Van Helmovie

It's cool when part of your workday is to go see movies. Today, the crew went to Van Helsing, which got terrible reviews but is a movie I've alternately looked forward to and cringed at the preview for. It turned out to be somewhere in the middle. Like the other Universal Stephen Sommers monster-adventure movies (The Mummy and The Mummy Returns), this was basically a large, cartoony CGI festival. Those kinds of things have their place, but to me bad CGI is one of the things that completely ruins a movie. If you can break through the believability barrier, I'll basically go along for the ride on just about anything, but cartoony CGI doesn't work like that, unless it's consistency and deliberately cartoony, a la Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Sadly, the CGI here was just plain distracting. The overacting wasn't an issue (it's a b-movie after all), the plot was paper-thin but that wasn't the issue either. I feel that it would have worked much better as an anime, because the cartoony nature of the monsters wouldn't be an issue and they could focus more on the fights, the adventure, and so forth. I didn't hate it, but I'm certainly glad I didn't spend any money on it.

The rest of my day was filled with the usual work-stuff. Tonight, I'm going to finish my character for Jon's Mutants and Masterminds game, which we're running tomorrow.