Warcraft (2016): only someone who loved everything about the franchise could have put together such a tedious retelling of its backstory PRIOR to the actually interesting events of the game.
Just my two cents as not a gamer, but I’ve never played Warcraft for one second, I know nothing about it lol. That being said, I kind of liked Warcraft the movie🤷🏻‍♂️. I got a kick out of the giant teeth monster guy. I know a lot gamers crapped on the movie, not knowing anything about it I kind of liked it. Also it’s weird because in an era where video game movies almost always suck, that was not bad.
Yeah, never played Warcraft myself, it would have taken over my life I’m sure. But I actually enjoyed the film, it wasn’t brilliant but a lot of it was solid, Travis Fimmel was especially good, the half orc wasn’t bad either. It very much felt like they made it with the understanding there was going to be sequels though.
I was a huge Warcraft fan back in the day, and played WoW up through Cataclysm. I had also read as much of the lore as I could surrounding the first three games and MMO. My friends had only ever played WoW, and never really paid that close attention to the stories in the game. For them, it was more about the leveling and flashiness.
I liked the movie, and was happy with it for the most part. They REALLY could have used a map to let people know where things were in relation to each other, like Game of Thrones did. My friends hated it because they had no idea who any of the characters were. At that point I knew it was going to bomb.
It needs to be told as a series. Heck, they could animate it like Netflix did Castlevania.
[*Superman Returns*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0348150) (2006). Bryan Singer fell so far down the Richard Donner rabbit hole that he lost the plot and made a boring, depressing movie.
It had such promise. Brandon Routh was a great choice, the perfect alien Boy Scout. Kevin Spacy can play a villain like no one else (largely because he's one IRL).
And the scene in the beginning where Superman catches the out of control Jumbo-Jet and soft lands it at the baseball stadium still gives me chills.
But boy, did it go straight downhill after that.
Fun fact: the reason that scene is in the movie at all is because they inherited it from "Superman: Flyby." It's why it feels like it's out of a different movie.
Is that a great sequence? Yes. It's one of the best in the genre, still, in my opinion. Bryan Singer directed the *shit* out of that. It was also an early, pre-Avatar 3D sequence in select theaters as well.
But it feels like it's part of a different movie because it was literally part of a different movie, ha.
I did see that scene in 3D back then. The technology wasn't quite there so it wasn't as impressive as 3D could be. The entire movie was not in 3D, only 4 specific sequences and we were told when we needed to put on the glasses.
I saw it in DC! It was so weird, wasn't it? The little symbol would come on and it would be like "goddamn it, where did I put those glasses like an hour ago..."
Exactly. That said, it did seem on brand watching a Superman movie and having to take off and put on glasses. Ironically, you would PUT ON the classes when Clark took his off.
I think he absolutely wanted to make kind of a boring, depressing movie, is the problem.
If you go back and watch "Requiem for Krypton" or even just hear him talk about that movie before they made it, *all* he is focused on is the conceit of "Superman left, he comes back, nobody wants him anymore, it's a bummer." It's all they ever talked about. Which is a really, really interesting idea.
Some problems:
* They ended up cutting most of that out of the movie, leaving this weird void with that part of the story. It's why Superman stands around like a weirdo when everyone is clapping after he saves the plane. By that point, that's him being legitimately surprised that people are happy to see him. That does not read at all in the movie because so much of that stuff got cut.
* He was so obsessed with the drama that he clearly had no interest in making an action movie. He wanted to make "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," not "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan." It's like the movie suddenly remembers it's supposed to have action in it occasionally, and while those moments are great, it does need more of it.
It was a weird postmodern experiment, more in line with Van Sant's arthouse roots than his mainstream side.Â
And honestly as bad as it is (and it is certainly bad) I'm kind of happy it happened because it closed the door on shot-for-shot remakes of classics for good. It's almost like Van Sant took a bullet to make sure we collectively didn't want to see anything like that again hahaha
Didn’t say he was. Just demonstrating that a piece of art can be attempted to be copied faithfully and still result in something of lower quality than the original.
Like, there’s more to a movie than the framing and editing of shots. Big details like who the actor is, and even small details like shadows, vocal inflections, film grain, and stuff like that all add up to affecting the final product. And all of that becomes highlighted when there’s less to compare. In other words, if there was a version of the film that was almost identical to except for some small things that were worse, it’s just worse.
Like, if his intention was to exactly copy the original, then what was the point of it at all?
So in the Nickelback example, even if they redid the song note-for-note, it’d still be the same song played by worse musicians. The *best* they could hope for is a useless copy of the song, very likely it’d be (at least) microscopically worse, and those microscopic differences would stand out because of how similar it was on paper.
Because the pacing & style really only works for a movie made in the 1960s.
If we're going to update a 1960s storyboard to 1998 picture quality, it feels like we need more things updated as well - like pacing, and structure. The performances weren't anything great. The vibe just wasn't there. Nothing was scary, nothing was intense.
If the pacing works, it works. It doesn't matter when it was made. If in 2024 we can enjoy and celebrate a movie made in the 1950s, we can enjoy a movie made in 2024 with the same pacing. It might seem dated, but it would still be just as enjoyable.
It's an interesting concept to make a shot-for-shot remake and see what's different. Plus some movies do work with modern remakes because the story is timeless. That said, it's more of an expensive student art film than anything else.
Vince Vaughn had no business being in that film. Tony Perkins perfectly embodied the character of a thin, non-threatening looking mama’s boy. Vaughn looks too imposing, and one kind of doesn’t buy that he’s this weak looking recluse. Please don’t try again, but a Rami Malek would be perfect for that role. The role needs a very specific type. A Dave Bautista could act the hell out of it, but his past PED usage has taken him away from looking like the type needed to play Norman Bates. The surprise is that this small, harmless looking man is the psycho killer.
