Name: Atlantic Rim
IMDb: link to Atlantic Rim page
Genres: Action, SciFi Country of origin: USA.
Cast: Graham Greene as Admiral Hadley, Anthony 'Treach' Criss as Lieutenant Jim Rushing, David Chokachi as Red, Jackie Moore as Tracey, Nicole Alexandra Shipley as Stone, Steven Marlow as Sheldon Geiss.
Directed by: Jared Cohn. Written by: Richard Lima.
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| image courtesy of TMDb |
The Three Acts:
The initial tableaux:
The film opens to a spill on an oil rig. A giant monster is identified as the culprit.
Three untested giant robots are sent to find it. Drunken incompetence results in a lot of collateral damage before an early success over one of the monsters. The 'hero' gets both lionized and jailed. Nice.
Delineation of conflicts:
There are all sorts of violation of chain of command. Nonfeasance was all over the place. After the first incident, another monster emerges. The robot pilot who was so dedicated to assisting the cleanup earlier is shown playing checkers with his fellow pilot. The second monster is bombed by one of our stealth aircraft; no one seems to notice that the monster slithers away alive and unharmed.
Reason versus all sorts of nonsense: reason usually loses. Florida does not really resemble Manhattan Island that much, despite what the film says the location is. The giant melee weapons used by the gundam (er, giant robots) supposedly were effective against the giant monsters, while much more powerful ordinance used earlier failed.
Resolution:
The video stops.
One line summary: Terrible screenplay and acting defeat moderately good sound and camera work.
Statistics
Cinematography: 8/10 The lighting, focus, framing, depth of field and the like were better than what I've come to expect from The Asylum.
Sound: 8/10 OK. The Asylum seems to have upgraded their sound equipment as well.
Acting: 0/10 Uniformly bad. This was undoubtedly the worst performance by Grahame Green that I've ever seen. There's a big disconnect between what the actors say and what's supposed to be going on, such as, 'maybe we hit a wreck' -- when the speaker is on a stationary oil rig.
Screenplay: 0/10 Mardi gras in Florida. Interesting, unexpected. 'The pressure is increasing exponentially.' Exponentially is not what it used to be; the issue vanishes two seconds later with no explanation. Which character(s) am I supposed to care about? Unknown. Which plot thread is supposed to be engaging? None of them are. Generally incompetent dialog. Needless romantic triangle that was barely explored. The gratuitous jiggling and drinking was OK, but not really needed.
Special Effects: 6/10 Varies between competent (dinosaurs) and amateurish (fake explosions, loss of the aircraft carrier Wasp).
Final Rating: 1/10
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