I found the ideas of the film, or whatever it's based off, interesting and nifty. Egyptian gods inhabiting a kind of blade runner dystopia with a human engineering edge. However good backdrops are necessary but not sufficient to create a good film, on most other necessary criteria, script, acting and story, it is miserable.
Script is lofty and pretentious, it is difficult to follow, requiring the viewer to have both a broad reference and understanding of things like fringe science, politics and religion. So a lot of the dialogue just went past me and I very much doubt there will be many exceptions to that. The script contains very little small talk or unnecessary dialogue that is typically used to develop the characters, to flesh out their personalities, near enough every line is just like a rail on a train track to keep the story ploughing ahead at full speed. when the script isn't of the aforementioned high-minded variety then it is just straight up cheesy clichés from Horus(antagonist) typically, with the impression that the former justifies the latter. I see a lot of praise in the reviews for the high expectations of the viewer implicit in the script, in the alien world which is depicted to make the characters even more difficult to empathize with by adding all these rare references and giving them boardroom speaks is double jeopardy.
The acting is probably what truly kills it though, you can see if the lines where actually delivered in ways in which some of the actors were competent enough to do so then the film could have been decent. Linda Hardy as the main character was just abysmal, it was hellish to watch and you just couldn't give a toss what happened to her character. She played the character in a kind of unemotional Keanu Reeves style, yet her character more than any seems to display moral outrage. Most characters by the end just seem one dimensional and you would struggle to care for them, a slight exception for Charlotte Rampling playing the doctor. Many of the characters appear in CGI, for the ones that are non-human it makes sense, but I don't understand why many human characters were CGI, needless to say they were the worst.
The plot line is commendable, it was capable of producing the right kind of scenarios that could have made for a good film. I imagine if they had been more professional in their acting and script then the main plot line would have been fine. It would have been a successful transplant from its original median and then this interesting world would have drawn in many more people, but instead they had to go down this weird, ott and arrogant route that just made it a boring cringefest.
Script is lofty and pretentious, it is difficult to follow, requiring the viewer to have both a broad reference and understanding of things like fringe science, politics and religion. So a lot of the dialogue just went past me and I very much doubt there will be many exceptions to that. The script contains very little small talk or unnecessary dialogue that is typically used to develop the characters, to flesh out their personalities, near enough every line is just like a rail on a train track to keep the story ploughing ahead at full speed. when the script isn't of the aforementioned high-minded variety then it is just straight up cheesy clichés from Horus(antagonist) typically, with the impression that the former justifies the latter. I see a lot of praise in the reviews for the high expectations of the viewer implicit in the script, in the alien world which is depicted to make the characters even more difficult to empathize with by adding all these rare references and giving them boardroom speaks is double jeopardy.
The acting is probably what truly kills it though, you can see if the lines where actually delivered in ways in which some of the actors were competent enough to do so then the film could have been decent. Linda Hardy as the main character was just abysmal, it was hellish to watch and you just couldn't give a toss what happened to her character. She played the character in a kind of unemotional Keanu Reeves style, yet her character more than any seems to display moral outrage. Most characters by the end just seem one dimensional and you would struggle to care for them, a slight exception for Charlotte Rampling playing the doctor. Many of the characters appear in CGI, for the ones that are non-human it makes sense, but I don't understand why many human characters were CGI, needless to say they were the worst.
The plot line is commendable, it was capable of producing the right kind of scenarios that could have made for a good film. I imagine if they had been more professional in their acting and script then the main plot line would have been fine. It would have been a successful transplant from its original median and then this interesting world would have drawn in many more people, but instead they had to go down this weird, ott and arrogant route that just made it a boring cringefest.