SiN the MOVIE (2000) REVIEW
I don’t usually do movie reviews, but I’m a big fan of SiN, a game forgotten by time but not by the real ones (LIKE ME). SiN’s that great champion of cheesy ultraviolence, crazy awesome shit where you play as a guy named John Blade, an officer of HARDCORPS (INSANE). I’ve never done a proper review of SiN, but I might do it at some point, I just haven’t replayed the game in a while. It holds a special place in my heart though, since it runs in the Quake II engine. It's jank but its great anyway. SiN was majorly overshadowed by Half-Life coming out like a month later, so it was lost in the ether for a long time…The name of the game is CHEESE. The humour is ridiculous and extremely 90s action movie, similar to stuff like Duke Nukem. There’s also the stuff with Elexis Sinclaire, who, uhhhhh… I know she was supposed to be sexy, and she probably was back in the 90s, but she just freaked me out lololol. Pretty good villain though, contributed to the camp a lot. It has a really stupid ending though. LIKE, JUST SHOOT HER?!?! SHE’S RIGHT THERE!!!!
The SiN movie is… confusing. It’s WAY different from the game— like, there’s no cheese. This movie is lactose intolerant. There is no cheese whatsoever. It takes itself so seriously it was actually insane, I thought I was watching the wrong movie. For one, they KILL JC immediately, and I liked JC!!! I know I’m in the minority when I say that, and he DEFINITELY was super obnoxious sometimes but I thought he was okay!!! What’s even weirder, though, is that they immediately replace JC with his sister… also named JC. ?!?!?!?! Did they just need bewbz?!?!?! lol?!?! They already had that with Elexis!!!
I’m not an animator, but I have a friend who is, so I’m pretty familiar with the amount of work that goes into every frame of animation. From a technical perspective, it’s a really good looking movie, with interesting colour palettes and framing shots. There’s this really cool scene where a mutant gets impaled on a spike and the background is completely red, and then it explodes and blood goes everywhere. Really cool stuff!!
The problem is that it’s a lot more style over substance. SiN, the game, doesn’t have a super advanced plot (the story kind of sucks tbh), because it’s supported by fun but hard gameplay and, of course, the CHEESE. The movie, meanwhile, is somewhat supported by the really good animation… but the plot was insanely confusing!!! I’m already pretty familiar with anime tropes, so I was able to suspend my disbelief a lot more than Civvie did back when he watched it (love you Civvie) but I was still so confused?!?!
The dub also apparently changed some stuff from the original version in a way that made the movie even more confusing than the original version!!!! For one, the bullets aren’t a cure for the mutants, but causes rapid cancer cell growth in them to kill them. Elexis had no part in making Blade a cyborg (sidenote: Blade a cyborg? lol. It makes sense in justifying why he could do all that crazy stuff tho, I can rock with it), and he foreshadows stuff like his mechanical ear earlier on in the story before it comes up.
It was still a better adaptation than the live-action DOOM movie, tho. Jackie tells me that the best video game movie is the Professor Layton movie, but I don’t play puzzle games or visual novels very much.
In the end, I didn’t hate the movie!! The dub, even if it made the story more confusing, had really good vocal performances and I really enjoyed the animations. LOVED the explosions, and there was a ton of gore. If you go in expecting it to be 1:1 to the game, you’re gonna be disappointed. But if you go in not looking for the typical cheese and keep an open mind, and also uhhh don’t worry too much about the plot, it’s a pretty good movie!! I give it a 6.9/10.