Serenity (** warning: spoilers ahead! **)

Oh my God, Equilibrium was all but unwatchable. Christian Bale is cool and all, and he almost made it tolerable (which is a testament to Christian Bale's greatness and Equilibrium's complete banality in all other respects), but dear God. The meetings before production probably went like this:

"We need to rip off the Matrix! That crazy action is selling!"
"So then we need another totalitarian society... Hey, let's mix 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451!"
"Awesome! And then, we'll give it to a director who will make music video directors look like Kurosawa with their attention spans!"

Seriously. How many .15-second cuts can you have before you say, "WHOA. This SUCKS." No one has ever been able to tell me what happens in any of those action scenes besides, "He hits a lot of guys." Not, "He hits guy A, kicks guy B," and so on, like you SHOULD be able to do in any semi-decent action movie. Just, "He hits people, and they die."

Gaaaaaaah. Take a music video (e.g., the unbelievably comedic System of a Down video "B.Y.O.B."), mix with 50-year-old dystopian fiction, and then snort lots and lots of speed. Voila! Equilibrium. Seriously, did that movie get anything right besides Christian Bale? It didn't look like anything besides Generic Dystopian Future, it had the plot of Slightly More Generic Dystopian Future, and the direction was totally Uwe Boll-level inept.
 
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Heh, and I just had a former buddy/co-worker call yesterday for the first time in months and during the course of the conversation he raved about this movie called Equilibrium that I'd never heard of before.
 
i think a lot of you are expecting too much from this movie. i think the budget the studio put into this movie should give everyone an indication of what the studio thinks of how well this movie will do. $40million is chump change for a scifi movie. when the matrix was given a budget of $90million it was considered modest and the wachowski bros. had to exclude a few visual effects they had wanted(which we later saw in the $300million budget sequels such as that anime influenced gun flare effect when trinity is falling from the building).
 
Tinkerbell will live if you'll just stop with the negative waves, Moriarity!

Whoa, Peter Pan and Kelly's Heroes. . .
 
vazel said:
i think a lot of you are expecting too much from this movie. i think the budget the studio put into this movie should give everyone an indication of how well this movie will do. $40million is chump change for a scifi movie. when the matrix was given a budget of $90million it was considered modest and the wachowski bros. had to exclude a few visual effects they had wanted(which we later saw in the $300million budget sequels such as that anime influenced gun flare effect when trinity is falling from the building).
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From Equilibrium? The problems I had with it have NOTHING to do with the budget. There were some big-budget set pieces, but it had the art direction of either a fourteen-year-old emo kid or an id art designer. For example, Christian Bale stops taking his drugs. The drugs that "prevent him from feeling," whatever the hell that means. Does the world look or sound different? No. Are the sets more detailed, or things that didn't appear before suddenly present? Course not. It's exactly the same. Except he can "feel."

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!

Once again, it's a action movie set in a future world that passes as science-fiction these days. There was no coherent thought at all in terms of an idea, except for something along the philosophical lines of "Thinking is good." Then, it has the gall to be a bad action movie. I'm not asking for Enter the Dragon or anything, just something that isn't going to give me a seizure.
 
geo said:
I think north of $150m in NA, $30+ opening week (thru Sunday). There's a HUNGER out there for this movie. I've been going to s-f cons this summer folks, and I tell you true.

If it is as good as I hope it is, we'll probably go twice.
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Im hoping those numbers happen. Fox will drool and a dozen execs will jump at suggesting first that the series should be brought back.

epic
 
The Baron said:
From Equilibrium? The problems I had with it have NOTHING to do with the budget. There were some big-budget set pieces, but it had the art direction of either a fourteen-year-old emo kid or an id art designer. For example, Christian Bale stops taking his drugs. The drugs that "prevent him from feeling," whatever the hell that means. Does the world look or sound different? No. Are the sets more detailed, or things that didn't appear before suddenly present? Course not. It's exactly the same. Except he can "feel."

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!

Once again, it's a action movie set in a future world that passes as science-fiction these days. There was no coherent thought at all in terms of an idea, except for something along the philosophical lines of "Thinking is good." Then, it has the gall to be a bad action movie. I'm not asking for Enter the Dragon or anything, just something that isn't going to give me a seizure.
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uh... wth are you talking about? we seem to be on different wavelengths. i was referring to firefly.

and equlibrium had a budget of $20million. so yea, the studio didn't think it would be a blockbuster to begin with.
 
epicstruggle said:
No, from Serenity.
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Oh. Well, it should do well. It's not like it has a lot of competition at the moment, for example (Into the Blue? Pffffffft.). Combine with large existing fanbase, and yeah, it could do $30-40 mil in North America easy.
 
you people are so cute. you actually think serenity will do better than into the blue? INTO THE BLUE IS A JESSICA ALBA MOVIE!!! look at the bigger picture beyond the niche of geeks and ******s.

sorry, don't mean to be the spoilsport, i'll shut up now. :cool:

edit: rofl fan*boy is censored? haha!
 
www
vazel said:
you people are so cute. you actually think serenity will do better than into the blue? INTO THE BLUE IS A JESSICA ALBA MOVIE!!! look at the bigger picture beyond the niche of geeks and ******s.

sorry, don't mean to be the spoilsport, i'll shut up now. :cool:

edit: rofl fan*boy is censored? haha!
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Remember Honey? Yeah.
 
