Yes, but then you don't have a popcorn movie anymore, and audiences would desert this extremely boring, overly long movie in droves, and with good reason. No Deep Space Nine episode ever took place solely inside Quark's bar, and those episodes were only about 42 minutes long, including main titles and end credits.
Star Wars Episode VII cast announced
- Thread starter Kaotik
- Start date
OK, it's not too difficult to explain:
Alien: Tense, dramatic, very scary, very good. Good special effects (for the era). Good concept and plot.
Blade Runner: Fantastic movie, great characterisation and drama, good acting, great storyline, decent special effects (even without the ability to CGI anything you might possibly imagine).
Prometheus: Utterly shit, CGI effects-laden, incoherent nonsense.
It's kind of hard to believe that Ridley Scott was behind all of these movies and I can't help but think that Prometheus wouldn't have been such a mess if CGI had been more expensive and less easy to create.
Alien: Tense, dramatic, very scary, very good. Good special effects (for the era). Good concept and plot.
Blade Runner: Fantastic movie, great characterisation and drama, good acting, great storyline, decent special effects (even without the ability to CGI anything you might possibly imagine).
Prometheus: Utterly shit, CGI effects-laden, incoherent nonsense.
It's kind of hard to believe that Ridley Scott was behind all of these movies and I can't help but think that Prometheus wouldn't have been such a mess if CGI had been more expensive and less easy to create.
Blazkowicz
Legend
That makes me long for a good movie with Vikings and/or celtic or Celts vs Vikings.
The cultural setting is similar to LOTR stuff, only it involves wood, steel and leather. Not much place for CGI.. Wooden boats taking in huge waves is about it.
Movies with antic battles do use CGI or excessive computer use for huge battles, though (and camera flying out). So either you have to use a huge amount of live people as done in some old high-budget movies, or keep the battles decisive but low scale enough.
/edit : that's the second Hobbit movie
. I was not aware of it.
The cultural setting is similar to LOTR stuff, only it involves wood, steel and leather. Not much place for CGI.. Wooden boats taking in huge waves is about it.
Movies with antic battles do use CGI or excessive computer use for huge battles, though (and camera flying out). So either you have to use a huge amount of live people as done in some old high-budget movies, or keep the battles decisive but low scale enough.
/edit : that's the second Hobbit movie
. I was not aware of it.
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Blazkowicz
Legend
I absolutely hate that scene ...
I still find the first movie the better of them, despite the great voice acting from Cumberbatch.
The best thing to do with this new Star Wars franchise (yes ... I'm saying it), is basically to kill your own expectations so they are near zero. That way it can't possible disappoint.
Writer: Dan O'Bannon (Dark Star, Total Recall)
Writer: David Webb (Twelve monkeys, Unforgiven)
Writer: Damon Lindelof (Lost)
'Nuff said.
Cheers
Yeah it bummed me out. There are already plenty of action space movies. Star Trek missed its core and just kept the shiny bits to attract crowds. Well it worked.
Yeah I like Prometheus and all, but it definitely had issues tied to the writing that no amount of good directing coulda fixed, the biggest of which being just how fucking random David's actions were. If they'd been explained better...
The non-writing big issue being the lead actress. My god, that woman can't act in English. Maybe she's better in her native language but holy fuck she was terrible. Replace her with someone far better and you'd raise the score of the film by one point out of a ten point scale alone.
Anyway, as someone who has seen a fair bit of Abrams works without realizing he was behind them, and hating almost every single one of them(Regarding Henry is an excellent film), I honestly think these will be worse than the PT. As terrible as the PT is, I can't call it mindless. It tried very hard. Abrams' works are utterly mindless, and that is their downfall. They're shallow as hell.
Really, the man's writing is the stuff of Michael Bay films in terms of intelligence and depth. Hell, he wrote one.
Edit: To clarify what I mean by shallow... I mean it's writing that when you read a synopsis of the plot on Wiki, it don't sound so bad. Then you go and see the ultra fast dialogue that upon further inspection doesn't make a lot of sense, characters change their, well, character at the drop of a hat, throwaway lines abound, etc. If you look at the synopses of Bay films, they usually don't come across too bad. It's watching them that reveals the true horror(BTW, the least Baylike of all of Bay's film, Transformers? Guess who was on set throughout most of the shoot and gave suggestions all the time? I'll give you a hint: he directed Jaws).