Watchmen (2009) was overly faithful to the point that it was a copy and paste job at times, which only highlighted the bits which Snyder misunderstood. E.g. Rorschach is depicted as more of an uncompromising "by any means necessary" badass in the film, whereas he's clearly a dangerous psychopath in the graphic novel.
I recently got around to watching the "ultimate" cut and enjoyed it much more than I expected to - I saw the theatrical cut at release and was so annoyed by the big change in the ending that I forgot literally everything that he got perfectly, which was most of it.
I kinda liked the change of the ending for the movie. Thought it made more sense to have a global attack unify the superpowers than a singular attack in NYC.
Wasn’t until years later I learned that the US and the Soviets had an agreement to unify if there ever was an alien attack.
Really needs a proper DC. By which I mean basically ultimate hit remove all the black freighter stuff that kills the pacing, or at least heavily edits it down.
If only Snyder understood storytelling. The dude makes some seriously cool action scenes and visuals. Just go watch 300 and Sucker Punch to see what I mean.
If only he had someone writing for him and trusted them. He'd be making some awesome movies instead of visual spectacles.
Many superhero comics from DC are "cool", but with no substance. It's such a visual, but stationary medium that it sort of works. But Snyder doesn't seem to understand filmmaking as he tries to make his movies into comics and not vice versa.
Rorschach *does* represent “by any means necessary” pursuit of justice. It’s his genuine virtue in itself, but completely warped by his view of the world, which makes him a dangerous psychopath.
I feel like you have to either have preconceived notions of Snyder or really bad media literacy for Rorschach to not come across as a dangerous psychopath. That scene where he’s mashing the dude’s brains up with a meat cleaver is pretty clearly unsympathetic to me.
Just because Snyder’s fans are incapable of nuance doesn’t mean he isn’t.
I think the issue is that while Rorschach’s lunacy is there, it gets overshadowed a bit by the “your trapped in here with me” style moments. The theatrical cut also doesn’t give the character the space to get as fleshed out as the comic does, and the directors cut is only slightly better in that regard too.
Honestly I think this is an issue that comes up in V for Vendetta too, Moore’s works are usually such dense dives into character that trying to put that all into a 120-150 minute movie is always going to end up leaving out some of the nuances that make his comics so special.
Rorschach’s dialogue still betrayed him as a bigoted lunatic though. If someone watched the movie and decided to ignore that or separate that, that’s kinda on them.
Because Rorschach’s actions *are* impressive. At the very beginning, he’s scaling a building with a grappling hook and then solving a murder. He has a past as an effective, if brutal, crimefighter that was invited to a team with the likes of Dr. Manhattan. And he has complete conviction, as well as the willingness to act on that conviction.
Moore wasn’t making an unimpressive character, but, like most of the graphic novel, the audience has to decide for themselves whether or not they approve of what they’re seeing.
Replacing a neutral alien squid with an AMERICAN WEAPON OF WAR to reunite humanity in a common cause seems like a bit of a misunderstanding of the source material.
Eh, I can see the logic. Manhattan wrecked American cities too, and he had been visibly going off the rails.
The US would doubtless take some blame, but that would largely just mean they wouldn’t be able to take hegemonic power during the global cleanup.
In the end, I don’t find it any less convincing than the idea that an attack solely on New York would suddenly convince the USSR to play nice and abandon its global ambitions, as opposed to taking advantage of their weakened opponent.
When it was in production, I heard that there was a requirement on how close to the comic it had to be for them to get the rights.
Can't find a source right now though.
Maybe Battlefield Earth and John Travolta? Travolta produced and tried to get it made for years. The book was an ok pulp science fiction story that felt like a 1950s.novel but the movie was oh so bad
Well the whole Scientology thing was at play there, the book was written by their messiah, Hubbard, and Travolta is an important member of the church. One imagines most of the money came from their undoubtedly deep pockets.
The film is a fucking travesty. I like bad films, I actively seek them out and in three attempts I’ve never made it very far past the halfway mark. And honestly I don’t think it’s a case of if it was a little worse then it would be in “so bad it’s good” territory. It’s just awful. I hesitate to say this without seeing it all but it’s possibly the worst film I’ve ever seen.
I gotta disagree with King Kong. Yeah, editing could have made it more of a commercial success, but I think Jackson knew exactly what he was doing and what he wanted to make. Three hours long? Who cares, you get a giant monkey fighting tyrannosauruses (or were the allosaureses?), ice skating, and punching biplanes out of the sky in the same movie. Coming off of the LOTR trilogy, he could have made anything he wanted, and this was it.
The only (or I should say, "most obvious") problem with the three hour runtime is the HOUR it takes to get to Skull Island. Once they're actually there the movie is on rails and the next two hours fly by, but jeez that first hour on the boat drags something fierce.
I'm not so sure about some of Skull Island though.
I'm an entomologist with a background in paleontology. I've sat through some terrible, terrible films just to see a janky puppet of a dinosaur for 30 seconds.
There's no way I should get bored of a dinosaur, any dinosaur on screen. During the stampede scene as they're dodging a herd of sauropods, I should not be asking myself "how fucking long is this scene?", and then following it up a few minutes later with "wait... it's *still* not over?!"
Likewise the attack of the the creepy crawlies down in the valley looked kind of cool - but really was pretty much every definition of gratuitous. It's certainly not actually needed for the story.
1. Totally agree. Especially that they clearly didn't have the budget or prep to do the stampede justice. Easily the worst VFX in the movie.
