Just watched this – unlike Dredd, I didn’t particularly enjoy it. Sure, it was spectacular, but it just felt kind of flimsy and not really very necessary. The original only came out in 1990! Not quite as bad as the recent Spider-Man reboot, granted, but I still don’t think it was needed.
There were some neat futuristic touches, like the phone that is implanted in your hand – Pretty cool that it could Skype too, just by pressing your palm against any sheet of glass. The generic futuristic robots and the robotic army looked pretty nifty, a little bit Tron, a dash of i-Robot, some nice lighting effects on the civilian models too. Tattoos that light up are an interesting idea too. This one is good: Imagine a gun, right, that shot a bullet through a closed door, yeah, and impaled itself onto a wall, then instead of exploding or something, it flung out several little cameras, which collectively, get this, provided a 3-dimensional model of the room and what was going on inside it. Cool huh?
Don’t get me started on the elevator that goes from England to Australia though. And don’t even think of mentioning that they go outside of this elevator (mid-journey), and have a fight on top of it. I know there need to be some kind of suspension of belief in a science-fiction film, but this is just a tad too far. Hand-phones are vaguely possible. Elevators that can go from one hemisphere to another in 14 minutes must be going so fast that opening up an emergency exit is actually going to cause more problems than it could ever solve.
There were some nods to the first film, like the three-breasted lady (which makes little sense now, because mutants and mutations have been written out of the fiction – it’s just some woman who’s had a third breast implanted?), the guy (robot) losing his arm in a fight with an elevator, and one reference was subtly played with – The fat red-headed woman at the security checkpoint was not who you expected it to be. No Johnnie-Cab though. Sadface.
The original, although camper and less epic, is still the better story.
