Perhaps I Was Too Harsh With Uwe Boll
No, wait. The other one. I was entirely not harsh enough.
Something feels unfinished after the previous post. I feel I accurately illustrated just how bad the film is without enumerating its countless mechanisms of failure.
See, this is kind of a personal matter to me, in two distinct ways; first, as a gamer, I always feel insulted when any game-related project gets flung in Boll's direction, perhaps accompanied by an "EWW! VIDEOGAME!" shriek and the frantic demeanor you'd exhibit when handling a live grenade. Because as sure as a bear shits in the woods, he's going to turn it into poison.
Video game movies don't exactly have a track record of proven success, but I can easily imagine a 1950s Lovecraftian Alone in the Dark, based on the original game and not handed to someone whose continued existence baffles people. I can imagine this hypothetical project turning into a half-decent film. Every time that doesn't happen--Every time Boll makes another movie that causes critics to exclaim phrases like "so mind-blowingly horrible that it teeters on the edge of cinematic immortality"--it decreases the chances of game projects with any potential ever getting made.
And on top of that, working in film has been my lifelong dream. I fully realize that it will take a series of impossible miracles and hilarious mishaps set to Benny Hill music for me to ever get to direct something. I acknowledge that once I did, it would be riddled with first-timer mistakes and improbable dialogue. But if I tried my hardest to make a bad film, I could not make a film as bad as any of Boll's have been. And yet he's probably a millionaire, dating hot celebrities, and I'm complaining about it on the internet.
But I digress. My point is that his work is personally offensive to me, so it's my ideological duty to communicate why.
As many reviews have indicated, the movie begins with a truly insipid and interminable text crawl involving lost civilizations, ancient evils, mad scientists, abused orphans, mysterious artifacts, a secret agency, and an abandoned gold mine. Without doing any research, I can guarantee that it's at least among the most derided text crawls ever written.
The evil archaeologist behind all the orphan-experimenting and ancient-evil-unearthing gets some further development to his dynamic, textured character when, in the first ten minutes, he tells his lackey to kill the main character and swears at a nun.
Characterization, incidentally, is either nonexistent or bewildering in this film. If you're an evil scientist, you don't even have the composure to threaten the heroes in a sinister tone when you're pointing a gun at them; you're so emphatic about (inexplicably) wanting to destroy the world that you have to frantically screech every line. If you're a helpless, vapid female archaeologist unable to speak your lines, you follow the armed assault team in to confront the horribly modeled monsters armed only with your poorly-articulated science words. If you're a combat-ready FBI agent with an assault rifle, you clutch it girlishly to your chest when confronted by said monsters, instead of doing the only thing a person trained to use a gun would be expected to do (point the goddamned thing, and maybe, you know, fire it).
Speaking of guns, I think this is the first time outside of a made-for-TV movie I've seen weapons that had muzzle flares added in post-production instead of firing blanks (or at least this is post addition at its most obvious). When you see a lineup of people firing assault rifles, every muzzle flare is the exact same identically-mispositioned shoddy fakery. This isn't as much a particular flaw as it is indicative of the buried-on-the-Sci-Fi-Channel-at-3-a.m. quality of the effects in this production. The "technology" doesn't make any sense and the monsters are derivative 1998 CG. Even the soundtrack is a garbled, annoying mess half the time, and the same repeated 20-second loop the other half.
In short, there's not a single redeeming thing about this film, and that's a really hefty statement for me to make. I'm the guy who's able to find something vaguely entertaining in The Hitcher because I harbor a secret appreciation of Sean Bean regardless of what nonsensical role he's playing. I'm the guy who can extract some value from the Saw and Hostel franchises, no matter how meager, because I make the effort to locate a psychological complexity there, even if it doesn't really work. These films were all largely hailed as utter trash, but I was always able to find something, anything, half-okay about them.
But this flailing atrocity has nothing. The only thing I felt throughout Alone in the Dark was literally embarrassment--for the actors, for myself, for the people at Infogrames. I'd go leaf through a thesaurus to generate some more relentlessly damning adjectives, but it's not worth your time or mine, because simple words will do: this is the worst movie I have ever seen.