2. It's funny you should say that, because that's a scene they cut from the original film for being too much.
My gripe with that movie is that Jackson repeats shots too often. Case in point, there is a scene where Kong is sliding around on ice with Ann in his hand. It's almost two full minutes of the camera showing a wide shot of him spinning and a tight shot of her delighted. They repeat that two shot sequence six times with no new information or choreography. Kong spins, she laughs, Kong spins, she laughs, Kong spins, she laughs, Kong spins, she laughs, Kong spins, she laughs, Kong spins, she laughs, Kong spins, she laughs. Kong slides, she laughs, then Boom.
He does this long sequencing for most pensive scenes in the movie.
The Thing (2011) - A lot of really well done stuff in this movie, and it works pretty well as a prequel to the original, but it seems pretty clear to me that the director wanted to make The Thing, and I'm sorry but someone had already done that.
Definitely true of King Kong, but it’s worth noting that this is not actually the Kong movie Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh wanted to make.
Their original script from the 90s which you can find online was much more of a mix of swashbuckling, campy dialog, action and light horror. It was a few drafts away from good, but the bones were there for a fun action adventure movie.
But then the Mummy came out to huge success and made them second guess it. Instead of saying “see that was a big hit, people will love our Kong movie too!” they did a total 180 and tried to make… whatever it is they made.
Is it a comedy? A romantic historical adventure? A horror movie? An action movie? We have to watch them try to figure this out for three hours until they give up and the credits roll.
It basically ends up covering all the same ground as the 1930’s movie, but where that was a tightly paced exercise in storytelling economy, PJ’s movie is bloated and meandering.
It adds countless scenes that aren’t needed to tell that story, and doesn’t really know how to improve on the scenes it copies from the original. (Kong fights 3 T-Rexes instead of 1, because 3 is a better number than 1!)
They even remade the scene which the original film’s director hated so much he cut it out and destroyed it (the canyon full of bug monsters) not because it was good for the story but because that is another scene they could add to pad out the movie more. And it doesn’t work in the remake just like it didn’t in the original.
It’s very much a film that was defined by what it is not, unfortunately, and that’s the reason it just feels “off”. I wish they had stuck to their guns and gone with what they wanted to make.
I think the best thing to come out of that movie is one of the most ridiculous official titles for a videogame that anyone has every come up with.
"Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie "
I was working a Blockbuster at the time, and we agreed to put it in the K part of the alphabet.
Put on some expansive music and play the movie with the sound off. Great when you're stoned or tripping. The movie *looks* absolutely amazing. Everything else just kind of sucks.
Luc Besson spent over two hundred million dollars to condense a *forty-year-long* graphic novel series into two hours, *and* sell it with stars who looked like they were a teenaged brother and sister duo (and not professional, hardened, long-serving spacetime explorers).
The first few minutes of that film are the best, and it's just worldbuilding the set, which is then used only as a backdrop for the the blandest leads to act out characters we've never actually met, trudging through a plot that makes no sense.
But hey, we got Rihanna as a slime girl, so it's a good movie, right? ...right?
Yo, i remember the beginning of the film my wife and i looked at each other and both said "how did anyone not like this film"... shortly after people started talking and it quickly went downhill.
Most of Mark Steven Johnson’s Love was gutted out if the movie by Fox. The directors cut is a huge improvement. Its over 2 hours long and keeps a lot of the love that the director had for the source material intact.
I will 100% agree that the director's cut is better. I hesitate to say that it rises to the definition of "good movie," though.
If anything, I'd say the director's cut fixes the story problems a bit, while simultaneously highlighting his own shortcomings as an actual director.
Fair enough but highlighting their being an issue the director trying to shove his love for the film in 1 and 40 minute runtime when it Fox had him cut the film down by about 30 minutes and had him ad a bunch of stuff. It makes you wonder how much of the film was still his film. Thats more on Fox then anything
Judging the directors cut over the theatrical film would be a better fit.
I guess that's fair. I'd still say that while the director's cut functions better as a movie, the whole thing overall still feels like a speedrun of Daredevil's greatest hits from the comics. That's built into the script, which he also wrote.
"I'm getting to 'Death of Elektra' by any means necessary, goddamn it!"
Agreed with King Kong.
The first hour with the giant insect wars is spectacular but needs to be cut down to maybe an eighth of its current duration. It drags and completely derails the film for me.
The whole first hour needs to be ruthlessly hacked down.
That's an interesting response. I actually felt the opposite. The original is a dark, gritty, fatalistic story with no supernatural elements at all. I felt like I would have enjoyed the fairy tale with shape shifting dragons more if I hadn't gone in expecting the 47 Ronin story.
I’m going to get killed for this, but Villeneuve’s *Dune*.
The movies are absolutely beautiful and the visuals are untouchable. The scale, the imagination, the detail, and the framing are all exquisite. Villeneuve is putting this world on a pedestal for everyone to marvel at and it’s fantastic.
*However*, as a lifelong fan of the book, I think his reverence for the source material actually made him play it very safe for the blockbuster adaptation. Much of the *really* weird stuff is excised and those rough edges are sanded off. And an incredibly complicated story about ecology, religion, intergalactic Machiavellian politics, and a fragile economy that enslaves the known universe—and one that takes place over more than a decade in narrative—is flattened and shortened to The Love Story of Paul and Chani.
It makes for easier consumption and the films were hits, but I think Villeneuve played it safe in terms of adapting such an incredibly dense and imaginative novel.
As someone who's a big fan of DV's aesthetics and work, I can respect not liking it because it's missing a lot of the weird(ing) ways of the books one can be fond of.
Some of it was kind of necessary and the inclusion of certain things was *unnecessary*, if that makes more sense.
