Verdict
Summary
An uneven mixture of Dark City, The Matrix, and Upside Down, Coma is a spectacular-looking Russian would-be blockbuster with visuals that any big budget Hollywood movie would envy, but the story is a mishmash, the acting is poor, and the script is pretty terrible, to be entirely up front.
Plot:
A guy in a coma wakes up in a world co-inhabited by other coma patients, who share a strange, ever-shifting landscape where reapers are on the hunt for souls.
Review:
A guy who only remembers that he used to be an architect (played by Rinal Mukhametov) wakes up in a bizarre, fragmented world where he’s immediately displaced and confused. He’s being chased by two factions: a human element and a dark, spiritual force known as The Reapers, and when he joins the humans, he’s inducted into a sort of resistance against The Reapers, whose sole purpose is to claim souls. The humans equip The Architect (everyone has name like Tank, Phantom, Astronomer, etc.) with the mind tools he’ll need to survive in the shifting and morphing landscape against The Reapers, and it appears that The Architect is some kind of prophesied person who will forever alter the coma world where every coma patient in the real world ends up, which is why The Reapers are so intent on claiming his soul before he can change the way things have always been.
An uneven mixture of Dark City, The Matrix, and Upside Down, Coma is a spectacular-looking Russian would-be blockbuster with visuals that any big budget Hollywood movie would envy, but the story is a mishmash, the acting is poor, and the script is pretty terrible, to be entirely up front. The plot is only halfway interesting, and it drags and ambles around at a long two-hour running time, but the most irritating thing about it is that it forgets to be fun. If you’re going to make a huge looking movie like this with all these incredible looking visual effects it’s vitally important that you don’t forget the audience, who are looking for an escape, not a slog. I remember when Timur Bekmambetov burst on the scene with his one-two punch of Night Watch and Day Watch, and while those were kind of mixed bags too, they were at least pretty fun. From co-writer Nikita Argunov.
The recently released Blu-ray of Coma contains a CGI special feature, plus a trailer. It’s now available to own.
