Forgettable

Conditions: Middling

No Trust

Shootings of western soldiers in Afghanistan by their Afghani military counterparts has been on the rise lately, and the trust between the two forces has been steadily eroding. Now training for new recruits has been suspended while a re-vetting process is undertaken.

The move comes as NATO officials struggle to stem the tide of attacks on NATO forces by their Afghan colleagues. The attacks, which have killed 45 troops this year, have forced NATO officials to acknowledge a painful truth: Many of the incidents might have been prevented if existing security measures had been applied correctly.

But numerous military guidelines were not followed — by Afghans or Americans — because of concerns that they might slow the growth of the Afghan army and police, according to NATO officials.
[...]

Afghan officials, working with U.S. Special Operations troops, have re-vetted about 1,100 Afghan Local Police officers and removed five policemen from the program. They are also in the process of vetting 8,000 Afghan commandos and 3,000 Afghan army special forces soldiers who are fighting alongside American Special Operations troops throughout the country. Special Operations officials said that they anticipate it will take about two months to rescreen all of the Afghan forces and that the training of new recruits could stall for as long as a month.

- washingtonpost.com/world/

So, basically in their rush to bulk up the Afghani forces they didn’t properly apply their own guidelines for vetting the new recruits, and are now forced to stop everything and do it all over again. How many times must the lesson of haste be learned?


Film Review: Total Recall.

They say you should never mess with a classic, and the makers of this new Recall have tried to leave the classic one alone. Apart from the names of the characters, and a couple of lines here or there, this is a totally new interpretation of Phillip K Dick’s short story, “We can remember it for you wholesale.” However, films do not exist in a vacuum, and we all cherish the Schwarzenegger version in our hearts. So this new one does have a big brother to measure up to. And I’m afraid it doesn’t measure up at all well. Basically, this is a fairly good action sequence movie, and a lousy movie movie. The sets, the CGI, the action sequences, the fights, are all marvelous (especially the fights, which a choreographed to a very enjoyable bone-crunching frenzy). But the actual movie part- where the actors inhabit their characters and act out the plot, just falls flat. People have given Schwarzenegger a lot of shit over the years, but I tell you the guy can really make you believe a character, and his Doug Quaid runs complete rings around Colin Farrell’s Doug Quaid. While Schwarzenegger was able to show bafflement, confusion, determination, anger, resolve, and triumph, Farrell gets stuck in bafflement early on, and stays there until the end.

It’s not totally his fault, as he’s lost in a story that’s trying to keep him and us in the dark all the way through. In a dystopian future, only Australia and Britain are liveable. They are connected through a giant tunnel, and workers commute from one to the other via a giant elevator-ship thing. Quaid works on an assembly line building robots, troubled by dreams about being chased and shot at. A resistance movement is rebelling against ...something. When Quaid gets bored and goes to Rekall Corporation for a holiday, they discover that his memory has already been tampered with. Which then cues the soldiers and soldier-bots and the big chase, which basically goes on for the rest of the film. Kate Beckinsale plays his wife, who’s trying to kill him. Jessica Biel, whom he remembers from his dreams, shows up to take him to the resistance leader, because Quaid has some code in his memory that can shut down all the robots that Cohagen is going to use to kill everybody in Australia.

There is a lot of running, and shooting, and crashing, and punching. Especially punching. But where is the actual intrigue? The strength of this idea is that Quaid may well be dreaming the entire thing, but this is not explored as well as it should be, or as well as it once was. Another problem is the characters; they are just not good enough. Kate Beckensale has only one mode in this thing, there’s no subtlety or depth to her Lori at all. In the crucial scene where they try to convince Quaid he’s dreaming, she’s not even in the room! Jessica Biel seems like she’s totally out of her depth. It feels like she’s a little girl lost in a tough action film, and just tagging along as best she can. Her Melina simply isn’t pro-active enough. And Farrell, really just comes across as the constant victim of the story. Always baffled, just aimlessly going where the plot drags him. Not once did I ever really buy his character.

Len Wiseman has been called a hack in the past, which I’ve always found unfair. But in this film, so easily comparable to the Verhoven classic, it’s clear to see how the director has made some bad choices that have teken away the depth of the material. It’s PG13, which is a big mistake when you’re trying to tell this kind of film. The violence and language, and even the colour, of this world is toned down to mush. They’re trying to focus on the threat of a robot army invading Australia, but the fact is we don’t care about Australia at all. We somewhat care about Quaid, but he spends most of the film in the U.K. I hate to do direct comparisons, but in the original Recall, they used Mars to setup a society that the audience actually cares about not being wiped out. Quaid, and then us the audience, cares about saving them. And by removing the Richter character played so brilliantly by Michael Ironside, the Lori character has no anchor at all. So she just wants to kill Quaid because... well I don’t really know. She just does, despite being told not to.

From the first I heard about it I thought it was going to be difficult to do a new interpretation of Total Recall. The original is a classic, and it seems to me now it was made by filmmakers and actors, who just do not have modern-day counterparts. Unfortunately, and sadly, this new one is exactly the kind of Total Recall movie that they would make today, a flashy, CGI-heavy, simple-minded film about a guy with a bum memory who fights because of a girl. Thanks a lot, Jason Bourne. Two dreams out of five.


- Peace out