Tustin Magazine Movie Reviews | Film and Video Reviews

A spaceship hovers over Johannesburg. It stalled there 28 years ago, when apartheid policies segregated nonwhites into Soweto-like townships. Alien refugees have been closed off from humans in the slums of District 9. Despite their mental acuity, they are demeaned as "prawns" for their crustacean-shell armor and the mouth tentacles that wiggle madly when they speak in gurgles, in our language and in their own.

Blomkamp and co-writer Terri Tatchell are not above having a laugh at, say, the aliens' jones for cat food, cans and all, and the popularity of interspecies prostitution. But there is serious business in watching the world grow bored as the aliens fail to put on fireworks for the media by attacking or showing off. Instead, they follow the human model and form gangs, hassle cops, deal with Nigerian drug dealers and — yes — plan an escape by covertly building weapons.

It's the artillery that brings in Multi-National United (MNU), the private-interest group out to make a killing from learning how alien DNA can unleash firepower. Gruesome experiments are performed in secret labs, and a plan is initiated to ship the aliens off to District 10, which is a concentration camp.

Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copely) is the MNU agent in charge of the move to District 10. The performance he delivers should make him an Oscar contender. He illustrates the complete and utter distain of man toward prawn, delivering a giddy explanation of how to abort developing prawn young and how they "pop" when you set them on fire. But once infected by an alien virus that begins to transform him into a prawn, he learns hard lessons at the hands of MNU killer. Yes it sounds like a silly remake of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, but it works. The soul of the movie resides in Wikus' relationship with two alien characters, Christopher Johnson (Jason Cope) and his son, the computer-generated Little C.J., who I found myself hoping wasn't computer generated because he was so compelling, but that would have been one really small actor.

Some will be disappointed in the non-ending; I was surprised when the credits rolled. I'd like to think the film makers were setting up a sequel, and with the return on investment this movie is generating with it's $30 million budget, I'm sure that will be strongly considered. And as much as I would like to "Revenge of the Prawns" (in fact, I think I'll reserve that URL), it could not capture the simple struggle explored by this well crafted movie.

TERMINATOR SALVATION [B]

Terminator Salvation" gives new meaning to the phrase heavy metal. The Terminators in this fourth film in the franchise are so big and clangy that, during the fight scenes, you may find yourself clutching your ears far more often than the armrests.

It's 2018 and Judgment Day, "Terminator"-style, has obliterated most of the planet's humankind. But the Resistance – i.e., a few measly mortals – are still holding out for humanity. Topping the hero hit list is John Connor (Christian Bale), who is so intense his stare could melt plutonium. As we keep being told, John is the "prophetic leader" of the Resistance.

The current John is the grown-up version of the hero-in-waiting played as a whippersnapper by Edward Furlong (in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day") and Nick Stahl (in "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines"). Through a time-travel scenario that only the Terminator faithful would fully understand, John's future father, Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin, who plays Chekov in the new "Star Trek") appears in "Terminator Salvation" as a teenager. John's mission – one of them anyway – is to rescue Kyle from the clutches of the big bots.

He has many other missions but this one is the biggest, because, if Kyle doesn't survive, John Connor will never exist. Except he does. Whatever.

Even though John is the ostensible hero of "Terminator Salvation," the centerpiece stalwart is Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington, who will be starring in James Cameron's upcoming "Avatar"). Marcus, as we see from the opening scene, was a murderer, or something equally atrocious, on death row who decided to donate his body to science. The really really bad intelligence network Skynet, which is responsible for the nuclear annihilation 14 years before that turned the skies a perpetual shade of blah, has coopted Marcus's corporeality and turned him into a state-of-the-art cyborg with – here's the catch – a human heart. Who thought the Tin Man from "The Wizard of Oz" would one day come back to us like this?

That heart is what apparently makes Marcus human, even though he's not. He's certainly human enough for Blair Williams, the Resistance warrior played by an actress with the altogether appropriate name Moon Bloodgood. Blair warms to Marcus when he helps her rout a band of scurvy marauders (human variety). Even when his electronic innards are exposed, she refuses to back away from him. When asked by John why she comes to Marcus's aid even though he is suspected of being the enemy, she replies, "I saw a man, not a machine." Who says love is blind?

