Lost in the Pacific

This hour and a half 'plane' wreck can be summarized by: terrible script, poor story, not one endearing character, atrocious acting across the board, mediocre CGI, and silly premise and irrelevant sub-plots. Another embarrassing flop coming out of China's film industry... Anyone with a bit of cash is a producer and film maker nowadays. There's apparently an over abundance of cash and arrogance to finance mindless crap like this... The mentality seems to be: How hard could it be?! Heck, we've taken some film making classes--maybe even got a few friends and/or relatives with some ancillary degrees in "entertainment." Thus, let's just hire a bunch of pretty faces and third rate actors. No need to worry about the writing, special effects, continuity and pacing, artistic values, plot and character development, English speech coaches, and least of all, the audience's intelligence and sensibility!

Well that is an hour or so of my life that I will never get back. The best thing about it is the plane itself.

I don't think I have ever seen such a trashy film. Average CGI effects when you consider how the quality in other films these days, this just looks as if it was 1980 standards. Appalling acting by virtually all the cast and a dreadful script.

At some points when they are "interacting" with each other it is almost as if they are not side by side because there is just no chemistry between any of them.

I find it hard to believe that when people are offered a role in a film that they would have considered saying yes to this one.

I was indeed lured in by the movie cover, because it does seem somewhat interesting, and having read the synopsis of the movie, I decided to give it a go.

Now, with the movie seen, I wonder how and why Brandon Routh ended up in a movie such as this. Has the well quickly dried out that quickly? The story of the movie is pretty straight forward, although a bit too simplistic and it actually doesn't really offer much to the audience. So you essentially just disconnect your brain and lean back in the chair and go along for the ride here.

"Lost in the Pacific" might actually have accomplished so much more if they had a proper budget for the CGI and special effects. For a movie that is centered on creatures and monsters, then it is essential to have a proper budget to spend on coming up with creatures that look impressive and realistic on the screen. "Lost in the Pacific" didn't have such a budget, and we are instead treated to some hilarious and very, very poorly animated creatures, that end up more as creatures you laugh at than creatures you would fear.

And the special effects, aside from the laughable creatures, was nothing of any noteworthy mention. They tried to put special effects in there, such as the airplane, but failed at turning out a product that would pass as believable and realistic. And that whole lack of proper CGI and special effects just furthered the low budget feel that permeated through the entire movie.

The cast ensemble for the movie was adequate, taking into consideration what kind of movie this was, and it was of course Brandon Routh who was the billed lead here. I wonder why the movie makers opted to go for Yuqi Zhang for this movie and made her speak English. Sure, she is a talented enough actress, but English is not what she masters the most. Yuqi Zhang's English sounds like she is speaking by a voice modulator, it is broken, stumped and halting. And it ends up being a thing of irritation and annoyance, rather than just a part of the movie.

The action in the movie, and bless them for trying, well let's just say it was there. But it was nowhere near anything interesting or worthwhile to mention.

This was by no means an impressive movie in any way, and it is hardly the type of movie that you will watch more than once, if you even get to watch it once. Yeah, it is the type of movie that came and went without even as much as a breeze in its wake. There is some kind of enjoyment to a movie of this type, and that is at the ridiculous special effects and the campy, cheesiness to it all.

Well people, another day, another crappy movie hitting our shores. Actually, this was filmed on our shores – Pinewood Iskandar Studios in Johor, to be exact, so I guess that's something. That's about it for the praises.

If writer-director Vincent Zhou intended for this to show the world what Chinese cinema is made of, he has failed. The People's Republic has been kind to cineastes and mainstream movie-goers alike in the past decade, ranging from the beautifully thought-provoking (Jia Zhangke's "A Touch of Sin"), to the big and bombastic (John Woo's mega-blockbuster "Red Cliff"), even veering off into the hysterical (Stephen Chow's recent "The Mermaid"). They do not need to cater to Western audiences at all – rather, it is the Western bigwigs that need to learn how to market these films properly. After all, if Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" can gross over US$100 million in the United States alone, why can't others, right?

Alas, my plea falls on deaf ears, and here we are, relegated to a C- movie starring struggling actors and made by a filmmaker who apparently conceded to the "everyone-watches-only-English-movies" mentality. Imagine a Muppet Babies version of "Snakes on a Plane" and TV's "Lost" meshed together in an unholy mess; sprinkle some stilted English dialogue ("She died so horribLE. .. so tragicALLY") and some truly bad and overdone VFX, the kind that's as half-assed as those in "A Sound of Thunder" if not worse. In this day and age, are mutant cats scary at all, especially if they look like an evil version of Jiji from "Kiki's Delivery Service"?

Hell, the film even goes so far as to hiring attractive Chinese stars like Zhang YuQi to dress up the nonexistent plot (she tries, dammit), but I must confess, dear reader, to feeling a little sad for still-hunky ex-Superman Brandon Routh, who's film career is relegated to thankless roles such as this - a nonsensical riff on Steven Seagal's "Under Siege" character. Was "Superman Returns" really that toxic?

Sci-Fi Channel this ain't.

I feel this was an "interesting" film in neither a good or a bad way. There was something about this budget film that I found interesting and actually wanting to keep me watching it until the end. But to be honest I can't quite work out exactly what it is I liked about it that kept me gripped. Maybe more a film that had a number of elements in just part that I liked than any single element of the film as such.

I didn't think the acting was to bad compared to what others have said. Sure, not great but certainly a mix of characters that I wish the film would have elaborated about each a bit more. Effects were odd at times yet decent at others.

Story was fairly ropey with what I feel was a lack of missing elements such as to the animals creation, the research & researchers and destination of the plane background etc. As well as a few unrealistic situations.

A respectable 5/10 for me as 1 of them films I rather enjoyed yet on paper possibly shouldn't have.