Polypore (2013) User Reviews

In The End, all that matters is...

[AlexandraBello · 7/10 · 20 October 2013]

This movie's trailer was awesome and it had a sample of what I was going to watch.

This is the information about the plot "A young man must cope with involuntary telepathy, a potion-induced transformation, teleporting agents and a clone reincarnation, all while dodging an evil corporation that wants to harvest his brain for knowledge."

The movie did one of the jobs all movies should do, it kept me attentive. I loved the concept and how the plot unfolds in theory because as I writer I can catch on the details what was really there.

However, not all the message was successfully conveyed throughout the movie, because the director needs to express with visuals so many elements on each single frame, that some might fail to do so on their first 20 movies.

The most important part of any story (screenplay) is the plot. This concept is very ambitious and somewhat innovative, which catches my attention and makes me witness the existence of a creative master behind all of it. But in the moment expressing everything he knows to the public, he shall not leave any detail behind for the ignorant on the particular subject of matter. Coming from a very common habits today's movies have of jumping from scene to scene, the premise can be distorted, when jumping too often.

20 minutes in the movie I started understanding what was going on, and which direction we were going into. I did find the actors were into it, and a lot of sceneries were visited to have parts of the movie take place onto. The other 40 minutes of the movie were more enjoyable, I noticed the main premise of the plot was revealing itself and bringing the joy of adventure to the viewer (in this case, me). Moreover, the release of the conflict made me pay attention more closely to the overcome or relief.

Following my 3rd Parr. Another thing that I celebrate about this film was the ability to successfully give closure to such a tardy conflict emergence.

Cons:

-The special effects could have better (but I have no information about the budget to understand better, what they were working with). -Colorization is a must on any feature that wishes to leave a legacy. Note that this shall not be confused with Color Correction. -Sound could've been mixed differently to wipe the low-budget film feel out of this great story. Note that ADR is highly recommended for Features. -Shallower depth of field will be appreciated by the viewers more that anyone can imagine. -Having a blur throughout the whole film should be fixed before distribution, but it can also be a compression or Vimeo uploading thing that is not alarming at all. -The Voice Over needs to be clearer.

Pros:

-This movie is innovative and has an amazing concept. -The rhythm in editing was right on the dot, giving a unique feel to this movie; specially on the scenes with no dialog. This makes the movie pretty enjoyable. -I had no clue where this movie was going to take me next, which is refreshing and I celebrate it for that. -In basically 40 minutes, I felt like I watched a lot, due to the beat and pace of the actions and scenes. This is an awesome thing that most directors can't accomplish. -Very good supporting actors, despite some actors that fell through sometimes, everyone was in character. -The ending was very realistic, although I left with some unanswered questions; but endings don't need to be Hollywoodee all the time. -The movie kept me wondering (the first 20 minutes due to confusion and the last 40 minutes due to new element introduction into the plot -at least every 10 minutes-), but in a good way and it also kept me interested.

This movie has a great potential because in the end all that matters is the concept within the premise; I have seen very bad movies make it to the Theatre because of the partnerships they participate in. It's not a bad thing to consider doing that and bring the experience to the next level where there is more budget to play with.

I recommend it and give it 7 IMDb stars!

Maybe it's too ambitious

[rodrigo-m-barrero · 6/10 · 6 June 2015]

It probably was an challenge to produce this on a small budget, and deserves recognition. But;

For an independent movie, it's pretty ambitious. Maybe too much. The script is all over the place. The photography relies a lot in the post- processing, it compromises the immersion.

There are some interesting characters, like the french guy and the guerrilla leader. But they feel underdeveloped, they needed more screen time. Again, there was too much going on.

When it was intended to be funny, it was funny. But when it tried to be serious, not so much.

In the other hand, it does makes some good points about corporations and such. I am looking forward for more movies from this studio.

Polypore sets out to reach epic heights.