Marcus endures what passes for an existential quest in "Terminator Salvation." "I need to find out who did this to me," he intones, and it is at this point that the Tin Man metaphorically morphs into an amalgam of Oedipus, Odysseus, and 'The Dark Knight' (played elsewhere, of course, by Christian Bale – franchise movies are nothing if not incestuous). In these technopop extravaganzas, it's always the inhuman, or half-human, who ends up being the most human – e.g., Mr. Spock. Marcus is more intriguing to observe than John precisely because he's a (sort of) cyborg.

McG, a music video maven whose previous credits include the "Charlie's Angels" movies, directs the action passably well. (I suppose we should be thankful this film wasn't presented in 3-D or else we'd all be ducking for cover for two hours.) I wish, however, he had inserted a bit of humor into the maelstrom. A couple of scenes directly reference the Iraq war and the Holocaust (where the humans are herded into cattle cars), and this is taking things much too seriously. This is a big blow-'em-up franchise movie. It should not under any circumstances be confused with a Statement.

About two-thirds of the way into the ridiculously satisfying new "Star Trek" movie, opening Thursday, there comes a brief shot of the crew on the bridge of the Federation Starship Enterprise. The film has been picking up familiar names as it goes, but you suddenly realize with a jolt that everyone, at last, is here: young, hopeful versions of Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Mr. Spock (Zachary Quinto), communications officer Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and pilot Sulu (John Cho), Bones (Karl Urban) and Chekhov (Anton Yelchin) and Scotty (Simon Pegg).

It's a throwaway image, yet you feel the final pieces of the puzzle snap into place with a witty and intensely fond reverence. I just about wept with joy, and I'm not even a Trekkie.

Neither, apparently, is director J.J. Abrams, and that may have made the difference. "Star Trek" - a.k.a. "Star Trek XI," a.k.a. "Star Trek the Franchise Reboot" - approaches the late Gene Roddenberry's original science fiction world not on bended knee but with fresh eyes, a spring in its step, and the understanding that we know these people better than they know themselves. Indeed, much of the vast pleasure of this movie comes from characters suddenly discovering things about each other that we learned watching TV four decades ago. There are flaws to pick at in terms of story line and other matters, but that can wait until the glow has faded. In the pop high it delivers, this is the greatest prequel ever made.

"Star Trek" isn't all fun and games. The universe has to be saved (again), and Spock has to undergo a personality crisis severe even by the standards of his half-human/half-Vulcan nature. A renegade Romulan named Captain Nero (played by Eric Bana) has dropped in from decades into the future, and he's very, very angry about something the older Spock has done, or will do. Nero's first order of business is to attack a starship, in the process killing Kirk's father (Chris Hemsworth) just as Mother Kirk (Jennifer Morrison) is giving birth to our hero in an escape shuttle.

Conceptually, this is a genius move: It establishes the entire movie as an alternate, parallel "Star Trek" universe in which Abrams and his screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman can do as they wish, fanboys and the canon be damned. Kirk can grow up a rebellious hothead, only learning about his father through the paternal Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood). Kirk and Spock can meet not on the bridge of the Enterprise but as clashing cadets in training school. ("Who was that pointy-eared bastard?," Kirk mutters.) Spock can even have a simmering relationship with Uhura that occasionally involves long, steamy kisses. Heresy!

But it works. As the characters scramble to deal with the Romulan threat - the baddies want to destroy the Federation's planets one by one, and they have the future tech to do it - their initial enmity is forged into camaraderie under heavy fire, and Abrams has a blast letting them get to know each other. Sulu and Kirk first connect while free-falling through space on their way to dismantling a Romulan megaweapon, and the ensuing fight with the enemy is outrageously choreographed, a ballet of high-impact fencing and brute force.

