Lowbacca1977

On a very fundamental level, this may be one of the worst things ever to be called a film. If the name and picture isn't a tip off, this is basically a fairly lazy ripoff of the incredible Hulk. It is also a fairly lazy ripoff of movies as entertainment.

I could go on about the plot being weak and nonsensical. I could talk about how most of the people in this have extremely poor acting skills (Shevaun Kastl apparently actually can do a decent job of it, though). There's a lot I could focus on, but really there's only one thing to discuss, and that's how utterly horrific the visual effects are.

For some reason, the entire film is filmed in front of green screens. That may seem common, but traditionally, those green screens are replaced with backgrounds that are not utterly horrific. There's only a few backgrounds, and so things repeat, locations are passed multiple times, and there's no feel of continuity during some scenes as scenery changes represent drastic changes. And then there's the fact that most things in the film are CG, but it's clearly using CG models that were pre-existing. This shows up early on when there's utterly ridiculous objects and animals that get screen time because the models were there and they didn't want them to go to waste, but it really reaches a climax towards the end when they decide to simply put every rendering they hadn't used yet in a chase scene that is like the idiot savant of chase scenes. It is so horrifically flawed to actually be sort of amazing. And finally, the Bulk may be one of the worst characters to show in a film, as it really feels like the movements are not in line with what the character is needed to be doing.

The attempts to merge it with live action fail embarrassingly. The running and walking in place ranges from hilariously overdone to barely existent, people routinely miss lining up with objects in the background or walk right through them, there's 4-foot cars, rooms that are far too small, and objects with strange perspectives, and every car scene is on a couch, sometimes a couch they didn't even bother to remove from the shot.

The only thing this has going for it is that it is simply so poorly done that it's almost astounding, and reaches comical levels. It's worth a watch once, but with a group of people that are good for a laugh because it's the only way to make it through it.

Large swaths of this film are unwatchable. When I say that, I don't mean it's really bad and tough to sit through, I mean literally unwatchable. The lighting is non-existent so probably a quarter of this film is so dark that I have no idea who was talking and where they were. Add to that audio problems and hollow dialogue, and it was extremely difficult to have any idea what was going on at any point in the film as such little information was successfully conveyed. It was really a team effort to even figure out what was going on in it.

The acting was also, largely, very underwhelming and the editing was extremely poor, showing both strange delays in people talking (edits that had too much waiting between lines and was very unnatural) and that conversations appear to be going on with people in different places. There's a lot of quick flashes of shots that don't seem to make much sense, and the film jumps between things so much it's hard to track any continuity or arc. Finally, the kill shots are more like shooting mug shots with a white wall behind people such that it just feels ridiculous to keep seeing the exact same angle and effects for various deaths.

I will grant that the first 5 to 10 minutes of this film were fairly impressive, mostly as the film started off set in the Spanish Civil War, and it was a few minutes before we were even sure it was the right film, starting not in English and in black and white. It was a very good start to the film, and it went downhill from there. Characters come and go without much clarity, and the film never decides if this is a film about zombies or cannibals, or some weird spot in between, and so it also means that the feeling of continuity between what the status of characters are is totally non-existent.

The film has a surprisingly interesting start, and what could be an interesting premise, but then the film very quickly starts to fall apart into some sort of train wreck for most of the film, to then have a couple interesting scenes to end it on, beginning and ending on notes that suggest this film stood a chance of being decent at one point in the planning stages.

Closer to God is a modern revamp of Frankenstein, and it somewhat straddles the genres of science-fiction and horror, or at least tries to. While there's a large attempt of things that seem scientific, I really feel like that area was so underdeveloped that I just didn't find that at all convincing, even for suspending disbelief for the purposes of a film. It's what comes of a film trying to make some pretty broad claims about science without really exploring or addressing them. The horror film aspect of it has its moments, and while I think it did a very good job of building up tension, it really seemed to fall apart when it came time to cash in on that by being a bit blunt about it, after doing a fairly good job of building up the unease and mystery.

There certainly are some other interesting questions that are at least mentioned about what represents humanity and how cloning factors in, and it acknowledges a lot of issues with the ethics, philosophy, and spirituality of cloning, but it doesn't really explore or discuss those issues much. It opens the door to them, and I do give it some credit for not pushing a particular answer to those questions, but I feel like more could have been fleshed out with them.

An overall slow pacing, I think it could've been made up for with stronger points, both conceptually and thematically, instead it fizzles out a bit at the end.