Alive by Ryûhei Kitamura (Review)

A hugely disappointing as a follow up to Versus.
Alive - Ryuhei Kitamura

This was my one major disappointment of the festival. Kitamura’s previous movie was the ultra low budget zombie/yakuza film Versus. Though that film certainly has it’s flaws, there’s a sense of energy, style, and excitement to it that had me really excited to see this new feature by the same writer/director.

Here’s the set up: Alive begins with a convicted criminal being strapped into the electric chair. The switch is thrown, the electricity flows, but the convict survives. He’s now given a choice; he can either be electrocuted again or he can be part of some secret experiment that will at least allow him to stay alive. He chooses the experiment and is locked in a large room with one other prisoner. They are told nothing at all about the experiment, only that whatever they want will be brought to them.

As the film progresses, it turns out that the scientists have a woman infected with some alien killing force that is slowly taking over her personality. They’re studying this force to determine if it has military implications, and just to further complicate things, the infected woman is the sister of one of the researchers. The scientists are curious to see if, by inciting the two prisoners to kill each other, they can get the alien force to jump from the woman’s body to one of the men’s. Got it?

Now Kitamura shoots some good-looking film, but there are problems with this film on a lot of levels. First, for a film that’s actually about this alien killing force, it takes a looooooong time to get there. We spend the first half of the film just watching these two guys locked in a room together. It’s dull, it’s been done before, and really, it’s a pretty unnecessary plot device. We could have gotten to the meat of the film a lot faster without sacrificing anything.

Second, this is a film that largely takes place on a two-room set. There are good reasons for this. Kitamura certainly isn’t commanding much of a budget at this stage in his career and limiting the scope of the film is an easy way to keep costs down. But think about it. It’s an action film. Set in two rooms, only one of which actually sees any action. There’s not a whole lot you can do in that sort of setting and Kitamura runs out of options fast once the action starts.

Finally, Kitamura’s approach on Alive to low budget genre filmmaking is totally opposite that of Coscarelli’s on Bubba Ho-Tep. Coscarelli kept the effects to a minimum, instead relying on mood and performance. Kitamura takes what budget he has and sinks it into CGI, hoping to wow the audience with splashy effects. It’s a legit approach, but to make it work, the rest of the film has got to move with some energy and the effects have to be pretty impressive. Well, the limited setting saps the energy and we’ve seen all of these effects before. I’m not talking vaguely similar scenarios here; I’m talking pretty much shot for shot theft from The Matrix.

When I sit through an iffy front half of a movie, I want the back half to impress me, and stealing the “bullets-slowing-down-in-mid-air-with-distortion-flowing-behind-them” shot from The Matrix just doesn’t do it. I mean, come on. If you’re gonna steal, at least steal from something that wasn’t in the freaking trailer of a major film, thereby guaranteeing that even people who haven’t seen the film you’re stealing from will have already seen your big money payoff effects shot.

Alive stops short of being painfully bad, but I found it hugely disappointing as a follow up to Versus.

Written by Chris Brown.

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