I Ate My DVD Collection

So I have a bunch of movies on my computer that I’ve recently…acquired…in HD. Not Blu-Ray level, exactly, but it looks like they were ripped from Blu-Rays and compressed just slightly. Every time I…acquire…them, they say 720p, and I’m inclined to believe that. Most of the movies I have like that are ones I’ve already seen, that I just wanted in high quality, because when you have an HD-capable screen such as that of the MacBook Pro, you want to test its capabilities. And these certainly pass that test.

However, there are a couple movies that I acquired that I hadn’t seen, and figured HD was the way to do it.  The first of these that I’ve seen is Sunshine, the last movie from director Danny Boyle before he made critical darling Slumdog Millionaire, which I’m still waiting to see.  Let me tell you – I do not ever want to see this movie in any lower quality now.  The visuals here are completely breathtaking.  Is this what HD movies really are all like? Because the other ones I have look incredible, but they don’t quite look like this one.  Maybe it’s the sci-fi aspect of it, whatever.  I’m getting a little preoccupied here.

And the fact that the visuals are incredible really informed my opinion of this movie more than visuals usually do, and they kind of keyed a mindset change for me.  I’m going to try to do that every time – not say “well, this movie has great visuals, but it sucks because the story’s stupid.” I think that’s a bad way to look at movies –  a movie can be bad despite great visuals, but the visuals still have to come into play – good visuals make a movie better, simply.

And I don’t think this movie is terribly smart, but I have a positive feeling about this movie because of the sheer wonder of the visuals.  The score gets a little too imposing at times, but for the most part it just serves the visuals perfectly, like at the beginning, when you’re getting the feel of the spaceship.  The string swells are so warm, I felt welcomed to this place – Danny Boyle’s trademark, everyone says, is highlighting the pure humanity of his characters.  Here you get that a lot.

But though the characters were incredibly fully realized, I thought they fell a little too much into tropes.  For this bullet point section, there are abundant SPOILERS.

• Cillian Murphy as Capa: The main character, thoughtful, a little introspective, is blamed for a lot of things, a bit of a martyr complex, a bit reflective of all the neuroses of the rest of the crew.
• Cliff Curtis as Searle: The guy who has an obsession with something weird that creeps out the rest of the crew, that is reflected in his demise.
• Michelle Yeoh as Corazon: The female crew member who is all about good-naturedness (and nature); her name’s fucking Spanish for heart, for chrissakes.
• Hiroyuki Sanada as Kaneda: The captain who is chill and under control, self-sacrificial.  He dies pretty soon, of course.
• Rose Byrne as Cassie: She’s a little out of place, because her character is a straight-up horror movie chick character – and I mean chick.  All she does is get scared and do things as a result of being scared.  Actresses who bore the crap out of me in interviews when they say “I only want to play strong roles” say things like that because they’re complaining about these characters.  Come on.
• Benedict Wong as Trey: The guy who fucks up, and can’t get over it.  Easy.
• Chris Evans as Mace: The badass/asshole who gets everything done.  Generally, you’re not supposed to like characters like him 100%, but I do.  He’s totally badass, and the mission would have gone nowhere without him.  The crew seems to like him begrudgingly, but they also seem to recognize that he’s always right – about EVERYTHING.
• Troy Garity as Harvey: The smug prick with a little power who is always looking out for #1.
• Mark Strong as Pinbacker: You’ll find out.

And since I don’t want every meaningful bit of analysis to be spoiler-laden, let me just say that I had problems with the ending.  Everything stops making sense, which Sam Walker tells me (and Danny Boyle would agree, I’m sure) is by design, but that didn’t get through to me while I was watching it.  There were just too many what-the-fuck moments that took me out of the film at the end – things that are in bad horror movies that badass mofo’s like myself who are NEVER SCURRED laugh at because they’re totally stupid.

But like I said earlier, I have to give this a positive review – the negative things I pointed out were really my only problems with it, and this movie was exquisitely watchable (in the most positive connotation of the word), and had a sort of surreal/real interplay – the story was obviously not grounded in reality, but the psychology of the characters seemed very realistic and relatable – something that I canNOT enjoy a movie without.  And that makes me very excited for Slumdog Millionaire, which I plan on seeing very soon.