Movie Reviews 2.0

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Yeah, that's what I thought about the pupils, my father had to use some many years ago because of a New Year's Eve accident.

As for borrowing from other movies or novels,

Spoiler

the approach to the Tet was even visually just far too similar to Independence day, not to mention the bomb and the sudden ID check by the defenses...

Not that I don't like the movie, but they really should have tried a little harder...

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At least they didn't hack the alien mothership with a mac laptop and a wireless card!

It's not like the

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giant alien mothership full of aliens who travel around the galaxy stripping planets of their resources isn't already a sci-fi staple used in books before Independence Day. The two motherships did look completely different. One was saucer shaped, and one is a upside down pyramid.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I had those drops that make your pupils dilate, and the nurse gave me a ton of them because my pupils wouldnt enlarge in the darkness (because of the morphine) I was fine untill I went out into the sunshine and bloody hell I couldnt see, it was like being snowblind

You're supposed to wear sunglasses out when you are using those drops. As you can't close your pupils to cut down on the light entering your eye, you can actually damage your retinas going out on a bright day.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

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At least they didn't hack the alien mothership with a mac laptop and a wireless card!

Then I would have walked out.

It's not like the

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The two motherships did look completely different. One was saucer shaped, and one is a upside down pyramid.

Both had

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- a thick outer shell with a huge corridor 'airlock'
- a gigantic transit area between the outer shell, the mid part and the inner sanctum
- an army in the middle area
- an unexpected security check somewhere along the way
- a nuclear bomb smuggled in undetected on the intruding ship
- practically the same camera angles, travel speed and mood
- one could argue that the clean geometrical shape is another common concept

Far too much similarity IMHO to be just coincidence. There are many possible ways to stage such a sequence and this level of similarity had to be intentional. They might have meant it to be an homage though...

Oh and

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both the drones and Sally had HAL's eyes

 

[Gubbi]

Enjoyed Oblivion, very pretty movie, good acting and interesting character development. A solid 6/10.

The premise is broken

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Tet is here to refuel hydrogen, the most common substance in the universe. It goes out of its way to blow the moon and struggle with surviving humans instead of just glassing the surface of the earth, which would have been faster and required less energy).

Minor quibs

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Tom's spacecraft has a tail rotor.
The Odyssey flight recorder records everything going on in the command module, but is recovered from the ejected hibernation module
The Odyssey has real time radio communication with the earth command center even though radio signals to Saturn, at 10 AU, has a round trip time on the order of three hours.
The Tet expend time and energy cloning humans for machine maintenance.

Cheers

 

[MfA]

The main criticism was that it was taking plot points from a selection of movies whilst ignoring the fact that these films were themselves highly derivative. How the same reviewer could give Avatar 5/5, I'll never know.

The modern man falls in with natives story from Avatar hadn't been done for a while and certainly not in a scifi setting ... the most central premise/twist used here came from a scifi movie a mere 4 years old.

I wonder if this script was written by a committee of office weasels or if the original writer was just such a hack.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

The modern man falls in with natives story from Avatar hadn't been done for a while and certainly not in a scifi setting ... the most central premise/twist used here came from a scifi movie a mere 4 years old.

I wonder if this script was written by a committee of office weasels or if the original writer was just such a hack.

Except Oblivion was originally done as a comic book in 2009. The comic never came to fruition, but there is a book of concept art that became the film and film treatment.

 

[MfA]

Your link doesn't really back up your assertion ... and the little text there is on those pages don't really say anything about the plot. He certainly had the visuals in his head at the time, but what there was of the story we can only guess. It seems my guess is more cynical than yours.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Your link doesn't really back up your assertion ... and the little text there is on those pages don't really say anything about the plot. He certainly had the visuals in his head at the time, but what there was of the story we can only guess. It seems my guess is more cynical than yours.

It takes a long time to get a big budget movie off the ground.

Empire Magazine reported writer/director Joseph Kosinski saying;

“It was just a stage in the project. The writers’ strike occurred in 2007 so I had a treatment for a film but I had no way to actually write it. It couldn’t be written by anyone in the guild so the partnership with Radical Comics allowed me to continue working on the story by developing a series of images and continuing to refine the story more over a period of years.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Yeah and then they were handing out papers at Comic Con and one found its way to Cruise; and his agent called Kosinsky the next day to start the movie.

 

[MfA]

It takes a long time to get a big budget movie off the ground.

But a very short time to put crap on paper.

 

[Mize]

The dude on NPR gave Oblivion a great review calling it "scifi for adults" and "the longest episode of The Twilight Zone ever made."

 

[NRP]

Oblivion was better than I expected it to be.

 

[London Geezer]

Just for you LB

I'm not a fudge packer!!!

 

[John Reynolds]

Are you saying you don't do the packing, that someone else does it for you?

 

[London Geezer]

Are you saying you don't do the packing, that someone else does it for you?

Delegate, my dear. Always delegate.

 

[Grall]

Delegate your rear? Ooh, sounds naughty/nasty!

 

[zed]

Saw oblivion 5/10 decent if you ignore all the implausability( but hey its SciFi). Good to know they're going to titian in 4 years time. Here's me thinking NASA isn't high priority. The major failings in film was the writing and the pacing.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Iron Man 3 is, I'd say, somewhere between 1 and 2... probably closer to the first one.
Lots of spectacle especially near the end, too bad I was spoiled a little by the Weta talk on it at FMX.

 

[Lightman]

Iron Man 3 is, I'd say, somewhere between 1 and 2... probably closer to the first one.
Lots of spectacle especially near the end, too bad I was spoiled a little by the Weta talk on it at FMX.

Do you mean between 1 and 2 on the scale to 10, or do you mean between Iron Man 1 and Iron Man 2 . I hope the latter!

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Of course the latter, I really liked the first movie and it was probably the main drive behind the success of the other Marvel movies and of course Avengers too. The second one wasn't that good though, good enough to watch but nothing to remember.