THE DAY
Directed by: Doug Aariniokoski
Written by: Luke Passmore
Starring: Shannyn Sossamon, Dominic Monaghan, Shawn Ashmore, Ashley Bell, and Cory Hardrict
Synopsis: A group of five young people have stuck together to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, then as they think they've found shelter, they run into some unexpected trouble.
Jonesy: I think THE DAY had a good premise, but the execution ended up being a very boring, lackluster rip off of every post-apocalyptic movie. The only difference is that this is dealing with a group of twenty-somethings that look too clean for having been trying to survive for the last 10 years.
Javi: This is the worst movie I have seen during the festival, and the more I think about it the more annoyed I am. Everything from the lack of real characters, bad CG, and stupid story that has zero context for any of the events of the world within the movie. Where are they going? What happened? This is not a movie where you can just figure out exactly what happened from hints here and there from dialogue. They just did not explain anything.
Jonesy: It didn't matter to me that we don't know what happened.
Javi: For part of the movie, the enemies that they are fighting are just the remnants of the post-apocalyptic world but they didn't cause it. Whereas there are some lines of dialogue that insinuates they did cause it.
Jonesy: I feel that the movie is basically a rip off from a section from THE ROAD, so I was filling in the blanks for what has happened based off of THE ROAD, and that might be a bad thing since I'm possibly getting parts of the history wrong.
Javi: The difference between this movie and THE ROAD is that THE ROAD never explicitly says what happened to cause the world to go to Hell, whereas this movie references it all the time, but doesn't give you a good idea of what actually happened. I don't feel I'm stupid enough not to figure out things in the movies, but this was incomprehensible
Jonesy: I liked that this movie was supposed to be a 24 hour slice of these characters' lives, and going along with what you said, do they always reference and talk their loved ones and the past all day every day? Or is it just a convenient way of trying to drive the plot along? Whereas, if they had left certain things more ambiguous, it would have just have made more of an impact and wouldn't have been so boring to see. The movie is really done very amateur.
Javi: And what's frustrating is that it's not a good kind of amateur, where you can see the potential, but rather just a Syfy-sort-of amateur. And thanks to the bad writing, the script kill whatever themes that movie could have had such as prejudice and redemption. Talking about the characters, it's very frustrating that there doesn't seem to be one person who's storyline we are supposed to follow. The focus shifts but never handles it properly. All you see Dominic Monahan's leader character being the Guy That Makes The Tough Choices, and these people walking around are not even archetypes; they are so thinly written. There's no reason for me to care about these people because I don't know their story or what they stand for. What's even worse is I don't know who the hell the villains are. They come in two-thirds into the movie, and all of the sudden we're suppose to fear them? And honestly, what's Dominic doing here? You would think that the guy has been around so many good actors and been in good movies that he would know better than to make this movie. I just read an article about straight to DVD movies and this movie definitely has that quality.
Jonesy: Or this feels like an MTV movie because the sheer ADDness of it makes me think it would belong there.
Javi: What do you mean by ADD?
Jonesy: It's ADD in its lack of focus from knowing which characters or plot point to follow. People seem to change their minds about their allegiances every 15 minutes. And the last set piece is very hectic.
Javi: I don't know if it's hectic or more incomprehensible. You said that HUMAN CENTIPEDE II had issues with the timeline. In this movie, there is a scene where it takes 10 seconds to go from afternoon to night and how there is absolutely nothing that tells you anything happened in between.
Jonesy: And they sure prepared for their final showdown very quickly, even though you never got a sense of anything being done.
Javi: Let's talk about the dialogue because it was really some of the worst dialogue I've heard in a while. @ThinkZombie said that he does not like cursing, and in this instance, I have to agree. Every other word is fuck or motherfucker, and it just got boring.
Jonesy: The story made the characters seem street smart, yet their dialogue made them sound so ignorant, that you really have to wonder how the hell they survived this long.
Javi: Like I said before, this is probably the worst movie I've seen at this festival only because I keep trying to forget I actually saw HUMAN CENTIPEDE II.
Jonesy: One good thing about the movie are the hand to hand action scenes, until you get fire and blood where the CG is downright laughable. It's like they ran out of money for decent effects.
Javi: It's interesting they seem to run out of money considering that there are no sets, and all you have is nature and the one broken down house. And what's worse is that the movie is boring, and that's something I can't get behind.
Jonesy: One of the worst movies of the festival.
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