Review of Mutant Chronicles (2008) by Sam R — 14 Jul 2009

The Mutant Chronicles have been slated all over the intertubes for no good reason. It seems that most people have never seen badly made sci-fi movie, when giving this little gem something like 1 star or so. The truth is that this film was made with love! I have seen countless of sci-fi films that are badly acted, with bad script, bad special effects and horrible boring. They all have it in common to be full of amateurs or with the smell of production companies running the show, rather then artistic directors. In those films you can see how bored everyone is, and how little they try. In Mutant Chronicles we have the totally opposite. Every frame of the movie is crafted, and someone has laboriously visualized it from start to finish. The film has a color scheme, and therefor its own spirit or look of sort. And the script, though pretty bad, is not trying to cover up a bad story, but rather fails in bringing a huge story into 140 page script (if that).

So am I saying that this is a great film, NO... a good film, Neh... But it is a very good effort from somewhat inexperienced director and the 13 producers (how did they ever agree on anything).

My feel of the film that it was too short. Too much was being cramped into a film. I'm not going to say that more than one movie should have been made, because then we would have needed to improve on a lot of things. However, this should have been done as a TV show. The characters (the team) had a lot more to show. When I first saw the team collected it read like I was starting to watch a new TV series - and we would slowly learn where all these characters came from and what made them tick. On top of that the back story is so huge, that something like Lost flashbacks would have served well if this would have been a TV series.

Instead we rush through the whole "end of the world" without ever really seeing why the world is ending. And there were few things that irritated me about the story.

SPOILER: the mutants start by being almost invincible, with their speed and agility. However, the minute they start dragging the bodies back, they became sluggish and stupid, not to mention that the team has almost no trouble killing them at the end!!

The film also starts with Capt. Nathan Rooker being caught by the mutants, then the world ends and no one is left on the planet and the team is almost at the end of their task of saving the earth... and there a mutant is dragging poor Nathan back. Like how many weeks did it take him to travel that 1km or so?

My point is this though - This film is much better than it is given credit for. It was enjoyable, and almost good when it came to visualization.