I don't know where to begin, so I'll begin with a snippet from the back of the cover of this movie. "Alive combines the tension of Vincenzo Natali's Cube with Kitamura's own Versus." I have not seen Versus, so I can't comment on that, but I think Cube was an excellent movie which I recommend to everyone. However, in this case someone has clearly confused "tension" with "boredom".
I'll just go ahead and spoil the entire plot, because besides being one holy Swiss cheese of a plot, it's also moldy cheese, and the movie is not worth spending any time on even if you don't know the plot beforehand, so it doesn't matter. If I have misunderstood the plot, don't hit me - it's probably because I had to struggle to keep my eyelids open.
So the American military in Nevada once lost a UFO i the Nambi desert. This apparently makes sense because they're both deserts so surely they're practically the same place. Different continents or not. A monkey broke into the UFO and acquired an alien something which was passed on to a Japanese researcher who had to eat the monkey to survive in the desert. What ever. The alien thing is now passed on to anyone who's "bloodthirsty" enough to kill the current host. The Japanese military wants to use it for military stuff, so they decide to make it pass from the current host (the researcher's daughter) to some other dude. But instead of just picking someone out of the military, which is full of people who are bloodthirsty AND already on the military's side, they decide that it's probably a good idea to pick some criminal out of death row instead. Oh, and the reason they pick this particular criminal from death row is because he was the first person in history to not die from the non-lethal electric shock which is the standard execution method, because everyone dies from the placebo effect when they get electrocuted. I don't know if they do this so they can giggle in the staff room at how everyone dies even though it's not deadly, or if they just want to cut down the electricity bill.
Then the movie turns into what The Matrix would have been if it had been really lame, and superfluous fighting bores us to tears for what feels like an hour. And oh wait, now they remember that they already had a dude who was infected with the alien thing, so the entire movie up to this point was actually a totally waste of time and also human lives. Then everyone dies. The end.
The only one moment in the movie where I didn't want to go away and sleep or eat a sandwich instead, was when a dude was pinned to a wall by a pipe through his chest, and he's hanging around up there and another dude walks by. The dude hanging on the wall says "I'm in pain, shoot me". And the living dude looks at him, and it's not like he's a mean dude or anything, so he really looks sorrowful and doesn't want the guy on the wall to suffer. So he shoots him.
(Rhetorical pause.)
In the stomach. "Gee THANKS A FREAKIN' HEAP."
I'll just go ahead and spoil the entire plot, because besides being one holy Swiss cheese of a plot, it's also moldy cheese, and the movie is not worth spending any time on even if you don't know the plot beforehand, so it doesn't matter. If I have misunderstood the plot, don't hit me - it's probably because I had to struggle to keep my eyelids open.
So the American military in Nevada once lost a UFO i the Nambi desert. This apparently makes sense because they're both deserts so surely they're practically the same place. Different continents or not. A monkey broke into the UFO and acquired an alien something which was passed on to a Japanese researcher who had to eat the monkey to survive in the desert. What ever. The alien thing is now passed on to anyone who's "bloodthirsty" enough to kill the current host. The Japanese military wants to use it for military stuff, so they decide to make it pass from the current host (the researcher's daughter) to some other dude. But instead of just picking someone out of the military, which is full of people who are bloodthirsty AND already on the military's side, they decide that it's probably a good idea to pick some criminal out of death row instead. Oh, and the reason they pick this particular criminal from death row is because he was the first person in history to not die from the non-lethal electric shock which is the standard execution method, because everyone dies from the placebo effect when they get electrocuted. I don't know if they do this so they can giggle in the staff room at how everyone dies even though it's not deadly, or if they just want to cut down the electricity bill.
Then the movie turns into what The Matrix would have been if it had been really lame, and superfluous fighting bores us to tears for what feels like an hour. And oh wait, now they remember that they already had a dude who was infected with the alien thing, so the entire movie up to this point was actually a totally waste of time and also human lives. Then everyone dies. The end.
The only one moment in the movie where I didn't want to go away and sleep or eat a sandwich instead, was when a dude was pinned to a wall by a pipe through his chest, and he's hanging around up there and another dude walks by. The dude hanging on the wall says "I'm in pain, shoot me". And the living dude looks at him, and it's not like he's a mean dude or anything, so he really looks sorrowful and doesn't want the guy on the wall to suffer. So he shoots him.
(Rhetorical pause.)
In the stomach. "Gee THANKS A FREAKIN' HEAP."