All I know is that, last week when I looked on Fandango for showtimes, it only returned 7/2 and 7/3 at AFI Silver. Looked again yesterday and it gave 7/7 and 7/8 at AMC Shirlington along with a few others.
We prefer to see movies on the weekend, don’t drive, and she’d rather stay out of DC & Maryland.
Yes but all you have to do to make this movie sound ridiculous is explain the basic plot premise. That’s a red flag in my book.
Is this the same Straight Dope that beat Prometheus over the head with logic sticks until it cried?
Not in mine. Some of the best movies I’ve seen have had a somewhat dopey-sounding premise. But for whatever reason, they worked. Of course, some with dopey-sounding premises have sucked. You just can’t tell by that.
The wife and I really liked Prometheus.
As did the wife and I. But in the end, I had to admit it had some really stupid stuff in it that really detracted from it as a film.
I agree that that was stupid. Insects are just meat.
My assumption was that the writer/director has a personal hangup about the idea of eating insects, and didn’t realize that it wasn’t shared as wholly by the rest of the world.
It’s like when I was watching The Killing (the original Danish version) and the main detective asks an underling for folders on “every woman in her 20s who has gone missing in Copenhagen for the last 10 years”, the underling goes off and the next episode comes back with like 5 folders. I could take from that, that Copenhagen is the safest and most popular major city in the world, or that the writers have a blissfully illusionary image of crime statistics which they didn’t bother to correct before writing the script.
I don’t remember the meat locker, but I’m pretty sure they demonstrated or talked about vat-grown meats.
As Dr. Strangelove notes, the meat locker scene is immediately after the aquarium speech. I laughed at this sequence because it was if the filmmaker was deliberately shoving it in our face that this is an absurdly contrived and unrealistic situation. Also note that they have to walk through the meat locker to get from the sleeping cars to the other living sections of the train.
Prometheus wasn’t allegorical. It was a shitty sci-fi movie written by an inept writer with a ton of money and a good director behind it. It was a tragedy because inept writing is what fucked it.
If this film isn’t ineptly written it isn’t fair to assume it’s the same thing.
I think the big difference is that one has a premise that might be, to some, a hard sell. But at least everyone in the story itself more or less acts like a normal human being in their situation would.
Most problems with Prometheus were less with some of the far-fetched elements of the film (which some might call fanciful and others non-sensical) but with the fact that so many people in that movie, who are supposed to be really smart, do really really stupid things.
And that also goes for the sauna car separating some important cars from each other. 
I’m glad you mentioned Oldboy and CitW because those two movies most came to my mind.
The former is evoked because of the relentless, almost obsessive momentum that exists in the story, always pushing forward deeper and deeper into a situation that is more terrible the more you learn. And while there is situational, gallows humor, it isn’t with the dry wit of Gilliam, but something more surreal.
The latter film is appropriate because, like the Goddard/Whedon film, it ultimately is less about the specifics of the individual’s story and more a requiem on humanity itself, and whether civilization is truly worth sustaining if it requires selling your soul.
I liked the film a lot, absurdities, notwithstanding. I liked the balance of scifi, apocalyptic dystopia, horror, and raw action. It manages to be both a cynical film and a very generous one, and while there are some very familiar genre tropes, there’s a lot of visual invention, too. So maybe not completely original, but a far more satisfying experience than any of its bigger budgeted counterparts this year.
It sounds like an uncanny-valley problem. Superheroes and talking animals are different enough from our own world that an audience just rolls with it. A train roaring through snow is too close to real life, though; it lets the audience nitpick the distinctions rather than absorb the overall vision.
Whoh! that ending was extremely dark
Anyone know when they are planning to release this movie in Canada?
Skywatcher, I think you misunderstand the website on which you’re looking up the showtimes for movies. I think they only give the times for the day you look it up and the day afterwards. That doesn’t mean that they are only showing it for two days.
Let’s see, Canada . . . Canada . . . That’s where now? Oh, yeah, it’s that place where you release films after they’ve already been released in all these countries:
South Korea
France
Hong Kong
Thailand
Taiwan
Vietnam
Estonia
Switzerland
Philippines
Germany
Japan
Italy
Belgium
Romania
China
Israel
Lithuania
Mongolia
Netherlands
Germany
Denmark
Poland
Finland
Brazil
United Arab Emirates
Greece
Kuwait
Austria
Croatia
Spain
Pakistan
USA
Australia
UK
Czech Republic
Finland
A train leaves New York City at noon heading west at 100 mph…
I’m about 2/3 through it right now, and it’s shite.
The premise is ridiculous, but, you know, it’s an allegory. I didn’t throw Animal Farm against a wall after reading it because the animals could talk.
I have to say, though, even getting past the obviously silly premise, I could only give it a “pretty good” rating.