Hex

While watching the first part, I was all set to give it a 2/10 or 3/10 rating. The skydiving scenes look good but there's not a whole lot else going on here. The premise of an evil skydiving formation is a bit iffy to begin with and they don't sell the menace of it very well. It just comes across as kind of silly. There is a lot of stuff that seems nonsensical and disjointed as it is happening. A lot of this makes sense in retrospect once you get to the end of the movie and the reveal. You have to sit through a lot of talky scenes and out of nowhere stuff to get there though. The eventual revelation does a pretty good job of tying it all together though and raised my score for this movie considerably. You have to watch to the very end to get that payoff though.

This movie seemed to capture the essence of dropzone life quite well.

The sound of the aircraft engines in partcular had me wishing I hadn't got old and hung up my jumpsuit.

I guess whuffos won't understand you can't communicate in freefall - it's a noisy old sport. But it doesn't detract from the movie, and helps keep the flow of the story going.

As for the "evil" characters, "why" is the best I can say. What is their motivation, what's going on there? No matter, just go with it.

The horror elements I found a bit confusing but the ending really was nasty. Confusing, but nasty.

I enjoyed it.

It started out pretty good. Cool jump scenes, an ok story. And then maybe 40 minutes into it. The entire narrative shifted from extreme athlete type movie to a nonsensical horror movie with bad makeup and a ridiculous plot. Even the acting got worse, or at least it seemed to.

It's gotten so bad that I'm writing this review with 28 minutes left in the movie playing in the background. 3 stars for scenery and jumps.

In keeping with the 600 character limit:

It started out pretty good. Cool jump scenes, an ok story. And then maybe 40 minutes into it. The entire narrative shifted from extreme athlete type movie to a nonsensical horror movie with bad makeup and a ridiculous plot. Even the acting got worse, or at least it seemed to.

I kind of enjoyed this as the story developed properly in the last half hour, but it seemed to be based, from the beginning, on a rather spurious urban legend which I'd never heard of and suspect doesn't exist or is highly unlikely.

I think the film could have been done better using the last half hour but with a better earlier story. Skydiving? Not so much!

Some lovely aerial shots and the acting was quite good. They were really let down by the plot which is very slow moving. Suspend disbelief? You may be a bit stretched on this one.

Overall I give it a 4. Could have been a decent film with a better storyline.

HEX tells the story of a group of six skydivers who perform the eponymous jump maneuver, a formation which turns out to be cursed, and then they are picked off one by one through mysterious circumstances.

The movie blends two genres which to my knowledge had not been combined together before, and for that innovation alone, it deserves to be applauded. Alas, the two aspects do not integrate well for most of the movie, and the skydiving scenes are vastly superior to the horror scenes. This is not only a pity but also a bit mystifying because the prologue, which runs for the first 2.5 minutes, actually does a really good job in both those regards, and strongly suggests that the film-makers could have done better.

I think the problem is partly a lack of budget and partly a lack of commitment.

On the budget side, while the skydiving scenes are very good, the CGI special effects and make-up look cheap enough that they hurt the movie's credibility. Perhaps there was also not enough money to employ cinematic techniques which could have both heightened the atmosphere (pardon the pun!) and provided additional visual clues for a plot that can easily get confusing.

The reveal or plot twist here is faintly reminiscent of that in DEVIL'S ADVOCATE (1997), and part of what made it so delicious there was the visual spectacle that accompanied it. The HEX movie poster itself suggests the kind of visuals that could have made for a memorable climax following the reveal. Unfortunately, the promise of atmospheric horror of the first 2.5 minutes of this movie never materializes.

On the commitment side, it seems that the film-makers were hesitant to go "full in" on the horror aspects of the movie as they did with the skydiving portions. For example, some but not all of the unfortunate victims go FINAL DESTINATION (2000) style, but the deaths are neither as creative nor do some of them really make sense. If this plot device is going to be used, why not make the most out of it? Or that some scenes are not "real" could have been hinted at with different color tones, character idiosyncrasies, or strange background phenomena etc. So that it all comes together when the explanation is revealed. These were missed opportunities.

Finally, I believe if a movie is going to have a downer ending it has to make sense, otherwise it seems gratuitous. The final mocking remark of the demon could be easily interpreted as a veiled insult to the audience, and I suspect that this has something to do with this movie being panned more than it deserves.