Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #217 Page 15
Magdalena nodded once, sighing. “You know best,” she said.
"Mother?” Riley wailed plaintively, as Pamela helped Magdalena limp through the tangled underbrush. “You can't do this to me! Run off and leave me ... you and that ... woman! I want ... I want ... I want to come home!"
Good, Pamela thought. Want that.
Around them, the spirit of the City settled comfortably back into its ancient, accustomed dissatisfaction.
Copyright © 2008 M.K. Hobson
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LASER FODDER—Tony Lee's DVD Reviews, Competitions
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X-Files “With its imitators ranging from popular crime dramas to occult mystery shows, it's the most influential genre programme of our time"
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Yesterday (14th April) is Korean sci-fi with an offbeat action-thriller structure and lively comic-book appeal. Hard-boiled police detective Seok (Kim Seung-woo, no stranger to genre films after psychic thriller Secret Tears and time-travelling nuclear comedy Heaven's Soldiers), leads the hunt for a daring gang that kidnap the heavily guarded commissioner. The chief's daughter, forensics expert Dr Hui-su (Kim Yun-jin, of TV show Lost), insists on joining the squad as criminal profiler of villains behind a spate of murders, but the ‘Project Goliath’ killer's MO alludes to a sinister government plot started 30 years ago, and there are startling revelations in store for both the haunted cop, and the forgetful scientist, when they eventually catch the bad guys. With all the slickness of Michael Mann's classic Heat, and stylised Miami Vice remake, muddled up with Blade Runner-ish gadgetry, and 2020 unified-Korean political scenery, in a hokum plot about mind-control experiments, child abuse and genetic determinism, this often looks great, with its assured handling of high-tension guerrilla gun-battle tactics, but finally it only delivers cryptic answers to direct questions, and irrelevant script waffle forms around narrative chokepoints, leaving the finished whole a bitter disappointment, however good it promises or appears to be from the outset. Various technological incongruities mean that 21st century urban design blunders, awkward social ploys, and niggling errors devalue its worthiness as proper speculative fiction.
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Chrysalis (9th June) is French futurism by Julien Leclercq, and it suffers from many of the problems affecting work by first-time directors. Photographed in ‘cool’ shades of blue and grey, it tries hard for stylish dazzle but just looks colourless. Essentially, this is a violent medical-crime drama with a sci-fi backdrop. Parisian cop David Hoffman (Albert Dupontel from war film Intimate Enemies) loses his partner/wife during an arrest, but he does succeed in shooting the killer dead. A new partner, rookie Becker (Marie Guillard), is not wise or capable enough to save David from his all-consuming doubts and grief, so a gun-and-badge handover scene is inevitable, as David's mental state deteriorates, crushed by guilt. Meanwhile, tele-presence VR-surgery proponent Prof Brügen (Marthe Keller, Time of the Wolf), struggles to save her dying daughter's life by a mind-transfer into another body. Of course, memory implants are good business for secret services, and when troubled David uncovers identity-theft and injustice he's a candidate for Euro spooks’ brain-wipe op. Alas, it's all rather confused and puzzling, mistaking obscured-narrative for a sense of mystery, though partly to make up for the obvious lack of any feature-length storyline. Long and brutish martial arts sequences, and insignificant film-school arty montages for scenic transitions, cannot hide a plot-vacuum or compensate for the stark unoriginality of its cross-genre material.
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