Project Terrible: Recon 2022: The Mezzo Incident

Oh, holy crap. We're back for more Project Terrible. Here's the cover.

Ah, crap.

I have to be honest here, folks. I knew going in that this one was going to hurt. I've seen Recon 2020, and that was a particularly brutal mix of horrid action, sexual innuendos, breast shots, an asinine plot, and particularly terrible portrayals of things like "zombies" and "vampires." It all added up to an utter waste of time, and was one of the more painful things I've had to watch.

So Al (who saw the first film with me), largely because he really, really didn't want to do it himself, gave me Recon 2022: The Mezzo Incident for Project Terrible. He's such a great friend.

Okay, so...how was it? In all honesty, it wasn't nearly as terrible as the original film. It wasn't good, mind, but they seem to have worked a little harder this time, gotten some people who can do some passable acting...sometimes, tried to get the effects to be of at least semi-reasonable quality, and at least cut down on the just plain goofy blending of fantasy/horror and sci-fi elements. This is unquestionably an improvement over the original. The trouble is that it isn't nearly enough of an improvement over the original to make it into "solid indie film" territory...it's still quite bad, it's just less horribly terribly bad than the original film was. So, while I'll applaud the effort and the improvement, this thing was still quite painful.

So, let's go into the good stuff first...there's not a lot, so this won't take very long.

The Sergeant/Lieutenant is actually pretty good, and generally does a nice job of portraying a commander.

• The Sergeant (or, shortly after the start, and for the rest of this review, the Lieutenant): The leader of the team and one of the actors who was present in the original film, this guy is much better than I remember him being in the first film. He worked hard at playing a believable commander in this film and to be honest, he does a good job. He has a good mix of bravado and no-nonsense commander about him, and pretty believably shows the pain that losing most of his squad in the first film put him through, and his need to keep people alive this time out. There are some pretty cliche moments with him, and his delivery is sometimes a bit off, but overall, if anything's going to actually grab hold of you and keep you watching this thing, it's him.
• The costumes, makeup, and suits: These aren't going to stand up to a high-budget picture, but they aren't bad at all. The Alpha Squad armor has a good sci-fi look to it, the aliens that we see in the film look okay, and the cyborgs could be better but have a nice design most of the time. I can't find anything major to complain about with these.
• The climax: I'm not saying this sarcastically, like one of those "the best part was when it was over" lines. The climax of the film is actually pretty good. I don't know...everyone was just "feeling it," I guess. We get a martial arts fight between the Lieutenant and the main cyborg bad guy that starts a little clumsy but soon gets pretty fast and decently brutal--way better than I've seen out of quite a number of other flicks. We get some shootouts that are actually more than decent. We get some honest-to-goodness dramatic acting on the part of not just the Lieutenant, but the head of the secondary Zebra Squad (and she wasn't doing so great for most of the rest of the film). There is quite a bit of stupid stuff in there too, and I'll get to a lot of it below, but if you saw the leadup and the climax of this film alone, you might take it for a pretty decent indie sci-fi action film with a few odd moments.

Here's a pretty nice moment from late in the film...I really wish this actress had put this much effort and feeling into the rest of her performance.

• The effects...mostly: There are some examples of poor effects in here, especially during the introduction (where a guy "in the middle of a battle" is very clearly just standing in front of a green screen having snow clumsily tossed up at him, and isn't even blended well with the footage behind him), and some of the animation isn't so hot, but quite a lot of the film's effects are not bad at all for an indie film. Good? No. But not bad. I've seen far worse, quite recently. Even the stuff that doesn't look so hot is at least decent conceptually...for the most part.
• An honorable mention goes to the poor guy saddled with playing the team's sex-obsessed medical officer, who does a perfectly fine acting job but still ends up with me hating his guts because his character represents everything that is wrong with this film. This guy actually does a nice job...it's just that any moments of actual humor from the character (clearly intended to be the film's comic relief) come from his portrayal, not from the way the character is written. Case in point: I loved one bit where he's told to go climbing up a hill to support the science officer, who was taking a look at an approaching storm...only for the science officer to go running back down as soon as he reaches the top. It's a funny bit, and it's made much more so by the actor's perfect "come on, really?" type of gesture. Sadly, this role really exemplifies everything bad about this movie, and I'll get to that below.

Yes, it looks like a video game, but let's face it...it looks like a pretty nicely made video game. That counts for a lot.

So, we've identified some positives...time to bring any hopes you might have that this is actually decent crashing down.

Futuristic funerals sure are...uh...private.

