Nemesis

8/13/07 Laptop alone 1:00pm

I remember watching this movie at my dad's apartment in Yankton, or I remember my dad watching it. I'm pretty sure it was this movie anyway; the Netflix version was a TV edit and the only image I remembered strongly from the movie was a butt. I'm pretty sure I know which scene it was from, but there was no butt. Mainly I remember the butt and the gritty neo-noir type feel copped from Blade Runner, which describes the first half of the movie fairly well. The title sounds right. It must have been this movie.

I think I mostly read a book while dad watched it, because I was pretty contemptuous of movies like this. Not a "real" movie, just a stupid scifi actioner. Now I'm almost more interested in movies like this than "real" movies, sometimes.

The opening action scenes were actually pretty bad, though. The type that remind me of the gunfights in The Life Aquatic, where people just pose in the middle of the frame and fire their guns, and then you cut to the people whom they're aiming at and watch various of them get hit or other things explode around them. No attempt to make individual gunshots correspond to any individual hits. The characters firing generally don't even appear to be aiming at all. Sometimes they hold their guns stationary; sometimes they wave them around in broad circles. The effect is the same. I wonder why even bother shot an action scene like that. You'd think if you're making an action movie you'd at least be interested in the action enough to try to make it have some kind of order or sense to it.

It's weird how the movie seemed to completely changed once it moved to Java. All of a sudden, the villains got way more weird, as if they just let the actors go crazy. Where it seemed like it was trying to strike a "restrained" note through the first half of the movie, once they go to Java it seemed to be much more about just trying to have fun.

The "fun" seemed most present with the weird well-dressed smiling guy cyborg, who showed up about ten cuts before he really became relevant, almost as if the movie was trying to warn us that we should be ready for him. He seemed to be kind of equivalent to a later level boss in a game like Final Fight or something. He was built up to be like some kind of badass, but as soon as he's dead he doesn't matter. As soon as he enters the movie for real, though, he jumps main-character-cyborg guy and they fall through a window on what appeared to be one of those giant slides they have at carnivals that you ride down in a potato sack. This quick trip down the slide led to two of the weirdest shots in the whole movie. The first came as the two are struggling, with smiling guy on top trying to choke main character guy, and first there's a POV shot from main character guy's perspective, a close up of smiling guy making a weird facial expression and reaching toward the camera. This shot is followed a few seconds later by a shot of what is supposed to again be a POV shot from main character guy's perspective, but this time the background behind smiling guy is all pink and glowy, and he's not wearing a shirt, appears to actually be standing still, and smiling open-mouthed at the camera, when his face cracks open to reveal a gun behind his right eye. They'd had a cyborg do this earlier, but the weirdest part about it was that he wasn't wearing shirt, which made him look like he actually was naked. One of those moments that's almost more surreal than anything an a "surrealist" movie, since it's not lingered on or presented as a surreal moment or anything.

The other interesting thing comes at the end of the slide, when main character guy shoves smiling cyborg's head into a big pipe that's suspended over the slide. Then we watch as the cyborg, whose head is apparently stuck in the pipe and possibly completely destroyed, we watch as his body, practically hanging from the pipe, the lower parts of the legs limp, the arm pointing a gun and randomly firing into the air, making the body wobble back and forth. It's really a pretty creepy little shot. Possibly one of the only shots in the whole movie that really works on the level it's intended to.

Throughout the movie, the characters keep making references to the main character guy's level of humanity. "86.5% is still human!" he says. "You're practically a cyborg anyway. You should join us!" The funny thing is the movie doesn't really seem interested in the slightest in the question of whether he's still "human" with all the mechanical parts in him, which ultimately isn't really that interesting of a question anyway. But it's brought up in just about every conversation main character guy has with another character. It's like the movie thought it had to pay lip service to the idea since it was a science fiction movie and there is often this idea that science fiction movies should explore some kind of question like that, at least a little bit. But really it was nothing more than a recitation of the question. And, ironically, the question probably would've seemed more relevant to the movie if it'd never even been mentioned.