How sad is this?

A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Alive is about some dingle berry who is a calming psychopath being utilized in a government experiment pertaining to some mystical thingy. Nice settings and some good action sequences but the story goes nowhere and the pacing is like slugs screwing. If this movie was at least 25 minutes shorter I would of liked it more because this dicking about with idle dialogue and meaningless progression was poofy. It's only worth one assimilation in its entirety at best.

I don't know where to begin, so I'll begin with a snippet from the back of the cover of this movie. "Alive combines the tension of Vincenzo Natali's Cube with Kitamura's own Versus." I have not seen Versus, so I can't comment on that, but I think Cube was an excellent movie which I recommend to everyone. However, in this case someone has clearly confused "tension" with "boredom".I'll just go ahead and spoil the entire plot, because besides being one holy Swiss cheese of a plot, it's also moldy cheese, and the movie is not worth spending any time on even if you don't know the plot beforehand, so it doesn't matter. If I have misunderstood the plot, don't hit me - it's probably because I had to struggle to keep my eyelids open.So the American military in Nevada once lost a UFO i the Nambi desert. This apparently makes sense because they're both deserts so surely they're practically the same place. Different continents or not. A monkey broke into the UFO and acquired an alien something which was passed on to a Japanese researcher who had to eat the monkey to survive in the desert. What ever. The alien thing is now passed on to anyone who's "bloodthirsty" enough to kill the current host. The Japanese military wants to use it for military stuff, so they decide to make it pass from the current host (the researcher's daughter) to some other dude. But instead of just picking someone out of the military, which is full of people who are bloodthirsty AND already on the military's side, they decide that it's probably a good idea to pick some criminal out of death row instead. Oh, and the reason they pick this particular criminal from death row is because he was the first person in history to not die from the non-lethal electric shock which is the standard execution method, because everyone dies from the placebo effect when they get electrocuted. I don't know if they do this so they can giggle in the staff room at how everyone dies even though it's not deadly, or if they just want to cut down the electricity bill.Then the movie turns into what The Matrix would have been if it had been really lame, and superfluous fighting bores us to tears for what feels like an hour. And oh wait, now they remember that they already had a dude who was infected with the alien thing, so the entire movie up to this point was actually a totally waste of time and also human lives. Then everyone dies. The end.The only one moment in the movie where I didn't want to go away and sleep or eat a sandwich instead, was when a dude was pinned to a wall by a pipe through his chest, and he's hanging around up there and another dude walks by. The dude hanging on the wall says "I'm in pain, shoot me". And the living dude looks at him, and it's not like he's a mean dude or anything, so he really looks sorrowful and doesn't want the guy on the wall to suffer. So he shoots him.(Rhetorical pause.)In the stomach. "Gee THANKS A FREAKIN' HEAP."

Out of all the Kitamura movies I've seen, this is my least favorite. I liked it but its not his best in my opinion. Hideo Sakaki was of course good, but other than that the cast didn't push me either way. They were just there. I say it is misleading about the whole Cube reference because it was nothing like that movie, except if you take into account that they're in a cell. But it wasn't claustrophobic at all. ******THIS IS WHERE IT MIGHT GET SPOILERY!!!!******** As far as the Sakaki/Sakaguchi reunion went I was a little disappointed. I knew Tak would come in at the last part and I knew they would have an ending fight-scene, but I was looking forward to that. Heh, I was even looking forward to the cheesy make-up/body suit that he would have on; which I enjoyed btw. But what disappointed me was that there was no bantering. Tak uttered not a word and that took some of the luster away from the fight/reunion. Also, I felt robbed that Hideo wasn't the one to give him the death blow. What's worse is that he died from a gun shot wound! No! Ah, what a waste. I didn't find it terribly perplexing, like some of Kitamura's other works, but there's one thing that kept rolling around in my head: was Zeros an alien? I don't think he was. I think that the alien part of the story was the virus itself, but Zeros was a human previously who caught the disease and the results were what we saw, he was changed extensively and was absent of any kind of personality and that's what Tenshu would have become eventually. *********END OF SPOILERS***************It was an alright flick, I wouldn't pay the list price for it but it was good. Perhaps even good enough to own, watch with a buddy or two and perhaps even play Mystery Science Theatre.

I found this movie to be very well-paced. The premise is quite imaginative, and as a viewer I was pulled along as the characters developed. The pacing is done very well for those that like to think--enough is kept hidden from the viewer early on, and questions keep arising which are later answered, producing a well-thought out and very satisfying film, both cerebrally and from an action standpoint.It seems some people were looking for a non-stop roller-coaster ride with this film--one of those that comes charging out of the gate. This would be more analogous to one of those coasters that first takes you slowly up the hill--creating a wonderful sense of anticipation--and is ultimately, in my mind, more fulfilling for the foundation initially laid.Excellent film.