LX 2048 (2020) - Sci-fi Film Review

LX 2048 (written and directed by Guy Moshe)  has got to be one of the strangest films I have seen this year. It's a sci-fi that combines elements of thriller, drama, comedy and more. It also manages to not have a central story to it, each side plot seemingly just as important as the last, which means the film is constantly going off into new directions and leaving old storylines behind as it looks to the next topic. Starting off at almost Black Mirror levels of technology created dystopia this becomes more and more surreal with a key theme seeming to be just what is it to be a human.

This takes place in a dystopian future in which the rays of the sun have become so harmful that most people choose not to leave their houses in daytime, instead conducting their business inside a virtual realm accessed by wearing VR goggles. Adam Bird (James D'Arcy - Avengers: Endgame, Exorcist: The Beginning), a broker, is one of the few who still does go outside, he despairs at what has become of humanity who choose to spend nearly every waking moment in the virtual realm. After learning he is dying he becomes concerned with what will become of his family who he is separated from, and so sets out to find a way for his soul to live on once his body has passed.

My synopsis is at least what LX 2048 initially seems to be about, but I'm not even sure that was actually what was going on. Of all the future dystopias I always though living in a VR world would be the coolest, but here with barely anyone actually 'living' it is shown to be a bit of a nightmare. Many films would have taken this idea and been content to create a story around it, but here that is just one aspect. This is also a world in which clones exist and where technically death is no longer a barrier. People have clones set up so that if they die they will come back in an altered form. These clones have all the memories of they people they are of, yet have been augmented to be the ideal form of that person,an unrealistic version. That isn't even all of it though, there is also an exploration into A.I and what constitutes a free will. In particular this is brought up with Adam whose marriage dissolved due to him having an 'affair' with an A.I construct he created, with some of the one hour forty run time dedicated to his attempts to somehow bring this A.I into the real world. The film is all over the place, but it was always fascinating, whichever aspect it happened to be exploring.

War of the Dead (2011) - Zombie Horror Film Review

I don't quite know why Nazis and zombies go so well together. I guess with that group being a universally agreed upon real life villain from history (agreed upon by sane people at least), and with their record of performing horrific experiments on prisoners it isn't a big leap to have them in a fictional setting creating the living dead. Writer and director, Marko Makilaakso's (It Came from the Desert) War of the Dead has all the required elements to create a fun zombie horror, yet there is something missing from this to cement it as a classic of the genre.

It is 1941 and the world is at war. Captain Martin Stone (Andrew Tiernan - 300, 300: Rise of an Empire) is in command of a platoon of American soldiers who have teamed up with a platoon of Finnish soldiers in order to locate and destroy a secret German bunker hidden deep in a Russian forest. After encountering and killing a group of Nazi soldiers they think their troubles are over for the time being. However, they are shocked to find their enemies didn't stay dead for long, returning as near unstoppable walking corpses. With the majority of their respective platoons decimated, the only two survivors, Captain Stone and Lieutenant Laakso (Mikko Leppilampi), along with a Russian soldier they stumble across (Samuel Vauramo), and a scared civilian woman decide to press on and try to finish their objective, pursued by the reanimated dead from both sides.

After a prologue showing a prisoner being experimented on the film opens with a black screen of text filling in some context. It then wastes no time in throwing the viewer straight into the action. Because of this there wasn't any time given to develop characters and I spent the entire first third of the movie not only struggling to make out characters from each other, but also finding it hard to determine which side was which due to the clothing everyone was wearing looking the same. Due to this I found my attention wondering away more than once and I admit because of this I missed the key aim of the soldiers in the story. This is a murky film that mostly takes place at night, and with grey and brown locations everything started to bleed into one. It was only really in the third act set in the German bunker itself that I finally began to be able to tell the different characters apart.