Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle

Let me start out with this...

If you liked Birdemic 1 & 2, do yourself a favor, and skip this entry. I'm dead serious. Don't bother.

You thought waiting 30mins (Birdemic 1) or 45 mins (Birdemic 2) to see the bad cg birds was bad?? Try waiting an hour in an hour and 23min long movie, and somehow, the birds look actually worse than they did in the prior two installments. Hell, Alan Bagh doesn't even show up in the movie until just after the birds. But you know what you do get to see?? The absolute worst & stiffest acting humanly possible by "paid professionals."

Once again, James Nguyen follows the same plot as he did the last two times, but somehow... worse. Each scene is some random person spewing exposition at the lead actors, sounding like they're just reading wikipedia articles held up by James off scene. Each character preaches at length in each scene, making the movie seem to last an eternity, despite being just a few minutes.

Hell, there is literally a scene where we watch the lead man watch tv for 5 minutes, with the camera panning around him & room, as he eats a sandwich. Before that, we get to watch both leads stand on a pier & watch a 5 man protest of wikipedia reading & unemotional yelling for another 5mins.

Honestly, skip this movie. Unless you're going to see it in person, with Alan & James there, in the theatre, so you can ask them "Why?"

All the same talking points. All the same overly long shots. All the same poor pacing. All the same wooden characters. All the same stilted dialogue. All the same unnecessary driving and walking. All the same million-dollar deals. All the same creepy guys staring at woman strangers who then fall madly in love with that guy - for no real reason. Nothing new to see here by the filmmaker who comes off as nothing more than an activist.

Global Warming. Climate change. Over and over and over again. Well the writer/director has no issues with pushing carbon emission into the air from his cars in his movies with his VERY LONG driving sequences, all the while harping the evils of just that.

I'm so ooking forward to seeing this, after coming upon its two predecessors recently.

Thanks to Amazon Prime, we'll give it a look this evening: --well, it felt like home: Birdemic's trademark opening tracking shots follow the main character sl-o-o-owly thru the credits; he spots the requisite comely blonde, and introduces himself (they're both as nerdy as their predecessors) and we're off!.......only this time the emphasis is directed toward environmental danger right away. There's no putzing around with trying to make a movie-within-a-movie; rather our hero seeks financing for a rejuvenating product.

In between, the environmental-crisis message keeps reappearing to remind us of the point of the film.

That message is fine and all, but there's absolutely no way philanthropic millionaires would appear on every corner, ready to give our hero oodles of money. Nor would young people ever, in any universe, spout dialogue like this.

But it's fun to see just how wooden the acting can be (with the lines they're given to say, I'm guessing the cast is trying to pretend they're anywhere else but in this movie) and it's a guessing game as to just how much walking around the main characters can do.

To break it up a little, an agonizingly long dance scene is included, a la 'Birdemic 2', along with the obligatory motel room hanky-panky.

Also like its predecessors, the bodies pile up all across town, in part because none of the people ever think to go indoors. But fortunately the main characters continue to be armed with an array of assault weapons and endless ammo.

In sum: in between the characters' endless walking around--encountering environmentalists everywhere they go, natch, and somehow neglecting to contact someone like the police or National Guard--the location photography is quite pretty, and you can enjoy that as you wait for the CGI fowl to finally make their appearance. Hopefully, they'll attack the offices of whoever wrote the script.

The film making presented in this movie is horrendous. Somehow Nguyen has managed to regress as a film maker over his 4 feature films. This movie is not even so bad it's good. It is painful to watch and offers almost no entertainment value as it is somehow a worse retelling of the first film. Somehow the writer/director managed to cram more hamfisted and clunky dialogue than his previous works so that Birdermic 3 manages to be both simultaneously extremely boring and also insulting to the audience's intelligence. There is nothing new here to warrant viewing this film as the same issues of the prior 2 films in the series are also present in this film. The plot is literally exactly the same, the same terrible bird special effects are used and the same awful editing is present throughout. As a result, Birdemic 3 has no entertainment value whatsoever. Save your money and put on the first film with the saturation turned way down.

"Birdemic 3 came out today, and Nguyen is already planning a fourth. But all I can think about is Evan Husney's sad portrait of a man who desperately wants to be a respected filmmaker but is so unable to let go of the movie that made him a cult hit that he sabotages himself."

This is what Ed Glaser wrote on Twitter alongside a clip of James Nguyen in a documentary from Vice, displaying his apparent inability to move on from the Birdemic phenomenon -- while leaving us confused whether he understands how deeply hilarious his movie about the attack of the killer bird GIFs truly is, or at least why this is so.

After all, the previous movie was trying to be funny on purpose. Alas, it is typical for a "so bad that it's good" filmmaker to lack the self-awareness to understand why people were laughing in the first place (just look at what happens when Tommy Wiseau, director of the legendarily inept The Room, tries to make us laugh INTENTIONALLY with The Neighbors) and sure enough, Birdemic 2 was just plain unwatchable.

Now, for some reason, Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle IS actually kinda funny.

Nguyen leans into what made the original movie so transfixingly terrible (the constantly shifting audio quality, white balance, and saturation seem all the more jarring with the improved picture quality) but isn't trying to be cheeky about it. The impression I got was that of a filmmaker who, deep down, does think this all looks really cool and that these sub-PSA "insights" about global warming and environmentalism are genuinely profound (one is reminded of bad movie legend Neil Breen, who still plays everything straight, possibly because he knows how hilarious that makes him).

But then, the movie does come with the additional (depressing) undertone generated by what we know from the aforementioned documentary: this is all Nguyen has in him. I was pondering this as I watched, but promptly forgot about all that when I heard a track by Melodysheep (composed for his sublime YouTube doc about life in the cosmos and its inevitable fate) among the stock music.

He's got taste, that James Nguyen.