nixsight

Mutant Chronicles is a very peculiar film indeed. Based loosely on an old cult-favourite role-playing game with the same name, and featuring some really promising elements, it’s tough to tell whether the film manages to surpass it’s apparent budgetary constraints – because it is quite entertaining and absorbing – or utterly fail by every qualitative critical metric – because it all looks so cheap and thrown together.

The film is set in an alternate future version of our world, with a nice steampunk aesthetic. This world has a detailed history – which is mandatory in RPGs, where the player will be interacting with this new world, but not so necessary in a visual and by necessity osmotically-immersive medium like film.

Early on, the film has problems with it’s overblown and expository introduction sequence, which takes ages to finish – and which only slightly supplements the initial action in the film.

Which is just bloody stupid.

Which isn’t to say that the detail of the history of this peculiar, green-screened and overstylised world isn’t interesting, as long as it’s delivered peripherally, but like the similar narrated intro sequence to “The Golden Compass”, almost every piece of information given in the scene is also delivered by the spoken script, within the first act of the movie.

It mostly becomes irrelevant once the arrival of the actual mutants, and with them the actual plot of the movie, comes along, anyway.

The other thing that makes the film look worse is the green-screen effect that is used throughout. Admittedly, the way that they’ve decided to approach the story is pretty large in it’s scope, and it might have been difficult to do on a low budget without the aesthetic decision to use the technique, but there are places where you find yourself just wishing they’d stripped back on the big stuff, and done a better job on the small stuff.

And it’s not as if money, or lack of it, is the only thing that fucks this stuff up. Attention to detail can make a hell of a lot of difference to a movie. So soon after watching “The Descent”, and seeing the awesome work done on the underground sets there, watching a makeshift squad of warriors – who incidentally, don’t really move much like warriors – walking upright through underground, darkened corridors, and clearly not being keyed into or lit appropriately for the environments that they’re supposed to be in, is a little disappointing.

AND ALSO: In a film where the prosphetic effects and violence effects are actually pretty accomplished, is it really that much more effort to use fake blood for spurting, instead of CG blood? Or if you’re going to use CG blood, is it really so difficult, after all the lessons learned down through time since Takeshi Kitano’s “Zatoichi”, to make it look at least a little more authentic than this?

Mind you, it made me think about other films that use the technique, and you know – I think that so far, “300″ is the only one that actually looked more expensive, rather than cheaper, because of it. Though “Sin City” had more extreme art direction than this film, which made it look almost deliberate how spare and disconnected everything was, it still looked pretty cheapass. Though where Rodriguez’ film almost made it look deliberate, “Mutant Chronicles”, despite it’s broad vistas and impressive imagined city and landscapes, doesn’t have the flair in the camera angles and such to really pull it off, most of the time.

Having said that, there’s a wiry humour that runs through the script, which is only sometimes shot through with cliche, rather than being composed entirely of it, and the cast does a good enough job with the dialogue and their roles that you still end up caring about them, in spite of everything.

It’s not a bad cast at all – Ron Perlman and John Malkovich don’t short-sell their characters, despite each being two or three pay grades above a film like this, and Devon Aoki lifts her role above it’s stereotypical origins. Even Sean Pertwee does a convincing job in the WW1 inspired war scenes at the beginning, and afterwards he is mostly required to shout, so that’s within his gift.

And now I really fancy Anna Walton, who I hadn’t heard of before.

Thinking about it, if this film feels like anything, it feels like “Lexx”, though, you know, that series was years back, so this really should look a bit better.

Still, though, it’s fun enough, if you come to it with low, low expectations, which we did. So it’s all gravy, baby!