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MISTI Reviews EXO-SQUAD : GENESIS So you like predictable oppression movies. Well… mostly predictable. Great—watch Exo-Squad: Genesis! Be prepared to remember The Matrix and maybe Star Trek while you watch it, but enjoy!
PEDRO Reviews EXO-SQUAD: GENESIS This film is Teufel’s latest attempt at a film here at HTG. Like all of his other films, this one too is pretty interesting. PLOT: The plot finds men on a future Mars. There are cities on it and everything. The plot consists of humans battling machine like creatures known as the Neosapiens. Doctor Johann Von Braun (John Malcovich) created the creatures and is incredibly upset that the Neosapiens have been enslaved by the humans. He however has kept one neosapien to himself, Gidas (Voice Of The Rock). Von Braun teaches Gidas some ways of dealing with this pain and Gidas looks after Von Braun. However Von Braun is killed by the human soldiers, building up anger into Gidas. Gidas then and the other neosapiens get into a battle with the humans. Like “Starship Troopers” its hard to tell who the villains are in this film. You root for the humans and at the same time you are also rooting for the neosapiens. Overall by the end of the film though, the humans abuse their power as we all do in real life. There is a strong message to this film. The plot was interesting but it could have been executed better. FINAL PLOT GRADE: 70/100 DIALOGUE: The over lengthy speeches can often be boring and could have probably been bumped down to smaller dialogue sequences. I didn’t buy the dialogue between Nicole (Keira Knightley) and Thomas (David Boreanaz) either. Their relationship was just stupid. Nicole is smart towards the beginning and seems almost intent on staying with her husband, but soon falls for Thomas almost immediately in the film. The best dialogue sequences are the dialogue between Von Braun and Gidas, showing great potential and emotion. FINAL DIALOGUE GRADE: 40/100 CHARACTERS: Gidas is a great character but most of the characters suffer from sci-fi film cliches or are just boring and uninteresting. I really lost respect for Nicole’s character in the film with her relationship with Thomas. I also thought that Thomas was a bit of an ass. Most of the best characters come from the supporting cast and the neosapiens, who’s characters really are interesting and they are what make the film work. FINAL CHARACTERS GRADE: 55/100 CASTING: I really loved the casting in this film. I think that Val Kilmer and The Rock were chosen perfectly for their roles and they play two of the most interesting characters in the film. Paul Verhoeven is the perfect choice to direct this film. He is perfect at directing sci-fi films like this and since I compared this film to “Starship Troopers” a bit earlier, that just makes it all the much better. I think that the casting was perfect for this film and I can’t wait to see how Teufel casts his next film. FINAL CASTING GRADE: 100/100 PACING: I loved the pacing in this film. I loved that the film didn’t have too much dialogue because a sci-fi film needs time to take in the scenery. The beginning of the film is great, we get great scenery explanations and I hope that this film gets an award for cinematography. I think that the film flows really smoothly and we get introduced to Gidas and Von Braun who make the film interesting. From there on we get great character motivated scenes mixed in with great action. I really don’t think that pacing can get much better than this for a sci-fi film. I’ve seen a lot of great paced films here at HTG and this is up there with the best of them. FINAL PACING GRADE: 95/100 ADVERTISING: Honestly, the theater poster was ok, not too great. I loved the extras on the website though. Most of the posters though I thought were pretty ugly though and I just didn’t like them. I thought that the advertising campaign was good though as Teufel advertised it nicely, even though the posters were ugly. I think that it could have been advertised a little better, so overall it was just above mediocre advertising to me. FINAL ADVERTISING GRADE: 60/100 WRITING: Overall I liked the concept of the film, cliches or no cliches. I thought that the neosapiens were written nicely and made for a very interesting time at the movies. I think that the other characters though could have been more interesting. The neosapiens take some energy off of the other characters and made them less interesting. The pacing was great and I’m glad that I saw very little to no spelling errors. This was just overall a really easy read for me. If this were a real life film, the cinematography would have been fabulous, so it would have been great to look at. Teufel wrote this story with great energy, but sometimes the writing fell just a little short. FINAL WRITING GRADE: 65/100 FINAL OVERALL GRADE: 70/100 BLACKSMITH Reviews EXO-SQUAD: GENESIS From the pen of Teufel comes “Exo-Squad: Genesis”, a big budget epic sci-fi thriller that attempts to tell a very human story on a grand scale. Under director Paul Verhoeven’s eye for poetic visuals and gruesome violence, the story follows several characters against the backdrop of a rising revolution between humans and a new kind of manufactured life. What started off as an intriguing story soon got bogged down by a pacing problem that