First off...
We're spoiled! -As media consumers... If this film had come out thirty years ago, people would still be talking about it today, teaching it in college film classes. The visuals and set designs were extremely well produced, the actors believable, (Goodman's weary detective partner was only in a couple of scenes, but his performance was so much fun to watch).
Sure, Captive State wasn't inventing anything new, (so maybe it wouldn't actually be taught in film history), but it knows all its metrics and uses them well. The production values were top notch, Chicago looked as bombed out and rutted with ruin as you could ever want for a post-war film set on modern American soil.
And that's hard! Visuals which have insightful backstories but which are not spoon fed to the viewers? If the observant and interested viewer might ask, "Whoa. What was that I just saw the camera breeze over back there?", I suspect the set designers and prop masters would be able and possibly even eager to explain it fully.
In the real world, every object, by virtue of simply existing in reality, makes sense in its presence. It has a series of causes and effects which served to place it there. -In a movie, however, the true reason an object appears on set is that the film crew put it there, (or chose not to hide it), and that means limited human minds were responsible for inventing a plausible narrative for its appearance. And humans aren't always very good at the job. -Which is particularly challenging for the sci-fi genre, whose viewership is often made up of obsessively knowledgeable and observant sorts.
For instance.., there's one shot in a bunker, with a kid is sitting on top of a bank of filthy car batteries. Just a quick glimpse, only a one or two seconds on screen. -But they were not arbitrary set dressing; they were probably powering the bank of salvaged computers being used by the story's resident hacker. (Also only on screen for no more than ten seconds). But by this point in the film, after seeing the exquisite attention to detail, I was willing to bet that if the hacker bunker were a real place, then the number of batteries necessary to run the operation would be accurate to the amp hour. Somebody worked it all out. It wasn't just a mythological wall of blinking lights and dials like you see in some generic Bat Cave. The set pieces were probably only a short distance away from actual functionality. (I hope the team responsible for designing the sets reads this: Great Job!)
Another of my favorite points:
Much of the story was told through television news clips, and man, they did a bang-up job with those! The fog of background news chatter seemed very authentic, had the newscaster voices and visual patterning any ongoing network coverage of war and disaster might feel like today. -It was not the focus, but put there deliberately to have that exact effect of filling the void with history, all well observed and well accomplished! Again.., Great Work!
However.., there were a couple of points in the story itself which I thought were a little too precisely thought out. -The execution of the elaborate underground bombing mission, without the allowance of any open coms, requiring the exactly timed actions of a half dozen rebel agents to not trip or miss their marks seemed a bit unlikely. -Like, when the calls for action came down, if just one participant had been taking a washroom break, or even just in the next room over, the whole operation would have stuttered.
But I can excuse that. It was cool to see an underground rebellion operation work flawlessly even if the mechanism seemed a little wishful in their perfection. In the depressing, hope-deprived environment of their soot-covered world, it's hard to begrudge a little sunshine by way of excellent human agents. And who knows? I've never lived under the heel of an authoritarian alien oppressor government, so perhaps it's only human to rise to the challenge. I'm willing to be the creators of this film would put up a stiff argument for why their protagonists were operating well within expected human capacities. Maybe I'm just soft.
Though.., at the ending, -and I mean the very ending, where the credits are rolling, the viewer is presented with a series of images which suggest how the story continues for the human race, and does so in positive, "Yay! We won!" kind of way. That seemed more than a little wishful to me, given what we had seen already and what we know historically regarding technologically superior colonizing forces. But in the realm of sci-fi, where cutting the red wire three seconds before the clock runs down, and where internet computer viruses reliably save the day, I'm not going to cast judgement on a little wanton hope at the end of this film. And anyway, it wasn't overt; most people would be filing out of the cinema at that point. Besides, who wants to watch a film where the bad guys win at the end?
Otherwise, I was really quite pleased to have seen this film. I hadn't been expecting much, and was rewarded with a much smarter script than this sort of fare normally offers along with a beautifully designed and produced visual experience with lots to chew on for the curious observer.
