Yeah, but the basketball shot was worth it.
It’s not the worst I’ve ever seen, but I also hated it and will never re-see it. I also think Battle Royale is amazing.
Train to Busan was a lot of fun, but the same guy made a sequel that was a snoozefest.
Alien 3 is the rare film that would have been better without Sigourney Weaver in it. Not that there was anything wrong with her performance, I just think her character was done after Aliens. Have basically the same movie, except it’s a whole new cast, encountering xenomorphs somewhere other than the wreck on LV-426.
Of course, what they really should have done is ditched the xenomorphs, and made a Colonial Marines movie.
Guffaw. I’ve grumbled about it for years. “What’s a Cap Trooper without his cap? If VerHoeven wanted to make a Nazi-warning movie, fine. Just call it Bug Hunt and leave Heinlein’s name off of it.”
TIL
Oh, and one of the few movies I’ve not stuck out all the way through – I saw it on disk – was First Knight. Sean Connery and Richerd Gere. What could go wrong? Plenty, as it turned out.
Gothic
Recommended only if you like crazy movies.
This one had Julian Sands, who recently died, in it and I had heard about it, so I checked it out. It’s insane in some ways, but never fully pulled me in. It’s about Mary Shelley, Byron, and the rest of the group that got together and ultimately inspired Frankenstein and The Vampyre, though this is 100% a fictional version of that event and is a horror movie of sorts.
It was only OK. Very strange, but not in a super gripping way like David Lynch or Ari Aster makes happen.
The only redeeming quality of the the fourth movie is that you can see foreshadowing for Firefly. Some of the characters and other things seem like rough drafts or trial runs of things that were done much better in Firefly. I can’t remember all of the details, because I’ve only seen 4 once, and that was probably 0.9 too many times.
Maybe these were ideas bouncing around in Whedon’s head that eventually found a home, or maybe they’re just space crew tropes, and I’m reading too much into it.
I recall reading about The Worst Witch (which I’ve never seen), and at one point in it Tim Curry came along in it as a rock star sex symbol, and I was thinking about how, since it’s for kids, you can just say that a random person is a sex symbol.
Since then, yes, I have heard how he was in fact a sex symbol. I just had no idea.
Tossing another copy of Battlefield Earth into the fire closely followed by Running Man.
Running Man seemed fun to me as a kid, though I have not re-watched it as an adult.
Battlefield Earth is downright hilarious and that gives it some worth. It’s one of the most unintentionally funny movies I’ve seen.
My opinion is based on having read the books first so I’m unable to rate them as if they were original movies.
The Running Man is a cinematic masterpiece compared to another Stephen King adaption–The Lawnmower Man.
It has to been one of the worst overblown movies I have ever seen and it does NOT have any of the humor or charm of The Running Man
I’ve never seen it and I know Stephen King had his name removed since they really did not use his story as much of a basis for it.
Perhaps it’s because I completely missed the cultural/societal context (I was born in 1970, the movie came out in 1955, I saw it in 1989). Perhaps it’s because I was in an extremely bad mood that night. Or perhaps it was something else. But of the 3-4 movies I’ve walked out on in my life, the one I remember the most is widely considered a classic. I didn’t get it. Rebel Without a Cause. It was utterly boring on every level, it completely lacked anything resembling subtlety, I absolutely could not wrap my head around Mr. Howell as a suburban dad, and the less said about James Dean’s ham-fisted acting, the better (“You’re tearing me apart!” while wailing and pulling at his hair - Jesus Christ).
Pearl Harbor. It felt like a parody of a war movie.
Not sure why everyone picks on Starship Troopers. After all there are plenty of film adaptations that are nothing like the book. And despite protestations there is plenty of satire in the film.
Is that movie hated? I’m not joking by asking.
- I thought it was a comedy. Again, isn’t it intended to be?
- I thought be loved how comedic it was.
Yes, it’s definitely hated, especiually by Heinlein fans. And not only RABID Heinlein fans.
The book was controversial when it came out. You can read a lot about the controversy if you google the book. But it was widely read and re-read, even by people who weren’t comfortabl;e with its political philosophy. Hainlein creates very believable future worlds, and his “mobilre infantry” of soldiers wearing feedback armored suits , along with the military training and structure to support them, was compelling in its completeness and plausibility. If you were going to spend a ton of FX money to bring the story to life, you’d have plenty of willing spectators.
But, as had happened with just about every Heinlein adaptation up to that point (and I include Destination Moon and The Puppet Masters), they didn’t simply adapt the story, but screwed with it. As noted above, this was apparently a case where Veerhoeven was setting out to make a completely new story, apparently with lots of similarities to Heinlein;s ST universe, but they figured they might as well buy the property, change the names, and say they were adapting the original. The same damned thing that they did with Asimov’s I, Robot.
And they got the same result – a story that was diametrically opposed to the original in philosophy, abd considerably “dumbed down”.
Yes, you could say that Veerhoeven made a political satire on future war that stands on its own and ought to be judged that way. But when you use the title of the original story and at least nominally the same characters, or at least their names, in a story that is so completely different in orientation abnd tone froim the original, people – especially the ones who loved the original – are going to be upset.
Imagine Gone with the Wind starring Jerry Lewis and Melissa McCarthy as Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, and where the South wins the war. Or a Harry Potter movie with a 50 year old Harry who uses high tech gimmicks because magic doesn’t work, and has a romantic entanglement with Voldemort to make it “edgy”.
Fans of “I, Robot” are upset about that movie, but they don’t seem as vocal as ST fans.
And, for what it’s worth, Heinlein adaptations recently seem tio be a lot more faithful. Have a look at Predestination or The Door into Summer or (I haven’;t seen it yet, but hope springs eternas) Life Line
I would NOT recommend watching Lawnmower Man. i
It is a horrible, horrible film NOT even entertaining in a “so bad it’s funny” sort of way. Just a complete waste of time to watch,
I am not a fan of I, Robot, the movie but unlike Starship Troopers the novel is a fix-up of nine short stories published in a span of eleven years and pretty much unfilmable.
I strongly disagree.
Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay. It had Asimov’s blessing, and was eventually published. With modern CGI it’d make a helluva flick.