20140122: SciFi Review--Lockout

Lockout

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. French live action feature length film, 2012, PG13, 94 minutes, action, SciFi, thriller.  Spoken word is in English.
2. IMDB: 6.1/10.0 from 65,283 audience ratings. Estimated budget: 20 million USD.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 38% on the meter; 46% liked it from 162,519 audience ratings.
4. Netflix: 3.6/5.0 from 1,913,783 audience ratings.
5. Directed by: James Mather, Stephen St. Leger.  Screenplay by Stephen St. Leger.
6. Starring: Guy Pearce as Snow, Maggie Grace as Emilie Warnock, Vincent Regan as Alex, Peter Stormare as Scott Langral, Peter Hudson as President Warnock, Lennie James as Harry Shaw.


2. Setup and Plot
1. The action is set in a SciFi universe of the year 2079.  There is a prisoner uprising in the orbiting maximum security prison in orbit around Earth.  Compounding this is that the daughter of the US president was in the prison doing interviews at the time.


2. As the film opens, Snow is in custody, and is being beaten/interrogated by Scott and his thug.  The subject was a botched operation where Snow's contact Frank was killed, Snow escapes for a bit, and gets a briefcase to his contact Mace before being captured.  After he's done, Scott leaves Snow with Harry.


3. In a parallel thread, the president's daughter travels to the orbital prison that is still under construction.  The prison is run by a corporation and uses stasis/sleep to keep the prisoners quiescent.  Emilie is trying to find out whether the prisoners are suffering damage from stasis are experiencing psychological or physical damage from the process.  Snow gets pointed to the prison as an inmate.


4. Emilie's first interview goes woefully bad: the prisoner escapes, has a gun and a plan for opening all the stasis cells and wakening the prisoners.  Emilie is wounded, but escapes temporarily.  The prison rebellion is successful.  They activate the prison orbiter's defense systems, so a massive armed rescue seems out of the question...at least without massive losses.


5. The Secret Service has a change of heart toward Snow, and injects him onto the station almost unnoticed.  Emilie is captured, but is unrecognized at first.  During the negotiations between the prisoners and the Secret Service, the prisoners find her credentials.


6. Snow manages to spring her, and to find Mace.  Mace has some severe mental damage, but Emilie manages to decipher his seemingly wild speech.  Emilie refuses the rescue plan as long as there are hostages on the station.


7. They escape the station via an improvised solution before a massive strike hits the station.  Snow is re-incarcerated, but Emilie finds the case.


8. Will Emilie be able to get Snow out of trouble?


3. Conclusions
1. One line summary: Reasonable thriller rescue in space, circa 2079.
2. Three stars of five


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 8/10 Mostly fine, but some of the CGI seemed a bit out of date for 2012, but not too bad.


2. Sound: 8/10 Few problems.


3. Acting: 6/10 Peter Stormare, Guy Pearce, and Lennie James were good.  Vincent Regan and Joseph Gilgun were OK.  Maggie Grace and most of the rest of the cast I could have done without.


4. Screenplay: 5/10 Meh.  The exposition of motivations was weak.  Why would Emilie be interested in Snow?  Yes, he had something to do with her rescue, which she tried to sabotage whenever possible.  Just what was in the briefcase, for which so much effort was expended?  Why would anybody care?  As it was, the only thing interesting about the film was rescuing a privileged daughter who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.