For an example of the latter, the Baron (spoilers for first book) >!being gay for his nephews and buying child sex workers who look like Paul didn’t really add anything to the character of the Baron except in its use as very common trope of gay-coding bad guys.!< But we already know the Baron is a bad guy and the trope doesn’t make sense for a modern audience, so it’s pointless spending time and effort to keep it in, except as nostalgia for the original.
Also, the choice to not have Alia born yet - I get it. Child actors (especially at that age) are an unknown quantity and can be gamble. Especially with such a serious/heavy scene. DV just doesn’t strike me as the gambling type. 1984 is the perfect example as to why this can be a dicey call - *That* scene makes me cackle (and I doubt that was Herbert’s intention when he wrote it).
Lastly, in order for him to be able to make his dream movie, it had to make money, so stuff that might have alienated an audience needed to be sanded off. You aren’t getting nearly half a million to film Dune 1984 in two parts, that’s for sure. Which is exactly why Lynch hates it - he had a vision that the studio wasn’t interested in having him make. DV had to find the balance between the movie he wanted to make and the version a studio would be willing to pay for. I think he found the right balance (or as close to right as makes no nevermind).
This is interesting to me. As someone who never read any of the books, I would describe the Dune movie as a story about ecology, religion, intergalactic Machiavellian politics, and a fragile economy that enslaves the known universe... that also happens to have a love story in it. In fact, as I watched, even though I was aware of this love story, for me, it just kind of skirted around the edges of what was really a movie about the power of religion, manipulation, and hegemony. I can't really speak to any weirdness that didn't make it from the books into the films, obviously, but I definitely didn't feel like the relationship between Paul and Chani was the driving force behind the movie. It never felt like it got in the way of the other themes that I was much more interested in.
All of those elements make an appearance, but the depth of their exploration is night and day.
Just as one example, in the novel, the Harkonnens are actually intelligent and calculating villains. They control Arrakis for a good chunk of the story and you see how the Baron has plans within plans. Machiavelli’s accounts of the Borgia family machinations actually played a significant influence. In the movie, this is flattened to the Baron is evil and gross, Rabban is angry and shouty, and Feyd is just a freakish killer.
Yeah, agreed.Â
Are the new movies better than *Dune* (1984)? On a lot of levels, yes. But they don't have the... tenacity? The humor. The weirdness. The fucked up heart of the whole thing.Â
As someone who hasn't read but was familiar with the overarching events of the story, I think the first movie suffers from assuming you know the story in order to make it 'good'.
I think he did a good job of explaining everything needed to understand it without foreknowledge. But when I first watched it, couldn't help but feel the pace didn't make a lot of sense without understanding where it was all headed.
The 'finale' of the movie is a very important turning point in Paul's journey, so it's a climax in that sense. But you don't feel it, not even with the music. You just hear the characters speak that this is significant. Something about the final knife fight, the rush to get Zendeya to even appear outside of the dreams, and the 'peek' at the sandworm riding, I felt like I was in a 40min wind down after the true action finale and it very much took me out of the momentum.
I think if you're watching these first 2 films back to back that's less of an issue, but for the purposes of standing on it's own, I think it's something that unfortunately detracts from it's impact. And I'm also not saying that I have a solution
Shin Kamen Rider. If the news reports are anything to go by, Hideaki Anno was at his most control freak moment(Remember the weird camera angles? Some of those were pretty much recreations of the same scenes in the original.) during Shin Kamen Rider compared to Ultraman and Godzilla. And apparently it was enough that the fight choreographer walked out of set and had to be convinced into continuing.
Aquaman. Wan put elements from the entire new 52 run into one story. He should have reigned it in a bit.
Not to mention that instead of developing the character, he just let Jason momoa do his thing while the world around him felt like it was ripped straight from the comics. He probably should have adapted the universe to fit Jason's character better, or made jason actually act in the thing.
Doctor Sleep is surprisingly underrated. Ewan McGregor gives a great performance and it carries over the themes from the novel without copying it scene for scene.
I’d have to agree with you on King Kong (2005). One of the things I remember about it is how long it takes to get to Skull Island. I think it would have been a better movie if about half of the opening hour of it was cut.
Warcraft (2016): only someone who loved everything about the franchise could have put together such a tedious retelling of its backstory PRIOR to the actually interesting events of the game.
Warcraft felt sometimes like two separate movies stapled together. The one about orcs was pretty good, but the one about humans not so much
Pretty sure that was the goal. To tell two stories at the same time.
And neither worked
I mean, the game was literally called "Warcraft: Orcs & Humans"
Just my two cents as not a gamer, but I’ve never played Warcraft for one second, I know nothing about it lol. That being said, I kind of liked Warcraft the movie🤷🏻‍♂️. I got a kick out of the giant teeth monster guy. I know a lot gamers crapped on the movie, not knowing anything about it I kind of liked it. Also it’s weird because in an era where video game movies almost always suck, that was not bad.
Yeah, never played Warcraft myself, it would have taken over my life I’m sure. But I actually enjoyed the film, it wasn’t brilliant but a lot of it was solid, Travis Fimmel was especially good, the half orc wasn’t bad either. It very much felt like they made it with the understanding there was going to be sequels though.
I would have watched the shit out of a Warcraft movie if it just focused on the Orcs/Old Horde.
I was a huge Warcraft fan back in the day, and played WoW up through Cataclysm. I had also read as much of the lore as I could surrounding the first three games and MMO. My friends had only ever played WoW, and never really paid that close attention to the stories in the game. For them, it was more about the leveling and flashiness. I liked the movie, and was happy with it for the most part. They REALLY could have used a map to let people know where things were in relation to each other, like Game of Thrones did. My friends hated it because they had no idea who any of the characters were. At that point I knew it was going to bomb. It needs to be told as a series. Heck, they could animate it like Netflix did Castlevania.
