Wednesday, October 6, 2010

NATURAL CITY (2003)

Well, somebody's a big fan of BLADE RUNNER, GHOST IN THE SHELL and THE MATRIX. Set in the 2079, there's a cop who's job is to hunt down renegade cyborgs. Cyborgs are suppose to only live three years, but shit happens and it's this guy's duty to kill the ones that got too smart for their own good. Problem is the cop is in love with his own private female cyborg and she's due to be shutdown in a few days. He finds some mad scientist guy on the black market that claims to be able to take the memory chip from the cyborg and implant it into a real life human if her DNA is a match. Blah, blah, blah. Stuff happens and there's romance and fighting and running in air and spinning in circles while shooting a gun and a heated conversation in the rain with steaming coming off a guy's head. It's all too over stylized for me.

Worth a watch if you're into this kind of futuristic action/love stuff, but I thought the story was undercooked and didn't show me anything new. I have nothing wrong with somebody borrowing from another story if (and that's a big "if" there) you can improve on the story. NATURAL CITY's heart is in the right place, but there's nothing here we haven't already seen before better. My biggest problem is the female cyborg had zero personality, so why is he even in love with her? If the filmmakers had made her a strong female character the entire movie would have been different. Instead, she had the personality of an microwave, so what's the big deal about her getting turned off?

I would say skip it, but after reading a few other reviews online it actually seems like a fairly popular movie. Maybe I missed something. In my opinion I say watch CYBORG GIRL instead. It might not be an action movie, more of a sci-fi/romance, but it creates something entirely new and original in the futuristic cyborg/human relationship genre and it's just a all around great movie. I love it!
Strip clubs in the future are fucking scary!