The Men who fell (2007)

Really good combinations of Scifi and horror are hard to find. Usually filmmakers try to hard (or too little) without even having that much of a love for any of the genres. Now The Men who fell arrives and it is a very nice try. It doesnt hold up all the way, but it is truly a nice try.

The movie takes place somewhere in the future on a planet that could be the remains of the earth, now a great wasteland full of looting nomads. Our two whining heroes arrive, convicts from an orbital prison sent down on a mission and promptly crash their spacecraft in the desert. The mission is somewhat vague they are to locate a place and retrieve an object. They dont know what the object is, only that they arent the first to look for it. The journey takes them down into a great underground complex that clearly hasnt seen life in ages, but it doesnt take long until they start to hear and see strange things. Are they alone or can everything be attributed to some strange hallucinatory gas? And what happened to the previous searchers?

The Men who fell is easiest (and probably laziest) described as a mix of those old favorites Stalker and Event horizon, and why not a dash of the russian computergame S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of chernobyl, without all those pesky soldiers running around. Most of the movie is dedicated to the journey into the complex itself with long scenes completely without dialogue, just enjoying the scenery. And the scenery is gorgeous. Huge abandoned halls full of strange machinery with enormous vaults and doorways, most of it greenscreen but it does look awesome (especially when you consider the fact that the budget was around $30000. The filmakers have been very careful with all the details and my brain automatically thinks of french comic books and the awesome manga Blame!. But(there is always a but!) now we come to the biggest fault of the whole production. The journey into the underground is drenched in atmosphere and tension, and the story does a good job slowly shining a light on the secrets below with good direction, but when we finally get some more detailed answers it all falls apart. Without spoling too much our heroes meet a character who is the key to everything is going on, and I couldnt hear a word it said due it's voice having been processed so much that all the dialogue is unintelligible. This of course sucks ass because The Men who fell is a an exciting, slowmoving piece of low budget triumph that I really loved but I guess thats what you get for pirating a movie. It desperately needs a proper dvdrelease as it is only available on dvd in Japan and Russia (the version I saw was a russian dvdrip with the english audio from the japanese dvd). I will be first in line to buy when it finally arrives.