The Baron said:
Oh. Well, it should do well. It's not like it has a lot of competition at the moment, for example (Into the Blue? Pffffffft.).
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-VS-

COMP.jpg
 
BTW....don't look for Fox to have any say in Firefly/Serenity. Now owned by Universal. There is no chance for it to come back on television. It's movies or nothing. Besides, you really think Joss is going to have anything to do with Fox after they way they ended Angel and Firefly?
 
The Baron said:
I'm not going to argue with that; most of it is awful. Just because the rest of it is bad doesn't make Firefly the Sci-Fi Messiah or anything, though. My real problem with it is that it had none of the more subtle thematic elements that make good sci-fi good sci-fi as opposed to "other genre in space," plus there were a few bad episodes.


Kay, but still, that doesn't make it good. First season B5 was pretty terrible, but it fulfilled a role in the grand five-season scheme of things. If you take away the rest of the show, first season B5 is totally forgettable. What's different about Firefly except that it's slightly less forgettable (in my mind, at least)?

I mean, I've seen two great sci-fi shows in the past year--new Doctor Who and BSG--and yet Firefly is the supposed savior of sci-fi? New Doctor Who was pretty consistent, way more interesting than Firefly, and is pretty much ignored (although that's probably due to its very limited viewing audience). BSG kicks the snot out of both of them (Edward James Olmos > *). I realize I'm judging it on the content of what is instead of what could have been (like most Firefly fans seem to do), and I know Joss Whedon's stuff is always full of those thematic undertones that were noticeably lacking from Firefly... but in those fourteen episodes, what exactly is there besides some slightly different (although not too much) characters, a Western-meets-Star Trek-meets-Blade Runner setting, and the plot of a Western in space?
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Wow, I've got to completely disagree here.
The new BSG was kinda "meh", ESPECIALLY compared to firefly.
Its only gotten good recently (season 2 eps 8,9,10, but especailly 8). Before that it was a "meh" with the addition that there was no other sci-fi to watch.
 
The Baron said:
Oh my God, Equilibrium was all but unwatchable. Christian Bale is cool and all, and he almost made it tolerable (which is a testament to Christian Bale's greatness and Equilibrium's complete banality in all other respects), but dear God. The meetings before production probably went like this:

"We need to rip off the Matrix! That crazy action is selling!"
"So then we need another totalitarian society... Hey, let's mix 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451!"
"Awesome! And then, we'll give it to a director who will make music video directors look like Kurosawa with their attention spans!"

Seriously. How many .15-second cuts can you have before you say, "WHOA. This SUCKS." No one has ever been able to tell me what happens in any of those action scenes besides, "He hits a lot of guys." Not, "He hits guy A, kicks guy B," and so on, like you SHOULD be able to do in any semi-decent action movie. Just, "He hits people, and they die."

Gaaaaaaah. Take a music video (e.g., the unbelievably comedic System of a Down video "B.Y.O.B."), mix with 50-year-old dystopian fiction, and then snort lots and lots of speed. Voila! Equilibrium. Seriously, did that movie get anything right besides Christian Bale? It didn't look like anything besides Generic Dystopian Future, it had the plot of Slightly More Generic Dystopian Future, and the direction was totally Uwe Boll-level inept.
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Huh.
Again, I think you couldn't be more wrong.
The action scenes were kick-ass, imo, and despite its huge wank factor, I like the whole "gun-kata" thing.
And I could describe the action scenes in the way you'd want.
Maybe your old slow eyes can't keep up!
 
I immensely enjoyed Equilibrium yet I also yearned to rewrite the screenplay. :smile:

I would have liked to seen the moral dilema as less black and white, at least initially. A scene or two showing the clerics busting clubs run by an exploitive element that catered to a clientele that was actually a bit decadent and depraved would have made the point.

A bigger budget would have helped. IIRC the one they had was relatively modest.
 
I shall not be reading this topic tomorrow for three simple reasons:

1). I hate to spew jealous dribble all over my monitor. And I'm out of those monitor wipes thingies.

2). I want my Saturday experience to be unsullied by you lot's perceptions.

3). My eyeballs might inadvertently encounter a spoiler and I would be crushed/enraged.

So, see ya back here Saturday afternoon.
 
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