31 Days of Halloween - Day 15 - Movie

A pair of scientists and specialized soldiers find themselves battling a winged creature out of Thai folklore in Garuda (2004).

If you make a movie featuring a creature out of mythology I'm pretty likely to want to watch it. Most times I end up being disappointed. This was one of those times. The intentions were good here, the performances, while uneven, were ernest, but the film itself was way longer than it needed to be. It took too long for the story to get moving, and featured some really terrible science in a proposal that was meant to put the scientists together with the garuda. The garuda itself swung back and forth from looking pretty decent, to being really shoddily rendered in CGI, often depicted in a quality you'd have found in video games in the decade previous to when this film was made. Set mostly in a bunch of tunnels and corridors which kept the creature from doing much flying until the climax. The idea that these soldiers were trained specifically for fighting legendary creatures such as this one was nice, but not really explored. Instead of getting tight, suspenseful narrative we get a padded story where the mostly interchangeable soldiers are picked off one by one, and the garuda, while demonstrating intelligence does not seem to have much motivation other than killing everyone off one by one.