[CEBaum · 6/10 · 28 September 2013]

With a sprawling cast and in five languages, Polypore knows what it wants to be: somewhere in between A Scanner Darkly, Jumper, Rendition, 24 and LOST. However, the budget is spread too thin to achieve this colossus of an idea.

Cinematography is sometimes amazingly exquisite when Barack applies his true skills, such as cityscapes, time lapse nightscapes with glorious pans across countryside and forest. Other times, locations are lit poorly and left uncolored in post, revealing huge spotlight shadows on actors and overexposed areas making the shot too sharp and "HD" ish.

There is an animation sequence, which is an excellent explanation to the convoluted plot – Kill Bill in conception. But I felt this should head up the movie. I would have loved more of this animated stuff – really, a first-class job here.

The script needed tightening long before shooting, and needed to decide on its tone also. Is it a parody? Is it a serious thriller? It was pretty entertaining in parts; sometimes slick and gorgeous like a music video, sometimes like a teen TV show, other times, I was rueful and critical. Occasionally I was embarrassed. But I'd like to know what genre I am looking at by the end of the first act and have the palette make sense throughout.

Another holdup is the huge cast. It's difficult to know who was who by the end. Many new characters would appear without telling the viewer who they were, often with guns.

Barack could stick with the gold and have a tight movie. Kyle Barry as Sebastian is great but woefully under-used (maybe because he was busy writing the soundtrack) The two doctors in Paris are humorous and could have been instrumental in describing what was going on – they seem most rounded out of all the characters. Trent (Barack) could have spoken more – he's got some screen presence. There's also a fantastic Tarantino-esque meditating assassin near the end – and a nice kill involving a car is sheer brilliance.

There are an amazing amount of good shots here to be mined in more detail. A paring down and a re-edit would make this a festival crowd pleaser no doubt, but in its current form it's more of a chore – and no festival crowd wants to work at a story, even if there are moments of genius. The film rollicks along and is terrific in places, and you can see the immense pleasure the entire cast and crew must have had making it: and to director Barack's credit, it must have been an epic task to pull this off especially considering this was "Kickstarted". Massive props for that.

Slightly schizophrenic

[henrybaum · 4/10 · 16 October 2013]

Polypore starts out inscrutable and complicated, unsure of where it's going or even what's happening. About a half hour in, one wishes for the tone of that first half hour, as it switches confusingly into farce – then to gun battles – then back to farce again. Once it reaches this point, the first half hour makes even less sense, and so does the rest of the movie.

Given the synopsis, it sounds like a hell of a lot of fun - "A young man must cope with involuntary telepathy, a potion-induced transformation, teleporting agents and a clone reincarnation, all while dodging an evil corporation that wants to harvest his brain for knowledge." However, without this synopsis, you would sometimes be hard-pressed to figure out all of this is actually happening, save the "evil corporation," which is so broad a villain as to add to that feeling of farce, when perhaps it's not supposed to be.

Is the movie a comedy in the vein of…well, what? Even on the Hollywood level, mixing sci-fi and comedy doesn't work very often, and is responsible for some of Hollywood's biggest failures - both monetarily, and thematically. In Polypore, which has the scope of a mainstream movie, but not the budget, the tone of the movie veers wildly adrift. Add to that the problem that the plot doesn't move logically or fluidly from one scene to the next, and it's a fairly unsatisfying experience.

Which isn't to say that the movie is unwatchable – there are many moments of cohesion, and it is visually striking at times. Once the film sets down in France, a plot seems to take shape that has the potential to be very interesting. The preview suggests that there are even more characters than are already present in the film's already-expansive cast, so perhaps a lot was left on the cutting room floor, and a better movie could be cut out of what was shot.

It's certainly ambitious, but without understanding its tone, the movie resides in a kind of no man's land. How does one describe the movie - funny, exciting, prescient, satirical? The answer is all of the above and none of the above because the missed tone cancels out some of the other features of the film. That said, there is a lot of energy here, a lot of impressive ideas and camera-work. But without a cohesive script, it's slightly schizophrenic - and not in the good, mind-bending way.

