avortac — 11 years ago(June 15, 2014 10:37 AM)

This is by no means an excellent movie or anything, but there's nothing fundamentally completely awful or wrong about it, either. It's an entertaining flick, even with all the flaws and plot holes, things that do not make sense, and so on.
"Humans who do not feel" is a suprisingly difficult concept to actualize, especially if you are not completely sure as to how to go about it.
I think it had been better, if they had been given some kind of 'mild euphoria', so that everyone would be in a more 'zombie-like' state, although still able to function, but just not caring about anything too much, except the next 'fix'.
Well, many things could have been better.
But there were a couple of small curiosities that bothered me;

1. The action scenes look like they have been filmed in 60 fps mode, and then 50% of the frames have been removed (every other frame). This removes the normally occurring motion blur, making the movements look incredibly jerky and odd - it almost looks like watching a 15 fps video. It's not a good look. You either want more frames per second for fast action scenes, or you want motion blur, to make it look smoother. Heck, you could even ADD motion blur and make it look better than it normally would (like they do in some console games, like "Soul Calibur" - the sword movements look just that much smoother with the 'white blur' added to them)
2. The katanas are stored completely wrong. The katanas on the table of the final boss - I mean, the 'father' villain - they are upside down! I guess someone thought they look cooler that way, but the only sensible, logical, plus traditional and cherished way to take good care of katana swords is keeping the sharp side of the blade pointing upwards. This also prevents it from sinking into the sheath. How can anyone who knows even the basics about katanas and sword storage, keep their katana swords the wrong way like that? If we are supposed to believe they know what they are doing, why does the movie present us with this amateur hour?
   Nothing else really bothered me all that much .. yeah, it's full of all kinds of stupidities and clichs and implausibilities and whatnot, and it copied The Matrix a lot (too much, actually), without replicating its coolness (it just doesn't .. dare I say it.. FEEL quite as interesting or exciting as The Matrix), and the "statistics-based" Kung-Fu Gunnery was just a ridiculous idea that should have been either scrapped, or replaced with some kind of 'spiritual sense/feel' (like Zen, for example, that the Zen Archers actually used in historical battles) that the clerics were allowed to have..
   (after all, it's the emotions, the ego-mind construct, that causes the anger and inhumanity - although plenty of supposedly better humans, caused more inhumanities in this movie than they probably would, if they had been allowed to 'feel' - isn't that why military men are trained not to feel empathy towards the 'enemy', so that they can be more efficient murder machines? So the whole premise is actually wrong - it's much more inhuman not to feel and go around on murdering rampages just because somone wants to read a book or look at a painting, than feel justified anger or something more cultivated, like an actual 'feeling' (instead of emotion))
   .. but it's still relatively entertaining, and it does make the viewer ask the question: "What is 'feeling'" and "How would a human being completely devoid of any feeling really act compared to this movie's interpretation?".
   And any movie that makes the viewer ask a question like that, can't be all bad.