Prova Final

Of course the story told by this film (aliens land in small Mid-West town and start taking over the humans) is very familiar but it is still a great story and this film tells it as well as any of the others (and better than most). There is a lot of humour, many very good action scenes, and some really nail-biting suspense. But what really makes this film special are the main characters: a delightful group of funny and interesting students, who have to cope with the trials of high-school life as well as the demands of defending the Earth against an insidious alien invasion.

If you know the other films of Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn) you will find another film which displays the same wit and assured lightness of touch that makes this director's work such a pleasure.

Great Stuff!

This film fuses elements of the Breakfast Club with Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Robert Rodrigues makes entertaining films, and does so consistently. The Faculty is no exception, though the formula is radically different from his standard approach. In place of large guns, spectacular stunt choreography and a silly soundtrack, Rodrigues made "The Faculty" with a classy ensemble cast and some awesome special effects. The script is also very good, featuring strong characterization and interesting dialog. All of these elements make The Faculty a very watchable film, and make up for the completely unoriginal and not very coherent plot.

The film begins as a paranoiac comedy about a typical high school where the students and faculty see each other as alien species. Ho hum. However, after about 20 minutes of set-up, the faculty really starts to become an alien species, as they are assimilated by water-loving parasites with very bad attitudes and a kind of group consciousness straight out of Invasion of The Body Snatchers and Star Trek's Borg. Six kids, very unlikely team-mates representing the archetypal teenage personalities of the postmodern world, team up to try to save the world, once they realize that the aliens can be driven off by, of all things, caffeine. Especially impressive are Elijah Wood, Piper Laurie, Robert Patrick, Josh Hartnett and Clea DuVall.

Like most of Rodrigues' films, The Faculty never loses its sense of humor, and pulls off its own absurdity with artful visualization and a tight, driving pace. Unlike many of Rodrigues' films, however, The Faculty is disposable - it's not really meant to be viewed more than once. See it if you're a Rodrigues fan, or somebody who enjoys the obscure but growing genre of horror-comedy.

Fun and Interesting characters and cool visual effects are the key to this Sci-Fi Thriller, which is largely based on 'The Invasion of the Body Snatchers'

I won't introduce the characters here, as the movie introduces (Clea DuVall, Laura Harris, Josh Hartnett, Shawn Hatosy, Jordana Brewster and Elijah Wood's characters) really well as the students at Herrington High, they each have their own individual personalities that evolve as events in the film unfold.

The Faculty is littered with top names like Robert Patrick, Famke Janssen, Bebe Neuwirth and Salma Hayek who all begin to behave strangely, un-nerving the students.

A small pocket of students begin to believe in a conspiracy among the teachers and it's up to them to save the world from invasion.

Great performances from the cast (Josh Hartnett in particular), a fun script and a cleverly re-written story all conspire to make the Faculty a cracking 100 minutes of all out entertainment.

7/10

Is a rough way of putting it. And never mind those Scream rip-offs or all those other cheap alien/creature-feature films from the 90's. This is a teen horror movie that gives you everything you'd want from a teen movie and everything you'd want from a creature feature, all in one. But what else is to be expected when you got Robert Rodriguez behind the lens? Any other director and this film would be tossed aside as just a teen body snatcher movie. But Robert Rodriguez shows here that he has the style to make it more than that.

Now, I've read the script to this movie before I even saw it and I kept thinking to myself, there has to be another draft of this, no way this could really work and be taken seriously... or as serious as you can take a movie like this. Yet not only was I surprised to see how much of the original script Rodriguez kept in, but I was even more surprised to see how well things actually played out. Sometimes I really love being wrong.

This film delivers, just as much as any other Rodriguez picture that calls back to the good old days of the Grindhouse and makes us forget that those movies weren't even close to par with these "tribute" films that somehow manage to surpass the movies they're tributing. You get everything you want and leave wishing you could spend more time in high school... or at least at this high school.

This film, to me, is the second in Rodriguez's own unofficial Sci-fi Grindhouse trilogy. Starting with From Dusk Till Dawn and ending with Planet Terror. Want to treat yourself to some fun? Watch all three back to back to back. You won't be disappointed.

7/10

It's a Robert Rodriguez film. It's a Kevin Williamson screenplay. You already know that it's in the same vein as'Bodysnatchers,' etc. Anybody who *doesn't* know this but saw and enjoyed the Scream flicks or the "I Know ..." movies is likely to enjoy this.

No, it doesn't really have the same underlying Red Scare theme of the original Bodysnatchers (or Arthur Miller's Crucible), although it *is* about what every modern high school movie seems to be about: how much their presumed roles imposed on teens makes their lives painful, and how great it is to unleash those strictures. Sure, it's not Bergman, but who really expects haute couture from a sci-fi horror flick? Oh, and any 'homophobia' attributed to the movie (as opposed to some of its high school student characters, just as occurs in real life) is questionable at best.

"The Faculty" is no more and no less than another entry in 'new geek cinema,' slightly more intelligent and self-referential than your standard SCI-FI Network fare. Appreciated on its own terms, or anything close to them, it's a lot of fun!