The Steam Experiment

This movie is also known as "The Chaos Experiment" - and I thought that alternative title really sums this up quite well. It's really quite a chaotic movie which has much greater potential than it ever came close to fulfilling. Val Kilmer plays a man named Jimmy who as the movie opens walks into a newspaper office and tells the editor that unless his story about global warming is printed, he's going to kill 6 people he has locked up inside a steam room by turning up the heat, so to speak, to demonstrate the chaos that will erupt between them and show what he believes is going to eventually happen in the world due to global warming. The movie then goes back and forth from Jimmy to the steam room, as he's questioned by a cop played by Armand Assante who tries to find out where the 6 are.

The premise is somewhat interesting. One of the major problems with the movie, though, is that - aside from the plight they find themselves in - there's no particular reason given to care for any of the six in the steam room. The characters are never really fleshed out, aside from a very brief introduction they give to each other in the movie's early stages, before they realize their situation. So we get a few seconds of each giving us their likes and dislikes and telling us where they're from. But for this movie to really work, we need to know more about them; we need to care about them - and frankly, we don't. There's even suspicion throughout (probably deliberate) about whether any of it is actually true, or whether it's just a delusion inside Jimmy's head.

The idea was interesting. It just didn't work very well.

Even if I got frustrated with almost all the characters at some points I can't blame it on poor acting. They were acting their parts.

This is a mystery/thriller vehicle with good actors trapped in bad writing.

In the very first minutes of the movie, the main antagonist is honoring his mentor proclaiming how much he is ahead of his time. He's years ahead of his time, no, he's light-years ahead of his time.. After that he goes on about how the protagonist doesn't have the intellectual capacity for his task. It got me thinking.. "light-years" is not a measure of time, it's a measure of distance. Sure maybe the antagonist could be kinda slow but it didn't look like they were going for that in the movie. Sure, you could say that someone is ahead of others by "miles" or something like that but it doesn't really matter to me. I thought it was kinda dumb and that is what I thought of the movie as well. I really like Val Kilmer and I really hate that I so often see him i movies like this.

If this is broadcast on TV and you can't fall to sleep - it's worth the watch. But that's being generous.

The good:

Kilmer pulls off a fairly believable psychopath, and there are some really great performances from those in the steam room, although they sometimes border on the "over-dramatic" rather than "convincing".

The music is not bad too, always reflective of the mood without becoming too invasive to the action on screen.

The bad:

Firstly, some of the scenes are quite drawn out with no sense of progression. Some of the steam room scenes are difficult to stick with, in particular one excessively long scene towards the end of the film. During this scene I looked at my watch to see how long was left on the viewing time - not a good sign if I was meant to be engrossed in the story.

Secondly, the method which the story unfolds seems fairly underwhelming. It felt as though there was more potential for the plot to thicken, particularly from those in the steam room. The captives also seem to have their own designated "turn" at falling apart/going mad, which is overall quite unconvincing and ultimately predictable.

So in conclusion, there are some good scenes, but this is not a film I will actively recommend to friends.

The above review is so stupid that I feel compelled to write one, through a basic sense of justice. This is not a great film. It's not a good film, in the sense that you'd never own it. But it's worth a watch - I was interested from the opening to the end - boring patches, yes, but never boring in the way that kills the movie. They were short as patches go, the flick recovered.

In short, if there's something you like doing, do it. But there's often nothing - and this flick is worth your time then :)

And Val - Val is awesome. Val is good movie in this OK movie. He should lose some weight - the parts would come.

I rent DVD's to pass the time on airplanes. Sadly, staring out at the clouds would have been better entertainment than this. I am not the best movie critic....I don't want to have to go back to college to figure out what a movie is about. In this Chaos, I didn't know if I was watching a psycho describe an event in real time, a past event, or a delusion that was only in his mind. This reminds me of Jacob's Ladder.....you never really knew what you were watching. The slow motion scenes in the spa were disjointed, and painfully slow to get through. If there was any sense at all of hot, sweaty panic, it was lost with the switching back to a particularly unappealing Val Kilmer sitting at an empty table staring into space. Finally, the ending was exactly the sort of finish I hate. You can guess and make presumptions, but you really have absolutely no idea what you just watched.