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alunrichards
Reviews
Pitch Black (2000)
Very good...
I've been looking forward to seeing this film for quite a while and I'm glad to say I wasn't disappointed. With this in mind I'll begin by commenting on the low points so as to end on a high. Spoilers alert The general premise of this film was pretty unoriginal and the story contained a few cliches, not to mention some moments which require a fair bit of suspension of disbelief. Some people have complained that it was ridiculous for a psychotic killer to be transported on a passenger ship, but I can accept that the mercenary "Johns" might have wanted to keep his trip back to Earth low-key in case a competitor tried to relieve him of his quarry, and we have to remember he was an independent mercenary and probably not possessed of infinite resources.
It's a little hard to accept that the ship would crash at exactly the right time in the 22 year cycle to experience a total eclipse, and the astronomical model in the film seems to show three incredibly small stars somehow linked together, orbiting the planet. Perhaps the centre of the model wasn't actually the planet, I'd have to see the film again.
The aliens seem to change drastically throughout the film, from some creepy looking "starfish" to swarms of bats, then from three feet tall quadrupeds to six feet tall bipeds. Also, their sensitivity to light seems to increase. Early on they all come out in the twilight as the suns pass behind the neighbouring planet's ring. Later they are warded off with bottles of faintly luminous grubs, though for some reason they have no problem running directly into torchlight.
Vin Diesel is just too resilient. He has no trouble running through the pitch darkness in an alien warzone pulling 140kg of power cells behind him and even wrestles with an alien and kills it (one of the bigger ones, not the starfish/bats).
These are the only problems I can see in the film, some people have complained about the dialogue, this is something that always irritates me as I feel that it's more realistic if characters don't have an ingenious catch phrase for any eventuality. People say dumb things in real life.
Overall, I though this film was very good delivering suspense, some decent action and incredible (but restrained) effects for the relatively low budget. Most of the characters were a little cliched, but they seemed fairly credible to me (face it, spaceships need pilots, equal opportunities will dictate there is a fairly good chance of them being female and most people don't like to leave others to die on alien infested hell planets). I was impressed that the Englishman lasted so long, I was tipping him for an early end, probably jumping down a dark hole after a particularly expensive Chardonnay. Apparently the characters were "irritating", so I must have missed a crucial character-building moment when I went to answer the door.
Apart from the points above I can't fault this film. You don't get much good scfi around these days but this is a highly respectable addition to the genre.
8/10
Bi xie lan tian (1998)
Excellent in parts with a few unfortunate short falls.
Overall I would have to say that this film is good, although it could have been excellent. Great fight scenes, wonderful camera work, a reasonable plot and decent performances all round. However, there are a few unfortunate failings which I feel could have been avoided with little trouble.
My major complaint with the version I own on DVD is the dubbing. While I make a point of always watching foreign films with subtitles it is impossible to avoid the voiceovers on the one because all of the Russian-speaking characters have been dubbed into English with varying degrees of success. Obviously this is a criticism of my version, not the film itself, but unless I learn to speak Cantonese I will not be able to enjoy the original version. Another problem is with the action scenes: while they are spectacular to say the least (as a martial artist myself I particularly enjoyed them) I cannot help thinking that they could have been a little more realistic. In the final showdown Chiu Man Chuk and Andrew Lin practically fly around the screen. This would not be so bad, but everything they touch shatters to pieces, be they tables or stone busts. As for the gunplay, a veritable army of terrorists with automatic weapons are almost completely unable to hit four soldiers standing still on an exposed bridge with no cover. My final complaint is the music in the romance scenes, which makes them seem a little slushy. Oh, and one misplaced blind guitar player in a subway showdown.
Obviously, I have been highlighting the bad points, rather than good - but this is simply because I want to illustrate that aside from these quibbles there is nothing wrong with this picture, which is why it is one of my favourite Chinese action movies.
Sat sau ji wong (1998)
It's not a Jet Li classic, but there's little to fault here.
Hitman is a good solid action comedy which calls upon Jet Li to do a little more acting than usual. The cast is good, with Eric Tsang standing out particularly, and Heiji Sato making a decent debut as the nasty Japanese guy (there seem to be a lot of these in Hong Kong movies). Action scenes are relatively thin on the ground but what's there is of a good standard - although you might expect better from "Hong Kong's greatest action export".
What's most refreshing about this film is its understatement. The plot isn't anything special but it's pretty water-tight, and the action is all pretty believable if unspectacular.
One thing I particularly liked about Hitman was the way that different languages were used throughout the film (without using dubbing as in The Black Sheep Affair). This contributes to the overall realistic feel of the film and is something I would like to see more on screen. This aside, there is nothing particularly innovative here, but nothing worth criticising either - a film I could recommend to people who don't usually enjoy foreign martial arts movies.