Review: Maggie

You'd have never thought a film with Arnold versus zombies would play out as a grieving father watching his daughter die.

Wade Vogel (Arnold Schwarzenegger) tracks down his daughter who had fled their home after becoming infected by a virus that slowly turns the victim into a mindless cannibal. He refuses to accept her fate, and wants only for her to live the rest of her days as a normal girl.

Maggie is a hard and bleak experience, and I must admit straight away that I was not in the frame of mind to watch it. While I of course knew this was strictly a drama rather than an Arnold action movie, I still wasn't ready for how depressing the experience really is.

It is sad that Maggie received so little praise from the public as well as a fatally limited release, making a film that actually stands out in Schwarzenegger's career as an acting role get a public 33% rating on RottenTomatoes.com while the travesty of creativity Terminator Genisys gets a depressing 61%. How exactly can Arnold prove he can do other things, if when he does just that the film isn't distributed anywhere so people can watch it?

Anyway, enough about numbers.
As a "zombie" film, Maggie is quite unique. Somewhere between The Walking Dead (season 2, specifically) and a cancer story-line, it is not your traditional zombie fare. There are no burning cities, no hordes of brain-chewing monsters, no chases, no invasions, no isolation, no chemical warfare, no military. Arnold doesn't even quip one liners or shoot any zombies. This is a very morose, sad story about what a family could go through if a "zombie" virus were to become a reality.
The film's cinematography makes everything look worn and drab, rustic brown and mellow grey, I don't think there was any vibrant colour throughout the story. We see a world suffering a long winter of famine; Wade and his family live in American farmland but crops have had to be burned to perhaps reduce the spread of infection. 
Arnold looks tired, an incredible transformation from him, to think there are brief moments here that the giant Austrian could vanish into a character. Although the economical script did feel like it was deliberately stopping him from speaking to any great extent, but it wasn't overly damaging; the film is a quiet, atmospheric piece already.

Genre fans will argue that these aren't in fact zombies Wade and his family are dealing with; that zombies are monsters that are born once someone dies. I don't remember the film ever mentioning the disease as "zombification", and really, when a zombie film has a maximum of two zombies on the screen at any one time (and only one time) and plays more like the genre's answer to My Sister's Keeper then you may want to refrain from nitpicking.

I cannot say I enjoyed the film, but I don't know if I was expected to... This is about as real and uncompromisingly human a story as zombie movies have ever been, and for that it is exceptional. Did it hold my interest throughout? No. It isn't a perfect movie by any stretch and characters feel a little too muted for how severe in tone the film attempts to be. 

But I can appreciate what it was trying to do with such a tired genre, and I can appreciate Arnold's huge step into dramatic acting. This is about as far removed from his typical roles as you can get!

Yes, it is better than Terminator Genisys.

Additional Marshmallows: This is director Henry Hobson's first film, having previously worked exclusively in art and graphic design department roles, for films such as Snow White and the Huntsman, video games including The Last of Us, and even the Academy Award Ceremonies for the last four years.

Review: Paranormal Activity 4

"All the activity has led to this"? Well that's just unfortunate really.

Following the events of Paranormal Activity 2 and after Katie and young Hunter disappeared, we follow another family, their daughter Alex, her boyfriend and her younger brother Wyatt. You guessed it, paranormal activity starts happening around their house, around the same time a mysterious young boy and his mother move in across the street.

My biggest problem with this film, asides the total lack of scares, is that its the exact same plotting as the third film. We have the same set up; there's nothing wrong until a ceiling light wobbles, there's constant pranks by the characters, demons being obsessed with children's toys, replace two young girls with two young boys, and generally nothing happening for the first hour.
Yes, the fourth film takes an hour (fifty-three minutes exactly) before anything actually "paranormal" happens. Of a ninety-six minute run time.

Now we are set in "modern day", this house is festooned with laptops. It is established early on that these laptops record everything their web cameras film and they film all the time (no sleep mode for these computers) so they hide them about the house to film the activity. Funny how they never view the footage, like when Alex is levitated off the bed.

Personal gripe about horror films nowadays. Consider: when you are in pitch darkness and are carrying a laptop with you (just go with it) do you run through the dark with the screen illuminating your beautiful face? No. No one would do that! You would turn the screen around to light your surroundings, you see less with a big bright light in your face! It is the equivalent of pointing the flashlight into your face.

You will see that this film made me ask all the wrong questions under the conditions of a badly made movie. There are, for the first time in the series, inconsistencies with the recorded footage. A time stamp in the corner of the screen normally represents a recording, but PA4 decides to sometimes remove the stamp... for no reason. This and sudden jump cuts, not even blurring, static cuts, just an edit that saves a character the time of walking across a room.

The plot goes absolutely nowhere since Paranormal Activity 3 since it spends so much time retreading the same "scare" beats and setup. This series is now worse than the Saw films.

There's so little to actually say about this film, those it does make the third part appear good.

Additional Marshmallows: I didn't even talk about the Xbox Kinnect gimmick, which is conveniently the meeting spot for the ghosts.