What I'm Watching: The Strain

Hey look, I did it!  Two in a row!  And this one is current events!  AND tv!  Don't do enough of that...

ANYways, The Strain!

It's no surprise that I'd give a horror show by Guillermo Del Toro a shot, considering my love of Pacific Rim, and Hellboy, and so many other things.

The Strain focuses on an aircraft that is mysteriously attacked from within, touching upon modern fears, and tapping into that zeitgeist.  It's made all the more palpable after recent events in the Ukraine, and the timing is downright creepy.  But I digress.

A lot of horror deals with our fears, and shit going wrong on airplanes is a big deal in the last decade, and this plays into them well.  Fortunately, rather than a bombing or crashing, it's a viral outbreak, which also ties in well with our fears of disease.  The two dovetail well with each other to create something of a mystery that we don't see very often, since the days of Fringe.

The mystery slowly unfolds, but any horror fan should be quick to pick up on some familiar bits of lore, and I love those little touches.  So yeah, we're pretty much dealing with vampires, but they are not your familiar bloodsuckers.  They are also most emphatically NOT prettyboy sparkling love interests.  Which is so welcome, for me.

We've seen the 'vampire as virus' idea played out in other places, and it's a natural fit with the whole blood angle, but The Strain takes things to this whole other level with details and science rarely seen in stories before this, and still manages to make their vampires stand out in a crowded field.  These harken back more towards the Nosferatu type, while picking up on details from Stoker's novel, and the more classical lore, while not relying on it heavily.  These creatures are entirely their own thing with just enough familiar DNA (Ahem) with the classics to please the big time horror fans.

Also pleasing to the big time horror fans are the use of scares and blood in the show.  There's not a lot, but what there is, well...they say go big or go home, and The Strain goes big.  The pilot episode slowly draws you in with flashes and teases for over half the extended running time, and then explodes for a few seconds of bloody ultraviolence when the main creature strikes.  It's well paced and does a great job laying things out before that moment, and it strikes at a perfect moment and works as a great reveal.

I'm also quite pleased that this is a series, and not a movie, because the expanded format gives us great character moments where we can just sit down and have our leads talk about their lives, and get involved in widely unrelated things, all for the sake of building these people up and getting into their personalities in more ways than a shorter runtime would allow.

I can't give this anything but one of my strongest recommendations.  I'm intrigued to see where things go, it's pleasing to old horror fans, while still delivering something new and doesn't feel stale.  There's a lot here to like, and while it doesn't lay the groundwork of possibilities that something like Sleepy Hollow's pilot did, this is well-crafted from the ground up, by some masters of the genre.

The biggest shame in all this is Syfy's "Helix".  Sorry, but a WAY better horror based medical outbreak drama just came along, guys!  And I enjoyed Helix, so no slight against it.  The Strain just blew it out of the Arctic.

What I'm Watching: Pacific Rim

Caught an afternoon showing of what may be my most anticipated movie of the summer, Pacific Rim!

Why was THIS, of all things, highly anticipated?  Well, it's from Del Toro, a favourite of mine, as anyone who frequents Trisk knows, that's right off the bat.  I also have a big amount of respect for Godzilla and friends, even if I'm not super well versed in the lore.  I know the general specifics like everyone, but never got THAT into the kaiju fandom, mostly just on the periphary.  Plus, giant robots.  And a great, headlined by the often-amazing Idris Elba.

But, probably most importantly, the movie is not a remake, it's not a sequel, it's not an adaptation.  It has its roots in the kaiju genre, and the mech genre, and you can see that DNA, so it's hard to call this an ORIGINAL idea, or unique, but it is its own thing, even if it owes a lot to the past.

All that being said, I guess that brings us around to the big question; so how WAS the movie??

The movie was REALLY good.

It's not mind blowing, it's not twisty and turny, and it does owe a lot to the past, but it takes those past bits, and while it's straightforward, it tells its story well, and sets up the characters well.

The story is set in the near future, after a rift to another plane of existence opens up at the bottom of the Pacific Oean, through which giant monsters come through to rampage our coastal cities all along the Pacific Rim.  After a few cities become rubble, the governments band together and create the Jaegers, gigantic robots piloted by humans to deal with the problem.

Admittedly, that's a big leap, but hey, you knew that going in, so you either accept it or went to the wrong movie.  If you can accept that, you are in for quite a ride.  The opening scene setting up the universe and giving you the backstory really does the job of explaining things to the audience, and really draws you in nicely.

I really liked their take on the mechs, needing two pilots to manage everything, the tech required, and even how it ties into the Kaiju themselves and even how its used with the enemy.

The movie has a lot of plot threads, and all of them are given equal time, giving most of the major players a moment.  I really like a movie that has a lot of things going on, and tying them all together to the central plot in the end.  You kinda see where everything is going, but the journey is most enjoyable.

