Reviews

1) The vespas are simply not very frightening. Yes, they look like a scary monster from a children's book, but surely most people get scared by things that pose a real threat, not just bad looks. 2) The characters make one poor and uneducated judgement after another. 3) What idea is it that 'dad' supposedly has, when he opts to leave the car? Surely not just throwing a wrench about to prove a point that has been made several times already? 4) Why does 'daughter' have the sound on when chatting with Rob, her being deaf? 5) Checkov's Gun. Anyone? The movie is riddled with objects that are hinted at but never used. Even guns. 6) Why is there a drain pipe where there is no dike and why is it barred? 7) Why is the farm house fenced like a fortress? 8) If the country is collapsing, who runs telecom infrastructure? They seem to have internet absolutely everywhere. 9) Apart from them knowing sign language, what exactly is it that is supposed to make a deaf girl better at being silent? 10) Considering the vespas supposedly navigate by ear, their hearing is remarkably poor. They are able to locate power lines to perch on, but not detect screaming food. 11) For a city slicker, 'dad' is remarkably quick at starting the wood chipper. And why does he not let it keep running? As someone else noted; he could have saved the planet long before it ran out of power. 12) What's with the 'the girl is fertile' thing? Humanity hasn't grown barren. It has become food. 13) Who in their right mind would allow their deaf daughter to walk the dog, alone, in the midst of an apocalypse?

This list can be expanded to much higher digits than this, however, there are many movies that suffer from these traits and still work. Why? Because they have redeeming features. What does this one have against it, then?

1) Poor or even close to no acting. 'Dad' seems to say 'okay' *a lot*. 'They crusified a man in Mississippi' -'okay'. 2) Amateurish CGI (admittedly the slow motion scene in the rain, is very cool, though). Especially the Range Rover rolling down the slope is tear wrenchingly horrible, closely followed by the explosion shortly after. 3) Scene transitions seem purposeless. Nothing carries a momentum. Things appear to happen out of the blue. 4) The score is... well I don't even remember if there even was one. More like a series of sounds attempting to present some level of eerieness.

So, what did it show in terms of redemption? A new take on the suicide belt cliché. A cool slow-mo CGI scene.

First things first: the books are fabulous... There! This movie - not so much. From here on it is easy to fall into the ubiquitous "the-book-was-better-than-the-movie-duh" trap, because this usually falls into the apples and oranges category. This is not what was wrong here. The books are immensely detailed and thought through. Nothing happens out of the blue and for no reason. In other words: there is a stringent plot course from start to finish with very little meandering. That seems to have vanished completely in the movie. If you know the books, you know *why* things happen. Why Dina does what she does and meet who she meets - in short; we get to know her very well and, just as importantly, her family. Here she apparently out of the blue befriends a drunkard assassin, a hard boiled armourer and a powder wielding mini-merlin, all willing to die for her for no reason whatsoever. Perhaps they mixed up the synopsis and the script when filming. One thing is certain. It is going to be immensely difficult to continue the story with gigantic build-up pieces missing.

As for the scenery mostly everything is spotless. Absolutely wonderful and for the most part beautifully filmed. And, by the way, the dragons are rendered verbatim out of the book as vile little buggers more closely related to primitive rats, albeit rather large, than the mercurial aerosol cans dragons are more often portrayed as.

A dark blot on Danish post-war history finally put solidly on record and irrefutably so at that. Or at least that is what one would have thought. Having lived many years in the exact place where this takes place, the hateful remarks made towards these German conscripts were not grabbed from thin air and can be heard even today. Even in the audience at the cinema, some 70 years after the fact, there were occasional crude remarks when the teenagers had their limbs torn off. War, however horrible, ends at some point; the innate hatred towards faceless representatives of the enemy is long lived and utterly unnerving to watch.

The sere landscape of Skallingen and Blåvandshuk makes for a beautiful backdrop to this fine and thought provoking drama. My only complaint was that the house where they are lodged, although correct for both period and location, appears too old fashioned, which may add to the feeling of something that happened a long time ago. There were more modern facilities in the area at that time, which would have been easier for us in this day and age to relate to. But that is nitpicking.

I don't know what I expected nor what was within reason. One thing, though, that I do know is that this wasn't it! I have never in my life felt so disappointed about a movie. In fact, I cannot remember to have ever been so disappointed - not ever!

There is this to say: Feardotcom is a a thriller. Why, then, does it not thrill? Feardotcom is a movie. Why does it not move something? One would imagine that it requires a script to make movie; did this movie have one? I seriously doubt it. Plot, then! Nope. Plural - maybe. It does not have one plot but several and with lots of gaps between them, that is. Nothing coherent. No point. No suspense. No fear. No shock. No acting. Even the color grading was amiss.

Let's dwell on the script a bit, shall we? How did our protagonist link the 'doctor' to the first deaths? How did the Bukowski-wannabe know about a 'site' from hearing of his co-author's death? What's with the "look, the sun is out" when our heroine puts on the sunglasses she already held in her hand? Why do computer experts always say "I know" when they are being told they are... well... experts? When was the last time you ever heard about a pathologist casually sticking her arm inside someone's chest, dragging out a lipstick, matter-of-factly handing it over to a detective who exclaims something along the lines of "uuh, a clue" after which the other detective turns the note around and reads the address of the place where our victim was killed moments before she wrote the note, rolled it up in said lipstick and swallowed it (in the hope of this exact event would occur sometime in the future)? It does happen, I know, but not very often (I would imagine).

Matheson's novel was, eh, novel in at least two senses: it devoodoolised vampires and tried to put some science into the mythical creatures' being. This book of his, by the way, was not the only one doing this. But that is another story. The movie honored this part extremely well leaving out only tiny bits. Where the movie fails blatantly and inexcusably is on the second point, some three quarters in: The point that actually made the book stand out...

*** here comes the a possible spoiler *** ...was our protagonist's status as a legend not among survivors but among vampires, effectively letting him become the Dracula of the story, completely twisting the sympathy the reader has come to get for him as it becomes evident that the vampires are the true heirs to the world.

Nice effects. Very (very, very) effective acting, I must say! But very little to boast about as the credits start rolling.