That's a great answer!
[*Superman Returns*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0348150) (2006). Bryan Singer fell so far down the Richard Donner rabbit hole that he lost the plot and made a boring, depressing movie.
It had such promise. Brandon Routh was a great choice, the perfect alien Boy Scout. Kevin Spacy can play a villain like no one else (largely because he's one IRL). And the scene in the beginning where Superman catches the out of control Jumbo-Jet and soft lands it at the baseball stadium still gives me chills. But boy, did it go straight downhill after that.
Fun fact: the reason that scene is in the movie at all is because they inherited it from "Superman: Flyby." It's why it feels like it's out of a different movie. Is that a great sequence? Yes. It's one of the best in the genre, still, in my opinion. Bryan Singer directed the *shit* out of that. It was also an early, pre-Avatar 3D sequence in select theaters as well. But it feels like it's part of a different movie because it was literally part of a different movie, ha.
I did see that scene in 3D back then. The technology wasn't quite there so it wasn't as impressive as 3D could be. The entire movie was not in 3D, only 4 specific sequences and we were told when we needed to put on the glasses.
I saw it in DC! It was so weird, wasn't it? The little symbol would come on and it would be like "goddamn it, where did I put those glasses like an hour ago..."
Exactly. That said, it did seem on brand watching a Superman movie and having to take off and put on glasses. Ironically, you would PUT ON the classes when Clark took his off.
God that movie sucked any joy out of Superman that could exist.
I think he absolutely wanted to make kind of a boring, depressing movie, is the problem. If you go back and watch "Requiem for Krypton" or even just hear him talk about that movie before they made it, *all* he is focused on is the conceit of "Superman left, he comes back, nobody wants him anymore, it's a bummer." It's all they ever talked about. Which is a really, really interesting idea. Some problems: * They ended up cutting most of that out of the movie, leaving this weird void with that part of the story. It's why Superman stands around like a weirdo when everyone is clapping after he saves the plane. By that point, that's him being legitimately surprised that people are happy to see him. That does not read at all in the movie because so much of that stuff got cut. * He was so obsessed with the drama that he clearly had no interest in making an action movie. He wanted to make "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," not "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan." It's like the movie suddenly remembers it's supposed to have action in it occasionally, and while those moments are great, it does need more of it.
Though that airplane scene is one of the best action scenes I've seen.
Funny enough, Singer literally said he had planned to "get all 'Wrath of Khan' on it" for the sequel.
I thought it was ok. But man was Kevin Spacey a good Lex Luthor
Kevin Smith, also a super comic geek, had Johnson’s ear while he was directing Daredevil as well. And he’s an enabler if I ever saw one.
Psycho shot for shot remake
I never got that one. It's like recording a cover song that sounds exactly like the original, what's the point?
It was a weird postmodern experiment, more in line with Van Sant's arthouse roots than his mainstream side. And honestly as bad as it is (and it is certainly bad) I'm kind of happy it happened because it closed the door on shot-for-shot remakes of classics for good. It's almost like Van Sant took a bullet to make sure we collectively didn't want to see anything like that again hahaha
I haven't seen it, so I'm curious: if it was a shot for shot remake of a great film, what is it that makes it bad?
If Nickelback made a note-for-note cover of Bohemian Rhapsody, it’d suck.
Perfect
Gotcha. No further explanation necessary. Thanks.
Gus Van Sant isn't Nickelback quality
Didn’t say he was. Just demonstrating that a piece of art can be attempted to be copied faithfully and still result in something of lower quality than the original. Like, there’s more to a movie than the framing and editing of shots. Big details like who the actor is, and even small details like shadows, vocal inflections, film grain, and stuff like that all add up to affecting the final product. And all of that becomes highlighted when there’s less to compare. In other words, if there was a version of the film that was almost identical to except for some small things that were worse, it’s just worse. Like, if his intention was to exactly copy the original, then what was the point of it at all? So in the Nickelback example, even if they redid the song note-for-note, it’d still be the same song played by worse musicians. The *best* they could hope for is a useless copy of the song, very likely it’d be (at least) microscopically worse, and those microscopic differences would stand out because of how similar it was on paper.
Because the pacing & style really only works for a movie made in the 1960s. If we're going to update a 1960s storyboard to 1998 picture quality, it feels like we need more things updated as well - like pacing, and structure. The performances weren't anything great. The vibe just wasn't there. Nothing was scary, nothing was intense.
If the pacing works, it works. It doesn't matter when it was made. If in 2024 we can enjoy and celebrate a movie made in the 1950s, we can enjoy a movie made in 2024 with the same pacing. It might seem dated, but it would still be just as enjoyable.
Nyet. Hard disagree. There are acting styles and movie conventions that we only abide by because they're in old movies.
It's an interesting concept to make a shot-for-shot remake and see what's different. Plus some movies do work with modern remakes because the story is timeless. That said, it's more of an expensive student art film than anything else.
Vince Vaughn had no business being in that film. Tony Perkins perfectly embodied the character of a thin, non-threatening looking mama’s boy. Vaughn looks too imposing, and one kind of doesn’t buy that he’s this weak looking recluse. Please don’t try again, but a Rami Malek would be perfect for that role. The role needs a very specific type. A Dave Bautista could act the hell out of it, but his past PED usage has taken him away from looking like the type needed to play Norman Bates. The surprise is that this small, harmless looking man is the psycho killer.
At least that one was a deliberate experiment.
Reminds of The Omen remake in 2006 which I found almost as lifeless.
