Rambo
Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 |
The film opens with newsreels of the crisis in Burma. Burma, under the iron fist rule of Than Shwe, takes harsher stances against the nation’s pro-democracy movement. One of the first scenes in the film is of a group of rebels being thrown into a mine-infested marsh and then being gunned down, while a cigarette-smoking Burmese Lt-Colonel gazes grimly at the scene.
The film reveals that, following the events in Rambo III, Rambo returned to Thailand and now resides in a village near the Burmese border. He captures snakes and transports roamers in his boat. A missionary approaches him and asks Rambo to take him and a group of his fellow missionaries up the river to Burma on a humanitarian mission. Rambo refuses, but is convinced by another member, Sarah Miller, to take them up there.
Just after the end of the Civil War, John Wilkes Booth and another man enter a bar and approach Thomas Gates (Ben Gates’ great-great grandfather). They produce a diary containing an encrypted message, and entice Thomas, a well-known puzzle solver, to decode it. Thomas recognizes the message as using the Playfair cipher and begins to translate it. While he does so, Booth leaves for the theater to assassinate President Lincoln. Thomas Gates solves the puzzle, a clue to a treasure map, and realizes the men are still loyal to the Confederate cause and have a sinister motive for finding the treasure. The Confederate man pulls a gun on him, threatening to shoot him if he doesn’t hand over the diary, however he is distracted from Gates by the chaos errupting in the bar over news of Lincoln’s assassination. Thomas rips several pages from the diary and throws them in the fireplace. The second man shoots him and attempts to retrieve the pages, only succeeding in saving a small piece. The dying Gates gasps, “The war is over,” but the man disagrees, stating, “You’re wrong about that, the war has only just begun,” and rushes from the bar. With his dying breath, Thomas Gates tells his young son Charles, “The debt that all men pay.”
The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep is a 2007 fantasy film directed by Jay Russell. The screenplay was written by Robert Nelson Jacobs, based on the novel The Water Horse by Dick King-Smith. The film stars Alex Etel as the juvenile lead, and Emily Watson and David Morrissey as the principal adult characters. The film was released in the United States on December 25, 2007 and will be released in the United Kingdom on February 1, 2008.
The film picks up immediately after the events of Alien vs. Predator. The Predator (”Scar”), who was impregnated by a face hugger before being killed by an Alien Queen at the end of the first film, gives birth to a Predalien on board his clan’s ship, which then sneaks aboard a scout craft headed for Earth and runs amok. As the Predalien rampages through the ship, a Predator attempts to kill it with his plasma caster and inadvertently shoots a hole through the ship’s hull, causing it to crash in the forests outside of Gunnison, Colorado. The ship’s crew dies either upon the crash or by the Predalien, which escapes. A boy and his father who are deer hunting see the crash and go to check it out. Both of them come across the wreckage of the ship-on board, and several face huggers escape from the damaged containment tubes and quickly impregnate them both.
Lyra Belacqua (Richards) is a young orphan girl who lives in a parallel universe in which a person’s soul resides outside the body in the form of an animal called a “daemon.” The land is controlled by the Magisterium, an authoritarian organisation which restricts freedoms in order to impose its own systems of belief upon the populace. A ward of Jordan College, Lyra spends her free time with the local children and her best friend, Roger (Walker). Lyra and the others tell of the “Gobblers,” who they hold responsible for the disappearance of several local children.
Robert Neville (Will Smith) is a brilliant scientist, but even he could not contain the terrible virus that was unstoppable, incurable, and man-made. Somehow immune, Neville is now the last human survivor in what is left of New York City and maybe the world. For three years, Neville has faithfully sent out daily radio messages, desperate to find any other survivors who might be out there. But he is not alone. Mutant victims of the plague-The Infected-lurk in the shadows… watching Neville’s every move… waiting for him to make a fatal mistake. Perhaps mankind’s last, best hope, Neville is driven by only one remaining mission: to find a way to reverse the effects of the virus using his own immune blood. But he knows he is outnumbered… and quickly running out of time.