AKA Space Jail.
So there's a space jail. And that's sort of that. Its the non-clever future you've seen in RollerBall to Total Recall to Blade Runner. VARIANCE they keep prisoners in Matrix pods in suspended animation which is apparently where the writers areHAHA! Boom! Suck My Dick!!!!
Guy Pearce stars in a movie that is so far beneath him that it bothers me. He's a great actor. Read: Great. This movie is piss. He plays a character who's name I think was Corporal Anti Hero. A soldier/cop/taskforce/specialist that you think would play it by the numbers wait no, he's a renegade who obviously takes life very seriously, wait no he breaks up the movie with his quick remarks and comic relief while bringing toughness and a hidden selfless mentality founded in him by the loyalty and tutelage of his General(not explained at all) whom is killed in the beginning of what could be the most rushed beginning of a movie since Red Dawn. Patrick Swayze doesn't even establish the fact he is a human before Russians are touching down. Enough about a good movie though, back to Space Jail's lead that you have seen at least 9,000 fuck all times. He's basically a scrapbook of other action movie heroes. Only the names have changed. Think Die Hard in a Halo suit played by an actor who could be in a movie that people would give a fuck about but instead is in a movie I'm pretty sure a copy paste program had as much passion in writing as whoever imdb gives credit to for issuing out this pile of well worn assery.
Really bad CGI chase scene with a motorcycle from the future. Its fucking music video quality bad. Kind of surprising to see really, and so early in the movie you immediately know you don't have to take the rest of it seriously, its kind of like the first time you hear Al Pacino's voice in Scarface and you realize the rest of the movie is a joke and nothing that happens from that moment on could mean anything to anyone who isn't a total fool.
Guy 'Neo' Pearce crashes the motorcycle into a building going an estimated 600mph based on the blurry Hellboyesque graphics and just rolls to a stop after smashing through a window. When filming this scene Guy had to just keep looking at a picture of the check he got for inspiration. Not sure what book the special effects guys read before making this scene but I'm sure it started with "An Introductory To:".
The jail has a revolt and is taken over with what can be described as a 2-3 minute rebellion. Games tag have had slower transitions than this. Its the most important part of the movie other than the climax and they rush it like it was a contest to see how quickly they could do it. They showed about 15 security guards grab guns. 3 get killed and next thing you know it's over. They showed about 1,000 cells and there are maybe 28 prisoners in any scene. I hope they didn't scale down to save money because the movie looks ridiculous. There's a space revolt that must be stopped because a group of 3 dozen horrible criminals are acting up? This could be filmed in a Detroit public school every day. Guy 'CorbanDallas' Pearce is sent on a one man mission to rescue the president's daughter who remains inconspicuous for about 10 minutes before someone reads her name tag and deduces she has the same last name as the president. So bad news for Reggie Bush 5 years ago, you're fucked. As for the President's daughter she is on a prison satellite full with thousands (dozens) of murderers and awful people. And she had 3 secret service guys with her. All over powered and killed. That's the best they can do? AC Milan's tour bus drove by me one time. They had a 20 police car escort, this seems like they're playing it a little cheap. Moving on.
So Guy 'Dutch' Pearce gets to the Presidents daughter in about 12 seconds of looking. Actually not even that long. He breaks into a floating prison looking for one pers...oh there she is. She's played by the daughter from Taken. So instantly I'm on the prisoners side. She is strangely attractive in this movie though
Maybe because it doesn't show her goofy running with a denim jacket bedazzled with unicorns. He finds her inside what looks like a floating O'Hare International Airport mega terminal floating in space in about the time it would take you to find Kate Upton's tits in this picture
They uncover that the prisoners are being expiremented on. More on this later....just kidding it only comes up once in passing and no one is vilified for it. I mean not even like an evil super prisoner, just that, the movie asks "do you see what they're doing?" and then immediately answers for you "yes". Did a writer from Lost have anything to do with this movie? What a weird aside to the audience that went nowhere and has no bearing on the movie in anyway. Guy 'RickDeckard' Pearce doesn't even really react to it, almost like he was trying to send a message that "yeah this is nothing focus on me". As for the experimented on prisoners? I kept expecting mutant altered mega prisoners later in the movie, they don't even have a reason for who is authorizing it or why. Its like they cut a scene out later in the movie explaining what that scene meant, they also seem to have cut the scene explaining why they even ended up in a lab to begin with. We're in ducts we're lost we don't know where we are going, brief check in on the power struggle amongst the prisoners hierarchy, ok we're in a lab now.... this movie uses cohesion like its bacon in Shareef Abdur-Rahim's kitchen.
