Warning: strong language from the very beginning (of the review not the film).
This is the most fucking blindingly stupid SF film I've seen in ages. It is so unbelievably fucking stupid that I thought it was going to be a complete con and reveal itself as something clever albeit derivative.
The scenario. About a hundred years from now, the almost the entire world has suffered an environmental collapse except for a British dominated western Europe. And Australia known as The Territories. Is there some invisible barrier which prevents the environmental collapse from moving into these regions? And what we see of Australia (The Territories) is a massively overcrowded city along the the lines of Ridley Scott's Bladerunner only much much worse. And -you really are not going to believe this- there is massive tunnel right through the earth -including the molten core!- that connects (I'm assuming) London with an unnamed Australian city. And people travel between the two in a giant lift which takes -wait for it, wait for it!- about 15 minutes to complete the journey which means an average speed of around 32,000 mph. I may be wrong but I think this is faster than escape velocity -the speed needed to get a spaceship into orbit. Apart from that, given the sheer amount of resources it would take to create such a thing it would surely be easier to create Earth-orbit habitats. And people commute every day as a matter of course. The energy this involves must be enormous -and all on an environmentally damaged Earth.
God help me and I haven't even got on to the story yet. If you've seen Arnie's vastly superior original then you've probably got a good idea of what happens next. Working class bloke visits a place that implants memories and wants to be a secret agent only something goes wrong. The police conveniently arrive within seconds, kill the staff (why? they didn't do anything wrong) and are killed in turn by Colin Farrell discovering fighting skills he didn't know he had. He goes on the run hunted by his secret agent 'wife' and discovers he's really a top government agent gone over to the rebels. The rebels, incidentally, haven't been letting off bombs. That's been organised by the head of the government who wants an excuse to kill everybody in Australia -or at least the city we've seen- because, according to him, they support the rebels but really they want the territory for their expanding population. Why? The place is a fucking tip!
There is lots of mindless sfx/cgi-filled action before it's announced that a few (like maybe three) thousand android soldiers are going down in the elevator to kill everybody at the other end. All millions of them. Wouldn't this take quite a while? Meanwhile everybody down under is told to go to the environmental collapse zone which probably isn't the healthiest place in the neighbourhood. Meanwhile, Colin and rebel girlfriend are trying to plant bombs on the elevator. I couldn't understand why the down-unders didn't destroy the arrival station and have the elevator crash destroying everyone on board but what do I know?
At this point I should inform you that very much earlier in the film I decided that the scenario was so stupid that it would all be an induced memory and that Colin Farrell really was just a working class bloke. A little later, not much later, I decided that even that part was induced and Farrell really lives in a utopian society and felt the need to escape into a hideous dystopia in order to appreciate what he really had (this idea is stolen from a short story).
Spoiler Warning!
No it wasn't. Everything is face value. As a film this is one of the biggest piles of shit that I have ever seen. It's so shitty it's an insult to the word shit. Did no-one reading the script, or treatment, realise what an illogical inane piece of crap this was? Clearly not which leads me to conclude that people in Hollywood are the most ignorant thickheads on the face of the earth (except for religious fundamentalists).
This film is so bad that I almost think self-harming is preferable to watching it.
And to add insult to injury, in the UK it was given a very lenient 12 certificate (triple breasted nudity, attempted genocide, violence, strong language) which means impressionable kids who don't know any better have to suffer it.
If there is any reason to watch this putrefying corpse of a film it's to see how bad a big budget film can be. But, for your own sanity, just take my word for it and don't bother. This really is one of the worst films I've seen in years.
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