I really just wanted to having something in the bag incase I didn’t feel like writing anything at some point next week. Good to use your time productively and give yourself some slack in the future if you need a quiet day to relax a little bit.
I made mention of this before, yesterday even. Not in my quick note about the Iranian tragedy but the little written piece before that.
Last night, on opening night no less, I went to go see “Underwater” at an eight pm showing in what would be considered to be a sparsely populated theater. I know it’s January and Hollywood tends to drop off its pinched turds into theaters at this time. But I tell you what, Underwater was a fairly well crafted film. Acting was decent, script was not too mealy mouthed or jargon heavy, and it was paced quick as hell too. Effects were practical and you had a real sense of tangible on screen utility. Kristen Stewart did a commendable job as reluctant heroin who was not an over powered Mary sue, and she is an engineer so things she does are in her handy woman wheel house. Plus what she suffers through has real time effects on her, and are portrayed as such.
But what really got me going about this $65 million dollar, practical effects, team driven sci fi flick was how good of a proof of concept it is for a Gears of War film. Namely a first in the series, that sets up the cog wars, Serra, the Gears and those huge bulky power suits. If the first film is a character driven war time story of a team of six very tight fighting fire team, that shows their origins, how they work together, their banter and dynamics against a backdrop of man vs man war, only to end with the last five to ten minutes including Emergence Day, which could lay out a great series of sequels but keep the budget to $65/70 million so it didn’t have to make three quarters of a billion to be profitable, I’d call that a huge win.
If the horde show up as prosthetics, and guys in suits, under smoke and bad lighting you could really get that budget to stretch and focus on the team and why were cared about the game franchise to begin with.
If the group dynamics, claustrophobic scenery and story of human suffering in war time coalesce, the first time out in a GoW story doesn’t have to have millions of effects on screen at once.
I liken it to Alien and Aliens. Do the small intimate story up front, let it sell itself, then pump the budget to include a sense of scale to a whole planet at war with alien/ancient underground foes.
That’s just my two sense, but I really feel you could do so much with it if you keep it small, focused and driven by the interplay among the title characters who were soldiers fighting other soldiers to begin with, before the world fell because of a massive Hammer of Dawn strike that didn’t really work, except to kill a few billion innocent bystanders.
But beyond that, I’d by Underwater on bluray, and will watch any specials features with pure glee! It was eerie, and suspenseful, and scary and exhausting and fun all at the same time.
Go see it. It’s not a remake, nor a sequel, nor an adaptation of a pre existing property. Although it does borrow mightily from The Abyss, Aliens, Cloverfield (the original good one). Kristen Stewart did a real good job, she was ultimately believable in her role. That’s about as much as anyone could ask for.
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