I just read this entire thread, and realized that Evil Captor’s evil plan to kidnap all of us who disagree with him, and force us to watch Attack of the Clones over and over again until the third/sixth movie comes out.
But at least he’ll let us do it with the sound off
Go back and look at the original Star Wars movies-- not the ‘special editions’ <shudder> the real ones that first came out. The effects were timely (read: not that great) but the story was absorbing. Those were characters that people cared about, even if they were clunky pedantic robots… and C3PO is pretty clunky too.
But Phantom Menace and AoTC? C’mon, the story makes no sense whatsoever, and while the * idea* of character motivation can be compelling, it is unfortunately horridly executed. When you’re spending millions to make a movie, you need more than just a great idea-- you need a great script, and AotC doesn’t have it.
As for Solaris, Evil Captor should be aware that Clooney wasn’t remaking a Russian film, he was adapting a Russian book. There’s a huge difference. But if you don’t understand that, quit claiming that you’re a science fiction fan, and realize that what you like is space opera.
PS Firefly rocks, but of course it made no sense when originally presented, because nothing was set up right-- and you can blame that on Fox. It’s amazing the same company has a hand in Firefly and the Star Wars franchise.
SAILING THE RIVER TAM
Buzz inside certain Los Angeles law firms suggests that talent contracts are being hammered out, and they’re timed around a May start for an upcoming Universal feature about a starship captain, a space hooker, a mysterious preacher and a pair of fugitives named Tam. The bad news: under the scenario discussed, “Firefly: The Movie” wouldn’t hit multiplexes until late 2005.
Solaris is entirely SF. Granted, if you start with Lem’s novel, it is awfully thorough and sometimes even tediously technical in background story and history covering the sentient planet. Clearly there are many elements of the book that neither film touch upon.
I believe “the Soviets”, i.e. Andrei Tarkovsky, was not able to deal with certain elements of the story due to technology constraints. But exploring certain parts of the book would have been irrelevant to the themes he explored in his films. All of Tarkovsky’s films are slow-moving. That is part of what makes them uniquely his own. Another reason has to do with the time period, in which most films had a certain slower pacing, and lacked flashy CGI effects. Saying that AotC is “soul candy” as opposed to Solaris, particularly Tarkovsky’s version, is amazingly naive. That’s like apples to oranges, or apples to cardboard cut-outs of oranges.
As for Soderbergh, he’s made his career out of remaking films, so it was no surprise he remade a film he supposedly loves. There was hope among some fans that his version could have focused on the background story of the planet, but then again, Soderbergh’s films are about relationships, so there really would have been no reason for him to directly explore all the details of the planet that are covered in the book. Unfortunately, we really didn’t need a cheap Hollywood copy of Tarkovsky’s film, so I agree that I don’t know why he made it, other than he must have lacked ideas for what film he was going to remake next at that time.
As for other older books to be made into films, why do you need them to be turned into films anyway? And point me in the direction of all the other Eastern European SF books that have been made into even one movie, let alone one plus a remake of one.
The stuff on Kamino was pretty good, I’ll admit. But they kept intercutting it with the romance between Ted Bund… I mean, Anakin and Amidala. Just when it starts to get interesting, BAM! Back in the damned field. This is what I meant by poor pacing. As soon as any tension was developed in the Obi Wan storyline, they’d cut away to the Anakin story, and the whole thing would just sort of deflate.
I’ll probably see it. I’ve seen every other Star Wars film in the theater, I feel obligated to see what I hope will be the last of them. Besides, it’ll give me something to whine about.
Apparently. AotC was one of the most bizarre theater experiences of my life. I’ve never seen an audience reaction like that. Usually, even if it’s a really bad movie, there’s still enough of a mob mentality that the audience will cheer or laugh or whatever in the expected places. Or, at the very least, sit there and fidget uncomfrotable. This was the first time I’d ever seen a movie that not only failed to achieve its desired effect with the audience, but received almost exactly the opposite of what the film was clearly going for. Most comedies don’t get the sort of laughs the romance scene got with that crowd. And this was opening night, too, in a theater locally known to be partially owned by Lucas himself. He bought it for PM and dumped a bundle on renovating and updating the place so it’d be the perfect place to see his “masterpiece.” (Thank God, he didn’t make them switch to digital projection for AotC.) If there’s any theater in the world that ought to have been packed to the rafters with dedicated Warsies, it was that theater on that night. And they still didn’t like it.
I think that’s the problem in a nutshell. The protagonist in a movie needs to be sympathetic despite his flaws. The audience is supposed to root for him to overcome his flaws, or being saddened when he is destroyed by them. This is easy to do if your character is Indiana Jones and the flaw he’s overcoming is something rather pedestrian like “lack of faith.” When your protagonist is a whiny teenager with homicidal tendencies whom the audience already know will one day grow up to be a genocidal religious lunatic, you need to have a fucking amazing script, an incredible actor, and a director who’s a master at working with actors. Otherwise, the audience is just going to sit there scratching their heads wondering why the hell they’re supposed to care about what happens to this guy.
