Dark Island

Lost has become one of the leading patterns for movie writers. Thinking like that and not following it through with great acting is like eating a bitter Ice cream. The movie has nice animations, fighting scenes, a bit cheap on the props because I clearly saw add/remove icon on the laptop. Better fix that next time. Acting is degraded. They not only lack acting skills, but the talent is totally non existent. The cast look like they've been rallied in some nearby coffee shop along side with their cheap looking laptops. Screenplay occasionally drops (like you know what) bits and pieces of characters lives. It doesn't explain a thing. It only shows how little you need to make a film today. You don't have to poses skills other than being someones nephew, or having a 3rd day black belt, to be in the cast. Just don't expect people to love your work!

I would like to say that this movie had some redeeming features but unfortunately cannot.

The low budget is obvious, the props silly, the special effects unimpressive. Any of this could be overcome with a good storyline, strong acting, great characters or a gripping fast paced plot. Unfortunately the acting is poor, the characters 2 dimensional and unbelievable. The plot is predictable. The duologue is trite.

Unfortunately there is no zero star vote, the only actual good point that I can give this movie is that it is over.

Don't waste your time with this one.

This movie surprised me. I thought I was in for a bore-fest, but it actually turned out to be quite nice.

The story was not without flaws, but it was good enough to keep me interested, and had a fairly good, steady flow to it. There were times when the movie was halting though.

The effects in "Dark Island" were also quite nice. Especially the CGIs for the animated black cloud. It looked really good, and moved in a very believable way. The make-up effects were good as well.

As for the cast, well I was not familiar with any of the ones in the movie, but most of them did a good job, despite often having halting dialogue to work with.

There weren't any scary moments or thrills throughout the movie, which kind of dragged the overall experience down a notch.

Where to begin? I'll give you two reasons I gave up on this movie half-way through.

First of all, it would be nice to see a cast of adults, behaving like adults, working together in the face of mystery and danger to accomplish their mission. But no, here we have our typical 20- somethings, acting like bickering 12-year olds, because that's what passes for "drama" in silly films like this.

And, why, oh why, can't producers ensure that at least one member of the crew be a veteran if they are going to depict military personnel? I don't care if it's the grip, the caterer, or even the honey pot driver... if you're going to show Army soldiers in uniform, have SOMEBODY on board who knows how a uniform is worn. In this movie, we have two doofus characters portraying soldiers wearing "Class A" green uniforms. One of them has two rows of ribbons, and various unit citations, indicating significant time on duty. And yet he has no rank. I mean, even a soldier who has just completed basic training is at least a "mosquito wing" Private E-2. His "commanding officer" had Sergeant E-7 stripes displayed. And both of them, for heaven's sake, had no idea how to wear a beret. Anyone who's drunk a bottle of French wine knows that you pull it over to one side, but these goof-balls--- well, one of them had it pulled down tight on his head like a beanie, and his "commanding officer" had his pouffed up in an expanding circle like a big muffin. I gave it all up right there...

Criticism is something that a lot of people find it hard to both explain and deal with and there are some who just ignore it all together, as such Dark Island is one of those many low budget action/horror movies that has so far had received very negative reception from critics, but from the film company's point of view they probably do not care as long as the film sells well enough to make money. Dark Island copies the many successful franchises like the Lost and Resident Evil series by putting them together with a cast of unknown actors and first time directors on some Canadian island.

Why is this film bad? The first question should be what isn't bad? Well it's not the low budget, as some low budget horror films have succeed both financially and critically like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. It's not the special effects which I think are some of the best special effects I have ever seen on a low budget movie, the detail on the black fog monsters is very good but I personally think CGI means very little when judging how good a film is, and I hate those Avatar lovers who only think Avatar is good because of its state of the art computer generated imagery.

The acting is only decent at best, just by watching the film you can tell that the actors are trying so hard to play the roles of their characters to make their acting as realistic as possible, the acting does not suck but they could at least be more relaxed about it.

Now for the answer to the question, why is this movie bad? Well it's the story, editing and script (if they even used a script and storyboards) the story is just plain bad from the start to finished and it has been done many, many times before it in far better ways. A group of people from different backgrounds are sent to a secret island that is run by Altracorp an evil corporation that specializes in developing biological weapons for the military, the same as the Umbrella corporation from the Resident Evil series, each character is not who they seem and they all have their own flashback sequence like in the Lost TV series, the story also has a twist ending which is not really worth waiting for, as I watch the film I feel as though the film's target audience was a dumb, uneducated audience. Now that's the story covered, another bad thing about the film is its action sequences which are very poorly edited and badly produced, they are often very cheesy and are not real enough to be taken seriously.

I will not be recommending Dark Island to anyone wanting to see an action sci-fi movie. It's not the worst movie I have ever seen but it does add to my top 10 worst movies I have ever seen list and while its special effects did save it from a 1/10 rating I still dislike this film and hope that this review will save you from both renting or buying this movie, it does not deserve your hard earned money.

3/10