Well, poop. I hadn’t noticed that. I have yet to really enjoy a film by Emmerich. There’s dumb, and then there’s Emmerich-level dumb. I don’t have a problem with cavemen fighting dinosaurs on screen, but Emmerich takes this sort of brain-wrenchingly stupid plot device to such a Platonic level of purity that I’m unable to follow. Is it possible to make a sword-and-sandal movie dumber than Conan? Yes, it is; and I feel certain that Emmerich will show us the way. Maybe the hero miraculously invents gunpowder and kills the dinosaurs by blowing them up.
I have a sneaky suspicion that Emmerich’s directorial and scriptwriting career is based on an elaborate postmodern philosophy of film deconstruction. He’s taking the science fiction movies of yesteryear, which often featured painfully bogus science even by the standards of the time, and recreating them on a lavish budget with modern technology. This in itself is an eminently worthy goal, but he’s missing a fundamental truth about those movies: the scripts were stupid because their writers weren’t very good.
It’s one thing to appreciate the good intentions of cheesy movies made on a shoestring budget, but reproducing them in a manner that improves every aspect of filmmaking except the actual script and acting seems like kind of a wasted opportunity, unless your real goal is to make fun of the industry itself. But if you’re the one responsible for cranking out these bloated blockbusters with laughable scripts and hammy non-actors, then you’re really the problem, and you’re just making fun of yourself.
If you’re going to update these films for contemporary audiences by giving them state-of-the-art effects technology, you could also hire the talented scriptwriters that the earlier films couldn’t afford. These summer blockbuster movies, unlike the old sci-fi B-movies, have lavish budgets and represent a huge studio investment. Why not go that extra mile and give them a sensible, solid, plot hole-free, non-stupid script? Try making them good movies in every sense. The effects may not last forever, but a good script will.
We’re in an era of movies with giant budgets, brilliant technicians, and crappy, poorly-constructed (or else entirely formulaic), dull-witted scripts. (I was going to say “B-movie scripts”, but in fact there are a lot of enjoyable B-movies with some interesting writing.)
Hey, the dude’s got a serious gambling problem. He’s admitted that several of the movies he’s done, he never once saw his paycheck from them, having to have the paymaster make it out to the casino where he lost all of his money while making the film.
This is like Roland Emmerich’s Serenity/Firefly. I see a certain historical consistency to it. It’s that in-between time… an Atlanteaen Myth, seems like fun, and those CGI Mammoths are awesome.
