Movie Reviews 2.0

Prometheus was the biggest load of horse sh*t I've seen in a while.

The acting of many of the characters was abysmal, especially Noomi and the geology bloke. Comicly, epicly bad.
The script was... I can't describe mishandled it was. *Nothing* was left to subtlely. And the amount of extraenous infomation that there was absolutely no need for boarded on laughable.

Example:

"Is that one of those super duper surgery bay thingys..."
[So now we know that there's gonna be surgery done at some point, thanks for removing that tension]
"...and only 12 of them were made, ever"
[and... why did we need to know this piece of information? To show how rich the people who put together the mission are? It's a multi-trillion dollar flight across the galaxy, we get that fact (and we don't care)]

There are TONS of script extensions like this. 50% of it could have been removed, and not negatively affected the movie. Another 25% needed to be made much slicker to fit an AAA movie. 25% was on par. 0% of the dialogue approached interesting or witty.

A trillion dollar romp across half the galaxy and most of the crew hadn't met each other before hand? This wasn't a bus. It was a life or death mission into the unknown, taking a day or two before hand to say "Hi", pretty fricking vital me thinks.

Why did no one care about stuff going on around them? Some staggers into your room naked, covered in blood, with a massive wound, and no one says A THING?!

The mural wasn't explained. The statue wasn't explained. Why the canisters are stood up in front of the head in a cave when the rest of the cannisters were stacked away wasn't explained. And you know why? Because all they were there for was to make it look like Aliens. There was no logical point to most of what happened.

I took the first guy effectively killing himself to be some sort of engineer terrorist, a lone fighter, seeding life where he shouldn't have done. This was pretty much the only reason I could see for them wanting to kill us. But the extended version seems to show lots of other engy's with him, guiding him towards it, like some sort of ritual. This changes the whole meaning of the film for me, and suggests that Ridley didn't know WTF story he was making. And it shows.

If there was ever a "paycheque movie" for Ridley it was Prometheus. He doesn't seem to have checked the script over and it would seem monkeys edited it, it feels like half the movie was cut out, not that this would make it any better. If I was given $200mil to make a movie loosely based on my 30 yr old highly loved work, I'd read the script at least once before shooting, and I'd be there every step of the way when editing.

I went to the IMAX to see the film, at 00.01am the first night/day. At the end, there was *total* silence. I've never experienced that before. And the theater emptied *fast*, I'm honestly not sure people hadn't walked out before the end.

In an effort not to make this too negatively... it was... er, very pretty. Not exactly the visual tour de force others seem to think it was, but on par with the better films around atm. Fassbender did a good, but somehow very expected, job, and Theron was OK as Mrs Stoic. The rest of the actors need more lessons.

I *refuse* to read more into the story than was on screen. It's not *our* job to make up the story, it's the writer/director that's supposed to do that. They failed massively.

PS. I don't really care if this is an Alien prequel, BUT, I think at some point it was supposed to be, given how 10 minutes before the end, almost ALL of the "ingredients" for the start of Alien were there. Crashed ship, alien with alien inside, warning message beacon. Again, I just feel this shows that Ridley was "making it up" as he went along, which has lead to this mess of a film.
 
Script was rewritten after Guy Pearce was already on board, because in Spaith's version the young Weyland made appearances too. So Lindelof was rewriting almost at the same time the filming was on.

We can't tell if Scott wanted a rewrite, or if it was Fox - but I suspect the later. Scott had no choice but to play along and then do all the marketing talk and interview stuff as well.
 
I mean, another Spiderman reboot? It's only 5 minutes since the Sam Raimi films which weren't bad (well, apart from the third one).
My suspicion on this one is that Marvel IP that was licensed out to other studios prior to Marvel creating their own studio (and then subsequently bought by Disney) has an expiration clause, i.e. if the IP isn't used by the licensee for a certain period then that studio loses the license. Spiderman reboot is too early, and I think Sony probably even know that, but they want to keep hold of the IP for now.
 
"...and only 12 of them were made, ever"
[and... why did we need to know this piece of information? To show how rich the people who put together the mission are? It's a multi-trillion dollar flight across the galaxy, we get that fact (and we don't care)]
To help explain why this existed here, prior to the Alien timeframe?
 
Script was rewritten after Guy Pearce was already on board, because in Spaith's version the young Weyland made appearances too. So Lindelof was rewriting almost at the same time the filming was on.
Apparently there were scenes of the young Weyland shot. Expectation is that they will be in the "directors cut" disc editions.
 
Indie Game: The Movie - Solid movie. Definitely gives you a good sense of the life for these highly-stressed people making your favourite "indie" titles.


