Interesing premise with poor execution, acting, FX and soundtrack

Since the forum is filled with good "fake" comments about this movie, I'm going to review it for myself, trying to balance the force a little.

I tried the movie with my kid, I got the title and was very intrigued that it's gonna be an Occulus 3.0 experience or something of the sort.

I gotta say this, because this is a review and I'm gonna be honest, the premise was good, the first act (the preparation) was solid but the director slipped through it's fingers some errors that are worth checking.

First of all, this is a movie about gamers that somehow are living in a future earth, so, they have uber advanced smartphones and cards with screens but they somehow have videogames with pre-xbox360 graphics (despicted on the gameplay from the screen of one of the character's home).

This is a factual error than can't be overlooked, they needed to put a render there, emulate a nice videogame from the future, this was lame.

THe movie proceed then to a nice first act in which we see the gamers preping for the game. The offices, the suits and the helmets were a nice touch and I must say they were a good fit to the movie (if not one of the strongest points).

BUT

As soon as the actions starts (the first 10 minutes of VR) you kinda see what the rest of the movie will be like.


The scenery is EXTREMELY limited, the script is non-existant, the "missions" stops being missions and starts being just "walk and kill", not a single videogame of this era will support this kind of nonsense gaming, not even a VR game, they need to have a plausible argument.

In this movie, the director switches the argument for the character development, he places all the stereotypical ones, the shy girl, the psycho, the ego-maniac fat guy who lives in the basement, the.. you get the point. Not a single stereotype was missing, this.. was not a good starting point, to be honest.

Since the movie is all about them, we get lost in a sea of corridors, switching from room A to room B and then to Room C, but then you kinda get the point. There is NO room D !

The whole movie is filmed in no more than 3 rooms, and 1 or 2 corridors with very poor scenery, they even had the guts to film several scenes with the same rooms in the same angle !. IF you're going to film a movie with few rooms at least try to switch angles.

Tip to the director: YOU CAN make a good movie with no scenery at all, I know you know because this movie seems to follow the same progresion as the movie THE CUBE. Yes, you can bet. Those who saw the movie will see the similarities.

I feel they tried so hard to emulate other respetable movies with similar budgets that they failed to make the movie unique. This is not THE CUBE, not by a long shot.

The ending was good but again, too similar to the movie THE CUBE.

For anyone reading this review, if you somehow liked the premise and you still dind't know what THE CUBE is, go watch it and you'll be amazed, that's a serious SCI FI horror movie worth of your consideration.

This movie could of been so much better if they hired better actors, Morfydd Clark was the only one doing a good job, all the rest was mediocre, being the guy who acted as "the sargent" one of the worse actors I ever seen in my life, even if he was trying to "emulate" a game.

Finally, I would not dare to speak too much about the music because I do really believe that the musician is just incompetent. Trying to make a soundtrack about a VR videogame with CASIO tone music from the 80's is only gonna make gamers more angry at you.

Gamers are not dumb stereotypes like the ones in the movie, that listen to CASIO tone music, stuck in a basement and still playing 1995 games. The world has changed, videogame industry has evolved to a point in which soundtracks are becoming an essential part of any videogame. I've seen incredible soundtracks from games where the budget was 3 times less than budget movies so this is really not an excuse to make an horrible soundtrack.

Talking about FX on this one is like talking about how does a videogame looked 5 years ago, because, seriously, the CGI was so bad that my Xbox can render better in-game graphics than some of the scenes of this movie, specially the "exteriors". They could be avoided and we should of get a much better product. Bad FX tend to somehow hurt a movie much more than it should.

Good movies could be made with almost no special effects and there are plenty of examples out there. As a rule of thumb, if you're not going to produce an aceptable FX, it's better not to do it and hide it, it's gonna be a much better overall execution than to do it badly, tons of directors did great things following this path.

All in all, the movie premise was good, the execution was really poor, all the middle is just expendable material and the ending is good but since it's almost a ripoff from THE CUBE and others, it doesn't create a rewarding experience.

The only reedeming factors of this movie are: the first minutes, the concept, some bits of the ending and the legs of Morfydd Clark on that amazing suit, that's it.

The movie is a solid 3/10

If you somehow are a fan of budget movies, there are WAY better movies out there. You can start by watching Kill Command for example.

Alex Vojacek