My biggest complaint is their one attempt at a twist, when they reveal that the plan to destroy the breach won't work.  Normally a twist like that goes along the lines of, the bad guys see it coming and will have it work to their benefit or to our detrement, but it's just, "We have intel that it won't work, just like all our other attempts!"

But it DOES give our side intel on HOW to make it work, so it works on that level, at least.

The movie does suffer a bit from the same problem that plagues the Transformers movies that you get a little too close to the action and it becomes hard to follow, but nowhere near as bad as that, since you at least have giant robots that aren't a mass of sharp pointy tiny metal shards, and mixed in with fighting solid, fleshy monsters that glow.  Both of these help manage that issue tremendously.  But a little less downpour would have helped even more.

It's nice that a movie that's all about cities getting holy hell stomped out of them, that this movie still manages to be bright, and not too dour.  A very stark contrast to Man of Steel, which gets to be a bit grey in the cinemtography, and didn't have much humour.  Pacific Rim used a lot of bright (But not Batman and Robin bright) colours to punch things up, both in the robots, the monsters, and the landscapes.  You can't have Hong Kong without neon lights, right?  Also, there's a good sense of humour amongst all the heroes, but not a black comedy sort of thing, as one might expect from anyone REALLY going through a decade or two of these attacks.

Things look bleak for humanity in the story, but the visuals and characters keep it refreshingly and enjoyably light.

The movie has a lot of heart, and the characters play well off one another, letting you get to know most everyone you need to know, and their personalities, before the big robot fighting kicks in.  This was a good balance of action and character, and I never felt like things got too draggy with pacing, since I enjoyed watching the humans as much as the robots.

If you are a fan of Godzilla or giant mechs, you pretty much HAVE to see this movie.  It's not an amazing, life altering movie, but it is good, well writen, and perfectly solid action adventure.  And it's something new and different.  Go see it!

What I'm Watching: Mama

I completely forgot about this!  Watched it last week, and promptly never got around to reviewing it.

Long-time readers may recall I wasn't too thrilled with the last movie that had Guillermo Del Toro's handprint on it, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.  It wasn't bad, but something about it never clicked.  I wanted to see Mama, but never bothered in the theatres, in part because of that (Even though Del Toro was only producing) and because the trailers made me cringe just a little bit, and not in a good horror way.

Which makes me SO pleased that after watching the DVD, I so enjoyed it!

The story is about a man who one day snaps and kills his co-workers and wife, and while taking his kids away to escape capture, he crashes deep into the middle of a wintery nowhere.  He finds his way to a shack and uses it as shelter for himself and the kids, but it's not long before something attacks and kills him.

Cut to several years later, when his twin brother, who never gave up searching, finds the cabin, and the kids, still alive and having gone a wee bit feral over all this time in the woods and no other human interaction.

Note the 'human' part of that sentence.  Because while the kids were left out there, they were not alone.  Whatever killed their father took care of them.  A something that follows them back to civilisation to watch over them, and something that they call Mama.

The plot unfolds quite well from there, with a lot of good creepy moments and scares, in that definitive Del Toro style.  He may have only produced, but you can tell he had his hands in this.  In good ways, and bad ways.

Del Toro's style is often quite terrifying, but also has this tendency to switch in an instant over to something more...whimsical.  And that is located here as well, sadly enough.  It doesn't ruin the movie, but the occasional silly or cute look to something we are supposed to be afraid of undercuts things just a little, in those few moments it happens.

Fortunately, it only happens when we're supposed to be sympathising with the creature, seeing its human side, both figuratively, and literally.  So at least it makes sense thematically, and makes it more palletable.

Most importantly, the movie actually ends with a satisfying ending.  Something that can be so rare in hrror these days.  It's not necessarily a HAPPY ending, but things are resolved, and explained adequately enough, and you are left with a sense of closure and hope.  I'm all for ambiguous endings, or sequel baiting, but these things have become so prevalent in horror movies, you almost forget what a legitimate *ending* is!

Probably the biggest problem is that the movie may not have the most original elements to it.  You will find many familiar tropes.  But they are put together in a new way, with its own style, that you can almost forget that nagging feeling of familiarity it sometimes has.

The cast is great, with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau doing a dual role of the brothers, and you really feel his pain at losing his family so many years ago, and the hope at rebuilding it again.  Jessica Chastain as his girlfriend who gets put in the unenviable position of trying to take care of the kids when she doesn't want to also puts in a way better performance than such a role would normally receive.  Even the kids aren't annoying.

Mama was a real treat to watch, both from a storytelling point of view, and visually.  Even on his bad days, even on a movie Del Toro just sneezed at, the movie has a distinctive style that is entrancing.  It may not be the most original horror movie, it may have its own quirks, but those are also its charm, and I think it works.