Peace Virus - Die Bedrohung

The art of tension is creating high stakes, and then dancing on the edge of disaster until the climax.

When the audience is cringing at the plethora of ridiculous scenarios spewed onto the screen in front of them, tension is not achieved.

The basic premiss is not too bad. We've seen these virus films before, and the potential is there for a couple of programmer spods to do effective battle with a virus. But you have to truly research the subject, and you might realize computers can't fire guns, sign cheques, take showers... any of which would have not seemed out of place in this dross.

There is little grace in the action. They pull over to have domestic conversations. Insert irregular and obtrusive dialogue. We might as well put a colour coded bar on to denote main and subplots.

All that said, if you are the kind of person who doesn't know how to wind up your sundial, then you'll probably love this film.

There's a massive amount of criticism with this movie . The CGI is terrible ? Yes it is especially the opening scene in the Ukraine . The plot is stupid ? yes it is . Very stupid . It's full of scientific nonsense ? Indeed it is . You'll fall out of seat how ludicrous everything plays out . However none of this would mattered if the film had realised its potential

The problem with the potential is there's a lot of scope for cruel things to happen . Certainly an idea of a super intelligent self aware virus is a good premise which could have ended up as a cross between PULSE and TERMINATOR 2:JUDGEMENT DAY . Unfortunately we once again endure TVM style kitchen sink dramas when we should have been watching lots of people suffering a grisly fate like the occupants of a lift , so the potential is sadly wasted

We're supposed to believe a computer goofball gives a 'virus' to a kid in a song which gets on the kid's dad's computer and infects multiple city facilities...killing people and blowing up phone booths. Yeah, and the virus is a 'smart virus' which makes judgement calls. No thrills, no monsters to watch (unless you count Timothy Busfield (goofball); or Michael Nouri looking very old, and not even remotely giving a performance. Marina Sirtis is very ill-used here. I hope she smacked the screen writer and the director after she saw this drivel.

Irredeemably amateurish as this is, it is more entertaining than many big-name flicks...maybe on account of its very trashiness.

Nouri, something less than an A-list actor even in his prime, plays Brad Weston, head of the crappiest looking software company you ever saw. After Busfield (employee reject of the year) throws a spaz and uses Weston's son to download a smart virus into the company computer (in a song no less)which manages among other things to blow a Ukraine nuclear facility to the hereafter - this has to be the WORST special effect ever foisted on to the viewing public at large - things just get dopier.

One must pay homage admittedly to the plastic plane sequences, not to mention the hand-drawn silo launching fx. Salaries aside (assuming anyone was PAID for this) the film obviously had a budget of less than $500....refreshments included! Defying plausibility from the word go, the conceptual brilliance of wiping out an entrenched super-virus, capable of speech and thought incidentally, with a hand-held "Game-Boy" is nothing short of awesome in its originality.

A classic of low-rent sci-fi.

I should have read the reviews first. But then I would not have witnessed how bad acting and directing can be.

For the director, just looking at his abysmal ratings over his career tells it all. Why would any producing company invest in such movies? Money, even if profits are low?

The acting: the performance of Dylan, played by Matthew Ewald is exceedingly irritant from start to finish. When I read that he received numerous nominations and awards, I discovered that two of his best decorated performances (coffins ...) had no rating and no reviews.

In conclusion, the movies industry follows the same Gaussian pattern as the one for IQ.