The Midnight After (2014) – A rickety little shuttle bus running from one part of Hong Kong to another in the wee small hours with a cadre of idiosyncratic passengers runs into a bizarre problem: When they get where they’re going, they discover that everyone else has disappeared. The whole city, and possibly the world. But they also start getting strange signals on their cellphones, and then they start catching glimpses of strange figures wearing gas masks…
Here’s the problem, and I’m gonna spoil it for you: It doesn’t resolve. We never get an answer as to what happened to them — or rather, we get a handful of mutually exclusive clues — and even worse, their personal stories (with which we become intimately acquainted) don’t reach any sort of catharsis, independent of explaining the Big Mystery.
I’m really attracted to premises like this, huge and mysterious and existential, but I’m starting to dread watching these movies and finding out that the filmmakers painted themselves into a corner and just gave up.
SAGA: Curse of the Shadow (bizarrely titled Curse of the Dragonslayer on Amazon, despite there being no dragonslayers) (2013) – Basically a feature-length piece of D&D/LOTR fanfic: An elven thief, a human paladin, and an orc who keeps talking about “honor” like a Klingon are thrown together to stop a dark cult that wants to summon Goth Azul, the Undead God, to devour the world.
Despite being cheap, it’s not unwatchable — competent CGI and latex appliances are now well within the reach of plucky DIYers — but the story didn’t really add anything beyond a transcript of somebody’s favorite campaign from high school. (When one main character is an elf, I’m gonna expect her to be more than just a human with pointy ears.)
Shot in Utah, by the way — I thought the flora looked familiar…
Camp Cold Brook (2018) – Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A ghost-hunting reality show, on the verge of being canceled, tries to find the “big one” that’s going to save their ratings…
Joe Dante stepped in as executive producer, so it’s a competently made indie flick, with respectable acting, restrained CGI, and all the story beats that we’ve come to expect from this premise-cum-genre. (I mean, you have to ignore the obvious fact that the “haunted” summer camp, site of an infamous massacre and abandoned for decades, does not look abandoned for decades. A year or two, maybe…)
The payoff is meant to be a twist that doesn’t work at all, mainly because it’s not foreshadowed in the slightest. On that basis alone, I’d advise you to skip this one.
Sounds like there’s a bit of World of Warcraft thrown into that SAGA movie too; orcs being a proud warrior race whose brutal nature is tempered with a sense of honor is definitely a common theme in the later games of that franchise. Of course, as you say, that makes for a movie which is basically a recounting of some gamer’s favorite campaign from back in his youthful days (be it a board game or computer game; Dungeons & Dragons in particular transitioned pretty well from the one medium to the other). On a positive note, a movie like this does prove it’s actually possible to make a good—or at least watchable—movie based on video game premises; you just have to focus more on fleshing out the characters and plot than on unimportant stuff like the game’s mechanics.
I remember in one of your reviews (for the old Double Dragon movie, I think), you pointed out making a video game movie is like trying to make a story entirely about a football game; not about the lives of the players on and off the field, which might actually be rather interesting to watch, but just the game itself. That’s exactly the opposite of the approach a writer ought to take: you want a video game movie mainstream audiences might actually want to watch, you should definitely focus on the lives of the players on and off the field. What motivates a character to go trying to achieve whatever the game’s goal is (e.g. become tournament champion, rescue a princess, overthrow an evil overlord, etc.) tends to be far more interesting than the goal itself.
I remember hearing some rumors that somebody was planning to make a movie adaptation of the classic arcade game Joust. (Nothing ever came of those rumors, so far as I know.) While that was a pretty dubious choice of games to adapt (because, y’know, it’s one of those “Story? Why would we need to have a story?” kind of games), I do remember thinking “That could actually work if someone actually put his mind to it.”
I mean, guys with lances flying around on space ostriches trying to unseat each other? Bizarre as that situation is to describe, the novelty of seeing that happening up on the big screen would surely wear off after no more than a few minutes, so that’s hardly the basis for feature-length movie. Show us what kind of civilization would actually build arenas for this kind of game and host these tournaments, however, and show us what kind of people would actually want to enter such tournaments (and maybe what kind of people are in the audience cheering on their favorite players and/or making bets on the outcomes of these games) and what kind of lives these people live in and out of the arena, and then you’ve got a premise for a movie people might actually want to see.
This review (https://lovehkfilm.com/reviews_2/midnight_after.html) suggests that the nuances in the characterizations of THE MIDNIGHT AFTER will be lost on Western viewers.
That’s probably so. On the other hand, Kozo does harp on the unfinished, unresolved story appropriately.