This is how Abrams films come across to me, which is why I was sad when he got Star Trek, it's why I was sad when my fears were confirmed, and it's why I was fucking livid when he got his hands on Star Wars, and it's why if he directs that rumored Portal film I will end all that exists with my fury and rage(Okay, not really, I'll just be sad again).
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Not easy when you're given the most incoherent character in the history of cinema. Elizabeth Shaw holds doctorates in paleontology, archaeology and human mythology. All sciences dealing with prehistoric man and its belief systems (ie before modern religion).
You'd think a high calibre scientist like that would wouldn't try to fit observations into her personal world view (devout christian), - yet she does. The fundamental mechanism in science is doubt; If an observation doesn't fit your hypothesis, your hypothesis is wrong and is cast aside. Yet Shaw's mantra is "Because I choose to believe" (X-files, really?). I wanted to punch her in the face everytime she said that.
Then you have all the other cardboard characters (the comic book tatooed geologist being the most aggravating).
Finally the plot is a mess. Who's the villain ? The black ooze/fungus or the xeno-morph ? Throw in the giant Engineer for good measure. It is exactly like Lost, instead of providing answers, Lindelof pulls another rabbit from the hat everytime his plotlines runs out of gas/credibility, Deus ex machina ad nauseum.
The one redeeming quality this movie has is its cinematography.
Cheers
Well, Prometheus certainly looked pretty. Just a pity about everything else.
I suppose my thought process was that somebody of the calibre of Ridley Scott who has worked on so many good movies would recognise that the screenplay was a load of old cobblers and then be able to do something about it! I suppose that the reality is that even big 'names' in the industry tend to end up doing what they are told by the studios, especially when they are getting paid a bucketload of cash.
One of the biggest disappointments for me of late was Elysium. I thought District 9 was really excellent so for Blomkamp to follow that up with something as disappointing as Elysium was really sad.
I suppose my thought process was that somebody of the calibre of Ridley Scott who has worked on so many good movies would recognise that the screenplay was a load of old cobblers and then be able to do something about it! I suppose that the reality is that even big 'names' in the industry tend to end up doing what they are told by the studios, especially when they are getting paid a bucketload of cash.
One of the biggest disappointments for me of late was Elysium. I thought District 9 was really excellent so for Blomkamp to follow that up with something as disappointing as Elysium was really sad.
Honestly, I don't mind that the movie had no clear villain. The movie doesn't need one, I feel. What bugged me more is why the fuck didn't she kill the starfish like fucking thing she had to Caesarean out of herself, or more importantly, why did no one else think to go looking for the weird alien thing she had to cut out of herself otherwise she would have fucking died.
I mean really folks, I like the film but I was calling bullshit as soon as that happened.
It's certainly one of the most visually stunning movies ever made - of the visual effects genre. Other, more contemporary movies have certainly also had amazing cinematography, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes immediately to mind for example.
I'm afraid it's much worse than that, from watching the Making-Of featurettes on the blu-ray edition (or DVD, I would assume), it would appear Scott ad-libbed the script to Lindelof, ordering constant revisions and re-writes of scenes, pretty much dictating the story according to his own wishes/vision. ...Whatever the hell that might be. The end result was a load of tripe however, not hard to recognize that from miles away.
There were so many things wrong with the plot of Prometheus, those two are lost almost completely in the overall sea of lapses in logic and common sense...
Not to mention, funky broken science (like re-animating a head that ought to have been freeze-dried and oxidized into a pile of dust millennia ago), and just incomprehensibly stupid, bad decisions (taking off helmets in an alien environment...wut!) and so on.Well, there seem to be mixed feelings about the movie. To be honest I don't remember all that much about it (I have terrible memory when it comes to movies) but according to my IMDB account I gave it 3/10 after seeing it. And I'm pretty sure at least one of those points is just for Charlize Theron's presence. Yet it averages a decent 7.1/10.
All I vaguely remember is finding it boring and a bit stupid. (And I liked Alien and Aliens, though I don't recall seeing the third and fourth movies.)
The film's biggest strength, IMO, is it gets the atmosphere right. It feels like an Alien film, like you said, just a kinda different one. I'm hoping the sequel, which IIRC was greenlit, is closer to Alien than the first one was, though.
Also I find it weird we're talking about Alien and its most recent entry in a Star Wars topic. I wonder what a Sith Xenomorph would be like...