Disconnect (2013)

Every year I make a resolution to 'disconnect', but it never lasts more than a few days.  It's not that I have any kind of internet addiction, it's just easier to ping someone on Facebook than it is to pick up a phone, even if it's the same phone I'm using to look at Facebook.  Kind of sad, really...

Disconnect follows a familiar format where you have several stories that eventually intertwine as they develop.  There are three main stories that all center around some kind of technology.  First, we have a reporter (Andrea Riseborough) that's investigating underage teens being used in online, sex chat rooms.  She interviews one boy (Max Thieriot) and hopes her report will be her big break as a reporter.

Then, we have a couple (Alexander Skarsgård and Paula Patton) that's having marital issues after the death of their child.  They've grown apart and she spends her time reaching out to people in chat rooms as her husband won't talk to her.  While on a business trip, they find out that someone has stolen their identity and cleaned out their bank account.  As the police are moving too slow, they hire a private investigator (Frank Grillo) to track down the man that stole from them.

Finally, a boy (Jonah Bobo) is cyberbullied by two classmates (Colin Ford and Aviad Bernstein) by creating a fake Facebook profile and tricking him into an extremely embarrassing situation.  Things spiral out of control and his father (Jason Bateman) is left trying to find out what happened.

Sometimes these types of films suffer from having too many characters, or not giving them enough depth, but one of my favorite things about Disconnect is that you learn a great deal about everyone without tons of exposition or explicitly being told.  You aren't spoonfed info and director Henry Alex Rubin trusts the audience to be smart enough to figure this stuff on their own.  I found myself caring about each story, so there was no drop off or drastic shift in tone when going back and forth.  A lot of times when watching movies that follow this format, I find that there's usually one story or set of characters that's not as interesting or that I don't care about.  That's not the case here and I credit writer Andrew Stern as well as Rubin for creating a story with relatable characters and situations.  I also credit them for staying away from too much melodrama while gradually building tension as things escalate.

My only real complaint about the story, is that I thought some of the details regarding the identity theft thread felt a little forced to me.  I'm primarily basing this on my own personal experiences with identity theft, and I understand that not every situation is going to be the same, but my experiences have been much different than what they went through in Disconnect.  It's a minor complaint though.  It didn't ruin the film for me or anything like that.

It's interesting that the title is called Disconnect, when that seems to be the message or goal for the audience, rather than what actually happens in the film.  I see the phrase "cautionary tale" being thrown about a lot in discussion of this film, but I didn't really feel that it was preachy enough to be a cautionary tale as much as it was a character drama.  After watching Disconnect though, I did come away from it feeling like I need revisit my resolution to stop spending so much time on Facebook or Twitter and work on actual in-person interaction.  I think the world would be better off if we all worked on that a bit.

While there aren't a lot of huge names in the cast, there really isn't a weak performance in the group.  All of the characters (even the bullies) manage to come off as sympathetic.  I give Jason Bateman crap for playing the same role over and over, but Disconnect is a movie finally that allows him to play a different type of role and show a side of him we don't normally see.  It really is well-acted across the board.  Even scenes where characters aren't even verbally communicating, but communicating through online chat, you get some kind of emotional depth from them.

Disconnect is easily in my top five of the best films I've seen so far in 2013.  It's a wonderfully acted dramatic thriller, that'll make you think a little about how we use technology in today's world.  It might actually get you to disconnect a little yourself.  Don't miss this one.

4 (out of 5) Death Stars

Battleship (2012) - Movie Review

You sank my sense of logic!  Battleship is one of those movies that you go in knowing it's not going to be revolutionary, but you hope it will at least be a fun, summer popcorn flick.  You'll hear people say things like, "Just shut your brain off and enjoy!"  The problem is, I'm tired of shutting my brain off.  If that's a perquisite to watching a movie, that's never a good sign.

I'm sure you're thinking I'm getting old and cranky, and that like other critics I have no soul, but I'm getting tired of lazy-ass movies that simply try to flash a bunch of a explosions and images on screen to distract you from the fact that there really isn't anything going on.  It's all the typical things that Michael Bay does, but somehow it ends up being even worse.  I've heard a lot of comparisons to Skyline and I'd say that's pretty accurate as far as both movies being about alien invasions don't make any sense.

As you may have already guessed, I didn't like Battleship.  This review is going to be a little more of a rant and spoiler-filled, so fair warning...

Where to even start?  The movie begins with showing you that NASA has found an exoplanet in the "Goldilocks Zone".  On the hope that there may be life there, a signal is transmitted, boosted by a satellite in orbit.  I'm already kind of scratching my head at this because lots of exoplanets have been found in the "Goldilocks Zone."  This isn't anything new, so why are we transmitting to this planet?  Are we doing this for all planets we find?  Is this why NASA needs more money?

Let's get the first flaw major flaw of this movie out of the way:  it's way too long!  It's well over two hours, yet you can walk in 30 minutes late and you wont miss anything related to the action.  You're introduced to our hero, a drunk Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), who breaks into a convenience store to steal a chicken burrito for Sam (Brooklyn Decker).  This scene would have been funny if it wasn't a blatant ripoff of an actual burglary.  Here's the clip of the actual event:



They reenact this in the movie as if it was something original.  This is the kind of crap I expect to see in something from the makers of Epic Movie.  Anyway, this scene is used to setup that Alex is a underachieving loser that's a disappointment to his older brother (Alexander Skarsgård), who's in the Navy.   He forces Alex to enlist in order to get his act straight.