At the same time, Abrams respects the campy verities of the original show enough to include a third Enterprise crewmember on this mission - the guy I and my roommates used to call "Lunchmeat." Remember him? The extra you'd never seen before who beamed down with the leads solely because someone needed to bite it? The script calls him "Olson" (Greg Ellis), but, trust me, he's Lunchmeat, and the movie's the better for his brief appearance and spectacular demise.

The editing, cinematography, and special effects work are state-of-the-art, as you'd expect - extra praise goes to an astonishingly detailed sound mix - but so are the same aspects of "Wolverine," and that film's a joyless bore by comparison. What lifts the Abrams film into the ether is the rightness of its casting and playing, from Saldana's Uhuru, finally a major character after all these years, to Urban's loyal, dyspeptic McCoy, to Simon Pegg's grandly comic Scotty, the movie's most radical reimagining of a "Star Trek" regular.

That said, the appearance of Winona Ryder as Spock's human mother comes as a jolt, and in no known universe can I imagine Tyler Perry as a Federation elder. (Abrams is a fan, I guess.) Still, the movie's center holds. The classic lines get trotted out - "Ah'm givin' it all she's goot, Cap'n," "Dammit, man, I'm a doctor, not a physicist" - but the players bring an affection and depth to their parts that's bigger than mere nostalgia; when they color outside the lines, it's on purpose. And when Pine sits down in the captain's chair with the exact macho sprawl William Shatner employed in the original series, you almost want to applaud.

Do you have to be a hard-core fan to enjoy the movie? Not at all. "Star Trek" has been knocking around for so long that the basics have seeped into the culture by osmosis. The director indulges himself with a monster that resembles his "Cloverfield" beastie, and there are in-jokes for followers of "Lost" and other Abrams projects, but he has made sure to tap into the longstanding emotion that surrounds the "Trek" mythos.

Above all, he understands the potency and pleasure of the Kirk/Spock relationship. There are certain pop duos that have become cultural institutions and about whom it's endlessly enjoyable to speculate. Who wouldn't want to have been there when Holmes met Watson or Butch met Sundance? (Or Oscar met Felix, or Jack Aubrey met Stephen Maturin; you could play this game forever.) Pine makes a fine, brash boy Kirk, but Quinto's Spock is something special - an eerily calm figure freighted with a heavier sadness than Roddenberry's original. The two ground each other and point toward all the stories yet to come.

Then, at a certain point, the movie's curtains part and Leonard Nimoy appears, playing an older, wiser, more fragile Spock. You're grateful for the continuity - his appearance carries much more emotion than you'd expect - and also thankful that this "Star Trek" stops there. One strutting ham of a Captain Kirk is enough, thanks.

The movie's not perfect. The final battle feels awfully "Star Wars" - later "Star Wars" - as does Scotty's sidekick, an Ewok knock-off in a lousy mask. Character, not plotting, is the film's strong suit, yet plotting takes over in the final half hour. Emotionally, though, "Star Trek" hits every one of its marks, functioning as a family reunion that extends across decades, entertainment mediums, even blurring the line between audience and show. Trading on affections sustained over 40 years of popular culture, "Star Trek" does what a franchise reboot rarely does. It reminds us why we loved these characters in the first place.

I went into Watchmen with a distinct advantage -- I knew nothing of the original comic book or graphic novel or wherever the heck it came from. I was thus unburdened by any preconceived notions, and I have no need or ability to discuss its "authenticity."

The story begins, as all good mysteries do, with a murder. A man named Edward Blake, otherwise known as the superhero the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is brutally killed in October 1985, and lots of people want to know why. Some have described the movie as taking place in an alternate universe, but technically it is our universe changed by the presence of the Watchmen. Richard Nixon is president in both, but in the "Watchmen" world he's been elected to five terms because the Watchmen altered the outcome of he Vietnam War.

One thing that was never explained was the "powers" of the Watchmen. The premise is that a group of vigilantes banded together in the 1940s as the Minutemen, and another group was formed decades later. Since the 1977 passage of the Keene Act, this new generation masked heroes has been forced to retire, and that's what Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) and Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) have done. Still active, each in his own way, are the most compelling of the group, Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) and Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley).