We're spoiled! -As media consumers... If this film had come out thirty years ago, people would still be talking about it today, teaching it in college film classes. The visuals and set designs were extremely well produced, the actors believable, (Goodman's weary detective partner was only in a couple of scenes, but his performance was so much fun to watch).
Sure, Captive State wasn't inventing anything new, (so maybe it wouldn't actually be taught in film history), but it knows all its metrics and uses them well. The production values were top notch, Chicago looked as bombed out and rutted with ruin as you could ever want for a post-war film set on modern American soil.
And that's hard! Visuals which have insightful backstories but which are not spoon fed to the viewers? If the observant and interested viewer might ask, "Whoa. What was that I just saw the camera breeze over back there?", I suspect the set designers and prop masters would be able and possibly even eager to explain it fully.
In the real world, every object, by virtue of simply existing in reality, makes sense in its presence. It has a series of causes and effects which served to place it there. -In a movie, however, the true reason an object appears on set is that the film crew put it there, (or chose not to hide it), and that means limited human minds were responsible for inventing a plausible narrative for its appearance. And humans aren't always very good at the job. -Which is particularly challenging for the sci-fi genre, whose viewership is often made up of obsessively knowledgeable and observant sorts.
For instance.., there's one shot in a bunker, with a kid is sitting on top of a bank of filthy car batteries. Just a quick glimpse, only a one or two seconds on screen. -But they were not arbitrary set dressing; they were probably powering the bank of salvaged computers being used by the story's resident hacker. (Also only on screen for no more than ten seconds). But by this point in the film, after seeing the exquisite attention to detail, I was willing to bet that if the hacker bunker were a real place, then the number of batteries necessary to run the operation would be accurate to the amp hour. Somebody worked it all out. It wasn't just a mythological wall of blinking lights and dials like you see in some generic Bat Cave. The set pieces were probably only a short distance away from actual functionality. (I hope the team responsible for designing the sets reads this: Great Job!)
Another of my favorite points:
Much of the story was told through television news clips, and man, they did a bang-up job with those! The fog of background news chatter seemed very authentic, had the newscaster voices and visual patterning any ongoing network coverage of war and disaster might feel like today. -It was not the focus, but put there deliberately to have that exact effect of filling the void with history, all well observed and well accomplished! Again.., Great Work!
However.., there were a couple of points in the story itself which I thought were a little too precisely thought out. -The execution of the elaborate underground bombing mission, without the allowance of any open coms, requiring the exactly timed actions of a half dozen rebel agents to not trip or miss their marks seemed a bit unlikely. -Like, when the calls for action came down, if just one participant had been taking a washroom break, or even just in the next room over, the whole operation would have stuttered.
But I can excuse that. It was cool to see an underground rebellion operation work flawlessly even if the mechanism seemed a little wishful in their perfection. In the depressing, hope-deprived environment of their soot-covered world, it's hard to begrudge a little sunshine by way of excellent human agents. And who knows? I've never lived under the heel of an authoritarian alien oppressor government, so perhaps it's only human to rise to the challenge. I'm willing to be the creators of this film would put up a stiff argument for why their protagonists were operating well within expected human capacities. Maybe I'm just soft.
Though.., at the ending, -and I mean the very ending, where the credits are rolling, the viewer is presented with a series of images which suggest how the story continues for the human race, and does so in positive, "Yay! We won!" kind of way. That seemed more than a little wishful to me, given what we had seen already and what we know historically regarding technologically superior colonizing forces. But in the realm of sci-fi, where cutting the red wire three seconds before the clock runs down, and where internet computer viruses reliably save the day, I'm not going to cast judgement on a little wanton hope at the end of this film. And anyway, it wasn't overt; most people would be filing out of the cinema at that point. Besides, who wants to watch a film where the bad guys win at the end?
Otherwise, I was really quite pleased to have seen this film. I hadn't been expecting much, and was rewarded with a much smarter script than this sort of fare normally offers along with a beautifully designed and produced visual experience with lots to chew on for the curious observer.