Escape to the Movies: Jupiter Ascending - Tries But Fails

[xaszatm]

Oh it could just be that even the Director's Cut will suck because the Wachowskis have been, for lack of a better term, washed up. It happens. Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas flopped for a reason: because they weren't very good. And this is their third in a row. I think it's safe to say the world has left them behind.

Hey, I liked Speed Racer and I didn't even know that the Wachowski's made it until you said so. Sure, it wasn't the best movie ever but it perhaps is one of the best anime-based western movies out there.

OT: Shame, I'm hoping we get our hit original IP space opera but it seems this wasn't it.

 

[K12]

Oh it could just be that even the Director's Cut will suck because the Wachowskis have been, for lack of a better term, washed up. It happens. Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas flopped for a reason: because they weren't very good. And this is their third in a row. I think it's safe to say the world has left them behind.

Can't comment on "Speed Racer" because I haven't seen it but Cloud Atlas WAS very good, brilliant even. It was kinda impenetrable though and I can forgive people for giving up in the first hour or so if it hasn't gripping them. It's expecting quite a lot from an audience to keep track of six different stories that are only related thematically and even that isn't very obvious until well over an hour.

It only really flopped in the U.S, as is my understanding, it did pretty well in the rest of the world.

 

[Sylocat]

snip

I prefer the "battery" approach myself. Yeah, it doesn't make much sense, since they could just hook up a shitload of elephants for the same result, but humanity being enslaved to serve as consumption feels way more dire than humanity being enslaved because the machines need more RAM.

To each their own, but I think if the situation is less "dire," then it has more moral complexity. I liked the idea of the machines being less over-the-top cartoonishly evil.

Oh it could just be that even the Director's Cut will suck because the Wachowskis have been, for lack of a better term, washed up. It happens. Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas flopped for a reason: because they weren't very good. And this is their third in a row. I think it's safe to say the world has left them behind.

Dude, Speed Racer was amazing, what are you talking about?

 

[scw55]

Hope that they release a Director's cut version on DvD that adds meat to the skeleton?
I really would love to see this film. But I don't want to pay cinema viewing price for something that's not working.

 

[MailOrderClone]

The plot of Pixels sounds a hell of a lot like an episode of Futurama.

 

[vid87]

Oh it could just be that even the Director's Cut will suck because the Wachowskis have been, for lack of a better term, washed up. It happens. Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas flopped for a reason: because they weren't very good. And this is their third in a row. I think it's safe to say the world has left them behind.

Dude, Speed Racer was amazing, what are you talking about?

I wasn't really following movies around the time it came out so I might not be remembering correctly, but I thought critics largely demolished Speed Racer. Nowadays Bob and a few other people plug it some I'm wondering if there really was something being left out of the conversation?

 

[Darth_Payn]

I particularly enjoyed Bob's use of images to emphasize his points in this video. Top notch and I'm sad this movie didn't hit the mark. I was really hopeful. Unfortunately this is the genre that Bob and I usually agree with so I don't have much hope that it'll turn out differently if I actually see it.

It's the images he uses that sell it, like Shigeru Miyamoto at "God", and what looked like Nick Park-animated sheep (I think, it went by pretty fast). I was hoping Bob would make fun of that whole "I'm better than all the sheeple around me" mentality some more. People who think like that are incredibly arrogant, and usually have no idea they're just following a different shepherd.

OT: I might see this if I have time, just for the wiz-bang action beats and crazy visual effects. But to me, the "deliberate over-population of planets to harvest body parts" scheme makes even less sense to me than The Matrix's.

 

[Slegiar Dryke]

Wasn't pixels a short video made years ago that had a tv exploding, video game stuff starting to attack, and eventually a bomb of some sort pixelizing the world into a cube?.....and they're making an entire movie off of that?!

 

[Solkard]

What I took from Bob's review is that this is either a good movie that was poorly edited together. And as someone else mentioned, it may be better to wait for the "actual" movie, when it's released as the director's cut.

Or...

This is a premise that could've been a good movie, but was gutted of its potential, and dumbed down into a generic sci-fi action flick.

Not sure which point he was pushing.

 

[Belaam]

The ads did look a little scattered, sad to hear that seems to be true of the whole movie.

I'm assuming Seventh Son is also a mess, but has anyone seen it to confirm/deny?

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

Translation: Wait for the Director's cut.

 

[Giovanni Jonny Caro]

what you've said about jupiter ascending is the exact same scenario for destiny

 

[DoctorNick]

So the last time I posted something anywhere on the Escapist was ... 30 Apr 2011, at 6:15 am.

I just went through the rigmarole of password recovery and the like to say this:

That Bob didn't like this film is in of itself immaterial, many things he dislikes I end up enjoying and vice versa. No, what makes me worried and completely deflates my interest in the film was the bit about (and I'm paraphrasing here) "It's a commentary on the dehumanizing nature of industrial capitalism!"

No.

Nononono...

Out of all of the overdone, obnoxious, irritating pseudo intellectual cliches used by people who think they're smarter and more clever than the av-er-age bear and have something SUPER DEEP to say that has to be absolutely the worst of the lot.

I will wait for the Redbox release.

Maybe.

 

[Swarles]

Oh it could just be that even the Director's Cut will suck because the Wachowskis have been, for lack of a better term, washed up. It happens. Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas flopped for a reason: because they weren't very good. And this is their third in a row. I think it's safe to say the world has left them behind.

Dude, Speed Racer was amazing, what are you talking about?

I wasn't really following movies around the time it came out so I might not be remembering correctly, but I thought critics largely demolished Speed Racer. Nowadays Bob and a few other people plug it some I'm wondering if there really was something being left out of the conversation?

It was mostly lambasted when it came out mainly because no one knew what they were getting into. To put it into perspective, Speed Racer is a bit of a strange film, allowing itself to follow a lot of eastern animation styles and input that into live action for a western audience. The trailers did not show that, and if I'm not mistaken, the film came out a week after Iron Man, so people were expecting another one of those, and didn't think they would be getting this strange stylistic film. As such the film bombed at the box office, but retrospective reviews are really hailing the film as one of the most severely underrated if the 2000s.

 

[MatsVS]

Mila Kunis finds out she's royalty and fucks her dog. I'll buy that for a dollar.

 

[WayOutThere]

So, is there a chance we'll be getting to see a more complete version of the film when the director's cut comes out, or something like that?

 

[pearcinator]

Bob, go watch Kingsman: The Secret Service. It's right up your alley! You will love it!