We fast forward a few years, and I can only assume it's been a few years because it's never said how much time has passed and nobody looks any older, but Alex is now somehow a lieutenant.  I say 'somehow' because it's clear that he's still a screwup and he's about to get kicked out of the Navy.  His last mission will be for the RIMPAC naval exercises and then he's out.

Oh, but before we get to that, we're going to watch a soccer match.  Yes, you came to watch Battleship because you wanted to see a poorly shot soccer match between the US and Japanese Navy.  There's no point to this sequence other than to show you that Alex doesn't get along with one of the guys from the Japanese Navy.  Do you think they'll be forced to work together and respect each other by the end of the movie?  Oh, the suspense!

Anyway, this is seriously the first 30-40 mintues of the film and it didn't need to be there!  You can skip that first part and there's 30-40 minutes of your life you just got back.  If you wanted to establish Alex's character, it would have been much easier, and taken less time, to simply start with him already in the military and show that he's the underachieving officer, who's about to be kicked out of the military for fighting or something like that.  It's a much harder sell to show him as an absolute screw up even before enlisting, and then in just a short time he's advanced without seeing any character growth or maturity.  They tell you several times that Alex is smart and talented, but you never see him do anything that demonstrates that.

Finally, the aliens show up as the Navy is going through their RIMPAC exercises.  One of their ships is damaged entering Earth's atmosphere and causes all kinds of destruction as it crashes.  These aliens can travel light-years, but I guess they don't have the ability to detect a satellite that's in its direct flight path.  Anyway, they Navy investigates the ships that have safely landed in the ocean.  Shortly after, the aliens attack.

The other huge problem is aliens themselves.  They aren't developed at all.  What do they want?  It's clear they are invading, but why?  They don't have a single line of dialog, so there's never a mention about needing resources or tech, biology or just wanting our planet.  Their primary goal seems to be that they need to reestablish communication back home, because it's assumed that their communications ship is the one that crashed earlier.  That sets up a silly subplot involving Sam and a military veteran trying to stop them.  It's silly, not just because of the characters involved, but because it's ultimately pointless.  We communicated with the aliens first.  That's how they knew to find us.  If they were capable of sending five ships to Earth, what's to stop them from sending five more, or 20?  If they never hear back from their ships, you don't think at some point they aren't sending more to investigate?

One of the worst things about the aliens is that they show that they have this threat assessment display that determines whether or not they will attack or even see you.  So basically, in Battleship, you can shoot an alien, but then stand still and put your gun down and there's a good chance it will ignore you.  This happened several times in the film.  Nevermind that they are invading the Earth for whatever reason and they're in the middle of a battle against people who have clearly fired upon them.  Also, the aliens showed at other times that they had no issues with causing random destruction that affected civilian targets that posed no threat.  Battleship doesn't worry about things like logic or making sense.

Their ship design was actually kind of cool though, but again, there didn't seem to be any consistency to their technology.  You see times where their ships will fly and other times where they hop around in the water as if they can't sustain flight.  The actual alien design was kind of silly.  When the masks finally come off, they have frigging goatees.  Yep, spiky goatees.  Even aliens have hipsters.

Battleship has some of the worst dialog I've seen in a while.  Co-written by Erich and Jon Hoeber, this movie badly needed some punch-up.  Peter Berg is a capable director, but it doesn't seem like he had a lot of control over this.  I have a hard time believing he thought some of the stuff that happens in the movie made any sense.  How did anyone involved in this think it made any sense.  There are so many things in the movie that could have been removed.  Like, there's a really bad CG shot of a great white shark swimming that looked awful, but it had nothing to do with the story.  Why put that in the movie?  There's a point in the movie where they actually play a version of Battleship staring at display screens, as the Navy and aliens try to find each other.  Really?

There are two moments in the film where someone (presumably) dies and there is absolutely no reaction from the witnessing character, even though it's someone they care about.  If you don't care about your characters to show any emotion about them, I don't care about them either.  Maybe this is due to hiring 'actors' incapable of expressing these types of emotions.  I don't want hate on Taylor Kitsch, but this is already the second shitty sci-fi/fantasy movie he's been in this year.  I get the feeling Hollywood is trying to force this guy on us.  Jeremy Renner was originally attached to this role, and he wisely passed on it to be in something else.  Rihanna doesn't have much to do in the movie other than to run in needless slow motion.  She wasn't terrible, but they did a good job of hiding her acting.  They just throw Brooklyn Decker in some tank tops and short-shorts, and then her acting consists of either smiling or making a face like she just smelled a fart.

What emotion am I trying to convey right now?  Acting!

Similar to the recent Act of Valor, the cast features a lot of military veterans.  Since these guys are not actors, I'm going to talk negatively about that.  If you cast non-actors in speaking roles, you can't expect much.  Even though he's heavily featured in the trailers, Liam Neeson maybe has a total of five minutes in the movie.  He gets a pass.  Same with Alexander Skarsgård, who's also barely in it.  Lastly, Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) shows up in a weird cameo.

In the end, Battleship is more like Battleshit.  This is a perfect example of a studio trying to make something out of nothing.  Actually, it was about something: product placement.  After watching Battleship, I had the urge to have a Coke Zero, microwave a chicken burrito, buy an AC/DC album and maybe join the Navy.  I'd love to say this is just a fun, but dumb, popcorn flick, but I couldn't even enjoy it on that level.  The movie has no personality, no excitement, and nothing in it makes sense.  It's barely worthy of a rental.

1 (out of 5) Death Stars