Mutant Chronicles

*repost from 08/27/2008

Directed by Simon Hunter

Starring Thomas Jane, Ron Perlman, Devin Aoki and John Malkovich
Availability: limited theatrical release on 04/24/2009

This is one of those tween movies. Not quite grand enough for theater release but also a bigger budget than your average std release. I betcha they could have cut a good enough trailer to convince some people to give it a try at the theater. So the main problem I have with it is that is should have been an epic 3 hour 80 million budget movie instead its only an hour and 40 minutes and a more limited budget. Still despite that I did enjoy it overall.

The movie is set 700 years in the future and there is a war between the different factions on earth. The earth is owned by 4 different corporations. One corporation owns North, South America and England, another is Africa and Australia. Europe is one and Asia is another. (at least thats as close as I remembered it) While fighting the war in England an inadvertent bomb opens up a huge seal in the ground. In the ground is an huge alien machine that takes humans, operates on them and converts them into genetic mutants that go on a killing spree to conquer the Earth. Once before several centuries back we had already defeated the machine and put the seal on. Ron Perlman plays a monk that guards a holy book that prophesies that one day the seal will be broken and the machine will once again be released. It is also prophesied that a man will go down into the belly of the beast and destroy the machine by blowing it up with a special bomb. Its all pretty ridiculous if you think about it but somehow it works in the context of the movie. While the mutants are destroying the Earth, Perlman gathers a team of mercenaries to go on a suicide mission to go down into the machine to destroy it. Do I need to really tell you how it ends?

Starting with the good I really liked the futuristic/WW2 aesthetic of all the guns and ships. I think that really worked. The mutants look kinda like the flood from Halo just with their arm converted into a single blade that they use to slice people up. There were some cool gory kills. The look of the movie had a color muted Gears of War feel that I really liked. The acting was solid by Thomas Jane and Ron Perlman as always. The movie did feel too ambitious for the budget and it had one of those cliched coincidence type of endings, but if you are a fan of Sci-fi/Horror then i would recommend at least checking it out when its finally released. On a scale of 1-10 I give this a "I just get paid to fuck shit up!" 6.9 out of 10.

Trailer