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Gyo (2012)
Downright awful
I'm surprised many reviewers are even positive about this movie. This has got to be one of the worst movies I've seen. It's incompetent but fails to even relish in its awfulness. In the end, this movie has left me with the question, "Why?"
Let me preface this by mentioning that I have read the manga and am a big fan of Junji Ito's work.
The story:
- The introduction is short and lacking. Introducing the main character, Kaori, and her two friends takes about two minutes. A few more minutes in we're already headfirst into the action. Considering a total running time of 70 minutes, I would overlook this if it weren't for my next point.
- The movie makes terrible use of its time. Many scenes drag on unnecessarily and there are many scenes that simply aren't relevant to the movie at all, while some interesting scenes from the manga are omitted in their favour and many others that are supposed to be key points are cut short. As a result, much of the original detail is lost and certain scenes feel disconnected from the story. In the same vein, the movie makes changes to the original story that just don't add anything to it.
- The movie has an overall even pace and is neither slow nor fast, I'll give it that. It does a pretty decent job of switching between calm and action scenes, never really giving too much or too little of either. That didn't stop me from pausing about halfway in to watch The Voice out of sheer boredom, though.
- Unnecessary motivational speeches and monologues. I'm pretty sure there's like five of them, if not more, and the movie is only 70 minutes long. We get it, you can't wanna give up. One monologue would have sufficed.
- Awful, awkward and unnecessary sexualisation. I'm not even gonna explain this one, just look at the octopus scene.
- The lacking visuals and characters and the watered down story cause it to completely fail as a horror. If anything, it's just gross. But whereas many seriously intended bad movies result in unintended comedy, Gyo, sadly, fails in this as well. It's too badly written to be taken seriously, but it's still too sensical to be funny.
The characters:
- All the characters are underdeveloped. They're boring and flat. None of them have a real personality, most can be summarised in one personality trait. None of the characters are really likeable. I couldn't get myself to care for any of them.
- All the characters except for Kaori have vague, nonsensical or seemingly no motivation to do anything. They assume unlogical things and say things in awkward ways.
- Characters are added and introduced unnecessarily and either fade out or are killed off without even serving a plot point. The biggest let-down was the fact that Tadashi's scientist uncle, who serves a major purpose in the original, was stripped of most of his relevance, but they added him to the movie anyway.
- The main character is swapped for no reason. In the manga, Tadashi is the main character and Kaori a side character with basically the same story arc as Tadashi in the movie has. In the movie it's swapped.
The visual and sound design:
- The visual style is bland and flat, sometimes even bad, and generally inconsistent. The line-art is often awkward or crudely drawn, resulting in unintended hilarity. The colour palette is boring and matter-of-factly, and doesn't add anything to the story. There is hardly any detail.
- The animation is incredibly inconsistent, sporadically jumping from mediocre to bad and lazy to completely excessive. The animation of subtle body language is downright awful. The quality level is about the same as you'd expect from a short-running low-budget anime series, which shouldn't be the case for a movie.
- The CGI is just bad and looks completely out of place in a 2D animated movie. I get that they used it because it's a lot easier and cheaper to animate than regular 2D animation, especially with the quantity of all the fish, but the end result just looks awful.
- The movie completely fails to capture Junji Ito's iconic style, the atmosphere hardly holds up to the creepy and disgusting atmosphere from the manga.
- The sound design is mediocre. The voice acting is generally okay. The sound effects are tolerable at best, albeit sparse. The music is what you'd expect from a low-budget drama anime and fails to capture the creepiness that the movie intends, often even ruining the atmosphere of a scene; I feel it would have done better even without the music.
Going in my expectations were low but Gyo still managed to shatter them. The movie barely even tries and fails to live up to a cult classic.
If you're looking for a creepy, absurd story, just skip this movie and read the manga, or do yourself a favour and watch Sharknado.
Prometheus (2012)
Not 'Alien'-worthy
Okay, so I liked this movie, but to call it an 'Alien' prequel...
Let me start of by saying that there's a big lack of strong characters. Hardly any of the characters seemed very likable to me (unlike, say, Ripley, who I instantly liked and thought of as a very strong character), the only character that I remotely liked was Mr Android, but even then, I feel quite ambiguous about him. Thereby, I also strongly disliked Vickers. I'm not very big on Charlize Theron anyway, but Vickers was just a poor, undeveloped character. Which brings me to the next topic: character development. Because I feel like there's not much of that either.
All of the characters remain mostly constant in what they're like. I've learned that a basic story goes like "Character is in an initial situation; conflict X happens; character adapts to solve X (in other words, character development happens); X is solved and character remains changed in a way." Well, that wasn't really what happened. The main character didn't really change at all. At the beginning she was pretty much "Must seek for engineers - because they made us!" and at the end she was just "Must still seek for engineers - because they made us and now they want to destroy us!" That didn't really seem like much character development at all. As for the other characters... They all just remained the same as at the start and then they all died (which I felt was very unnecessary for this movie, too, but that aside).
I felt the ending was a bit too much 'desperate last measures'. Everything, to me, seemed kind of rushed, I guess. And it was all too much of "Oh no, we don't have a heroic ending that results in the main character seeming as a strong character! Better kill everyone and give a semi-emotional speech, problem solved!" (The speech didn't really add anything, in my opinion, and seemed to be mostly just there to give it an ending slightly similar to the first 'Alien' movie.)
The whole idea that Shaw wants to go back to the Engineers' home planet doesn't make sense either. I get that she wants answers and that she's lost her love and the initial mission wasn't a success, but what could she possibly achieve by going to there? If they would really want to kill the humans, they'll likely just kill her anyway. And even if she did get answers, what would she do with that? Go back to earth where she has nothing and let everyone know "Oh, these aliens want to kill us because of X reason, but yeah, they let me just go back to my home so I could inform y'all!" I felt it was really just "This mission ended up badly and now I feel terrible, let's just go on a suicide mission!"
My last point is that this movie didn't feel 'Alien' at all. I get that it's a spin-off, but still. There's nothing that felt very 'Alien' to me, aside from that one part at the end where the Xenomorph is born. I felt like they just crammed that in quickly to make it a bit 'Alien'. The Xenomorph birth was completely pointless and literally didn't add anything to the movie at all. Of course, this movie is supposed to maybe explain how and why the Xenomorphs were created and all that, but in my opinion it added nothing to the story (and if they really wanted to do a movie to explain the Xenomorphs, they could've come up with a much better idea for it, rather than just "We're going to find the creators of humanity, BUT OH NO THEY'RE EVIL - oh and here's you're alien bye".
In short: In my opinion, this movie is fundamentally flawed and not worthy of the 'Alien' franchise name. It's at best as good as your average modern Sci-Fi movie. The movie had a lot of potential as a standalone (unrelated to the franchise), but they tried too hard to just be able to throw the name 'Alien' on it, and I can't possibly see this as an actual canon to the Alienverse.
Would rate 6/10 because it is an interesting and entertaining movie to watch nonetheless, but I'm downing it to 5/10 because of how it butchered the franchise name.