FILM@TW0_SENSER: The Rover

"Whatever you think is over for me, was over a long time ago..."

The Rover - an intense, disturbing piece of film-making. A study of a future that may well become inevitable...

I've always liked Guy Pearce's acting and he doesn't fail to deliver in this either. But the real surprise comes from Robert Pattinson. Forget Twilight and Harry Potter; he's almost unrecognizable as he delivers a stark, sympathetic portrayal of a desperate half-wit on the road to nowhere.

So what is it about? Well imagine if you will, a bleak outback landscape; the world after a global economic collapse. It could easily be the dawn of the Age of Mad Max. And into that landscape you drop an even more haggard version of Walter White; haunted by his past and with nothing much left to lose - except his car.

And then you team him up with a simpleton, who could easily be Jessie Pinkman but without the street smarts or the colourful vocabulary. The story unfolds as they proceed to have a very, very bad day... This is not Breaking Bad, its Badly Broken.

The future has never looked so bleak, and yet so completely plausible...

Check the trailer:

FILM@TW0_SENSER: Man Of Tai Chi

Oh my goodness me - where to start with this? To watch Man of Tai Chi is to get a ringside seat into the near comatose mind of debut director, Keanu Reeves...

Hello, hello, is there anybody there? Keanu seems to be stuck in a world where the action scenes from the Matrix keep running and re-running, until the film itself starts to wear thin.

To say you've seen this all before would be an understatement.A typical martial arts film, where an innocent martial arts practitioner is tempted by 'the dark side' (played by a one-dimensional Reeves, dressed in grey or black), and bucket-loads of money - to beat all his opponents and ultimately commit the ultimate Tai Chi sin - to kill.

There is hardly any character development. There is no explanation as to the motivation of Reeves' character, and main protagonist, Tiger Chen (a veteran stunt artist from the Matrix films) struggles to convince - unfortunately looking more like a bow-legged uncle than a powerful young martial artist exponent.

Adding to the cast is a cardboard Karen Mok, playing a detective trying to track down Reeves' illegal underground fighting tournaments. She's got to be possibly the worst detective in history, always turning up late at the scene of a crime, and apparently hiding in plain view, so that the bad guys always know where she is...

What a film, what a film... if you're watching purely for fight scenes, then you won't be disappointed, as our Tai Chi hero is pitted against all other forms of martial arts, to prove to everyone just how powerful Tai Chi can be.

But after half an hour of non-stop grunts and groaning sound effects as they kick the stuffing out of each other, the noise can start testing your patience... 

To give this movie 2 out of 10 would be generous... All that's left to be said is... "Keanu, what were you thinking? Maybe you took one too many blue pills?"

WARNING: The trailer is much better than the actual film!

FILM@TWO_SENSER: PROMETHEUS

Let's get things started with a bit of "catch-up" from earlier this year...

I watched Prometheus. Epic. It took about five minutes after the end credits for me to remember to close my mouth. 

Mostly for the right reasons... although there were some scenes that just left me stunned and I'm still not sure why - perhaps just waiting for my brain to still catch up.

Ridley Scott goes to places few other directors dare to venture - and on this wild celluloid ride into humanity's future/destiny/fate/origins, his pivotal character is ironically not human at all...

"David" is a state-of-the-art android; caretaker and steward of the human crew who set out for the stars aboard the starship, Prometheus.



He is just the latest incarnation of a line of memorable, more-human-than-human robot characters brought to life by Ridley Scott and those that followed in his wake. In the Alien franchise alone, we now have A, B, C, and D: Ash, Bishop, Call and of course David.

But to me the greatest on-screen rendition of a robot at odds with his prime directive is Roy Batty, the Nexus-6 Replicant, who stole every scene in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

Scott's love affair with the robot has taken him full circle, and in the disturbingly perfect semblance of humanity that is David, we see what in many ways may have been the beginnings of Roy, before the experiences of his volatile 4-year existence had taken their toll.

As Tyrell refers to Roy Batty as his 'prodigal son', so too does Peter Weyland describe David as the 'closet thing he ever had to a son'; that similar, tragic relationship between machine and maker...

Given time to develop, 8th Gen. David  may one day question his role of carrying out tasks that his "human counterparts find... distressing." But of course that's a potential storyline for Scott to decide on. Hopefully he will.

There are many things that can be said about Prometheus, and its obviously going to be spoken about for many years to come. But David as portrayed by Michael Fassbender (the performance of his career, thus far) is set to become a truly iconic character.

(I always believed there could be no-one else to reprise the role of Roy Batty in any sequel/reload of Blade Runner, which was why I have been against such an idea. But now in Fassbender, I see a fitting successor to Rutger Hauer's haunting portrayal).