There's a Chinese cigarette case, and the rest you can keep

Each Day, A Film:
January 5th 2011

Thanks to a slightly biased Amazon recommendation list - in part due to purchasing a large number of Japanese films recently - I get odd things popping up every now and then.

So let's talk about The Gene Generation.



I feel conflicted when I talk about films like this, because it's clear that a lot of passion, energy and effort has gone into The Gene Generation, but it just doesn't... work. At times, it feels like a bundle of discarded William Gibson circa-Neuromancer storylines all rolled into an unhappy bundle; lithe assassins with fingerprint-tagged guns, low-life hustlers in debt with the local gang lord, genetic manipulation that's not really exactly explained at any point...

The last point is the clincher, because in this life of mine I've watched and read a lot of science fiction, and as far as I understand it the trick isn't to make your plot device believable - it's to make the viewer believe your plot device is believable. You don't have to explain things in excruciating detail; you just have to make it appear that what the narrative discusses could theoretically happen in our future, the future, or an alternative future.

Muddying the waters doesn't help; the DNA transcoder of The Gene Generation is initially presented as a healing device that's been developed as a weapon that - for some reason - tends to turn people who the plot doesn't love into tentacle monsters. It requires a chip to make it work, then it requires a separate chip to make it work right, and even then, tentacle monsters. Lots of naughty tentacles.

The plot without the transcoder makes more sense; assassin sister wants to protect fuckabout brother from local ganglord. If someone had come along and said "you know what? screw this genetics shit, let's remake La Femme Nikita in the future and throw in some sci-fi bits", that would actually have made a more defensible film. But as soon as the transcoder - and the scientists (although let's use that term bloody loosely, frankly) who all want it for various reasons - get involved with Bai Ling's Gunplay Show, it all goes a little... wrong, somehow.

Also, there are occasional random flying steampunk viking raider ships. Let's just put that out there and leave it.

For me, no film is truly awful, because I've seen Alone in the Dark. And let's not get around to trashing Uwe Boll, because it's neither big, nor clever, nor difficult. Alone in the Dark is physically the worst film I've ever seen, and I have to thank it for that, because nothing since has even come close. So it's nice to have a benchmark, frankly, but it's so bad that (a) I can't even find a trailer for the film on Youtube and (b) even if I could I wouldn't post it here, because that might just encourage people.

The Gene Generation is not as bad as Alone in the Dark, it's just complex when it should be simple and simplified when it should be complex. And someone also threw a wad of cash at the aftereffects people; the city of the story loses it's entire centre following a disaster with the transcoder --

-- And let's just stop right there to ask how messing around with genetic engineering wipes out both a city and the city's atmosphere --

-- so everyone lives on the fringes, while attempting to get into the new housing built in a circular wall around the city itself. I can't quite imagine the real estate sales pitch there; so it's got a lovely kitchen, two bedrooms, it's close to the tube, and the front room has a balcony window opening up on to SCENES FROM AN APOCALYPSE, plus there's a lovely bakery down the road. The centrail character is trying to save enough money to buy her and her brother passage into the special effect wall, but fuckaround that he is, he keeps gambling it away and borrowing more.

Let's also recognise that assassins apparently don't know how to hide their cash in this crazy future of ours.

So the brother gets into trouble, the sister attempts to solve this trouble by (a) throwing two of the gang lord's thugs out of a window to their deaths, (b) paying the gang lord off, and (c) killing another thug as they're leaving to save 'on the medical bills'. At this point, it's basically easy to assume that every, single, person in the film is functionally psychotic and retains no basic reasoning skills; but let's not dwell on that, because the film certainly doesn't.

I like middling sci-fi; I loved Ultraviolet, for instance, although it was clearly What Milla Jovovich did on her holidays between Resident Evil films. Doom has a special place in my heart; Starship Troopers 2 is even involved there somehow. But there's a curse upon middling science fiction films at the moment, and that curse is called inconsistency; inconsistency of plotlines, of shooting style, of postproduction colour correction (half of The Gene Generation is coloured either low-rent orange or washed out, the other half is Blade-Runner blue), and generally a lack of wanting to tie anything in particular together.

But I've watched it, now, so I guess that's done with...