I think I hate myself. I must be inflicting punishment upon my own person for something awful I did that I don’t remember. There’s no other rational explanation to my having gone to see both Dreamcatcher and Tears of the Sun this weekend.

To be perfectly honest, I went into Dreamcatcher for the sole purpose of watching The last flight of the Osiris (an Animatrix short that was showing before the movie), which was everything I hoped. Made by the guys at Square Pictures (the same guys who made Final Fantasy: The spirits within — which, despite what the critics said, kicked serious ass), it shows a story aboard the Osiris, a human ship similar to the Nebuchadnezzar, Morpheus’ ship. I don’t want to give away the story, but you should seriously consider watching it. The story is good (written by the Wachowski brothers), the pacing is great and the animation is top notch. It even has a kinky, sexy part that will make you laugh.

Ok. About the actual movies: Dreamcatcher is one long winded piece of dog crap that is full of people who take themselves too seriously and deliver their lines in a ridiculously dramatic fashion (I actually burst out laughing two times in some of the more “dramatic” parts of the movie — that can’t be a good thing). Four telepathically linked friends (and their other retarded but all powerful friend) confront an alien invasion by what must be the most incompetent alien race in the history of movies (they make it seem so easy to invade and yet, they’ve been trying for 25 years without so much as a goddamned occupied city to show for it). You never get into trying to make sense of the plot, because every explanation is provided by the characters themselves (and usually involves some unbelievable fact from their lives), but don’t worry: in the end, the plot doesn’t make any sense, however you look at it.

The namesake of the movie, the dreamcatcher thing, doesn’t actually play a part in the movie, which is odd, since it is plastered all over the posters, trailers and whatnot. The dialog sucks, the story has an incredible amount of stuff happening at the same time. There are many, many really dumb, on-the-spot explanations. In case I haven’t made myself clear: this movie blows goats

Tears of the Sun is not really that bad, so much as it is nothing more than a carefully presented collection of all war movie cliches to date. I don’t think they missed any one of those, other that there was no soldier planning to move to Montana and start a farming business when “this damn thing is over” and then died. I have a strong suspicion that they didn’t miss it, but that the dialog got cut somewhere between the director and the theater, though.

Bruce Willis was good but his part lacked depth, and everyone else was halfway decent, except the woman doctor (Monica Belluci) who kept acting like a raindeer in the headlights and making stupid, life-threatening decisions (couldn’t she have sent Arthur in the chopper in the first place and saved herself a world of hurt??) and somehow bossing Willis around. The only cool thing about this movie was watching the equipment the soldiers carried (do they really use those neck-tied radios? those were nifty). Other than that, bleh.

— sergio on April 20, 2003