Well, he sure nailed petulant and self-involved, I’ll give you that. I don’t recall seeing him being brave or determined, though. I just remember whine whine whine slaughter unconvincing romance and then he gets his arm chopped off. Oh, yeah, he did jump out of that hovercar in the beginning, but that seemed more “stupid” than “brave.” Although the difference between the two is admittedly slight.
No, he’s not. Not if he’s the main character. This sort of character arc needs for him to start off sympathetic, else there’s no emotional weight to his fall. There’s no tragedy involved when an unlikable character simply becomes more unlikable. Anakin needed to be the best of the Jedi: smart, likable, strong, and wise, and then these attributes need to be gradually inverted, until he’s the monster we see in Star Wars. The character we see in Clones is some sort of idiot savant. He’s an incredible pilot - thanks to the Force. He’s a great swordsman - thanks to the Force. Everything his character does comes to him naturally, not through effort or hard work, and then he spends the entire movie whining about how unfair everything is. As someone mentioned previously, I want to see the third movie just so I can see this little shit get his ass throughly stomped. Somehow, I don’t think that’s the reaction Lucas was going for.
But it only looked great because Lucas had an essentially unlimited budget. I don’t find that to be the least bit impressive. He didn’t do anything interesting with all those wonderful images. “It’s a planet-sized city!” Yeah, we saw that in the first movie. “It’s a desert planet!” We saw that way back in Star Wars. “It’s an alien palace!” Seen it. “It’s an army of stormtroopers!” Seen it. “It’s a field of grass with a giant bug in it!” Who gives a shit? PM still worked, kinda, as a spectacle because it was showing us things we hadn’t seen before: the underwater city, Couscant, the pod race, Jedi combat in the era of Hong Kong wireworks. AotC was almost entirely a retread of stuff we’d already seen. Even as spectacle, it was tired.
I was expecting it to be better than Phantom Menace. I don’t know how much lower my expectations could have been. And it still failed to meet them. I think my disdain is entirely reasonable.
Absolutely untrue. You need to see more movies, or at least, better ones.
You mean A Fire Upon the Deep, I assume? Not a bad book at all, especially by the generally debased standards of SF, but I’ve seen plenty of movies that succeeded as movies better than A Fire Upon the Deep succeeded as a novel.
Minor nitpick: the first movie was Russian, but the book was Polish.
As much as I want to defend Solaris (the movie), I don’t think I can, except that the visuals were beautiful. The book was great, but next to impossible to make into a movie without either being a superficial mishmash that misses all the deeper points, or running for hours and being filled with scenes of characters just sitting and philosophizing. There’s the human drama that Clooney’s version seems to do an ok job of, but then there’s also Lem’s message (one of them, anyway) about space travel, which is a fairly bleak and lonely one that’s very hard to adapt to the screen: that the universe is teeming with life, and we will never, ever be able to communicate with it (the same thing comes up in His Master’s Voice, Fiasco, some of the Pilot Pirx stories, as well as one of the stories in One Human Minute). In this sense, I guess, the script of AoTC comes out on top as its sights were set far lower.
Well, I’m not AGAINST characterization, generally the better it’s handled the better your story works. As a general rule, in action adventure you don’t NEED as much characterization as you do in most other forms, because the key is to keep things zipping along plotwise. All you need if you have a compelling story is one or two characters whom the audience can identify with and who act consistently. Still, there are ways to project characterization very quickly and easily. Frex, in the anime Dragon Pink, the adventurer Santa has decided to use his cat slavegirl Pink as bait for a monster. He doesn’t tell her what he’s up to, but when they and their companions Bobo and Pias break for the night, he jumps on Pink, rips her clothes off and begins tying her up.
How does Pink respond? Does she say, “What do you think you’re doing?” Does she say “No, please no!” Does she say, “Not in front of the others!”? No, she only says, “It’s too early.” Three words, but it reveals a great deal about their relationship. They go on to catch the monster using Pink as bait but we no know about their evenings.
Not that most American movies feature characterization to match what you see in your average Japanese adult anime.
picks jaw off of floor and reattaches it slowly I can’t believe you take some stupid throwaway joke in a bad Hentai’ish movie and label it good characterization.
yes. American movies don’t often match Japanese anime…unless you discount your average low budget teen movie. Let’s see who populates 95% of all anime movies.