First off, the film's opening twenty minutes or more are pure torture. Well, that's not entirely true. The first few minutes are just a little cheesy and use the aforementioned terrible blending of the guy in front of the green screen with the sci-fi battle backdrop, and then we get a decent scene of the soon-to-be Lieutenant talking over the emotional impact of the first film with his doctor (thankfully refraining from mentioning the terrible horror elements). But then? Well, just as I started thinking this might not be that bad, the next scene opened with a shot of naked breasts and a guy hooked up to a VR sex machine by his you-know-what, and the film's quality shoots down the drain and stays there for a while. 

If this movie were our world, this would be the first sign of the apocalypse.

Aside from a couple very brief interludes so the sergeant can attend a funeral (which consists of him, alone, ejecting a coffin into space, apparently), be upgraded to lieutenant, and be vaguely given his next mission (leading Alpha Squad and a second team to destroy an alien base), roughly the next twenty minutes consists of meeting characters who appear to have nothing on their minds but sex. These guys turn everything into a sex joke/reference. Cleaning guns? Yep. Cocking guns? Yep. Using VR Training sims? Yep. Talking about a woman who recently lost her boyfriend? Yep. Everything in the movie is a cheap way to either joke about sex or seriously reference sex, and it's rather hard to give a crap about the characters when none of them save the new lieutenant have anything deeper on their minds than finding the nearest thing with breasts and going to town. We've got the medic who thinks of nothing but sex, the science officer who defends a girl from the medic's advances but really just wants to romance her (admittedly, a little less quickly than the others) himself, another soldier who is having sex with the woman who recently lost her boyfriend (said soldier will, of course, die within minutes of the start of the mission, making me wonder why we wasted so much time on him), and the targets of the guys' advances, who of course are the other team they're going with the mission on. Then we've got the droid lady, the lieutenant, and the pilot girl. And just to make sure everyone references sex at some point, the lieutenant and the pilot are an item. Oh, and by the way, there are some actual sex scenes mixed in, too, as sex is apparently kind of a hair-trigger reaction with some of these people.

Here's the medic, who cheerfully maintains the film's infantile sense of humor for the duration. Points for dedication?

Also notable, the film's first dropped plotline: The film also builds up that there's something going on with the characters psychologically, as the aliens they're fighting have some psionic abilities and have basically infected them with nightmares, leading the lieutenant to have his flashbacks and some dreams and the pilot to dream about her dead boyfriend. Screwing her, of course, because everything has to come back to sex. This plot will be utterly dropped once the mission begins and will never return, ever, so really I suspect it was just there as justification for the corpse sex scene.

Sub-Zero...wins.

So, let's talk about the mission. The mission is better than the introduction purely because it doesn't consist entirely of sex-based humor (not that it totally stops...the medic will continue making horrid jokes for the rest of the film, and there are several other references, such as the cyborg lady who fires electricity from her breasts and jokes about  the size of the medic's you-know-what when he's rescued naked). Unfortunately, it isn't much better. We've got an amazingly confusing aerial dogfight, a shaky cam snow worm attack that is somehow even worse than shaky cams usually are (to the extent that it was making me ill), and a poorly choreographed shootout between the ground troops and a starfighter (in which I have to wonder why the droid lady didn't just use the rocket launcher to begin with instead of waiting for them to lose a guy first), all within minutes of each other. We follow that up with a snowstorm that splits the remaining characters up somewhat, and some exciting walking, followed by a very brief ambush and some more exciting walking.

Here's a tip: Next time, shoot down the fighter with your rocket launcher before this happens.

Honestly, though these feel low budget and aren't particularly well done, the movie isn't all that bad during the mission...the main issue is that it just isn't really arranged and plotted out that well. The whole thing feels like a bunch of scenes that would indeed probably happen during a mission, but without any real feeling of connection. There's a snow worm! There's a fighter! There's a snowstorm! We got separated and two of us ended up behind enemy lines! There's some guards to ambush! There's another defensive line! The whole thing is in dire need of a bit where the lieutenant spreads out a map and draws out the plan of attack, and that's missing. Add in a clearer plan for the assault and this whole sequence would be vastly improved.

Hello, I'm from intel. I probably should have mentioned the incredibly lethal snow worms that I clearly knew about before you landed. Ah, well. Thanks for not being mad at me or anything.

