Atomic Nerds

More light content. I am finally being dragged kicking and screaming into upgrading to Windows 7, and since it’d be a good idea for a number of reasons to do a complete wipe and reformat of my hard drives, this means I have to spend today and possibly part of tomorrow moving everything I actually care about over to the house media box. Woe is change-resistant me.

Okay, so technically Legion cost FAR too much to be considered a B movie, but in terms of spirit and execution it was. It was an exceptionally shiny and special-effectsy one, but it still embodies pretty much the same spirit of “let’s go with this because it’s fun for an hour and a half, never mind the details.” It is best described as a cross between Terminator and zombie apocalypse films with Christian trappings. It is, depending on your state of sobriety, your appreciation for shout-outs, and your willingness to forgive a movie all sorts of failings because it’s fun, either so bad it’s good or just a very pretty yet awful movie.

I landed on the side of “so bad it’s good”, though what I would actually describe it as is a series of cool scenes that are, as a movie, substantially less than the sum of its parts. If they’d been able to decide on an overall coherent plot arc and an ending that made sense before shooting the cool scenes, it might possibly have qualified as a decent action flick, and if they’d decided to make the characters more interesting than the best the actors could squeeze out of cardboard (which in some cases- Dennis Quaid- is actually quite a bit), it might have qualified as a good one.

This movie has an exceptionally high degree of gun porn, which was what initially made us sit up and go “ooh, do want” instead of nonstop snarking at it, up to and including a scene that inspired a shout of “OLD SLABSIDES SAVES THE DAY”. EVERYBODY gets a gun, including the teenage waif and the pregnant lady whose survival the plot hinges upon, and this is universally presented as not just a good idea, but the only good idea. It also, sadly, contains a cringeworthy scene in which the only human character who carried a gun for personal protection BEFORE the apocalypse started is ruthlessly grilled on why he’d have such a thing… which is so incredibly out of place amid the rest of the aggressively survivalist movie that the actors themselves look downright confused and angry about having the conversation.

What merit the movie has is in a few funny moments and a series of great action scenes and sequences. There is stuff blowing up, there is creepy shit being shot, there is toe-to-toe supernatural badass brawling, and there are plenty of shout-outs to classic action and horror movies like Jacob’s Ladder. What the movie lacks is characters who are remotely interesting or all that sympathetic (the few who are do not survive), and ending that makes a single lick of sense, and overall a reason to exist beyond the action sequences.

If those are enough for you, grab your alcoholic beverage of choice and some popcorn or nachos (we went with nachos), at least one friend, and give it a rental. It’s not worth buying, but it’s fun enough for a watch.

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