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Wii + Netflix = Bad Movie Marathon Madness

Posted by Mark | Filed under Reviews

I’ve been a fan and owner of Nintendo’s Wii con­sole for some time. When I heard a while back that Net­flix was going to start allow­ing peo­ple to stream movies to the Wii; I got very excited. I signed up for the ser­vice the first chance I got and waited eagerly for the disc to arrive. Eventually it hit my mail­box and I’ve been enjoy­ing it ever since.

The thing I hadn’t really thought about was how it would change what I watch. While usu­ally I don’t have con­nec­tion prob­lems with the ser­vice; it does hap­pen from time to time, so I watch more TV shows than movies. Also if I have a cou­ple of hours with noth­ing bet­ter planed or if the weather doesn’t coop­er­ate with what plans I do have, I can quickly choose to watch most any­thing from my queue. And usu­ally what I choose to watch is one of those movies.

You know what I mean. They’re that class of movie that looked inter­est­ing enough that you were kinda/sorta want­ing to see it, but not inter­est­ing enough that you’d actu­ally be will­ing to part with cold, hard cash to watch it at the the­ater. Tonight’s case in point, Ech­e­lon Con­spir­acy. Our main char­ac­ter of the film receives a mys­te­ri­ous cell­phone that saves his life and starts to make him rich via well timed text mes­sages. Only the casino he’s at notices and gets upset, worse the FBI gets involved (enough though said casino is in Prague, well out­side their juris­dic­tion). Hijinks ensue, most of which appear to be either out­right stolen from other movies or at the very least heav­ily inspired by them¹.

Was this a good movie? Good lord, no. Was it an enter­tain­ing way to kill a warm sum­mer night? Heck yeah. Does it make me won­der if the instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion of stream­ing movies via Wii+Netflix is ruin­ing my already ques­tion­able test in good cin­ema? Hmm.…

¹ My best exam­ple of this is the end­ing, so I’ve changed the text color here to hide it, to avoid spoil­ers. If you want to see the exam­ple select all text on this page. The end­ing was very much play­ing off of War Games.

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