Damnation Alley

This post-apo has a great opening, in which we see the nuclear war unleashed, a great Goldsmith score (which is why I watched Damnation Alley in the first place), and then one or two interesting scenes worth watching. But most of the rest of the time it's really boring. It gets two below-average stars. (05.10.2011)

The talk about how Damnation Alley is a great cult sci-fi flick with souped-up effects that only languishes in the shadow of Star Wars, which was released only a few months before by the same studio, is very misleading. The creative brilliance of George Lucas and the revolutionary nature of his special effects are entirely evident when set side by side with Damnation Alley. If the sources on IMDb can be believed, even Star Wars cost less to make than Damnation Alley, where apparently a large part of the budget went into the production of fully functional futuristic vehicles, which the film doesn’t use as an attraction at all, and we only learn about the ingenuity of their construction from bonus interviews, but not from the film itself. Besides the rather poor and ridiculous visual effects, which are limited to re-colouring the sky in whole shots, the film’s fatal weakness is it’s mediocre screenplay and its undramatic execution in episodic sequences, which are basically interchangeable and have no meaning in the story as a whole. When we add to that characters who have no personality at all, then it’s really no wonder that Damnation Alley and its outdated effects didn’t hold up in comparison with Star Wars. But what’s really surprising is the existence of a handful of avowed fans who swear by this film. (20.04.2014)