Cyber Wars

I watch a lot of movies, generally seven to ten a week. Few of them are very good, even though I try my best to pick the diamonds from the swill. I failed on this one, it's not only lame and derivative, but not even interesting.

The heroine was drab and a bad fit for the part of a cyber warrior. She looked like a soccer mom acting in a neighborhood production. Bad casting there. I suppose they gave her the part because she was in the Matrix series, and Star Wars.

The storyline was lame, the special effects were the same ones you've seen over and over, the acting was mediocre at best. Nothing original or innovative in this film. It's hard to get into the plot and next to impossible to care what happens to the characters.

In the early 21st Century, society is connected through the Cyberlink. All communication and monetary transactions occur within its sphere. The Cyberlink records the identities of all legalized citizens. Simplants provide criminal with alternative identities. Ident police and private headhunters track them down.

In Entropolis, the efficient bounty hunter Dash MacKenzie (Genevieve O'Reilly) is hired by the big corporation boss Joseph Lau (David Warner) and his henchman Davinder Sandhu (Michael De Mesa) to hunt down his former employee Edward Chan (Gerald Chew). Edward has vanished after submitting to the state-of-art procedure neuromorphing. While seeking Edward out, Dash stumbles with Ident Detective Victor Huang (Luoyong Wang) and he warns her that someone might want to kill Edward, but she does not pay attention to him. Dash finds Edward but he is assassinated before telling her why he is hunted down. However his mistress Sylvia escapes from the killer. Soon Dash finds a clip and her biotech guru Julius Kui (Kay Siu Lim) stumbles with the truth and finds why Edward was murdered. Dash brings Victor to meet Julius and he shows Megacorp transactions in Sintawan to them. He explains that these five companies make up the total infrastructure and have total control over Cyberlink. They form a powerful consortium and play a game based on the ancient Chinese game Wei Chi. Sintawan is the playing field where they wage corporate war in accordance with the strategies of the five companies, manipulating the course of the society and everyone living here. Therefore the place is an illusion and nothing is what it seems and there is no distinction between the game and reality. Then Dash finds that they are all avatars. What will they do?

"Cyber Wars" is an interesting film with a complex story. The plot has flaws and gives too much new information to the viewer; therefore the best to do is to watch the film again on the next day to understand better the details. Dash is an unpleasant character and Genevieve O'Reilly and Luoyong Wang are histrionic in certain moments and do not show any chemistry, but this combination of Matrix and Blade Runner entertains. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): Not available on Blu-Ray or DVD.

Despite all the bad comments, this movie is rather enjoyable. True, the acting is not always at its best...but other than that it is a solid classical cyberpunk movie that looks as a professional level job...not the amateurish home-made thing that someone described!

It's not a world shaking work of art, but it accomplished the job of entertaining the viewer and is much better then some Hollywood-crap we see this days.

I rate it a 6 for the movie "value" ... a 7 because it shows a good technical work ... and a 8 because we should get more of this stuff, it deserves support.

In the grand scheme of things this film probably does not deserve a 7/10 - which places it with countless other "better than bad" films. A movie like this is all about expectations going in. High expectations? Not a great movie. Low expectations? Well, this movie is a pleasant surprise.

There just are not many solid cyberpunk inspired films these days. Classics like the original Matrix and Bladerunner are singular standouts. Movies like Hackers or Brainscan are more the norm. Certainly there are stinkers like Johnny Mnemonic that has too much in common with a bad episode of Earth Final Conflict (an already terrible TV show). Avatar reminds me of the made for TV movie Cypher, though it is not as good as this little known film.

Avatar is a movie made for the film buff who has seen FAR too many movies. The director clearly has a vision, it keeps a solid consistent pace, and despite what other reviews here state, there is a great deal of ideas and content to like. Perhaps this is an easy movie to hate on, but reviews here that state that "the story is bad," and "the acting is bad," don't give clear reasons to back up their claims. If there is a clear weakness, it would be the casting. I don't mind looking at Genevieve O'Reilly, and one may believe Dash's (yea, thats her name) intelligence, but not the street hardened marksman that the viewer is supposed to buy into. Standout performances would be Joan Chen as an surgically and chemically "enhanced" 90 year old woman, and Kay Siu Lim as Julius. Julius is completely believable as a master of the net, someone who has given up their humanity for a life in cyberspace. I also liked a couple of the other "game masters" in their limited, but clearly fun roles.

At its core, Avatar is a mystery movie with a cyberpunk backdrop. I feel it could have been improved with noir characteristics of seedier characters, dark relationships, and perhaps more of an antihero. Regardless, the viewer is introduced to a "head hunter" or modern detective who specializes in the apprehension of identity thieves. I have to admit the telling of the story is much better than the story itself. I enjoyed following the main character through her quest to first find an identity thief, then dig deeper into the real story when it becomes clear she is just another pawn in a much larger game. The story suffers from anticlimaxes - points at which the story needs more impact, but somehow the importance of these moments are missed.

And yet I still enjoyed the film as a whole. Its fun, has style, and though not in the same league as so many other big budget films - still has much to offer in ideas and concepts, which deserve attention.

Not bad, not bad at all. I gather this is Australian, at least in part, and it seems of a piece with the generally good quality of Australian films, at least those imported to the US compared with the US domestic product.

As my title suggests, it combines general plot elements of Domino, The Matrix, and the general concept of Blade Runner; it doesn't try to outdo any of them, but instead is a somewhat stripped down, sleek SF action film, more in the spirit of Domino than the somewhat ponderous senses of The Matrix and Blade Runner, which had to set up the cyberpunk world that this movie can now take for granted.

What's nice about it is a general lack of crap or cheesiness; actors are all good, including Joan Chen and William Sanderson, apparently a permanent fixture of the cyberpunk world since Blade Runner; dialogue is good; no cheesy effects, performances, dialogue, etc. I find this compares favorably with something like Freejack, which had the faint whiff of fromage floating about it, as well as Mad Max (the original) which was sort of obviously cartoonish.