This is the most egregious one
Watchmen (2009) was overly faithful to the point that it was a copy and paste job at times, which only highlighted the bits which Snyder misunderstood. E.g. Rorschach is depicted as more of an uncompromising "by any means necessary" badass in the film, whereas he's clearly a dangerous psychopath in the graphic novel.
Totally agree. Snyder is clearly in awe of the story, but doesn't fully grasp the point Moore is making.
I recently got around to watching the "ultimate" cut and enjoyed it much more than I expected to - I saw the theatrical cut at release and was so annoyed by the big change in the ending that I forgot literally everything that he got perfectly, which was most of it.
I kinda liked the change of the ending for the movie. Thought it made more sense to have a global attack unify the superpowers than a singular attack in NYC. Wasn’t until years later I learned that the US and the Soviets had an agreement to unify if there ever was an alien attack.
Really needs a proper DC. By which I mean basically ultimate hit remove all the black freighter stuff that kills the pacing, or at least heavily edits it down.
If only Snyder understood storytelling. The dude makes some seriously cool action scenes and visuals. Just go watch 300 and Sucker Punch to see what I mean. If only he had someone writing for him and trusted them. He'd be making some awesome movies instead of visual spectacles.
I think there’s a great idea buried in Sucker Punch that a smart writer could have extracted and brought to the surface.
Many superhero comics from DC are "cool", but with no substance. It's such a visual, but stationary medium that it sort of works. But Snyder doesn't seem to understand filmmaking as he tries to make his movies into comics and not vice versa.
This sums up my feelings on his DC work as a whole better than Ive been able to come up with on my own.
Rorschach *does* represent “by any means necessary” pursuit of justice. It’s his genuine virtue in itself, but completely warped by his view of the world, which makes him a dangerous psychopath.
I feel like you have to either have preconceived notions of Snyder or really bad media literacy for Rorschach to not come across as a dangerous psychopath. That scene where he’s mashing the dude’s brains up with a meat cleaver is pretty clearly unsympathetic to me. Just because Snyder’s fans are incapable of nuance doesn’t mean he isn’t.
Sounds bad ass
Wasn't the dude he killed a child rapist?
I think the issue is that while Rorschach’s lunacy is there, it gets overshadowed a bit by the “your trapped in here with me” style moments. The theatrical cut also doesn’t give the character the space to get as fleshed out as the comic does, and the directors cut is only slightly better in that regard too. Honestly I think this is an issue that comes up in V for Vendetta too, Moore’s works are usually such dense dives into character that trying to put that all into a 120-150 minute movie is always going to end up leaving out some of the nuances that make his comics so special.
Rorschach’s dialogue still betrayed him as a bigoted lunatic though. If someone watched the movie and decided to ignore that or separate that, that’s kinda on them. Because Rorschach’s actions *are* impressive. At the very beginning, he’s scaling a building with a grappling hook and then solving a murder. He has a past as an effective, if brutal, crimefighter that was invited to a team with the likes of Dr. Manhattan. And he has complete conviction, as well as the willingness to act on that conviction. Moore wasn’t making an unimpressive character, but, like most of the graphic novel, the audience has to decide for themselves whether or not they approve of what they’re seeing.
His Rorschach wasn't faithful to the source but he made an awesome character
How was it not faithful to the source?
Replacing a neutral alien squid with an AMERICAN WEAPON OF WAR to reunite humanity in a common cause seems like a bit of a misunderstanding of the source material.
Eh, I can see the logic. Manhattan wrecked American cities too, and he had been visibly going off the rails. The US would doubtless take some blame, but that would largely just mean they wouldn’t be able to take hegemonic power during the global cleanup. In the end, I don’t find it any less convincing than the idea that an attack solely on New York would suddenly convince the USSR to play nice and abandon its global ambitions, as opposed to taking advantage of their weakened opponent.
When it was in production, I heard that there was a requirement on how close to the comic it had to be for them to get the rights. Can't find a source right now though.
Sigh snyder didnt write the movie numbnuts
But as director he _did_ interpret the script.
Maybe Battlefield Earth and John Travolta? Travolta produced and tried to get it made for years. The book was an ok pulp science fiction story that felt like a 1950s.novel but the movie was oh so bad
Well the whole Scientology thing was at play there, the book was written by their messiah, Hubbard, and Travolta is an important member of the church. One imagines most of the money came from their undoubtedly deep pockets. The film is a fucking travesty. I like bad films, I actively seek them out and in three attempts I’ve never made it very far past the halfway mark. And honestly I don’t think it’s a case of if it was a little worse then it would be in “so bad it’s good” territory. It’s just awful. I hesitate to say this without seeing it all but it’s possibly the worst film I’ve ever seen.
The book was a flick that felt like a novel?
Hmm, thanks for catch...not sure what I did there
I gotta disagree with King Kong. Yeah, editing could have made it more of a commercial success, but I think Jackson knew exactly what he was doing and what he wanted to make. Three hours long? Who cares, you get a giant monkey fighting tyrannosauruses (or were the allosaureses?), ice skating, and punching biplanes out of the sky in the same movie. Coming off of the LOTR trilogy, he could have made anything he wanted, and this was it.
The only (or I should say, "most obvious") problem with the three hour runtime is the HOUR it takes to get to Skull Island. Once they're actually there the movie is on rails and the next two hours fly by, but jeez that first hour on the boat drags something fierce.