Jeff Who Lives At Home - I kind of hated this movie.


21 Jump Street - I was surprised it didn't bomb. It actually made a lot of money. I watched it, and I'm still surprised it didn't bomb. WTF?
 
To help explain why this existed here, prior to the Alien timeframe?

And that they wouldn't be able to make more in the decades between the two films?

There was a crap load of funky technology that wasn't seemingly available in Alien, decades later. But that's another bugbear (similar to the "new" Starwars movies) that I'm willing to overlook.

I don't think this explaination is the reason though, as I can point to many many many more examples of this kind of over-verbose-ness that just isn't neccessary. If your explaination was the reason, there would be less other incidents. But there are tons. It's plainly just veyr very bad writing.
 
Regarding Prometheus, the complaints I don't understand are the ones related to "unanswered questions." Alien had some big questions that weren't answered, but nobody cared. Why did the spacecraft have a wackload of Alien eggs on board, neatly filed in rows. At that point in the series, you didn't know anything about Alien Queens, so you wouldn't think about whether there was or wasn't a Queen on board. Who were the mysterious creatures that were possibly transporting the eggs? Even now, it's not clear whether the eggs on that ship were transport or not. Everybody watched the movie, and nobody cared that those questions were not answered. It didn't matter. Sometimes the mystery is good. Prometheus, to me, made the mistake of maybe showing too much in attempting half answers. At the same time, most of what it didn't answer was not that big deal. Good writing is not necessarily clearly explaining everything. I have other problems with the movie though.
 
Hugo. 6/10. Liked it but it moved REALLY slow. The pacing was the biggest issue with it. That that Paris being filled with UK'ers.

Drive. 4/10. I'm giving it a 4 because they had the best audio for gunshots I've heard in a movie in a long time.

Underworld: Evolution. 4/10. I actually like the series but this was flat out generic.
 
The wonks who run Hollywood are too scared to risk producing something particularly new and instead do the old tried and tested sequel after sequel and remake after remake.
I can stand sequels ... it's the remakes and prequels which get my goat, I blame it on the increasingly large ego (and allowances thereof) of writers.

I wish they'd just do stuff like Spider-Man like James bond, very loose continuity and just change the actors every couple of movies ... I'm sick of origin stories (of course James Bond fucking did this too but at least it was a rare event). Also why the fuck change the origin story of Spider-Man ... with great power comes great thirst for vigilante justice? Ugh ... not-spider-man.
 
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Alien had some big questions that weren't answered, but nobody cared.

Why did the spacecraft have a wackload of Alien eggs on board, neatly filed in rows.
Who were the mysterious creatures that were possibly transporting the eggs?

Everybody watched the movie, and nobody cared that those questions were not answered

That is because those questions had very little relevance to the plot, which was about escaping from the creature and not exploring its origins. And that plot had a beginning, a middle, and a satisfying ending too.

On the other hand the very promise of Prometheus was that it will answer these questions.
Yet it failed to explain the creature's nature or how it was created (remember, there's a mural on the wall of the large chamber depicting it, so the thing coming out of the engineer in the final shot is not the first one - although I still have to wonder why it looks so different...). It also managed to erode the mystery of the space jockey by turning it into a large human in a funny spacesuit. The plot was a mess, almost nothing makes any sense and many of the important elements are also left unexplained, like the black liquid or the change in the engineer's look and spaceships between the first scene and the present time.
Sure, we can try to come up with explanations - but we already had 33 years of it, and some 120 million dollars later we're still at that point, which is highly unsatisfying.

And on top of it all, the writing is terrible, full of basic mistakes in characterization, consistency, logic, pacing; key scenes are rushed while others could be cut without any consequences.
 
That is because those questions had very little relevance to the plot, which was about escaping from the creature and not exploring its origins. And that plot had a beginning, a middle, and a satisfying ending too.

On the other hand the very promise of Prometheus was that it will answer these questions.

...

Did it promise that?

I don't think the nature of the black goo, the mural, the statue or any of that is important to the story.
 
Now a Judge Dredd remake would be worthwhile. Wonder if he will keep his helmet on this time instead of the Stallone version where he barely wore it?

That said, stylistically, the Stallone film looked more true to the comic books than the remake.

Don't have high hopes for this one, but you never know, I suppose.
 
Fighting his way up a tower filled with crackheads ... really that's the next Judge Dredd movie?

Don't get me wrong, I like B-movie action flicks, but I don't think the plot makes the best use of the source material.
 
