I will grant you that. Hopper in his day could out-scenery-chew Pacino and Cage combined.
I’ve watched the Rifftraxed versions of a James Nguyen written / directed trilogy of movies: Birdemic, Replica, and Julie and Jack. The Rifftrax treatment certainly helps with palatability, but even on their own, I think I would have found the movies to be fascinating in their awfulness.
In addition to the laughably bad special effects, the acting is not only bad, it’s like that of space aliens who’ve only been studying humans for a day or so. The writing is so juvenile and nonsensical it’s like that of a five year old who has little or no understanding of cause and effect or adult human motivations, especially when it comes to sex and romance.
And then there are the weird little directing eccentricities, like often showing characters in long pointless driving scenes, complete with 3-point turns and parallel parking shown in complete unedited detail.
It’s like Nguyen saw Tommy Wiseau’s The Room and vowed to himself “I can do worse!”
I usually have no problem suspending disbelief or accepting a movie’s own internal logic. I just couldn’t do it with Snowpiercer. Ridiculous and awful. I know people liked it but I’ll never understand why.
Like a lot of “thought provoking” scifi it works a lot better if you just examine it as a dressed up metaphor for society (which it is) and NOT try to consider it as a movie. Doesn’t make it great, just lets you suspend the disbelief a bit easier. Ditto for things like Equilibrium which has a lot of Rule of Cool, but is just amazingly full of assumptions the whole way.
Snowpiercer (IMHO of course) was trying to hard, which made the incongruities stand out that much more.
I think the Ralph Bakshi animated adaptations of LOTR are cringey. It has everything from lame background vocal music (“The cracks of DOOM! The cracks of DOOM!”) to taking Boromir, the son of a quasi royal family in the most powerful city in a high fantasy epic, and turning him into a quasi-Viking, with horns on his helmet, (Even real Vikings didn’t wear horns.).
I literally can’t watch it, and I say that as one who actually does enjoy a few films everyone else hates.
I watched the Bakshi version of The Lord of the Rings with a friend who loved the books. His reaction was, “WTF is this crap? This isn’t The Lord of the Rings!”
I can understand that. If I thought about any detail for more than 10 seconds, it made no sense. But the premise was so cool, and the direction and sets so interesting, I decided it wasn’t a movie to be analyzed that way.
I liked it so much, it set me off on a Bong Joon-ho binge, and not one of those movies disappointed either. He’s just an interesting storyteller, even when (especially when?) the story is fantastical.
Anyway, not trying to convince you, just providing some explanation from someone who saw the same logical challenges you did but liked the film a lot.
Lost me at the premise. I didn’t think it was cool, it’s really dumb. A train makes no sense in that situation. We are watching people on a train. We are not watching people ride a metaphor. In order for the metaphor to work the premise can’t suck.
There’s nothing wrong with injecting metaphors for social relevancy into existing genres, but… “if you want to send a message, call Western Union.” (Of course, the counter argument is that non-edgy message movies still carry messages: that the status quo must prevail, you proles.)
Compare the dumb science in Snowpiercer with the smart science in Surface Tension, a short story that’s considered one of the best, but has never been made into a movie. So go ahead and make it, and inject all the Eat the Rich or DEI or whatever might move the needle on any pertinent social pressure gauge.
Ralph Bakshi is an impressive animator, and on the few occasions when his LOTR movie is animated from scratch and not rotoscoped, it can look gorgeous. The problem is that most of the damned film IS rotoscoped. Some of it is the most blatant rotoscoping I’ve ever seen – as if they simply colorized the live footage they shot (like the people at the Inn at Bree).
What really annoyed me was the Balrog. This could’ve been a GREAT animation moment. Just draw and animate the otherworldly creature. Let your imagination run free. You can’t really do the Balrog any other way, right?
Except they did. They dressed up a guy in a Balrog suit, the filmed him and did the very literal rotoscoping, so it LOOKS like a guy in a Balrog suit that’s been colorized.
It’s the worst possible look. We didn’t get a good image of an animated Balrog until Peter Jackson’s CGI Balrog in The Fellowship of the Ring.
I was ten when that film came out. I thought the Bakshi Balrog and rotoscoping were super-cool! I also loved Wizards. The only thing I was disappointed with was where the film cut-off, as I was already a precocious fan of the book.
That was when I was ten. My opinion had shifted a bit since then . But I admit I still have some nostalgic memories.
I got hold of a DVD of Wizards recently and re-watched it. It was Bakshi’s trial run for LOTR. It has some great stuff (again, when he;s animating, not rotoscoping), and a lot of WTF moments. Its message is inconsistent and screwed up. Technology is Evil – except when you use it to kill the Bad Guy, apparently.
. But I admit I still have some nostalgic memories.
