derlowen

Hey, come on. You rent a movie about Air Force One on a collision course with another plane and you gotta already know what you're getting into. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and think it will one day reach cult status, especially since the only true star in it is "Carl Winslow" (Reginald VelJohnson) of Family Matters. His appearance alone makes it worth a watch.

Where do I start? The movie starts off slow at first and them BAM! You find yourself on a careening roller coaster of delightful entertainment implausibility. The acting, dialogue and scenarios keep a coming fast and furious, with each scene exponentially worse than the last, and I mean in a good way. I actually found myself seriously contemplating what I might do if faced with retrieving a bag containing life saving medication for a woman having a grand-mall seizure, if it meant snatching that bag from sealing a hole in the plane made by one of Air Force One's Sidewinder missiles! Admit it, you can't find that kind of mind numbing creativity in just any old movie. This one is special.

Or how about the crazy passenger who assaults the male flight attendant, gets knocked out by another passenger with a book only to awaken later and gleefully jump out of a SECOND HOLE in the top of the plane, made by scrapping the underside of Air Force One in a near miss. Can you beat that level of creative absurdity, I ask you? Simply wonderful and stupid fun. At least this movie never tries to be what it isn't, and that should be appreciated BEFORE WATCHING to get maximum enjoyment.

I loved it and will haul it out from time to time just to remind me of what makes a bad movie such a guilty pleasure. It reminds me of all those great, goofy 80's movies that were just so craftily stupid they were big, dumb fun. Watch it and check your brain at the door, you'll have a good time, I promise.

I got this neighbor who scours thrift store video tape bins to find what I can only describe as the worst misuses of VHS media known to man. The worse the movie, the bigger his chest swells with pride for saving it from oblivion. So when he gives me another one of his treasures I said OK, because I was bored out of my mind anyway and knew it would be a trek into weirdness. Incidentaly, here in the US the title of the movie is "The Shaft", my neighbor happens to enjoy the company of men so I suspect he thought he had stumbled upon a porno! Heh, heh, heh... :). Anyway, I popped it in the VCR and was immediately struck by the quality of the cinematography in the opening scene, really novel and well done. The setting kind of reminded me of some of the mid 80's films HBO used to run as filler, the look and pace of it hail to a previous decade. I kept watching and became ever more surprised by all the twists and turns, it really keeps you off balance and that makes it fun. I found myself talking at the screen and bursting out in laughter with some of the ridiculous things the movie asks you to accept. Just a great little quirky, surprising and fun pseudo sci-fi ride.

Rather than rehash what an ingeniously well-crafted masterpiece this film is, I'm going to talk about what was most poignant for me. Parallel, distributed and Quantum computer designs will one day give machines the neural horsepower necessary to replicate human behavior, so well in fact as to be indiscernible via telephone. Advances in medical research will someday map the human brain in addition to the genome. Linguists collaborating with programmers with find a way to describe our world to the machine. Robotics will give them our form with the letters SONY embossed on their backsides. Face it folks, evolution is about to merge with Moore's Law. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the emotional interplay between David and Monica, my intellect has to deem the relationship superfluous, necessary to sell tickets via mass appeal. I don't believe that artificial intelligence once it is achieved will choose to adhere to the limited model of human emotions. Machine emotions will be developed according to a different environment than ours. Unlike mammalia that experience the world with only a single brain, the machine will have both one and many. Perhaps they will find it necessary to design a new language describing their world to us, that is, if they deem us necessary at all.

I also liked the way the film broaches the legal aspects of machines in society. Best to put laws on the books before an uprising, a machine bill of rights if you will. It would be foolhardy to neglect anticipating this most momentous of possibilities, the Internet being a prime example. Could we really survive artificial discontent? Integration is always better than opposition. Ethics should be discussed before and not after.

Finally the saddest point of the movie was the most likely future outcome, we will destroy ourselves with technology before it has a chance to save us.