White Wall

White Wall tells the story of a world racked by disease and corruption. It focuses on a group of "brothers" - not blood related siblings, but those who endured gruesome internment camps together and managed to get out alive. When Shawn finds that one of them has died, he begins to investigate and unspools a conspiracy amongst the elites.

This movie is an action film, but it's very story-driven and focuses more on the mystery and the bonds between the "brothers." The sci-fi elements (and the giant wall) is a bit like The Maze Runner, mixed in with the noir elements of movies like Memento. Add in a dash of sibling tension a la Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, and you have White Wall.

The set design in this is great - plenty of dingy and gritty shanty towns and expansive, dusty Western landscapes. The cinematography is genuinely impressive with all its shadow-y noir influences. The actual conflict here is layered and ambitious, and it all culminates in a fantastically tense battle between Shawn and the "evil" brother, Jude Black. All in all, the film is definitely worth checking out.

When you think of "great" post apocalyptic films some titles that come to mind include "The Road", "Dune", "Pitch Black", the "Road Warrior" series, and of course "Planet of the Apes". I don't know where some people get off claiming this is the "Godfather of Action films" or the "greatest" post-apocalyptic film ever made. I can only formulate they had some sort of connection with the film, whether it be they were part of the cast, crew, production, or distribution of this film. I believe these people giving rave reviews of this film are frankly, well, smoking something funny and have really, REALLY, low standards for films.

The film looks like it's been filmed outside of New Mexico or something. It's supposed to be a post apocalyptic background, but to me, it looks like some sort of south American city. A little grungy in places, but I don't see rats, people starving for food, etc etc. On the contrary, all the actors seem to be wearing clothes that looked like they were sporting Levi denim. The city has it's own well kept hospital, the streets have lighting, and a couple of the characters sport plate fulls of food on their kitchen table that would make many of us look poor. What's with the fancy shiny looking MG 2 door sporty car?? The acting is awful and stiff and rigid. The storyline is too slow. And there were quite a few times I could catch the camera trying to focus in and out of what is going on in the scene. Don't kid yourself, this movie is bad, really bad. Actions scenes?? Hardly, even those are bad. Almost laughable. This isn't even a "B" movie. More like an "F" movie for F as in "Fail". I don't recommend anyone going out of their way to rent or purchase this film. In fact, I don't know where you'd really do both. I was given a copy of this film, and after 2 minutes of popping it into the DVD player I knew this was going to be really bad. After giving it a chance 30 minutes in, I decided I had better things to do with my life then spend the next hour watching this disaster!!

I discovered this movie by searching "post-apocalyptic" right after watching the Book of Eli. I checked a couple of user reviews that stated things along the line "best action movie ever created in the history of film making" and "a masterpiece not to be missed".

So, after watching the first 20 minutes, I started fast-forwarding. After 40 minutes I just kept hoping someone would come along to shoot me in the face and put me out of my misery.

The movie doesn't have a real plot and the script could have been written by a 12-year old kid, very likely it was as a matter of fact. The fight-sequences are so badly performed to the point of being comic. The list goes on and on for why this movie is a very successful way if you want to lower your IQ, fall asleep real fast or both.

The one and only positive thing I can say about this movie is that the guy knows his martial arts. He is clearly well trained and for that thank heaven because the rest of the actors could not fight if their lives depended on it. He was still a bad actor, though.

So, why is it that the reviews I read were "singing praises for this glorious masterpiece"? Well, a quick check reveals that all the incredibly positive reviews were done by accounts opened on the same day and pretty much commented on nothing else but this movie.

Conclusion, if the cast of this movie spent as much time in acting classes as they spent flooding IMDb with false reviews, this movie wouldn't have been so terrible.

2/10 (only because of a couple semi-decent fight scenes)

This movie is bad. The acting is bad, the script and screenplay are bad, sometimes even the cut is bad. The pace is too slow, and many scenes seem strangely out of place.

For instance, the scene were our protagonist meets a policeman in some small alley, and then quickly leans towards the wall, I'm not even sure why he does what he does.. At first I thought he wanted to turn his face away from the policeman to not be recognized, but this wasn't the reason, as they look at each other just after the cop walked by. So he didn't want to hide his face. He had no freaking reason to stand there for like 30 seconds looking at his own reflection in a piece of broken glass in a window frame. After that he just walks away. And the whole thing was acted ridiculously bad.

Now this was just one small scene. There are lots of scenes which just don't make any sense or don't quite "fit in".

The idea of the movie as a whole is actually pretty good. Other than most reviewers I even think the fighting scenes weren't bad, I kinda enjoy "realistic" fights, even when not all fighters are good at martial arts. But still, that is not enough to give this piece of junk two stars. The rest is just too bad.

A post-apocalyptic low-budget film that does everything right that this flick did wrong is the German movie "Kampfansage - Der letzte Schüler". Not sure if there is an English version. But if you wanna see a good low-budget post-apocalyptic movie, I would suggest that rather than "White Wall".

I even read the directors message in the IMDb board telling us how he had to struggle to make the production of White Wall possible, and how he had to shoot most of the movie in a 3rd world country, etc. Obviously they only had 15 days to do the whole thing.

But even with such massive odds, I just can't give this flick more than one star. No matter the troubles that the crew had to go through to make this indie movie possible, I'm sorry, it just disappoints completely.

My message to the crew would be: Do this in a more consistent fashion, make the scenes "glue together" better, ensure that your actors bring some real emotion into it, and for gods sake, give it a faster pace and remove the strange out-of-focus crap and the pseudo-artsy strange music. Please learn from this failure, thank you.

The movie is an interesting take on the whole post apocalyptic genre. It isn't anything new or particularly original, but it does deliver its own spin on a movie done a lot of times. I liked that the world wasn't such a ridiculous deviation from life prior to the disaster. The gangs weren't leather clad freaks like a Mad Max movie. People weren't all crazy and roaming around robbing each other. They had their normal jobs and lives. There was just an somewhat oppressive government trying to maintain control, and small cells of people rebelling against that system.

The movie looked good and had a decent idea, but the acting was very flat. Not one of the characters delivers a convincing performance. So none of the scenes have any emotional impact. This is probably due in large part to the stilted dialogue in the script. In the hands of a better write and director, I could see a big time Hollywood blockbuster. As it stands, it probably isn't worth much of your attention.