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agentorange [Film Festival 10.25.10] post apocalyptic movie review trailer scifi

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Year: 2010
Directors: Brad Anderson
Writers: Anthony Jaswinski
IMDB: link
Trailer: link
Reviewed by:Corridorstyle
Rating: 4 out of 10

Brad Anderson’s ‘The Machinist’ is one of the best films I’ve ever seen at Sitges, however his follow-up film, Transsiberian, flattered to deceive and left me very disappointed. With that in mind, I was really looking forward to Anderson’s latest offering, ‘Vanishing On 7th Street’, and with very little information leaked onto the internet, my expectations of a return to form for Anderson were high.

It’s really difficult to provide any synopsis for this film, as the story is fairly vague and ambiguous. The film begins in the aftermath of a power outage in a US city as Hayden Christensen wakes up and tries to find other signs of life. For some reason daylight is running out rapidly, and within a couple of days Christensen finds himself in total darkness. He comes across a bar inhabited by a teenage boy that still has electricity, and is soon joined by other survivors John Leguizamo and Thandie Newton. As the generator begins to fail, the group try to figure out their best way through the darkness that will destroy them, and find safe haven. What then follows is a nod towards recent post-apocalyptic films such as I Am Legend and The Road, but gets far too bogged down in political and religious allegory without having a strong narrative to wrap them around. No attempt is made at any time to explain why there was a blackout or why they were spared and no time is spent building the characters so that as the story unfolds you actually care what happens to them.


It’s easier to figure out what went right with this film rather than what went wrong and I could find very little to be positive about. You get the distinct impression that nobody really cared about this film whilst making it. The producers probably had a script that they felt was interesting, and set about assembling a cast and director that they could sell internationally. Anderson obviously saw this as an opportunity to emerge from directing episodes of TV and the B-List actors saw this purely as a pay day. The problem with this is that the people who benefit from this least are us, the paying public, who are left with a confusing, soulless film that you have no emotional connection with and probably wished you’d never seen.

Expect to see this on a cable channel near you, sooner rather than later




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