HEven the special effects look remarkably good despite their age due to the misty-foggy nature of the movie, and could look even better if touched up using modern compositing technology - assuming all the original source film has been preserved of course but I'm not sure that's strictly neccessary. Sometimes the "life" and "texture" of the visuals is lost when such things are re-done in the modern era. It starts looking uncanny valley-like instead, not matching the rest of the movie. Oh well... *shrug*

In Ridley Scott's 2007 Final Cut of Blade Runner they digitally removed the cables from the flying cars. It made them more believable.
 
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"Is that one of those super duper surgery bay thingys..."
[So now we know that there's gonna be surgery done at some point, thanks for removing that tension]
"...and only 12 of them were made, ever"
[and... why did we need to know this piece of information? To show how rich the people who put together the mission are? It's a multi-trillion dollar flight across the galaxy, we get that fact (and we don't care)]
It showed the expedition had wealthy backing and was one of the early hints that Weyland was aboard.

A trillion dollar romp across half the galaxy and most of the crew hadn't met each other before hand? This wasn't a bus. It was a life or death mission into the unknown, taking a day or two before hand to say "Hi", pretty fricking vital me thinks.

Quite often in expeditions the crew who man the ship are quite separate from the expedition personnel and often aren't introduced much before hand. I don't see this as such a huge issue.

Why did no one care about stuff going on around them? Some staggers into your room naked, covered in blood, with a massive wound, and no one says A THING?!

Given that one of the people there was David who already knew what was going on with her and the other attendant was the flight surgeon whom she brained with an oxygen bottle in the dash for the auto-doc. They didn't need to ask.

The mural wasn't explained. The statue wasn't explained. Why the canisters are stood up in front of the head in a cave when the rest of the cannisters were stacked away wasn't explained. And you know why? Because all they were there for was to make it look like Aliens. There was no logical point to most of what happened.

The stacked cannisters were on the alien ship stored in the same kind of chamber as the eggs in the original alien. This chamber, during the original film production was referred to as the bomb bay. Just a thought but you might store the weapons slightly differently in the mechanism designed for deploying them than you do in the facility that is making them.

I took the first guy effectively killing himself to be some sort of engineer terrorist, a lone fighter, seeding life where he shouldn't have done. This was pretty much the only reason I could see for them wanting to kill us. But the extended version seems to show lots of other engy's with him, guiding him towards it, like some sort of ritual. This changes the whole meaning of the film for me, and suggests that Ridley didn't know WTF story he was making. And it shows.

The film is set at christmas, the crew explicitly note that the alien they revive has been in stasis for about 2000 years. And we have a healthy theme running through the film of death and rebirth with heavy sacrifice involved in that. Now I ask you what supposedly happened around 2000 years ago that might have got the aliens steamed with us and also involved death, rebirth and sacrifice?

If there was ever a "paycheque movie" for Ridley it was Prometheus. He doesn't seem to have checked the script over and it would seem monkeys edited it, it feels like half the movie was cut out, not that this would make it any better. If I was given $200mil to make a movie loosely based on my 30 yr old highly loved work, I'd read the script at least once before shooting, and I'd be there every step of the way when editing.

You are having fun with the hyperbole. I have issues with the script, mostly in how the main characters do very stupid things repeatedly - which is completely the opposite of the first film where everyone there behaved pretty intelligently and still got into trouble.

I *refuse* to read more into the story than was on screen. It's not *our* job to make up the story, it's the writer/director that's supposed to do that. They failed massively.

You aren't just refusing to read more into the story you are also missing large details which they did put in there.

PS. I don't really care if this is an Alien prequel, BUT, I think at some point it was supposed to be, given how 10 minutes before the end, almost ALL of the "ingredients" for the start of Alien were there. Crashed ship, alien with alien inside, warning message beacon. Again, I just feel this shows that Ridley was "making it up" as he went along, which has lead to this mess of a film.

Except that you miss the fact that Alien is set on LV426, Prometheus is on LV223 - completely different planets. Ridley has been on record as saying it isn't a direct prequel but an exploration of what the space jockeys were about, which it is.

By all means criticise Prometheus but please actually do so about valid points.
 
Dredd trailer:
Fucking hell.

I did NOT just see that!

Dredd vs. war on drugs, who the SHIT wrote that script? Fifty years in the cubes for him! And who cast Carl Urban as Dredd, that's the dumbest thing I ever saw. And those uniforms, don't get me started. Why do they reinvent everything in movies for no good reason? Either stay true to the concept, or if you think it's too stupid then don't do it at all!

When there's SO much great, great source material to pick from, why did they do this? Holy crap. And Mega City One isn't even recognizable here. It's supposed to be a DENSE city, this just looks stupid. Like everything else about this movie. The complete abomination that was the Stallone version actually managed to be the more true version, I would not have thought it possible.
 
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