mercoledì 19 novembre 2025

Spectral - 2016

A sort of soldiers vs bad ghosts movie, made like a war movie,, and with a scientific explanation for everything happening and likewise scientific method to deal with it.
Not a bad film, but I didn’t care much for the finale. As it often happens with this kind of movies, the ending was a bit disappointing. 
I also didn’t much care for the female lead character, well, she was the only female unless you count the young girl they meet. It strongly feels like she’s in the movie only because they needed their female quota and nothing else, she doesn’t do anything really, what she says could be said by anyone… and of course she gets stuck with them even if she’s not a field agent or whatever, so she’s always there… well, she’s useful because she seems to be the only one who can understand the local language, there’s that at least.

There’s also the fact that it’s so simple for them to make whatever they need on the spot, like McGiver or the A-Team, but on a much bigger scale.  It really felt like too much.

So, there’s soldiers in some European Country, I think Moldova or Chech Republic or something (did they say it clearly? I don’t remember it), and some of them start dying in a weird way, and their special high-tech glasses show what appears to be ghost-like entities that attack the soldiers living him dead instantly, half frozen and half melted like with acid, or something like that.
The engineer who designed the glasses is Mark, and he’s called on the field to explain what it is. He can only see that they have human-like shapes, but to know more he has to do more research, mounting a camera on a tank - or whatever it was - and studying them more.
What the girl Fran says appears immediately to be absurd. Not sure on what ground she’s there, but anyway, she says the enemy is wearing some high-tech camouflage armory and she wants to retrieve one of those, which is nonesense if the men have died as they say they did.

Mark goes with a team. Only the soldiers go actually out, Mark stays in the car/tank/what-was-it as does Fran and a few others. Almost all the soldiers are killed by the almost-ghosts while Fran insists they should retrieve the new technology… one man survived the almost-ghosts the first time by hiding under a bathtub, but they take him away and he won’t survive the next attack.
The soldiers insist on shooting at those entities, but it’s clear it’s not doing anything, and so most of the soldiers die, and the remaining ones run to hide in a factory where they find two refugees, two children who are still alive because their father warded the place against the almost-ghosts using iron that they can’t trespass. 

They make huge bullets/bombs filled with iron to stop the almost-ghosts, and together they all walk out to reach a point where they might be rescued, but the base where they come from has been compromised so they go to another place, a safe-bunker or something, and join other soldiers and survivors there.
Some of their group die before getting there, included one of the two children, the young boy.

Mark had already modified his big high-tech camera so that everyone could see these entities without wearing glasses, so they could fight back, and then he talks to the young girl and asks her about his father, who had to know something if he knew about iron stopping them.
He figures out the science behind these things, something about the Bose-Einstein theory, so they all go towards the power plant that Mark is sure is at the head of everything that is happening. 

Now it’s the A-Team moment: somehow they have everything they need, how fortunate, and Mark is able to make them all big weapons designed against these spectrals. Really, in no time at all he has everything ready, just like that. 

They move and when they get to the power plant, there’s many many more spectrals there, and while the soldiers try to stop them, Mark and Fran go inside to look around and find out what happened.
They do find it, the big lab where scientists were creating these spectrals. They were studying some people (a lot of people) making perfect replicas of these people only in that ‘spectral substance’ , and they also linked these spectral so some part of those people… I mean, it ought to be the brain, but when Mark sconnects the machine, itjust goes poof, like a colored dust… 
Mark and Fran see that there are many more spectrals there that never got loose (they shouldn’t have been out and about, they were because some ‘cells’ were broken) and there is the very real threat that they might be soon, so they study a way to stop it, and quite conveniently Fran tells him what he needs to do, quite easily… 
Anyway, as soon as Mark manages to switch them all off, they all stop immediately, it’s over. Fran thinks for a moment that it might be interesting to study all that, but when Mark sees what remained of those people he had no doubt and proceeded to stop those machines right away - well, we see only a few, but we can guess that he moved along and deactivated every single one. Although there’s little doubt that they’ll want to study it all, but not Mark, he’s done with it all.

As soon as possible, he takes his stuff and goes back home.



General Orland - Bruce Greenwood
Mark - James Badge Dale
Fran - Emily Mortimer




 

Nessun commento:

Posta un commento