Thinking conservatively, shouldn't a space jail have a sleeping gas fail-safe control that could be activated from earth to cull riots? And I hate to problem shoot a movie because it's lazy and stupid. It takes a shallow boring human to shoot down plot holes of a fantasy movie with reality because the key to any movie is the suspension of disbelief and if you are sitting in a movie where you just say things like "just call the cops and wait outside" or "just kill him and its over" is something an uncreative unimaginative bore would do. So me even mentioning the sleeping gas idea is stupid...but they mentioned having one. And for some reason didn't use it. I guess they didn't want to have a security override system from earth for whatever reason, which is fine. Otherwise how would we get to experience Guy 'SolidSnake' Pearce go through the motions like every kid in highschool did when they had to do pushups in gym before they got to play dodge ball for 40 minutes. Pearce virtually films this movie like his car was running in the parking lot. Filming time couldn't have been more than 10 days.
I feel like a lot gets cut from this movie. The beginning, establishing the main character, and getting to the jail is maybe 45 seconds. The takeover is maybe 2 minutes. The insurgence is quicker, yet the movie somehow ends up over 2 fucking hours. Thats a lot of time Guy SnakeBliskin Pearce spends in duct work. Its like the beginning of Golden Eye when you can't figure out where to go initially. I want to almost see an editors cut. So much is missing. They show a scene where 8 security guards get chased by 12 inmates and they imply I guess that the armed guards lost that battle. The movie takes place in a crawl space for about 50 minutes, you get claustrophobic to the point its like you're reading a fucking Ray Bradbury novel. It gets so cramped he breaks out into a hallway with no windows and it feels downright spacious. Guy 'JohnMcClane' Pearce has quip filled interactions to what he believes is a silver spooned doesn't know anything about the real world spoiled brat, and she gives it right back to who she believes is a heartless soldier cog of her passionless father. A dynamic rarely seen in a movie since the last time they made this movie 4 years ago.
Back to the scale issues of this movies. The prisoners turned hostage takers make mention of more hostages. They can find 4 safety engineers at the snap of a finger. They elude to a giant room full of hostages they never show, all sorts of engineers guards infirmary workers janitors technicians and so on. Then the loose cannon prisoner leader takes a six shot revolver starts executing random people and all of a sudden Guy DetectiveRiggs Pearce tells the first daughter "All the hostages are dead". Oh? Are they? An entire floating space jail full of humanity is overrun and murdered by 30 bad guys? Specifically in a scene where you hear 6 maybe 7 gun shots? That was abrupt. That was pretty fucking quick. Especially when you didn't show any of it. So basically you have implied carnage that they repeatedly refuse to show. Not to sound like a disgusting man pig but...where is the violence? This movie is shockingly PG-12 with the violence. They shoot hostages but, really only in the background of a security camera granulated feed. I mean it's a prison riot movie. The prisoners turn on each other and get revenge on the rats by...insinuating that they're going to hurt them? They take over from the guards by throwing them over a rail and playing the sound effect of them hitting the ground. Even the big payoff at the end of the movie is just a jarring quick jab punch that knocks the bad guy unconscious. Unsatisfied? Imagine Guy Pearce's face at the premier half way through a movie that could kill George Clooney's career.
I also don't want to ruin the movie for you but I will just give away this so think hard about it before you see this. Guy 'CaseyfuckingRyback' Pearce escapes prison satellite jail by jumping from it and parachuting back to earth. So yeah. Go see it. Seriously. Read that and go see it.