didn’t fix itself until just before the final act. Yet the movie has an inner strength that most movies on this scale don’t. The story begins with a Lieutenant named Thomas Winfield who joins a post on the planet of Mars, which has now been colonized. There he meets an old friend named Marcus (Val Kilmer) and together they receive a new assignment: Guard a new race of engineered beings called Neosapiens, blue-skinned powerhouses who resemble humans, but there is some question of how they measure up to humans in intelligence. At the moment, they are being treated like cattle, cruelly forced to work in the mines of Mars. But in a twist of fate, their creator (John Malkovich), the one person who treated them as humans, is killed, and his Neosapien companion Gidas ( voiced by The Rock) begins to question the Neosapien’s role in society. Eventually, it leads to an all out battle in a fight for the right to humanity. There’s a lot of other things going on, and in some ways that’s good, but in others, it hampers the main storyline. The subplot of the Neosapien disease seemed to only serve the purpose of making humans look more barbaric when it came time for the Neosapiens to revolt. While the first half of the movie has some interesting moments, the movie plods along without any driving action to move it forward other than a brief shootout and a gutwrenching torture scene. When the action finally does pick up around seventy-five minutes in the movie, it’s almost too little, too late. The action and descriptions in the movie are a little overwritten, but the battle scenes and scattered others are effective. The theme of the movie is what impressed me the most. Tackling heavy subject matter like this takes balls and Teufel does portray it well. This is what the genre of science fiction was truly created for. Showing life in the future to help change the present. And the message comes across loud and clear. Teufel shows humanity in both sides which gives a great gray area when it comes to the violent confrontations between them. That alone gets high marks from me. The characters in the film were a bit of a problem for me. While Winfield’s character was pretty well fleshed out, a lot of the supporting characters blended a little too much for me to uniquely identify them. The one standout was Gidas’ character. The Rock was an interesting choice to play him and he pulled it off, making the character jump off the page and show his humanity, which was essential to the role. But given the wide range of characters, more diversity needed to be given to each one, just in the way the dialogue was written and through small character quirks. “Exo-Squad : Genesis” is flawed in ways, but in others it shines. Teufel has truly given this story a lot of thought and he has weaved a heavy theme into a special effects filled movie. If only the pace of the script had been quicker and the characters a bit more defined, this movie would have soared. Worth a look. 68/100 MBRODERICK Reviews EXO-SQUAD:GENESIS I should start by announcing my bias. I was very turned off by the title, the cast and director, and the advertising for the movie Exo-Squad: Genesis. It just didn’t seem to be my cup of tea. So I must say, I went into this with low expectations. But my low expectations were easily exceeded by this surprisingly enjoyable sci-fi flick. Not only did I have fun reading it, but it turned out it wasn’t even a brainless action movie either. Who knew? The story opens with a man, Thomas Winfield (David Boreanaz), who meets a friend (Val Kilmer) on Mars (in this movie’s future, humans have colonized it). There they receive orders to protect a new genetically engineered species created by a scientist (John Malkovich). The species are Neosapiens, blue-skinned beings who are similar to humans. There are some crucial differences between us and them of course, and these are used to justify using them as slaves working endlessly in the deep mines of Mars. One Neosapien, Gidas (voiced pretty well by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), begins to question whether the treatment of his fellow Neosapiens by humans is fair. This would be the crux the of the story. There is a lot more to the movie’s story, which is actually a bit of disservice to the viewer. The thing runs too long and if it had been pared down more to its core it might’ve hooked me in better. This would be the principal problem I had with the movie. Its length is such that it would only be justified if the movie had more interesting things to say, which it doesn’t. The basic premise was fine and could’ve been contained with leaner editing. Despite this, it is an interesting movie and most of the action works quite well. The description was top notch and while some of the character suffered the generic sci-fi movie syndrome, the most important ones stood out enough that I can’t fault it too much there. In the end, the film is far more on the side of cool, well thought out sci-fi of a Phillip K. Dick rather than the dumb, plodding, “hard” sci-fi of a L. Ron Hubbard. The film certainly has it’s flaws (as I’ve mentioned, the bloated length), but it gets enough things right (particularly the highly philosophical central plot) that it is certainly worth seeing. 