Slutty girl (red hair check)
Smart Girl with glasses (blue hair check)
Girl that looks 12 but she’s 18 I swear to god. (poofy hair in with braids in it. Usually red hair but color varies)
Sullen teen guy. (pale goth skin check)
Goofy guy that’s the main character that trips over his own feet (check)
if goofy guy isn’t main character then whiney loser that spends 1/2 the movie bitching about his destiny is.
There are of course a few anime that transcend this drek but on average a disney cartoon has more dynamic characters and complex relationships then the average anime.
Oh, it’s worse than that. I plan to force you all to watch AotC until you see it with your eyes … in the Richard Burton/1984 sense of the words.
A) I don’t argue the idea that the characterization in AotC is weak. I do say it’s good enough to work in conjunction with a fast-moving plot, which I will argue that AotC has.
A) I’m not aware which Clooney’s version adapted from, but it sucks either way. (Giant Monty Python foot squashes staring George Clooney.) B) And I do like space opera. But I like a lot of other SF, too.
I haven’t read Solaris the novel, I tried to read a couple of Lem’s novels, but “tedious” is the word alrighty. I’m not necessarily put off by works that takes some effort – I enjoyed Banks’ Fearsum Endjinn – but the game has to be worth the candle, and Lem’s game isn’t, AFAIC.
I’m sorry, but I think Solaris just isn’t that good a film on its own merits. I have seen it. AotC is MUCH more enjoyable to watch, and more profitable, too, as it has all the good imagery.
I don’t need them to be made into films. I was just pointing out that if you’re going to base an SF movie on pre-existing material, there’s much better stuff out there than a movie that was dull to begin with. As for your challenge, surely someone’s done something with R.U.R. or War With The Newts. I’ll concede that there haven’t been a lot of East European SF adapations.
I’ll grant you the romance angle was poorly developed. If there’d been a real relationship between Anakin and Padme it might not have dragged, but there wasn’t. Still, some nice imagery, like the shot of them leaning on the railing by the water. Looked like it was inspired by classical paintings more than anything else. A lot of the imagery in Star Wars had a fine arts feel to it.
I saw it in the suburban miniplex, and to tell you the truth they had the sound cranked up so high that I couldn’t tell what the audience was doing. Plus, I was engrossed in the movie.
Yeah, if your movie is basically a character study, which AotC wasn’t. Also unfolding was the larger story of the beginnings of the Clone Wars. Anakin’s transformation was just a part of that arc.
Lessee, jumped off the aircar, fought the Sith Trainee, went after the sandpeople singlehanded … no, I’d say there’s no lack of cojones there. Might well be that much of it is derived from the knowledge that he has the Force with him and all, but even so, you sense he wants to do the right thing.
You don’t see any strong points in him at all? He loved his mommy …
It hasn’t tired me on several repeated viewings, and I generally do not watch movies more than once.
Well, it succeeded for me. One of the best reads I have ever had in the last decade. Maybe you need to loosen your standards a bit. Enjoy things for what they are. That sort of thing.
Oh, come on. Even as humor, it’s a very smart line. The usual, normal, predictable line for someone in Pink’s situation would be “No no no” “Please stop” “Not in front of the others.” Or the porn answer would be “Oh, baby you are making me so hot. Me so horny so horny so horny.” Choosing something as sly as “It’s too early” is smart no matter how you cut it – humor or characterization.
OK, I might have been stretching a bit on that adult anime comment… still, anime do have a way of frequently surprising me, much more frequently than American films do.
You don’t need to respond, as it’s not a defense. It’s actually more of an attack on my own position. I was using that particular scene as an example of how with deft writing you can say a lot about a character without a lot of exposition. So you CAN have strong characterization in an action/adventure movie – or cartoon porn, for that matter. Doesn’t mean you HAVE to, but you can.
Well…I guess you could grade on a curve for the Japanese origins but it seems to me jokes like ‘oh it’s too early’ were on sit coms on TV ten years ago. This doesn’t strike me as fantastic writting or characterization more like an amusing quip you can find anywhere.
As for me, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. I thought AotC was jaw-droppingly bad–and I mean that literally; I found myself sitting in the theater with my mouth hanging open, stunned at how clumsy the film was. Even by the standards of cheesy pulp science fiction (and believe me, I’ve read my share of cheesy pulp science fiction), it was bad. The only acceptable parts (note that I don’t use the term “good”) were some of the special effects.
On the other hand, Firefly is some of the best television I’ve ever seen.
See, that’s the thing. I don’t think it worked. I think there are very few ocassions where CGI is necessary and hardly ever does it “make” a movie. I admit, it has helped for a lot of stories, but I’ve seen it done a lot more impressively on low budget television series. The CGI in Farscape was a hell of a lot more impressive than anything in Attack of the Clones, and they used an aweful lot of puppets and made sets to get that. As for movies where sets set up didn’t look all that bad, hell, the Hoth base in Empire was pretty damn impressive, and that didn’t require any CGI. All of the Alien movies had great sets that didn’t require fully CGIed backgrounds; the Terminator created a great look into a dismal future of earth without any CGI. Sound stages and backdrops have been used for a long time, and they looked just as impressive than any of the shit I saw in either prequel films.
