39,327
edits
Future War: Difference between revisions
m
Mass update links
(Import from TV Tropes TVT:Film.FutureWar 2012-07-01, editor history TVTH:Film.FutureWar, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license) |
m (Mass update links) |
||
Line 2:
{{quote|''"From the future traveled a master race of cyborgs. They made abductions from Earth's past. The dinosaurs were trained as trackers. The humans were bred as slaves. Now a runaway slave escapes to a place his people call [[Heaven]]... we know it as Earth."''|''The [[Opening Narration]]''}}
If someone were to combine ''[[The Terminator]]'' and ''[[Jurassic Park]]'', with a fraction of the formers' budgets, while [[What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic|throwing in religious overtones]] just to spice things up a bit, you'd get something close to ''Future War'', a [[Direct to Video|direct-to-video]] gem ([[So Bad
The story concerns "[[Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep"|the Runaway]]," a slave who escapes his cyborg masters' spaceship and crash-lands just off the coast of California. Two cyborgs and a pack of dinosaur puppets are dispatched to recapture him. The Runaway kickboxes one of the cyborgs to death and takes down a dinosaur puppet, but is then unceremoniously [[Crash Into Hello|hit by a car]] driven by Sister Anne, a hooker/ganger/druggie-turned novitiate nun. Anne takes him back to her home, a half-way house inhabited by overweight men, and nurses the Runaway back to health. With him choking her and all, they seem to be hitting it off, but their growing bond is interrupted by a dinosaur puppet attack that claims one of Anne's friends.
Anne and the Runaway make a break for it, and wander around the streets and ride on a train for a while. Anne's having second thoughts about the whole nun thing, but the Runaway quotes verses from [[The Bible (Literature)|The Bible]], which mostly seems to confuse her. Then the pair are picked up by cops and tag along as a SWAT team combats another one of those dinosaur puppets. The heavily-armed specialists get their asses bitten off until the Runaway takes down the threat with a stab to the jaw, and in gratitude, they haul him back to the police HQ for questioning. Fortunately, the remaining cyborg tracks the Runaway there, and our kickboxing hero is able to escape in the carnage, thrashing the cyborg in the process.
Line 27:
** An arguably less justified (or at least more conventional) occurrence; the film's original ending involved Sister Anne leaving the convent to team up with the Runaway and help deal with any more Cyborgs that might come back from the future. As it turned out however, one of the film's main backers was a devout Catholic, and he demanded that the ending be changed so that Anne did join the convent after all. This also resulting in the ending which shows the Runaway becoming a counsellor.
* [[Explosive Leash]]: On the dinosaur puppets. "No wonder fossils are so rare."
* [[
* [[Fan Nickname]]: ''Future Wax''. Due in large part to how the title scrolls onto the frame in the opening (left-to-center zoomed in, then pulled back so the title fills the frame) so that the "r" is the very last letter to be revealed.
* [[Filler]]: The flashback and flash forwards smack of this.
Line 33:
* [[Forced Perspective]]: Used to cunningly create the illusion that the dinosaur puppets are quite large dinosaur puppets. This makes the fight scenes a little difficult.
* [[Gender Blender Name]]: According to the credits, the actress who played Sister Ann is named ''Travis''.
* [[Hey
** Robert ''Kabuki Cop'' Z'Dar, who is an MST3K [[Soultaker (Film)|repeat offender]].
** The old guy with the Hawaiian shirt is legendary science fiction fan and ''[[Vampirella (Comic Book)|Vampirella]]'' creator Forrest J. Ackerman. He was apparently too distracted reading a copy of "Famous Monsters of Filmland", the magazine he edited for 25 years, to notice the dinosaur that killed him.
Line 50:
* [[No Budget]]: None. See Mary Jo Pehl's comment about the ''cardboard TV camera''.
* [[No Name Given]]: The Runaway is never even given a nickname to be referred to by for convenience's sake; even the credits only list him as "The Man". And that doesn't make any logical sense, he is clearly not cool enough to be the Man.
* [[Non
* [[
** Doubles as [[Actor Allusion]], as Bernhardt was also the [[Poor
* [[Shirtless Scene]]: Even if he has to clearly do it himself...
* [[Stock Sound Effect]]: Often not well-matched with the visual, such as the cyborg sounding like a car's suspension when he deflects a cardboard box, or when two characters open a wooden door in a house and it sounds like a steel door on a ship or a submarine, or when we hear crickets chirping even though it's clearly the middle of the day...
Line 64:
* [[We Will Use Manual Labor in The Future]]: Apparently the whole reason "the Masters" need slaves is because they lack opposable thumbs. No, really. How exactly they managed to enslave anyone ever isn't made very clear. Presumably the cyborgs aren't "the Masters," nor does the species that created them feel like using robotic servants instead of captured humans.
** Or, you know, giving themselves prosthetic opposable thumbs...
* [[What Do You Mean
* [[What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic]]: There's a lot of religious subtext and overtext, but mostly, it's confusing.
* [[Your Size May Vary]]: The dinosaur puppets never seem pinned down to a consistent size. In low shots they seem about the size of large dogs (the "Cuteasaurus"), while in high shots they loom over the cast. Handwaved by the opening narration, the nun does say the dinos come in all shapes, sizes, and ages, "and its masters". Doesn't explain the inconsistent size of a dinosaur ''in the same scene''.
| |||