Strong points to offer despite its incoherence

[catebaum · 5/10 · 16 October 2013]

Polypore is a near-future sci-fi adventure with an edge of dark humor following the rediscovery of a plant of the eponymous name of the Polypore, said in legend to be linked to supernatural powers, the last widespread tale of which details a slaughter by those who were poisoned by eating it. We follow several characters, but the film is mostly following the journey of one young man as he stumbles across one re-emergence, discovering far more about the truth of the world than he might have ever planned to, leading to a trip through the real laws of the universe and the depths of depravity that exist behind the closed doors of one certain corporate group.

The direction behind the film seems somewhat lacking. And the film is by no means straightforward. Most parts of the story are quite disjointed from each other, especially the cold opening which leaves us watching a family mealtime with absolutely no clue or reason to know why we should be paying attention to the details of their table conversation.

Things only begin to start taking any specific direction around a quarter to a third of the way into the hour running time, but still don't quite settle into one particular flow until the end, which is not particularly built up to as a finale as much as a scene that happens to hold the actions that cause the story to stop being interesting enough to continue following. There are many characters introduced as the film progresses, many with very different goals and thoughts which are never explored as the 'show don't tell' principle is taken to an extreme, and the short run time of this kind of film sacrifices any development for progression of the overall story.

There's even a completely-divorced-from-reality scene that seems straight from Scooby Doo where a hired killer begins talking about how terrible his job is mid-chase to a passing film director. This is not helped by a cast that seems not to have been given a strong enough direction for their parts - deliveries feel either too wooden or far too scrambled to provide an emotional shorthand for what we otherwise can't draw from the writing of the film, which itself has a lot of cultural run-off in its influences.

Anyone who has played an Assassin's Creed game will notice a lot of similarities between the near-magical pseudo-science and techno-babble hand-waving on the concept of a concrete scientific basis to past lives and perfecting the bridge between past and current reincarnations, not to mention the anti-corporate sentiments, and even certain aesthetic sensibilities of "The Rein Corporation" (get it?). Use of "Ave Maria" during one scene certainly calls back to several recent pieces of media, but various other callbacks can be spotted as unintentionally included in the film because they don't lead anywhere.

Despite this, there are some very interesting shots throughout. Many cutaways have very interesting surreal images like a man convincingly throwing himself to a remorseless suicide, and a dreamy alternate reality where the main character has exactly the life he wants, highlighting the following scene's demonstration of just how far from ideal his current situation is. Many transitional scenes are very visually pleasing and are well-colored and shot in a way that that film overall should have taken clues from. Locations are very fitting and seem well researched, never staying in one environment for too long and each one does feel distinct. Once in a while a shot is so incredibly well made that it stands out to make the rest of a scene feel lacking, and this stood out to me more than anything else about the film.

Criticism aside, the film definitely has a lot of care taken and it has strong points to offer despite its incoherence and oversights. It has the feel of someone with limited resources but a lot of research and writing time who maybe has such an over-understanding of their script they have forgotten what doesn't come across to an outside viewer. It seems as if the story board was well conceived but poorly recreated, or that the script had many line notes that weren't translated. If published as a book I'm sure it would be a lot more interesting to experience, or if given a little more time and funding to develop, or perhaps a change in director. Sadly, the finished film definitely does have a sense of something being missing, and while I recommend that if you're looking for something very quirky and different this short film may well be worth sitting through, perhaps a second time with a little more conviction, it may be worth skipping on if you have no patience. As it is the film is simultaneously slow on the atmospheric shots and far too quick on the plot, some of which is incredibly interesting to hear about but gets parroted off with no deeper exploration most of the time, so a lot of interest from the start is likely required.