No, just someone who thinks that a lot of movie makers have started to slack off once CGI started becoming popular. I already pointed out one blatant example of a green screen used in this film, and I know of at least two from PM, but I’m sure if I watched either movie more, I’d find a hell of a lot more blatant mistakes. As for the “big city” scenes, they weren’t anything impressive. Lots of blinking lights and shiny vehicles…okay, what’s new with that? We saw it portrayed much more impressively in Blade Runner how many years before? It wasn’t anything impressive.
Hey, the bit with Anakin killing the Tuscan Raiders was the only part where he seemed to fit well. He was pissed, and he acted on it. But what about all the pissing and moaning he’d been doing the rest of the movie? “You never let me have any fun!” “Why don’t we do what I wanna do?” “How come girls don’t like me?” “Whaaaaaah, I’m a whinny bitch! Ehhhh.” There was no excuse for this behaviour. I don’t know why, but from Star Wars, I got the image of Anakin being a very strongheaded, lighthearted, likeable kinda guy. Seeing someone like this go threw hell and being dragged into the dirt and turned to the dark side would make for an interesting movie and a good story. What they presented as Anakin was a little whinny punk who I wanted to throttle with his own intestines after beating his face in with a sock full of quarters. How am I supposed to give a rat’s ass if he falls on hard times and his life goes to shit when I feel this way towards him? I’m not, and thus, the movie failed.
As for his attitude rendering him more attractive to Padme…I’m guessing you don’t interract with women much, do you? Because that kind of behaviour does NOT attract women. Unless they’re insane, which Padme quite possibly could have been, but aside from her nipples, I had no interest in her in thie movie either.
Yeah, and a piece of shit covered in shinny, pretty paper is still a piece of shit.
I saw this movie with my eyes, and they found flaws. Obvious green screens, poorly animated aliens, and an old favorite turned into a fucking joke (I’m talking of Yoda here). My ears listened to the dialogue and found it to be almost on par with a Greg Araki film (which is about as low as you can get in my opinion), and my brain analysed the plot and found it convoluted and pathetic…there was no flow, and there was no point.
I have learned something about these motion picture things. People look for different things, and are put off by different things in movies. It may be inconceivable to you that others don’t agree, but hey, it is the real world we are talking about. My wife will absolutely not watch a movie based on a misunderstanding (i.e. Anger Management) and even a minor plotline based on a misunderstanding will spoil a movie for her. This girl I work with, she hates manipulative scoring.
Me, I’m pretty standard. I hate bad acting. Turns me right off, no matter how good the movie is otherwise. Take Underworld for example – lots of people I know saw it and liked it. I saw it, thought it was utterly abysmal (despite Kate Beckinsale’s leather clad ass). Why? Because more than half of that cast couldn’t act themselves out of a paper bag.
Didn’t see Firefly. AotC was one of the worst movies ever for me. Jesus I wanted to slap Hayden Christiansen. PM was better but Jake Lloyd yelling “woohoo!” the whole movie pretty much did it in for me there too. AotC was beautiful, but kind of like Jessica Simpson: the others parts of it were so repellent that you just wanted to get the hell away from it.
Solaris I liked, but probably only because I love the book (and Lem in general). It was really slow, but then again it was visually engaging (the set design and the planet were fun to watch). It certainly wasn’t as slow as the Tarkovsky version, which would have been long if it had been half of its length. Soderbergh’s Solaris was trying to out-20012001, and it didn’t really succeed. It had a more comprehensible ending (although different from the book), but the rest of it didn’t extend past the slow-silence-of-space and the moral-dilemmas-when-confronting-a-sentient-nonhuman of 2001. I give it a B- or a C+.
If we are looking for great epic-style stories to mine for sci-fi, I would go with Ender’s Game or the Worthing Saga by Card or Great Sky River by Benford.
This thread kicks ass. It’s like reading dispatches from Bizarro World.
It’s also made me make a mental note to rent Solaris. I figure even if it’s not quite as, you know, bad as Firefly, compared to the AotC yardstick, and even if it doesn’t contain characterizations as good as pornographic anime, (but really, to be fair, what does?), it still sounds intriguing.
Not really. To spell it out, Pink had just had her clothes stripped off and was being tied up, and was undoubtedly anticipating that Santa was going to fuck her in that state, probably right there, in front of their travelling companions. And she wasn’t protesting ANY of that, really just that it was too early in the day for such shenanigans.
What kind of TV shows have YOU been watching? Have I been missing out here?