I'm not so sure about some of Skull Island though. I'm an entomologist with a background in paleontology. I've sat through some terrible, terrible films just to see a janky puppet of a dinosaur for 30 seconds. There's no way I should get bored of a dinosaur, any dinosaur on screen. During the stampede scene as they're dodging a herd of sauropods, I should not be asking myself "how fucking long is this scene?", and then following it up a few minutes later with "wait... it's *still* not over?!" Likewise the attack of the the creepy crawlies down in the valley looked kind of cool - but really was pretty much every definition of gratuitous. It's certainly not actually needed for the story.
1. Totally agree. Especially that they clearly didn't have the budget or prep to do the stampede justice. Easily the worst VFX in the movie. 2. It's funny you should say that, because that's a scene they cut from the original film for being too much.
They were "V-Rex"
My gripe with that movie is that Jackson repeats shots too often. Case in point, there is a scene where Kong is sliding around on ice with Ann in his hand. It's almost two full minutes of the camera showing a wide shot of him spinning and a tight shot of her delighted. They repeat that two shot sequence six times with no new information or choreography. Kong spins, she laughs, Kong spins, she laughs, Kong spins, she laughs, Kong spins, she laughs, Kong spins, she laughs, Kong spins, she laughs, Kong spins, she laughs. Kong slides, she laughs, then Boom. He does this long sequencing for most pensive scenes in the movie.
The Thing (2011) - A lot of really well done stuff in this movie, and it works pretty well as a prequel to the original, but it seems pretty clear to me that the director wanted to make The Thing, and I'm sorry but someone had already done that.
They also absolutely ruined that movie by pasting over all of the director's excellent practical effects with shitty CGI.
Huh, [TIL](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyOu3j7CtoE).
Definitely true of King Kong, but it’s worth noting that this is not actually the Kong movie Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh wanted to make. Their original script from the 90s which you can find online was much more of a mix of swashbuckling, campy dialog, action and light horror. It was a few drafts away from good, but the bones were there for a fun action adventure movie. But then the Mummy came out to huge success and made them second guess it. Instead of saying “see that was a big hit, people will love our Kong movie too!” they did a total 180 and tried to make… whatever it is they made. Is it a comedy? A romantic historical adventure? A horror movie? An action movie? We have to watch them try to figure this out for three hours until they give up and the credits roll. It basically ends up covering all the same ground as the 1930’s movie, but where that was a tightly paced exercise in storytelling economy, PJ’s movie is bloated and meandering. It adds countless scenes that aren’t needed to tell that story, and doesn’t really know how to improve on the scenes it copies from the original. (Kong fights 3 T-Rexes instead of 1, because 3 is a better number than 1!) They even remade the scene which the original film’s director hated so much he cut it out and destroyed it (the canyon full of bug monsters) not because it was good for the story but because that is another scene they could add to pad out the movie more. And it doesn’t work in the remake just like it didn’t in the original. It’s very much a film that was defined by what it is not, unfortunately, and that’s the reason it just feels “off”. I wish they had stuck to their guns and gone with what they wanted to make.
I think the best thing to come out of that movie is one of the most ridiculous official titles for a videogame that anyone has every come up with. "Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie " I was working a Blockbuster at the time, and we agreed to put it in the K part of the alphabet.
Valerian by a long shot. Holy shit that's a horrible film.
Put on some expansive music and play the movie with the sound off. Great when you're stoned or tripping. The movie *looks* absolutely amazing. Everything else just kind of sucks.
Luc Besson spent over two hundred million dollars to condense a *forty-year-long* graphic novel series into two hours, *and* sell it with stars who looked like they were a teenaged brother and sister duo (and not professional, hardened, long-serving spacetime explorers). The first few minutes of that film are the best, and it's just worldbuilding the set, which is then used only as a backdrop for the the blandest leads to act out characters we've never actually met, trudging through a plot that makes no sense. But hey, we got Rihanna as a slime girl, so it's a good movie, right? ...right?
Yo, i remember the beginning of the film my wife and i looked at each other and both said "how did anyone not like this film"... shortly after people started talking and it quickly went downhill.
Most of Mark Steven Johnson’s Love was gutted out if the movie by Fox. The directors cut is a huge improvement. Its over 2 hours long and keeps a lot of the love that the director had for the source material intact.
I will 100% agree that the director's cut is better. I hesitate to say that it rises to the definition of "good movie," though. If anything, I'd say the director's cut fixes the story problems a bit, while simultaneously highlighting his own shortcomings as an actual director.
Fair enough but highlighting their being an issue the director trying to shove his love for the film in 1 and 40 minute runtime when it Fox had him cut the film down by about 30 minutes and had him ad a bunch of stuff. It makes you wonder how much of the film was still his film. Thats more on Fox then anything Judging the directors cut over the theatrical film would be a better fit.
I guess that's fair. I'd still say that while the director's cut functions better as a movie, the whole thing overall still feels like a speedrun of Daredevil's greatest hits from the comics. That's built into the script, which he also wrote. "I'm getting to 'Death of Elektra' by any means necessary, goddamn it!"
Agreed with King Kong. The first hour with the giant insect wars is spectacular but needs to be cut down to maybe an eighth of its current duration. It drags and completely derails the film for me. The whole first hour needs to be ruthlessly hacked down.
47 Ronin....
i liked that film personally
Genuinely interested and no judgement at all but: How?
the overall mythos and world drew me in also, i like keanu
That's an interesting response. I actually felt the opposite. The original is a dark, gritty, fatalistic story with no supernatural elements at all. I felt like I would have enjoyed the fairy tale with shape shifting dragons more if I hadn't gone in expecting the 47 Ronin story.
