That's a shame, the overall changes. I'll admit I wasn't too impressed with the trailers in the first place, as I've never seen any remakes/reboots that lived up to the predecessor. But it's a concept that's got a lot of potential for good storytelling, if done right.
Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched
- Thread starter Th3Ch33s3Cak3
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If I'm not including re-adaptations (yes, there's a difference), I can nominate Battlestar Galactica, and as controversial as this will be, Total Recall.
Well I was thinking of films, since that's the topic of this thread
But yes the remake of some tv shows have done well. Never saw the TR remake, but I didn't really hear anything good about it, and it didn't catch my interest.
Arguably. From what I understand, the 1990 film bears little resemblance to the story it's based on.
It's arguably in a similar situation where we get stuff like Heart of Darkness, then Apocalypse Now, then Spec Ops: The Line. The latter two can harken back to HoD, but are they "adaptations" in the truest sense of the word?
Most Phillip K. Dick adaptations bear little resemblance to the story they're based on. Blade Runner is nothing like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep for example. He will have a really cool concept, and they will tweak it to be more fitting for a film.
But it basically is. The movie comes up with its own mood and aesthetic but the basic plot remains more or less unchanged. There're some crucial differences but none to the point where I'd go "Movie is NOTHING like book".
To be fair, I haven't read that short story in many years, but I don't recall, other than the broadest of strokes of plot, there being much similarity. There wasn't anything about the shared empathy tv show people watched and how that spoke about society, and that was a fairly constant narrative as I recall. The way all actual living creatures were considered holy by pretty much every human.
It's a novel, not a short story.
The biggest difference is that in the novel there's no question regarding Deckard's humanity, and Sebastian is practically a co-protagonist. Each chapter cuts back and forth between them. Otherwise the plot plays out more or less the same. Characters are tweaked, the order of things is changed, settings are changed, but nothing major. The movie's biggest ace is turning Batty what we remember him for. He's barely a character in the book.
The movie glosses over animals being a rare commodity with Tyrrel's owl and when Deckard examines the snake's scale from Zora. That it doesn't get much more into that or the shared virtual thing hardly qualifies the movie as having nothing to do with the book.
What you said about PKD stories and adaptations definitely applies to Total Recall and Minority Report though.
Huh, I don't remember that at all. My memory of it was a short story that was only vaguely similar to the film, as far things like replicants, a fucked, post-nuke earth, etc. Memory is a wonderfully spotty thing.
I'd read that it was one of the highest paid "concepts" for a movie ever. I think the writers got some $400K, not adjusted for inflation. The question then was, can you sell a movie in one sentence. And this one is one heck of a sentence, something along the lines of with doctors now able to stop and restart "life" what if some students did so trying to go as deep into the arterlife and come back, as possible? Great grab line. Now could they make a better movie? Worth remaking if you could really do better.
It's a really cool premise, in fact there is an old World of Darkness game based around the premise, or at least some aspects of it. Orpheus.
I think this was approaching the peak scriptwriter mania in Hollywood: remember Joe Esterhasz?
Although honestly, if they're going to pay actors so many millions, there's no reason scriptwriters shouldn't be earning huge sums, either. It's not exactly like a script is unimportant to the quality of a film.
Yup! I imagine it was a very brief peak. I wrote but did not sell a few screen plays. I had my fantasies. Entertainment Weekly used to do the top 100 most powerful people in film making. One year that really put things in perspective, they did a follow up article: "No Power". It was about writers. Around that time, "The Player" came out with a scene of Hwood execs talking about how they didn't even need writers. Great concepts sell themselves. Might be a coincidence. Real life calls. But I've not written a script since.
Sorry to hear. As someone else whose written but never sold(though that's mostly on me not feeling like my writing was ready to pitch yet), I know the feeling.
Just watched Mortal Kombat 2021. I'm not 100% this will be my final opinion on it, but overall, I had a fun time watching it, but there was one major issue that held it back constantly for me, and that was Cole Young.
I was already iffy on having a new character as the protagonist for a video-game based film (why not have literally any game character be the protagonist?), and this movie really proved my concerns to be founded. He was the most boring of the characters, and in terms of plot impact, he arguably had the worst showing. The only fight he straight-up won was against Goro, and that was because he discovered his secret power at the right moment. His other fights? Lost his cage fight to establish his need to grow as a fighter. Needed Sonya to finish off Mileena for him (and keep in mind, he's the only one of the heroes who needed a tag assist for their fights in that scene), and in the final fight against Sub-Zero/Bi-Han, it was Scorpion who did almost all the work, with him spending about half the fight trying to punch his wife out of ice.
That said, the fights were pretty solid for the most part, and the gore was definitely a highlight, as it should be. I can't say it was as fun as 1995, but it is far superior to Annihilation, and I'm ready for the sequel.
I was already iffy on having a new character as the protagonist for a video-game based film (why not have literally any game character be the protagonist?), and this movie really proved my concerns to be founded. He was the most boring of the characters, and in terms of plot impact, he arguably had the worst showing. The only fight he straight-up won was against Goro, and that was because he discovered his secret power at the right moment. His other fights? Lost his cage fight to establish his need to grow as a fighter. Needed Sonya to finish off Mileena for him (and keep in mind, he's the only one of the heroes who needed a tag assist for their fights in that scene), and in the final fight against Sub-Zero/Bi-Han, it was Scorpion who did almost all the work, with him spending about half the fight trying to punch his wife out of ice.
That said, the fights were pretty solid for the most part, and the gore was definitely a highlight, as it should be. I can't say it was as fun as 1995, but it is far superior to Annihilation, and I'm ready for the sequel.
Thunder Force (2021)
Melissa McCarthy makes two kinds of movies. She alternates between decent-good movies that can showcase her talents effectively, and godawful garbage written and directed by her husband Ben Falcone. This is one of the latter. It's very nice that they love each other so much that she'll cheapen her talent to give him some work, but as a viewer, you can't help but wish she didn't.
Melissa McCarthy makes two kinds of movies. She alternates between decent-good movies that can showcase her talents effectively, and godawful garbage written and directed by her husband Ben Falcone. This is one of the latter. It's very nice that they love each other so much that she'll cheapen her talent to give him some work, but as a viewer, you can't help but wish she didn't.
There are quite a few movies on the weakness of scriptwriters in Hollywood. One cannot help but feel scriptwriters have managed to get a few films made making clear how low down the pecking order they are. Barton Fink - the sensitive and intellectual East Coast playwright summoned to Hollywood with promises of creative greatness, and then contractually forced to write grindingly dumb wrestling movies.
I think Hollywood has lots of fashions. William Goldman I think it was said "nobody knows anything": the studios, producers, directors, actors, scriptwriters have no idea what will make a hit. They have fashions because they don't really know how to hit paydirt and have a lot of insecurity because failures can wreck their careers, so they'll leap on any new idea that appears to promise doing better. The "genius scriptwriter" phase came and went.
