to them.
2 comments:
I guess I didn't consider it as bad a film as you did. lol. See, when I see even a sliver of promise to a movie, I like to try to pick out its better components--those which hold the movie together, rather than those loose, strewn about ends. I think certain elements to this movie made for a more viable film than many other films that tackle the zombie/plague subjects. For one, I felt that the characters were pretty strongly molded, particularly by their actors. When it comes to films, most often a good set and a solid story are not enough to hold everything together. I think the best of it is left up to the actors and their interpretations. If they can't do their jobs right, you've got nothing. So they at least deserve some veneration. :) The brothers especially had a lot of palpable strife towards eachother. While it was obvious they loved one another and had a similar goal in mind, they had a kind of unspoken Cain and Abel thing going on. The older brother, who was arguably the driving force of the movie, wanted to reach their destination at all costs, no holds barred. He had a setlist of rules that should have kept them all in the clear, but a very destructive way about him. Ultimately, he was very human because he couldn't uphold those rules when it came to he, himself, contracting the plague. He crumbled. A true leader would have taken himself out, but he just coudln't do it. The younger brother was very much in his shadow, taking orders. They were like night and day. The elder of the two was clearly the alpha, issuing commands to the others while they just sort of took it. The younger brother, however, I felt was the only one of the three party members beneath the "leader" to provide any kind of moral undercoating. He almost always tried to keep his older brother in check by telling him what he was doing was wrong. Sadly, he just wasn't strong enough to stand up to him.
I think there was so much more than just the characters that gave this movie a fighting chance, but some of the relationships were what made this movie worth watching at least once, in my opinion. I've seen so much worse in the same genre, and said movies are "cult classics" with wretched acting and poor, cliched storylines. So I figure this one isn't so bad.
While I can understand where you're coming from on this one, I have to reiterate that in a movie such as this where there is little to no action, and much traveling and conversing between the characters you have to have some emotional connection towards these characters. The way the directors made this I felt disconnected to them, I didn't care who lived or died because none of them really stood outside of the generic cut-outs that they were written as. While the younger of the two brothers did provide the best performance in the movie, it just wasn't enough to save this. Imagine what "Reservoir Dogs" would have been like had you felt as disconnected to those characters. You wouldn't care in the least what happens to them at the end.
It's that connection that the directors have to establish between the audience and the characters that can make a movie. Without it, you're just watching pretty pictures move past on a screen.
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