Virus - 1999

I called the first death in 1999's Virus.  I love movies like this.  This is the kind of movie where based on dialogue, and how much screen time a character gets, you can tell who will die, which parts are important, etc.  I called the guy that was gonna die because he was alone, his screen time was minimal, and if he died it was gonna take a while for anyone to notice.

Why doesn't the bad guy ever kill anyone important first?  Of course, you have movies where the heroes die and movie like Executive Decision that kill a known actor, but why don't movies have like, the airplane pilot die first?  You know, they do these things out of convenience.  Of course the fucking cook dies first.  It's a horror movie, you don't need a cook/hot dumb blonde/guy who's a druggie.  You do need the strong virgin, the airline pilot, and the older dude who will eventually die (but not till later).

I also love how often charaters in movies like this stay in a location because "(X Character) is still in there".  It's the "what about (Y Character)?"  and basically just throw a random name into the blank there.  Some dude/some chick dies and the group doesn't know it, so they don't leave and they don't take action because they don't know where that person is.  How many times can we possibly see this?  Now, I'm not calling it unrealistic.  I'm just saying that it ALWAYS fucking happens.  Case in point here.

I also love how robots can usually be killed by shooting them in the head.  Now, you know what, I'll fucking be the first to say that humans have a huge weakness in the head.  Cut off one very obvious part, the entire thing dies.  Why would a robot follow that design?  Plus, since it obviously doesn't need a body full of organs and lungs and shit, couldn't it distribute the head parts in the body, or make backups, or whatever?  I have seen so many movies wherein the robot dies via a head destroyed.

Also, I love dialogue that's so threadbare that you know when they say something that it was written specifically for us as the audience.  Like when in this movie, they say, "oh look, incendiary grenades" it's so glaringly obvious that those grenades are gonna come back later.  Again, not calling it bad.  It'd be worse if randomly like 55 minutes in they found the grenades exactly when they needed them.  We'd call that stupid.  But I just love noticing that.  You insert one line of dialogue somewhere, and then you can get away with anything!  Remember that 3 second scene 38 minutes ago where they found the grenades?  Well shit, let's get those grenades back!!!

I've gotten to this point and I barely even feel like putting a plot summary here, so here's like 2 sentences.  Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Sutherland star in this movie where they find an abandoned Russian ship in the ocean and decide to board it and salvage it cause they think they'll be paid.  Onboard, they discover the ship's empty, and then phantom things start happening, and oh shit it turns out a bunch of machines are alive and starting to kill all the humans.

The effects and the pacing of this were pretty good.  Scratch that.  Effects were fucking awesome, pacing was okay.  They obviously had a good team to assemble the machines, and that's great cause it's the crux of the plot.  I don't care how bad your movie is, it can't be too terrible when your villain looks this fuckin cool:

But other than this, it's pretty low-rent average sci fi action, with not a lot to say that's unique...but then again, it doesn't have to be.  This isn't like, gonna be anyone's favorite film, but hey for what it is, it works.  I give it a solid 3 star rating.