Near Extinction: Shangri-La
Sometimes all you need is a cheesy movie, and science fiction probably does the best job of that. I mean, look at “Battlestar Gallactica” (the 1978 film and series), “Space 1999”, or even the original “Star Trek” for that matter (those sets, Oy!). If that’s what you’re in the mood for, well, here you go.
This feels almost like a TV show (from the creator of NBC sci-fi series “The Event”) in that it clearly wants to be a franchise in that it feels like recent films such as The Maze Runner saga.
How it does that is by throwing as many overlapping storylines as they can at us to hopefully keep our interest and make it more complicated i.e. suitable for re-watching when you have to catch up before the next episode release. The original Star Wars trilogy was good at this.
As far as plots go, we are introduced to the first of three storylines with title cards telling us what’s going on without giving too much away, but c’mon; we’ll figure it out by the end. It’s not James Joyce. Apparently some multinational scientists created a self-aware creature called Konglings which then reproduced en-masse (“Nature will find a way,” you can almost hear Jeff Goldblum say). To wipe them out, the world governments created a global Ice Age to wipe them out also killing off most of everything else. In other words, the cure was worse than the disease.
Like Creepozoids among others, a small group travels through mostly-dead post-apocalyptic world this time snow being hunted by something called “the green eyes” (yes; you will know by film’s end). There are two leaders of this group and you know because we hear their internal monologues (sounding like Kirk doing log entries).
The first one and star of the film is Vargas (Eric Szmanda, most commonly known for his role as investigator Greg Sanders on original “CSI”). The group of five or six travel the world in search of a safe haven called Shangri-La while hitting up lab facilities that might bring to mind Umbrella Corporation (with a few puppet-like creatures here and there as well). This is our main storyline.
Another story is the origin of Konglings which is interwoven as the creature is created by scientists harkening back to films like Species (which has its own “CSI” connection) and Splice. Unlike those two which base whole movies on start-up, it’s secondary here to what’s going on in above segment.
The third and most ridiculous of all three is the strange-Jedi militant cult of which one of our crew, Kalo (Patrick Batiste) is an ex-member. They have some weird, thick strand of hair glued to their foreheads, wear red robes and hoods that are straight out of any Satanic film you’ve ever seen, and naturally make human sacrifices. One more enemy for our crew to fight against.
Given the amount of this that is done in front of a green screen, it looks pretty good for how much money they had. It’s definitely ambitious, which goes both ways. On the side of good, there’s more a computer can do on no money than puppets can for a blockbuster summer movie. But then again it takes a certain skill to act opposite a green screen where you have to “imagine” everything around you happening and while some people are up for that challenge others err aren’t.
Some of the creatures (like the bat-like ceiling dwellers) look really bad, but most of them look great especially the Konglings. Also nice is that you never really know who are the good guys and who are the bad, and it plays well until the end even then there are some good conversations to be had.
At its heart this story is about how deeply co-joined at the hip multi-national corporations and governments are; here we see quite clearly that it’s actually the former running those. Sound familiar? Wisely, Wauters also goes with a multi-national cast with strong Asian flavors such as Pamela Chau and Thai actress Sara Malakul Lane (who plays two roles!). This was a smart choice and accurate considering where our story comes from.
The only real extras on this DVD are the trailer and quite good 17-minute “Making Of” featurette that’s worth watching after you finish.
While I still stand by my statement that this is cheese I will say I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it in spite of all its clichés. As far as renaming this for release goes well. I actually like their new title better but think it’s going to cause problems if there’s ever any kind of franchise situation here.
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