Tactics are also pretty questionable most of the time. No one in the film seems to much understand the concept of taking cover, with most of the characters just standing out in the open and firing repeatedly. The lieutenant and the droid girl both at least get the idea of going prone. The team's idea of ambushing the enemy usually consists of having two of their squad members run out in the open without firing at all for several seconds, giving the enemy multiple free shots at them, before the two squad members left as snipers finally decide to start shooting. Oh, and the droid girl repeatedly only decides to pull out a handy special weapon that could easily resolve the situation once lots of fighting has gone on, despite the fact that there's nothing appreciably different that makes the weapon usable then when it wasn't earlier. This continues as they enter the base...they just follow a strategy of "point and shoot," with no use of cover or other tactics (one gunfight excepted, nearing the climax). The worst offense, though, is in the final moments of the film, when the team willfully announces itself to an opponent they have the drop on, enabling him to activate an energy shield to block their shots when they otherwise would have taken him easily.

No, no, no. You barely manage to put together anything resembling a coherent action scene as it is. Don't try to be stylish like this!

The series also continues its strange obsession with putting fantasy/horror character types into a sci-fi film continues, as a beholder ("gazer" in this film--for those of you unfamiliar with the creature, it's a giant ball-shaped thing with one big eye and mouth in the main body, and a whole bunch of little eyestalks overhead, and traditionally it is one of the nastiest things you can run into in an RPG dungeon) pops up in the middle of the base. Apparently a gazer is also the possible source of an answer to the Unified Field Theory, which is...odd. No, really. A gazer, rather than being any kind of threat (the thing just runs the heck away as soon as they shoot), is something they should really have tried to capture because it could blow science wide open! I'm mystified, still, why this series has this obsession with throwing fantasy creatures into what looks like otherwise pure sci-fi, but more than that...if you aren't going to have a beholder/gazer be in any way an actual threat or behave in any way like it does in the material you're pulling it from, why even use it?

Forget that schmuck Einstein! I alone hold the keys to glorious science!

The acting is another weak point. There's no one hideously bad, but a lot of people really fail to emote for most of the film--most notably the pilot, who utterly fails to express any emotion at all in what is supposed to be a very intense and challenging dogfight in which she is utterly outmaneuvered and shot down. It drains all the energy out of the scene--it doesn't help that the animation for the fight is confusing to begin with, but she utterly ruins any ability to be excited by it.

Yes, my dear, you've mastered the emotion of "staring dazedly off into space." Now, could you try to give us "worry" or "tension" or "anger?" Please? It's take 759 and I really would like to go home...no? Okay, fine, we'll take it.

Most of the rest of the squad, save for the doctor and the Lieutenant, are just kind of flat. A couple have strong accents and kind of stumble over their lines, making it hard to read any emotion in them, and others just don't really do much at all with their portrayal of their characters. The droid lady, of course, gets a pass since she's supposed to be unemotional, but there's just not a lot to see here, overall. The villain doesn't help things either, though he's on the other end of the spectrum...extremely cheesy. I don't think anyone could have made the lines they gave him any good ("We don't just kill our opponents...we rape them." Seriously.), but he actually manages to make them worse.

Loading Overacting Program Version 2.3...please wait.

As for the ending...bit of a spoiler warning here though I won't go into much detail, so skip this paragraph if you don't want to see it. Actually, it's pretty decent for a while, but it chooses one heck of a strange place to cut off. It's like they want to do a shock bad ending, but then the seeming deaths of the remaining troops are followed immediately by an announcement that the soldiers will be back in Recon 2023 (which, yes, exists...and I bet you'll see it in a future Project Terrible). Kind of a spoiler about whether any of them survived, though I suppose they could start up a completely new unit next time. We also get a stinger of the villain being dragged out of the base...I'd rather have seen what happened to the heroes, but whatever.

Look...this is an improvement over Recon 2020. Recon 2022: The Mezzo Incident is actually kind of close to being a passable indie, low-budget sci-fi film, and it actually accomplishes quite a lot with what it has. Unfortunately, an infantile sense of humor spoils any goodwill in the early moments of the film and continues to ruin any hope for an entertaining experience as the mission rolls on, and the utter disorganization and complete lack of portrayal of military tactics or sensible combat spoil most of the film's plot and action scenes. There are moments of hope for the movie, and I can see some potential, but that potential is far from realized in this film. It is indeed highly terrible, and while it is an improvement over the original that's roughly the same as saying that being allowed a 5-minute break between sessions of being beaten savagely with a whip is better than only being allowed a 1-minute break. The torture's the same...it just isn't as constant.

Not recommended at all.

No, really...I'm sorry, but what emotion is she supposed to be expressing? This drives me nuts!