Anti Matter (2016) Reviews

• Brilliant Indie with "weaponized editing"

  A_Different_Drummer2017-07-28

  I have said before that if I had a dollar for every "auteur" indie (where the writer and director were one and the same) that aimed for the stars but kept hitting the floor, well, I could retire. But for every dozen or so indies that hit a brick wall, one soars. This is the one that soars. Indeed it aims high, turning what looks like a basic "sci fi experiment gone wrong" into an existential crisis of the soul. But it succeeds, astonishingly, at being both entertaining and bemusing. I was glued to the screen from the beginning to the end. That seldom happens. The actors, the script, the direction, all remind me of Hitchcock at his peak. YOU CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO THESE PEOPLE. And the editing, OMG. This is the first film I can recall where aggressive editing was used instead of complex SFX. The editing is beyond brilliant, it moves the audience at a visceral level from scene to scene. Recommended.

• No matter

  begob2017-07-28

  A student scientist makes a world changing discovery, but to confirm her hypothesis she must experiment on herself, and it doesn't turn out the way she expected ... Hmmm. This is real sci-fi, taking a plausible development and exploring what it does to humans, and the opening act is really promising. The first 25 minutes has a good balance between character and exposition, introducing interesting people, a bit of back story, and just about letting the audience keep up with the technical stuff through mounting tension. After that it fell apart for me. The dialogue was flabby, with repeated questions-questions, and many scenes where the actors struggled to give the story direction. There's a two-shot in a restaurant where nothing the characters say adds anything to the story. And a chase scene which feels inappropriate for the character, as she plummets through a window and slides across the front of a car. That was the point I began to lose interest, and the dialogue added to the chore of watching through to the end. The final annoyance was when they explained the fabric of space-time with the space-time honoured piece of paper. The performances by the two female leads are good, but I could have done without the mama and the alzheimers red herring. Also the animal rights angle with the police isn't necessary for the story. The writer/director really needed to cut savagely and reimagine the second act. In the end, it's just too talky and sentimental. Nothing special about the photography, and the music is ordinary with a constant background radiation to maintain the mood. The outside locations were good. Overall: Good start spoiled by incoherent drama.

• The Nature of Man, written by people in Monkey Masks

  Arfpint2017-07-27

  Pop quiz hotshot, you wake up one morning and go see your friends. They are suddenly acting very evasive and hostile towards you. Do you a) ask them what is the matter and wait for an answer, or b) just ignore it and carry on as though nothing is wrong. What do you do. What do you do? If your answer is a, welcome to the real world. If your answer is b, you will love this film. An interesting premise ruined by people deciding not to act as any normal person would do. Indeed, if they did act normally, this film would be around 30 minutes long and actually be a really good short film. Such as it is, we have to sit through an hour and a half of a mish mash of genres, to an ending that basically could've been tied up long before you get through your first handful of popcorn. Anti Matter, or Worm, follows the story of 3 scientists who invent a wormhole, basically. I couldn't tell you any more because the first part of the film is so filled with scientific terminology that they could've been making anything, really. It then turns into scifi, a bit of horror, a random chase movie thriller, and a romantic drama. It's all well done all the whole, the acting is decent, directing is solid and the script is serviceable. So far, so 7 or 8 out of 10. The problem is that the story, in order to fill a decent run time, becomes so convoluted that it begins to detract from the film's central ideas. The chase scene is so bizarre, it seems to have been taken from another film. The various red herrings are unnecessary and increasingly ridiculous, culminating in a comical playground chant that I genuinely couldn't work out was meant to be serious or not. There's even a gratuitous sex scene, which possibly ranks as the most shoe-horned excuse for nudity that I've ever seen. It's so frustrating that a movie with an interesting idea and decent cast and crew would feel the need to keep adding more and more nonsense, and culminate in an ending which is nonsensical to the point of just kind of shrugging and going, "well, yeah, there you go". There's even a touch of ambiguity about it, which would've had me walking out if I wasn't comatose already. How you like this film will depend entirely on my opening question. If you don't mind the fact that everything that happens could have been easily explained straight away, and not slowly dragged out, than give it a shot. I don't like it, but I respect it.

• Very good film true to what scifi drama should be

  costasz2017-09-23

  I had no idea this was a low budget/indie film until I read that it was. Keep in mind there are no high tech CGI gimmicks as far as I can tell and no famous Hollywood actors in it. Still, the film was good, much better than the usual low budget drivel. The acting was really good. The director must have made a choice to not use his limited budget on CGI and that must be a good decision because low budget CGI makes a movie look like low budget. Low budget usually also shows in the props and studio setting that is used. Again, good choices must have been made so that the low budget is hidden. Excellent work. I can only imagine what this crew can do with more $$$. Thanks

• Great Little Indi Sci-Fi That will leave any fan of the genre satisfied

  paul-23692017-09-21

  Anti matter is evidence that you don't need a massive budget, multi- million pound special effects or A list actors to carry a film if the plot and story is a good... To be honest I'm the target for this type of sci fi and I really enjoyed watching it from start to finish, I look for films like this one and like to watch on my own without interruption. Time Lapse is another low budget favourite of mine. I can't understand the negative reviews; I mean what were you expecting from a low budget, independent production? The story telling is solid and outcome satisfying. I did guess what was going on quite early, but that's because its my genre, but it didn't spoil my enjoyment