ONE, TWO, THREE, BRANCH.

003. Ink (2009)

Oh, this movie.  This poor, poor misguided movie.  It could have been good, heck, it could have been great. I can’t place my finger on exactly what went wrong but something did, everything did.  The visuals were cool, I love the projected faces thing, the idea of characters that snap into existence like the flame of a lighter or a lightswitch was pretty cool, but…it was just genuinely uninteresting.  It would have been better to perhaps delve into the mythology of the …what were they even called?  Well we’ll just say ‘the good guys’ and ‘the bad guys,’ but then there was a Storyteller? and a like… one lead Incubus guy that seemed no different than the other ones?  And how did the character who kidnapped Emma know where to go to find the two pieces of code that were supposed to be so difficult to find, and what was the code even for?  None of it functioned as a story.

It may have worked as a comic or graphic novel.  In that medium a writer may have been able to fill in some backstory or identify characters more clearly, but of course in that format we would then miss the musical, beat tapping nature of the Pathfinder himself; another idea which, excecuted properly, could have been fascinating.

I got the feeling the filmmaker here had seen MirrorMask (2005, Dave McKean & Neil Gaiman) and was leaning heavily on it.  Too bad.  Now I just want to watch MirrorMask again.

3/10