Hope

By Jason Santo • Dec 30th, 2004 • Category: Science Fiction

If nothing else, Hope proves that $250 partnered with today’s technological tools and buckets of effort can get you some pretty impressive production value. In this 25-minute prologue to a larger story called Heartland: An American Nightmare, we see the Golden Gate bridge submerged in San Francisco Bay, great plumes of smoke wafting over burning cities and an eroded Statue of Liberty still standing, through probably not for long.

All done on a $250 budget with After Effects and Photoshop. Whoa.

The story finds our heroine, a young college girl named Hope, on a road trip back from her West Coast College to her home town in the center of the Promised Land. While en route, the world goes to Hell in a handbasket, over-run by a red dust contagion that converts the masses into zombie hordes. Chaos and burning cities ensue, although we only see the aftermath.

Although many of the visual effects aren’t that convincing, the effort from jack of all trades Wade F. Stai on this movie is astounding. The writer/director/shooter/editor/effects guy/caterer pulls out every trick in the “post apocalypse” book that’s been laid out by Hollywood over the last 50 years, and while that’s commendable, it’s also oddly the movie’s failure. In Hope, Stai is trying to do an epic story on a shoestring, the exact opposite of what someone like M. Night Shyamalan did with a movie like Signs. Whereas Shyamalan worked at the intimacy and increasing dread seen in small spaces, Stai seems more compelled to show the larger scale, which isn’t nearly as nightmarish. Why? It’s not because Stai’s effects are limited by budget, but more because we’ve seen it all before. Most recently, The Day After Tomorrow wiped the world out with special effects, but before that there was Independence Day, The Stand, The Day After and plenty of others. Hell, even Escape from L.A. with its big California Quake sequence offered destruction on a massive scale. And why the Hell were there two moons in the sky in Hope? Perhaps I missed a voice over explanation, but that didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything. Wouldn’t the world have been wiped out by tidal waves before fire? It appears Stai just figured it’d look neat (which it did) but why include it when it needn’t be there?

All of this attention to post production, with super Dolby-fied sound effects, and ton of After Effects plug-ins contributes to a movie that’s largely style over substance – something that it desperately doesn’t want. As Hope walks through now desolate streets and parks, she looks somewhat bored and she speaks in baby-voiced narration about how much the world changed and how everyone and everything she’s loved is gone. This ponderous narration feels read off a page, lacking the pathos it wants to convey even though it’s written in pretty broad strokes. Sometimes it’s interrupted by shots of The End of the World as seen through poorly delivered television newscasts and slow tracking shots of a world in ruin. Another time, Hope’s ruminations are halted by a zombie attack when she, mistakenly, breaks an empty soda bottle. This sequence with the bottle is one of the only non-stylistically edited scenes in the movie, and it musters up a pretty fair degree of suspense. It’s a shame there isn’t more of this kind of storytelling at work. Instead, the movie is largely composed of assembled images that have no direct relation with one another, Stai tossing out traditional narrative cinema in exchange for the more non-linear approach largely favored by “artistes.” Whereas a normal movie has action within a scene and shots that lead logically from one to another, Hope is bound together by narration and clips of what’s going on, almost like a long trailer. The effect is numbing after awhile and works against the movie’s wish to be something heart-felt.

In the end, Hope is technically impressive but lacks soul, showing that even though a ton of effort can be spent making a movie, without good acting and a solid, original screenplay all you get are pretty pictures.

It should be mentioned that there are all kinds of nifty extras on the Hope DVD including behind the scenes interviews, deleted scenes, and outtakes, but do skip the embarassingly slapped together “slasher movie” homage called Homecoming that Stai would have been wise to have left off the DVD.

Two stars

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.