Cypher

There’s a fine line between “visionary” and “tacky”. *Fifth Element* 

and Dark City are two visionary films that come to mind now. While they were two completely different films, they both had a definite vision, and dealt with their subjects in a fantastic way.

was pitched as a visionary film. The director, Vincenzo Natali, had done one other film, Cube , which I rather enjoyed. The acting and dialogue wasn’t so great, but the film worked anyway, because Natali successfully made the movie about more than just the people and what they were saying – they were puppets in a bigger machine. After seeing it, I decided to keep an eye on this director, as he has potential.

So I walked into very curious to see what Natali has been up to lately. With a debut feature like Cube , the next one would either be fantastic or complete trash. Unfortunately, it was complete trash.

The acting was awful, don’t even talk to me about dialogue – and the big surprise payoff at the end? I’ll just say I saw it coming a mile away. While the basic idea was sound, the plot veered into tacky absurdity too many times to really take this film seriously at all. There was far too much techno-wizard gadgetry around – useless stuff that looks good on camera. It reminds me of when screenwriters first discovered the Internet and made a bunch of really crap “hacking” films with impossible computer stuff. This film would fit in really well with those, unfortunately. It’s as if Natali just turned on a computer for the first time in 20 years and thought “wow this is kinda cool”. I won’t even bother talking about the plot, because it really doesn’t matter.

Of the few good things I can say about this film, most are about Lucy Liu’s butt. The rest have to do mostly with some of the look-and-feel stuff. There was one shot, towards the beginning, that showed an arial shot of the neighbourhood our hero lives in. While it was obviously computer generated, it showed the monotony of suburban life better than the opening sequence of American Beauty could. The film was also lit really well, very dramatic. The use of colour was very well done as well. I think that’s why it reminded me a little of Dark City .

To sum up: Skip it, don’t even bother when drunk or off your head, because the plot is too complex and some of the scenes will give you vertigo.