2307: Winter's Dream

The story is not unique, but actually a good one. However when you combine that good story with bad acting, poor CG, terrible dialogues and immense plot holes, the output is inevitably below par.

I say bad acting because any mimic, gesture and voice acting are so exaggerated that you feel an urge to slap their faces to help them back to their senses. Other than a few main roles, every character is either shouting hysterically or acting overly self-confident.

Poor CG is acceptable in consideration of the lower budget.

Terrible dialogues are everywhere. Either there are lots of cut scenes or several writers authored the script individually and than shuffled the pages to make a scrambled innovation. The result stinks like a bowl of deteriorated and uncooked scrambled eggs.

Plot holes. Oh my! Countless. Self detonating non-explosive things, inverted hands with absurd axis shifts in camera view, unexplained relationships, and most importantly climate defying "everything"... In a movie of which the plot is about extreme climate change, some clothing freezes in water, which is surprisingly present in extreme low temperatures and some organic tissues survive in the same water source.

All in all, it would have been a masterpiece, toppling "Oblivion" of Cruise in many ways.

If you really have a two-hour spare time and the movie is free, watch till the end, against all odds. The ending is satisfactory. But the journey may get really boring and your thumb would reach out for the stand-by button any time.

After reading some of the reviews for this film then watching it myself, my immediate thoughts went to how sometimes we go into films with too many expectations, especially when watching genre fare. But I tend to give ambitious Indy films the benefit of the doubt because I know from experience that they have tremendous financial obstacles to overcome. This "little Indy" is kind of epic though, and I was immediately impressed as to what was accomplished visually on such a low budget, which I've heard was around $750K. That's not even the catering budget of a studio film folks. Like most films, this one is definitely flawed -- some of the acting is mediocre and the story is heavily influenced by Sci-Fi predecessors such as BLADE RUNNER, PREDATOR, and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, but it has this unmistakable Western pace, mood, and atmosphere, that is especially heightened by a fresh Sci-Fi Western soundtrack. It's a filmmakers film most likely created by a cinefile, for cinefiles like me, with lots of cool references and homages to the classics, but to its credit, it also has some unexpected twists especially at the end. It is a film with a message, a spiritual message to be exact, which is rare in these days of empty thrill ride $180M blockbusters selling plastic heroes and paper tigers. I recommend this film to anyone who wants to have a cinematic experience and be immersed in a future reality that is not so far off from our present.

Formulaic pseudo-post apocalyptic film, with terrible action scenes and the flimsiest excuse of a plot, carelessly patched together by common myths infesting actual movies.

There's really little to none redeeming value in this.

1)As sci-fi it doesn't even compete; it raises no questions, introduces no new ideas, creates not even a shadow of an actual futuristic setting.

2)As a thriller it has no tension; nobody can summon the willpower to care for "characters" who systematically act out the most inane choices and the amateurish direction doesn't help.

3)The backbone of the plot is so.. safe, it feels like a sham. I'll occasionally stomach the pseudo-intellectual doctrine that passes for liberalism in Hollywood these days as long as it is attached to a 100M production. But in an independent production - and a sci-fi to boot - I expect to be presented with the unpopular opinion, the 'truth' that lacks recognition or exposure, not to be spoon-fed the mainstream dogma!

In any case there were a couple of decent lines - maybe even competent - so I'll give it a 2.

Starts so-so ... continues even less so-so ... picks up where it's a little too late ... ends nicely enough although weak amateurish acting (despite all the effort everybody puts into making it look professional) is probably the main problem with this not so well made movie just as it is with most other low budget ones ...

the winter setting is kinda cool but not cold enough ... ;-) some shots and scenes are also fine enough to make me like them, especially in terms of lighting ...

overall, it reminded me of some really cheap and failed movies i used to watch in the Syfy channel in the mid 2000s (when it was still named Sci-Fi or something like that) and that was why i stopped watching that channel almost totally and started seeking better scifi stuff elsewhere on regular channels ...

300 years in the future, after the whole planet is frozen over, Bishop (Paul Sidhu) is asked to hunt the renegade android ASH 393 (Branden Coles). The high intelligence and supeerhuman strength of his opponent makes that an extremely hard task in a hostile environment. Besides, Bishop's general hasn't told him the whole story before he sent him on that mission...

Produced for less than a million dollars, the movie is quite ambitious for its low budget. Its frozen future world reminds me a little bit of Robert Altman's 'Quintet', but unfortunately '2307' enjoys its gun battles in trash movie style too much and has only actors with limited capabilities while suffering a bit from pretentiousness. The best supporting actors are Timothy Lee DePriest as Ishmael, whose harmonica playing is another reference to western movies, and Arielle Holmes as Kix, the most fanatical member of Bishop's team. What we finally get is a movie that fits into the 'Cyborg' subgenre of the 80s/90s Terminator rip-offs, but with a modern design and a better story that most of them.