Dr. Manhattan, once physicist Jon Osterman, is the only being in the "Watchmen" world with true superpowers, courtesy of a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong. Often seen pale blue and naked, the good doctor is a master of space and time, capable of bending matter to his will. The others are all just people that signed on to work "outside the law" to get things done. How, then, do they have the ability to walk into a room of thugs and kick all heir butts? Never explained.

The movie's theme is a straightforward examination of the grayness of life. Nothing is black and white. A horrible assault and rape attempt leads to something positive. The world domination plans of the Dr. Evil character may save humanity. There are several such conflicts in the movie, and they are left unresolved because there are no right or wrong answers.

The film was very different, very interesting, and definitely worth seeing. Having seen the movie, I now know that many of the objections and criticisms I was hearing were utter nonsense. Yes, Dr. Manhattan walks around naked, but that makes complete sense in the context of the movie (he is supposed to be a near God), and it is not done for any sort of titillation or shock. The movie is not at all kid appropriate given the violence and a sex scene, but even then the violence is no worse than any other movie rated R for violence, and the sex scene is actually quite artistic.

Batman began three summers ago - now it's time for him to finish what he started. Bruce Wayne and his alter ego Batman hover on the verge of victory over Gotham City's corruption, thanks to the help of the stalwart Lieutenant Gordon and the capable D.A. Harvey Dent. But then a grinning, horrific specter rises up out of nowhere to thwart Batman at every turn... a devious anarchist who calls himself The Joker. In order to defeat him, Batman will have to explore the darker side of justice and risk becoming more villain than hero himself.

A great movie in its own right, not just standing on the pillar of the Batman storyline. Maggie Gyllenhaal was an unfortunate casting choice. She is a fine performer -- truly great in The Secretary -- but I could not suspend enough belief to see her as the love interest in this movie.

I feel like the producers of this movie did an excellent job of lowering expectations. Based on what I was hearing, I almost didn't go to see this movie. I'm glad I made up my own mind. Don't listen to the nonsense; this was a very entertaining movie.

The movie does take a surprise twist in the middle, leading some people to claim that it is two movies spliced together. But the twist is not a spoiler, and it is not without some foreshadowing. You know from the moment that the character played by Charlize Theron sees Hancock that there is some history between the two. The surprise is just the precise nature of that history. The people who complain about the 90 turn just weren't paying attention.

Admittedly the movie doesn't spend a lot of time on character development -- Hancock is a jerk from frame one -- but it's fun to learn how everybody got where they are. Ignore the other critics and go enjoy Hancock's world for 90 minutes.

Pixar’s latest creation is not a racecar, fish, bug, or monster. It is time for the robot. WALL-E, a name derived from Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth Class. Humans so polluted the world with trash, that they left behind robots to clean up the mess and went on a long space cruise. For reasons revealed in the movie, the cruise turned into a 700 year trip, and WALL-E is the only one left (at least the only one we see). As we learn, although gone the cruise ships still send back robots to probe the planet. That's how WALL-E meets EVE -- a very fancy robot indeed. The rest of the movie is a robot love. Can love survive while saving the earth?

The graphics in this animated tale are the best I have ever seen. A great family movie. My only complaint is the use of one real actor. It may just be me, but when you present animated humans, especially when they are very stylized as they are in this film, then your mind's eye adapts to that interpretation. To then throw a real human into the mix is just strange, because then you instantly reduce all the animated characters to cartoons, like Roger the Rabbit.

"Hellboy" is a standard-issue superhero movie -- except that writer-director Guillermo del Toro, taking his cue from "Hellboy" comic book creator Mike Mignola, brings a wicked sense of humor to this particular monster mash. Not the goofy slapstick of "Men in Black," mind you, but dry wit and humanizing touches that make Ron Perlman's title character more than a big red monster. A good thing too, for "Hellboy" is pretty derivative stuff. Pulling elements from "The X-Files" and "X-Men" to "Star Wars" and Perlman's own "Beauty and the Beast" TV series, the world of Hellboy feels awfully familiar.