70/100 RANDOMFX Reviews EXO-SQUAD : GENESIS I’m a really big fan of sci-fi as most people are probably aware, and I have to say that I was looking forward to Teufel’s ‘Exo Genesis’ script. It was based upon a cartoon that was unfamiliar to me, but Teuf’s previous works convinced me that it was going to be a great amount of unlubricated fun. But (and you probably saw this coming) it falls agonisingly below the standards set by the author’s other works. The story is quite an interesting one, as it seems that in the far future on Mars, super-human beings are being produced for to work in the mines. These Neo-Sapiens are mammoth in size, but give the impression of low IQ – this secret being their best weapon of surprise. The topical issue of cloning is handled quite well, with the Doctor creating the Neos treating them like his children and the rather more aggressive military types viewing them as little more than slabs of meat with a pickaxe. There’s also the subtle handling of slavery, not so much in that’s quite clearly what the Neos are, but more in regards to how they act once they are free. They wreak revenge on their oppressors in the same ways that pain was inflicted upon themselves (a rather disturbing lab scene highlights it.) This is all about slave mentality and represents how the behaviour of some black people is linked back to how they were treated as slaves. Our hero in the movie is Thomas Winfield, a soldier who is being transferred to the Eden base on Mars, where the Neos are being bred. In the role we have David Boreanez, who does a wonderful turn as a sleepwalking plank. Although he is presented to us as our hero, his actions are sometimes far from being so. What I’m referring to in particular is his relationship with Nicole. They have perhaps two brief meetings with each other in the mess hall where we find out that she is married, and Winfield has been starved of sex for almost a year. Okay so they don’t say that, but he’s virtually humping her leg. This all sets up (somehow) for them to have strong enough feeling for each other to have sex, something that I found to be extremely troubling given Nicole’s prior insistence in others scenes that she couldn’t cheat on her husband. Okay, so she is upset at the time, but whatever happened to simply listening to a woman’s problem? She needed a backbone… and not the kind Winfield gave her. Unfortunately this led to me detesting both the characters and from then on I was on the side of the Neos. In terms of the writing, Teufel once again produces some great description, however it is simply too dense. The great blocks of writing given to the action are excessive (almost turning proceedings into pages from a story book) and made it a chore to read. I also have to stress the importance of capitalizing all character names in the action. Please, remember next time. The dialogue is variable also. There is a strong relationship built up between Dr. Von Braun and Gidas, resulting in the latter becoming the most sympathetic character. Overall, though, I found it too dense, hammy and often too repetitive in its exposition. It’s uncomfortable and uninteresting, which I put down to a lack of humour or conflict (in the early stages) and quite simply the mass of exposition. My last fault to pick with the movie is its poor pacing. Absolutely no action takes place until a third of the way into the movie, which means that for forty minutes you’re bombarded with science and largely uninteresting characters going on and on (I feel I have to point a moment where Kaiser says he will be brief, but proceeds to talk for two and a half pages.) After that we pretty much have to wait until half an hour from the end before there’s anymore. This is also the best part of the movie and fans of Verhoeven (like me) will certainly find redeeming features in the marvellous action sequences. So overall, then, I found Exo-Squad: Genesis to be a reasonable story that raised some interesting moral issues, but it become weighed down by the masses of exposition that it felt obliged to repeat. With more concise writing the pacing would also have been cured. I also found all of the human characters to be mostly boring or worthy only of my contempt, which may have been deliberate, but then that wouldn’t match up with Winfield siding with the Neos. -- Good, descripitive language, but the paragraphs could be easily cut. Lot ’s of unnecessary comments that make the actions seem more like a story. -- Character names are haphazardly capitalized. Must capitalize both names. -- Hammy dialogue… real hammy. It’s uncomfortable and uninteresting because there’s not enough humour or conflict mixed into the masses of exposition that is given in the introductory scenes. -- Odd how Kaiser says he’ll keep his introductory speech short, yet it rambles on for 2 and a half pages. -- Nicole could do with more backbone. -- No action until about 40 pages. Poor Pacing as by then we are a third the way into the movie. -- They have sex for absolutely no good reason. Is Nicole so weak-minded that she has to cave in to Tom every whim. I mean, she’s married for goodness sake, and she gives in too easily. Plus, she’s really upset. Okay so that might explain her frame of mind, but I don’t think sex is what she needs. Whatever happened to simply listening to a woman’s problem. It makes me detest them both. 59/100
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