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Where can I begin? After the last Ice Age a machine comes from the stars to make men into mutants. Only it doesn’t succeed. A warlord buries it in a secret European vault and his descendants The Brotherhood take charge of it for the next few thousand years. Then in 2707 two warring corporations have the burial site in their battle lines. Pause here for a) Sean Pertwee to do his die-hard soldier bit and b) for some confusing trench scenes that could have come from the 1st World War except for the high tech weaponary. A bit of friendly fire breaches the vault and bad things happen. First indications are that Sean apparently buys the farm fighting bravely to the end. I think it must be in his contract. Brother Ron Perleman of The Brotherhood hears about the problems and rallies the corporations (in the shape of John Malkovich) into allowing some champions of humanity to venture into the earth and slay the demon machine. Brother Ron may be attempting an Irish accent in places it’s hard to tell. There’s an overall oppressive steampunk feel to the scenery, and this is the first coal powered assault lander I’ve seen. Mutants may be a problem in 2707, but clearly we will have sorted out all those annoying conservationists by then. There are some painfully precise English accents, in one case apparently so we can demonstrate some extremely stiff upper lipishness after an injury. Finding the old church on top of the vault, we confusingly descend 60 stories inside an old skyscraper to find the bad guys. There are a lot of bad guys. For a long-buried alien artefact there’s a lot of flame, smoke and cog wheels inside – plus the obligatory running around in dark places and having things jump out at you / jumping out at other people / various spare people dying lots. All this is apparently very loosely based on a role-playing game where you’d imagine people spend a lot of time getting temporarily but rather frequently killed. It’s all very post-apocalyptic, nihilistic and occasionally just ick. But as a way to lose yourself for a couple of hours it’s not too bad. There’s a setup for the sequel toward the end, so we might be seeing more of the bad guys yet. |
