Gunhed (1989)
[+]
(Foreign Titles)
Nomination Year: 2009
SYNOPSIS: For the last several years, at least one movie that I've watched
has contained a preview for Gunhed. This year, I figured it was time
to bite the bullet. In the future, an island in the Pacific is
devastated in a battle between a rogue robot manufacturing plant and
the gunhed (mecha) battalion sent to shut it down. Thirteen years
later, an independent salvage team arrives to go through the wreckage.
Meanwhile, the day before, a pair of Texas Air Rangers in pursuit of
a rogue biodroid with a vial of the dangerous mineral Texmexium, were
shot down over the island. The plant and the biodroid quickly kill
most of the salvage team and one of the Rangers, forcing the two
survivors, as well as a couple of kids who are the lone survivors of
the island's original population, to restore one of the gunheds and
fight their way off the island. Director Alan Smithee hit the
trifecta with this one -- everything is really, really dark; almost
all shots are closeups, rarely showing characters in relation to
each other or nearby objects, making it extraordinarily difficult
to figure out which characters are together or what they're doing;
and the Ranger's dialog is a great deal quieter than anything else
in the movie, meaning I missed about half her lines. These features
combine to make it extremely difficult to figure out what's going
on for a great deal of the movie.
Greg Pearson
Masato Harada
