Saw it last night and I pretty much will echo everything Captain Lance Murdoch said. Sad to say they drained most of the subtlety out of the books and as noted the happy ending robbed the movie of much of its potential impact. The whole thing felt horribly rushed, both in terms of shoehorned plot and in terms of character development. Subjectively it was a pretty weak adaptation.
Objectively it was okay, at best.
Agreed. If they make more I’ll watch them for those reasons alone. But I don’t think I will expect much.
The purse scene? I thought that was decent enough, actually. Just a bit rushed like everything else in the film. But it was rather abrupt in the book as well, if I recall correctly.
Saw it Saturday night, the theatre was almost full. I knew from the TV previews that it would be a neat movie to look at, if nothing else.
I thought it was great. Some parts were slow, some parts were too fast, but there was an overall sense of wonder and otherworldliness throughout the film. I think it borrowed a lot from LOTR, Chronicles of Narnia, and even Star Wars, but still, I liked it a lot. It probably is a little too perilous for young kids (and boring in several spots), but there is basically no blood and gore.
Well, it appears that the movie is bombing. Only made $26 mil. opening weekend. This is, apparently, Very Bad for a movie that cost $250 mil. This means, in all likelihood, no sequels.
It also means that the head of New Line may be out of a job. Which means that TGC’s failure might pave the way to Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” (since the head of NL, whose name escapes me at the moment) was one of the biggest obstacles to the movie.
Crap, it is also Very Bad in that the whatstheirnames Catholic League or whoever it is with the “we haven’t read it, or seen the movie, but are boycotting it anyway” group will only be encouraged by this.
Don’t know where they’re getting that. I didn’t see anything anti-religious about the movie. It was more “authority versus freedom.” I also found it amusing that one of the characters was part of the ruling “government” or whatever it was, yet they did not play by any rules but their own.
Where did I post an unboxed spoiler? My other remarks are very general and won’t make much sense if you haven’t seen the movie.
Crap about no sequel–but maybe there will be. I am very tired of Hollywood basing its decisions on the opening weekend. Look at Bend It Like Beckham–it ended up doing very well.
I had no reason to suspect anything bad happening to Roger before reading your post about his “fate”. I guess fate doesn’t have to be bad, so that’s possibly nitpicky. It’s also probably irrelevant considering there may not be a sequel.
Bad news is that Weitz’s name now has some tarnish on it, and thus the Elric movie may be dead in the water. By the way I’d love to see them shoehorn a happy ending onto that series, or even the end of the first book…
I haven’t seen the movie yet, as I am slowy beating my way through the book first. So far I’m indifferent to it, but only about a 1/3 of the way through so still trying to give it a chance.
However, if I have to sacrifice the sequals to this movie for a Jackson-produced Hobbit, count be as first in line to throw them on the Pyre.
Perhaps the fact that most people who have actually seen the movie don’t absolutely hate it will produce enough word of mouth for people to actually see it next week, since apparently the percentage fresh has nowhere to go but up.
What I’m getting at is that perhaps there is a concerted effort on the part of those who don’t appreciate the purported message* to drive down the review percentages in order to make the movie look so bad that no one will want to see it?
*Yes, the author admits he set out to give a certain message, but strictly from seeing the movie, not having read the book, I call it a “purported message” because I don’t think it was expressed very well so far!
So, the movie was muddled and unclear? That jibes with the buzz I’ve been getting (if you didn’t read the book, the movie will look like a couple dozen SFX sequences in search of a plot).
I don’t think they made the anti-religious thing as clear as Pullman did in the book, but using words like heresy, coupled with iconography complete with halos on Magisterium walls seems like it’d be pretty damn obvious that some form of (Christian?) church is implied.
I’ve seen the movie, and there’s no need to invent reasons for people not to see it. I read and enjoyed the book so I was disappointed, my friend who hadn’t read the book was bored and confused.
I really wish you had used a spoiler box for this. I know it’s not a spoiler, per se, but the word “fate” definitely implies something to me, so I know what I’ll be expecting.
Anyway, as for the movie, I agree with others in that it was basically a jumbled mess. I can’t say that I wasn’t at times entertained (the bear fight had me almost peeing myself!), but there was really no drama, no sense of wonder, no discovery to be made that wasn’t simply barfed all over you as soon as it occurred to you to be curious about it… it’s as though they had no time for subtle exposition or development, so they had to make every character and every plot point rudely blatant. I don’t know if it was the screenplay, the editing, or what, but it just didn’t come together well at all, IMO.
I just saw the movie, and I liked it. I always have to point out the stuff that bugs me though, like a Star Trek fan bitching about misuse of the little communication badges they wear on their uniforms.
Biggest nitpick was that daemons died INSTANTLY when their human host was hit with an arrow in the kidney. It was the usual “people don’t die instantly from wounds like that” nitpick that almost every movie is guilty of, but magnified a dozen times and pushed up to you-can’t-possibly-ignore-this standards by the bright flashy daemon death poofs. I loved the daemons until people started actually dying, and by the end of the movie I hated the effect.
Another problem was how quickly stuff got resolved. We never saw how a polar bear got into a building with human-sized doors, but he had to crash through a giant wall to get back out. By the way, if you’re a giant polar bear crashing through a wall, and you can pick ANY WALL at all to crash through, wouldn’t you pick the wall that’s not guarded by a hundred and thirty six guys pointing guns at you on the other side? Not Yurich. He waits to see which wall the musketmen will line up at just so he can violently and triumphantly roar at them while they stare in disbelief. Personally, I’d have chosen to exit via whatever wall I had to crash through to get inside in the first place, but apparently polar bears don’t have to worry about head trauma or concussions.
Seriously though, go see the movie. I had a lot of fun, and I’m not very easy to please.
No, the ideas seemed to be pretty clear, but if you decide to write an anti-Christian screed, you don’t set it in a world where they actually have access to magical powers and there are very powerful deity-like beings and the church hierarchy actually controls things from behind the scenes (okay, that last one was true for hundreds of years.)
I was raised Catholic but am not a church-goer but I don’t have anything against the Church. So being fairly neutral on this, I certainly see the anti-ecclesiastical aim, but I don’t think it hits that close to home.
My other remarks are very general and won’t make much sense if you haven’t seen the movie.