The sheer ingenuity and obvious joy del Toro puts into the major action sequences lifts the movie out of the mundane. Otherwise, the paranormal stunts, the fights between good and bad demons, the face-off between the good scientist and the evil charlatan have all been done to death.

In essence, much of the movie is an extended battle between a creature that cannot die and a creature that does die only to be reborn -- and nobody on the creative team seems to understand that is a hugely static situation. As with those endless fights between Keanu Reeves' Neo and the hundreds of Agent Smith clones in "The Matrix" sequels last summer, the risk of tedium is high.

Starting out much like "X-Men" in the final days of World War II, Hellboy is born -- so to speak -- when desperate Nazis hire evil mad monk Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden) to open a portal to the cosmic void to bring to Earth a creature who will cause Armageddon. Then, American GIs intervene and in the ensuing mayhem that creature, dubbed Hellboy, is intercepted by the good side, meaning Professor Broom (John Hurt), founder of the clandestine Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. Raised like a son by Broom, Hellboy becomes a champion for good rather than evil.

Perlman's Hellboy is a red giant, his leathery skin the shade of terra cotta, his horns sheered daily at the forehead much as a normal man would shave, a large right fist made of pure concrete and, oh yes, a tail just like the devil. Something of an overgrown kid, he lives in a bachelor pad underneath the BPRD, where he pumps iron, indulges in pizza and beer and raises dozens of cats. His job is to hunt down monsters, which he does with cool nonchalance and a number of wisecracks.

Only one thing throws him and that is Selma Blair's Liz Sherman, a fellow freak with pyro-kinetic abilities. Hellboy has an enormous crush on her. When John Myers (Rupert Evans), a young FBI agent, joins the "nanny squad" of normal humans who must look after Broom's freaks, Hellboy becomes hugely jealous of the burgeoning friendship between Liz and John.

The main story line is not terribly interesting. Rasputin returns to Earth -- where exactly has he been since 1944? -- to claim Hellboy for the dark side. He unleashes two villainous creatures, Sammael (Brian Steele), a hideous monster that as the "lord of resurrection" refuses to die, and Kroenen, once a human being but now a bloodless killing machine.

Coming to Hellboy's defense is Liz and another exceptional creature, Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), a fish-man with near psychic intuition. The movie's best moments come not during battles between Hellboy and his enemies, but rather in Hellboy's bratty behavior, which drives agent Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor) crazy, and his growing envy of Liz and John.

Shot in the Czech Republic, the movie mixes CG with models, matte paintings, animation, animatronics and prosthetics to give the comic book world a hint of realism. Marco Beltrami's music, dramatic and full bodied, is a major plus.

The first half of Open Range is presented almost as a documentary. If you would like a glimpse into how cowboys on the open range interact, set up camp, deal with a hard rainstorm, retrieve their missing horses, etc., then this film will not disappoint. The writers no doubt felt that this long introduction was necessary to give us some insight into the characters that would be playing out the drama to come, but such character development could have been accomplished much more elegantly (and efficiently). The acting is very good for this documentary portion, compelling you to want to like it, but there is just nothing there.

The story was formulaic -- an evil land baron with his army of bad guys versus two vastly under-gunned American cowboys who only want to live free Like other identical movies, most recently Monte Walsh with Tom Selleck, the film's main intent is to build to the ultimate showdown that we all are waiting for. It is always fun to see just how the good guys are going to overturn the odds against them. And what a gunfight it is. The movie concludes with the best western gun-battle I have seen. The sound effects are amazing.

The gun-battle is followed by a tacked-on romantic conclusion that is both far too long and utterly implausible (sending the message once again that women cannot resist a scoundrel).

Open Range will undoubtedly garner some strong reviews based on the impeccable acting. The acting was so good that you desperately want the movie to be better than it was. However, as interesting as it might be just to watch Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall sitting around talking about how ten years equals a decade, it would not make a movie. Wait and rent this one.