Watching Cold Storage, it's has to be the worst movie I've seen this year. Has the same problems Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die did. I will call it "Crappy Netflix Movie Syndrome" or CNMS. Temu Brendan Fraser is distracting. Checked out after 30 mins. I do not recommend even if you're a Liam Neeson fan.
Haven't seen that, but I just watched GL,HF,DD. I'm curious about what are the parallels you draw between the two movies.
I thought it was a fun movie, Sam Rockwell is great in it, as always. The rest of the cast is generally alright. Other than Rockwell I only know the spic who played Ant-Man's friend, and the nigress who played Domino in Deadpool 2.
The movie likes to waste time, with scenes that go on way longer than they should.
The twist was very, very predictable, and the
other twist is just depressing but also makes the entire thing pointless. It has a lot of very hackneyed social commentary about AI, social media addiction, virtual reality, and school shootings, but it
sort of justify it by having the quite exaggerated state of those things in the movie (in comparison to real life) being caused by
an AI working to perpetuate itself.
The long story short of it is,
a guy time travels to the past to prevent the creation of an AI that will decimate humanity not with killer robots but by drawing everyone into a VR world. His mission is to do this by recruiting the right combination of people from a diner; he has tried and failed this 117 times. But in the end, it's all inside the AI's VR world, which is evidenced by an AI-brainrot monster roaming the streets of what's supposed to be the real world, and that once they succeed in the mission, people from the recruit's backstories who were dead or otherwise lost show up, telling the survivors that things are OK now*. The guy realizes this and resets the timeline again, and this time he changes the plan from stopping the AI to using rats to infect humanity with one of his recruit's Chuck McGill-like wifi sensitivity disease (this recruit is also his mom, who is pregnant with him at the time, but nevermind that), which would prevent the downfall of humanity by making people unable to use the AI's tech. In the very last shot of the movie, the dead rat he's carrying opens its eyes, insinuating this, too, is in the VR world.
It's unclear if there's any actual time travel in the story, but we're led to believe the AI also traveled back in time and is doing a lot of things to perpetuate itself (hiring mercenaries and people to protect the kid that is programming it; brainwashing children, causing constant mass shootins and cloning the victims AND shooters to replace the youth with meat automatons that read ads a few time a day, and getting people addicted to VR). But this may all be a lie, and the AI emerged normally. The only things we know really happened is that an AI emerged, and started gaining ground in society; the girl with the wifi sensitivity lost her boyfriend to VR, and went completely off-grid, as the world completely collapsed from the AI's actions. She was pregnant and her kid one day found a VR visor and activated it, leading a drone to his position, and to his mom's death.
From there we're told he joined a group of survivors who came up with the time travel plan, but most likely he just put on the VR visor in despair, and the AI gave him this story of a time travel mission to save the world, a compelling narrative, which is something he even warns the recruits about, as something the AI will give them to keep them compliant.
So yeah. The whole movie is the guy being fed a heroic story in VR after he got his mom killed. And that's if "the things we know really happened" even happened. He may be just a VR junkie in a setting completely unknown to us. So the movie is fun on the surface, but below that it's just pointless and depressing.
*Incidentally this reminds me of a joke at the end of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang:
the scene is being narrated by the main character in a hospital room, and he says that he and the other lead "survived seemingly lethal injuries, which is hard to believe but it's what happened", and the movie then shows all the other characters who definitely died walk into the room, followed by Elvis and Abe Lincoln, who promptly get shooed away by a nurse).
Also a thing I chuckled at was a scene where the wifi-sick girl's boyfriend tells her he's decided to leave her and completely destroy their relationship and future together to plug himself into VR permanently, but he uses the word "transition" for it. I absolutely do not think this is an intentional reference or analogy to troons going into a life-ruining procedure in pursuit of a hedonistic lie, but god damn if the shoe don't fit.
I have enjoyed everything I've seen by Verbinski before, his Pirates trilogy is great, and Rango is just about one of my favorite movies ever. I rewatch them every once in a while.
This one? It was fun, but I don't think I need to ever watch it again, nor think about it much after sending this post.