Aftershock

Aftershock

Nicolas Lopez’s “Aftershock” left me with my emotions freely ranged. Just like a re-center movie to the “Evil Dead” remake, I was fidgeting back and forth during the movie but once I came out of the theater, a totally different thought came to me: that was dumb. Please excuse this lame and childish word, it is the first word that I instantly thought. To put it more eloquently, “Aftershock” faced the challenges of a self-proclaims the author as a genre and at the end produced unnecessary storytelling with any character development.

“Aftershock” describes the events in the lives of six friends who travel to Chile. Pollo, Ariel, and Gringo (Eli Roth) join other raves and parties in quite a number of places. They are also able to fit in a winetasting session where it becomes clear that Pollo and Gringo have never met before and are merely acquaintances to Ariel. And as if there are a million other ‘I remembers’ and ‘You know what’s?’ in the script, it brings me to my first point of the criticism.

This film makes a futile effort not just to turn people into a group, but to make them appealing to us the audience. Beat after beat, we watch the three men try and out-joke gaudily and undergo the hideous motions of attempting gentle dance moves that are guaranteed to antagonize anyone in the vicinity. What surprises many, or maybe just shocked me, was the fact that the filmmakers actually think these people are liked in the first place.

Pollo uses his arrogance to try and teach Ariel and Gringo in confidence. Gringo and Ariel are also joined by three new women Irina, Kylie and her half sister Monica who run into Pollo after apparently having a lovely time with him the night before. Of course, the fact that Pollo can charm anyone with his arrogance means he can succeed with one liner and a shrug is outrageous. I mean sure guys like ugly women but couldn’t they at least pick someone who can tell a joke?

Here comes the second issue, I started looking through my mobile since it started to feel like I was watching a horror film. While the genre is horror thriller there is an additional element one cannot get on moment for the first forty minutes of a film that calls itself a ‘classic’ film. It also seems to me that there are stories of uncountable idiots who planned to make something average and then decided to take their film in a very different direction in the second half and that direction was comedy.

In the end, the earthquake arrives and it is time to witness the terror. There needs to be character development at some point in the story, but this time there was hardly any and instead, the filmmakers decided to shove an unhealthy amount of gore down the viewer’s throat in a span of thirty minutes. There are so many things introduced in such speed that they become major plot points by the end that everything just felt so random.

This isn’t really a spoiler, but the first half’s focus on pacing is absent in the second act as well. There did appear to be some sort of Near Evil Dead 2 moment in there, but only ‘near’ it. I would say this is because I simply wanted to see that film instead. The variety of death scenes present does relieve at least some of the suspense, but in the end, it was like watching intriguing and suspenseful horror but rather, watching Jason controlling tectonic plates to crush faceless party-goers in massacre number eleven.

This was Nicolas Lopez’s first wide release and his first horror movie. Mostly having directed romantic comedies, his lack of experience in the horror genre was apparent throughout “Aftershock”. Lopez could have used further editing to guide him on how to pace and build the tension when portraying the remorseless wrath of natural events.

Another of the basic ways for coming up with characters is through the creation of their individual traits, objectives or something which actors will reproduce in the film. Lopez opted to just have them on set, enrolled in a few catchy lines and choreographed a few moves. The big pull for “Aftershock” came from director Eli Roth starring and presenting the film. To be frank, it would have been the film where no attention was placed if Eli Roth were not involved in any capacity.

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