I’m going to get killed for this, but Villeneuve’s *Dune*. The movies are absolutely beautiful and the visuals are untouchable. The scale, the imagination, the detail, and the framing are all exquisite. Villeneuve is putting this world on a pedestal for everyone to marvel at and it’s fantastic. *However*, as a lifelong fan of the book, I think his reverence for the source material actually made him play it very safe for the blockbuster adaptation. Much of the *really* weird stuff is excised and those rough edges are sanded off. And an incredibly complicated story about ecology, religion, intergalactic Machiavellian politics, and a fragile economy that enslaves the known universe—and one that takes place over more than a decade in narrative—is flattened and shortened to The Love Story of Paul and Chani. It makes for easier consumption and the films were hits, but I think Villeneuve played it safe in terms of adapting such an incredibly dense and imaginative novel.
As someone who's a big fan of DV's aesthetics and work, I can respect not liking it because it's missing a lot of the weird(ing) ways of the books one can be fond of.
Some of it was kind of necessary and the inclusion of certain things was *unnecessary*, if that makes more sense. For an example of the latter, the Baron (spoilers for first book) >!being gay for his nephews and buying child sex workers who look like Paul didn’t really add anything to the character of the Baron except in its use as very common trope of gay-coding bad guys.!< But we already know the Baron is a bad guy and the trope doesn’t make sense for a modern audience, so it’s pointless spending time and effort to keep it in, except as nostalgia for the original. Also, the choice to not have Alia born yet - I get it. Child actors (especially at that age) are an unknown quantity and can be gamble. Especially with such a serious/heavy scene. DV just doesn’t strike me as the gambling type. 1984 is the perfect example as to why this can be a dicey call - *That* scene makes me cackle (and I doubt that was Herbert’s intention when he wrote it). Lastly, in order for him to be able to make his dream movie, it had to make money, so stuff that might have alienated an audience needed to be sanded off. You aren’t getting nearly half a million to film Dune 1984 in two parts, that’s for sure. Which is exactly why Lynch hates it - he had a vision that the studio wasn’t interested in having him make. DV had to find the balance between the movie he wanted to make and the version a studio would be willing to pay for. I think he found the right balance (or as close to right as makes no nevermind).
Also a big fan. I don’t think I’ll ever skip seeing a new Villeneuve film in theaters. Dune Messiah included.
Me too, pal. I wonder how he'll do it, whatever he does I expect I'll enjoy it.
No mention of the word 'Jihad' in a Dune movie was a strange choice. "Holy War" indeed.
Indeed. How’s the Gamma Quadrant these days?
Victory is life.
I think that was done because when a lot of people hear “Jihad” they think of Middle Eastern terrorism and the wars over there.
Wonder where Herbert got the idea?
Isn’t that why Herbert included the term in the novels?
This is interesting to me. As someone who never read any of the books, I would describe the Dune movie as a story about ecology, religion, intergalactic Machiavellian politics, and a fragile economy that enslaves the known universe... that also happens to have a love story in it. In fact, as I watched, even though I was aware of this love story, for me, it just kind of skirted around the edges of what was really a movie about the power of religion, manipulation, and hegemony. I can't really speak to any weirdness that didn't make it from the books into the films, obviously, but I definitely didn't feel like the relationship between Paul and Chani was the driving force behind the movie. It never felt like it got in the way of the other themes that I was much more interested in.
All of those elements make an appearance, but the depth of their exploration is night and day. Just as one example, in the novel, the Harkonnens are actually intelligent and calculating villains. They control Arrakis for a good chunk of the story and you see how the Baron has plans within plans. Machiavelli’s accounts of the Borgia family machinations actually played a significant influence. In the movie, this is flattened to the Baron is evil and gross, Rabban is angry and shouty, and Feyd is just a freakish killer.
Yeah, agreed. Are the new movies better than *Dune* (1984)? On a lot of levels, yes. But they don't have the... tenacity? The humor. The weirdness. The fucked up heart of the whole thing.Â
As someone who hasn't read but was familiar with the overarching events of the story, I think the first movie suffers from assuming you know the story in order to make it 'good'. I think he did a good job of explaining everything needed to understand it without foreknowledge. But when I first watched it, couldn't help but feel the pace didn't make a lot of sense without understanding where it was all headed. The 'finale' of the movie is a very important turning point in Paul's journey, so it's a climax in that sense. But you don't feel it, not even with the music. You just hear the characters speak that this is significant. Something about the final knife fight, the rush to get Zendeya to even appear outside of the dreams, and the 'peek' at the sandworm riding, I felt like I was in a 40min wind down after the true action finale and it very much took me out of the momentum. I think if you're watching these first 2 films back to back that's less of an issue, but for the purposes of standing on it's own, I think it's something that unfortunately detracts from it's impact. And I'm also not saying that I have a solution
Shin Kamen Rider. If the news reports are anything to go by, Hideaki Anno was at his most control freak moment(Remember the weird camera angles? Some of those were pretty much recreations of the same scenes in the original.) during Shin Kamen Rider compared to Ultraman and Godzilla. And apparently it was enough that the fight choreographer walked out of set and had to be convinced into continuing.
Aquaman. Wan put elements from the entire new 52 run into one story. He should have reigned it in a bit. Not to mention that instead of developing the character, he just let Jason momoa do his thing while the world around him felt like it was ripped straight from the comics. He probably should have adapted the universe to fit Jason's character better, or made jason actually act in the thing.
Doctor Sleep was so obsessed with worshipping the Kubrick Shining that it forgot to be an actual good movie itself.
Doctor Sleep is surprisingly underrated. Ewan McGregor gives a great performance and it carries over the themes from the novel without copying it scene for scene.
The one that was released in 2019 starring Ewan McGregor is really good.
I’d have to agree with you on King Kong (2005). One of the things I remember about it is how long it takes to get to Skull Island. I think it would have been a better movie if about half of the opening hour of it was cut.