Overshadowed by the list of actors

[seeitconsultancy · 4/10 · 16 October 2013]

From the mind of Jesse Barack comes "Polypore," a sci-fi thriller that centers around a real-life fungus known as polypore. In the film some of the characters, such as Paul, played by Jeffrey Bielat, stumble upon the fungus and are exposed to its powers. He then struggles to control his new power of telepathy and finds himself targeted by a power hungry corporation that seeks to harvest his powers. From here you're on your own; the already over-ambitious storyline becomes clouded when we are introduced to a variety of characters, all of which have their own point of view.

The sheer number of cast members in this short 1-hour film becomes too distracting. One after the other, in flash-forwards and flashbacks, a dizzying amount of names and character importance become lost in the already complicated storyline. Some characters do impress, such as Paul's father, played by Shelly Whittle, but even then at times many of the actors seemed to overact their roles at the request of the director.

While the film becomes overshadowed by the list of actors it contains, it did have some very impressive camera angles as well as special effects. From the start the camera seemed to never stay still, in a positive way, and it truly helped move the otherwise confusing film. The other high point was special effects, for a limited budget the film impressed with its gun shootouts and fungi special effects. The film wanted desperately to hit the CGI standards of Hollywood thrillers but, unfortunately, they were hidden with the confusing story and characters.

The director seems to ignore his limits and rather then accept the budget and constraints with his actor's performances he still pushes the limits. There was also a struggle with combining and finding the complicated balance between comedy and thriller. At random moments characters would break into jokes during scenes that were meant to be dramatic. The failure to find the right timing was evident and this further dampened the film.

Overall there is not much to see here, after viewing you are left with more questions then answers. You have traveled around the world yet you feel like you haven't seen anything to explain the story. The characters, while passionate in their roles, fall flat at times and fail to drive the story forward. But you still will find yourself impressed with the young ambitious filmmaker. He wants nothing more then to impress with his art but unfortunately he is still learning and understanding his craft.

So intelligent science fiction still exists ...

[mikehaberfelner · 9/10 · 2 October 2013]

Polypore, a film about a young man on the run from a multinational pharma company, is an in recent times increasingly rare specimen of thought-provoking and intelligent science fiction that nevertheless never gets dull. And while I have to admit the very complex story is at times hard to follow (in its complexity rather than its basic narrative), it is incredibly well-paced, finds the right balance between delivering a serious message and outright satire, and has an air of mystery to it throughout to keep the audience guessing. Add to that some great action and locations, a rich visual language, and a solid cast, and you've got yourself a pretty good movie. Recommended!

A Sci-fi film that makes you think.

[moviemaniacd · 8/10 · 22 October 2013]

This film is a prime example of independent cinema giving us what Shlollywood has not been able to give us, original stories. This is a science fiction film that makes you pay attention, if you miss a few minutes you miss a lot. This story about a young man on the run from a global pharma company while dealing with a sudden life alter transformation keeps you curious until the end. Definitely an unpredictable script that has everything you would want out of a good sci-fi film, a mixture of humor, social commentary and WTF moments. Both actors who played as Paul did a good job of selling that they were the same character. The special effects in this film were also well done for an independent production and in general this film was a lot of fun. I highly recommend it to those who are looking for something original to watch and fans of intelligent science fiction.

Amazing Flick

[oneworldmanystyles · 10/10 · 9 October 2013]

Amazing sci-fi thriller, it draws your attention, great concept, curiosity and interest. incredible special affects, the film has a good set tone, did an great job, you can tell their was so much effort in this project and ambition, even though it gives you many characters, it makes up for all the imaginative and creative things that are brought in the film. If you are a lover for SCI-FI crazy, creative flicks, this film is for you! You will be amazed . It does have a lot of elements in the flick but adds unique artistic style to it. For a independent flick, Jesse Barack did an excellent job . Also funny film as well. I would recommend this film to anyone and hopefully every gets the chance to see this flick and see how much hard work was done in the independent movie. Excellent scenes and the philosophy of it, so much originality into it. Fantastic Job!