MovieChat Forums > Aylmer
Aylmer (32)
Posts
John Barry's score?
Batman 3 kills Robocop 3
Thulsa Doom at the end
Death Star Laser stock footage?
Poptarts = "Breakfast"???
Great cinematography but really doesn't hold up. *SPOILERS*
View all posts >
Replies
I look at most Godzilla movies as heavily flawed, even well-remembered ones like GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA. However I do find myself, just as I did as a child, rating them on how many effective moments they have. TERROR OF MECHAGODZILLA had that excellent sequence with Mechagodzilla and Titanosaurus destroying downtown Tokyo while Ifukube movie blares ominously. It added a lot of gravity and enjoyment to an otherwise underwhelming Godzilla movie. GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA also had that great scene set in the burning oil refinery.
Similarly, this movie overall comes off as unfortunately both addle-brained and slow paced. It means it essentially has no audience because adults will roll their eyes at the absurdity and children will be bored. There are a few extremely effective moments though mostly focused in the mid-movie attack on the city, such as the atmospheric shots of the planes dropping flares in a desperate attempt to lure Godzilla back out to sea. The sound design really helps too, especially when you consider how primitive the Japanese film industry was in the 1950's.
My favorite part of the movie is after the prisoners (in an admittedly dumb plot point) crash into the oil refinery and set the whole thing on fire, Godzilla turns his head ominously and gets drawn in. The American dub even accentuates it with some eerie 1950's stock horror movie music playing over the shot of the burning refinery, almost hinting at some impending spiritual doom for thousands of people. It still runs a chill up my spine, even 30+ years after first seeing the movie.
So I am reluctant to write this movie off entirely. Something like GODZILLA's REVENGE is far easier for me to discount, as I don't think there was even a single thing in that movie which actually worked, if even for a brief moment.
I've got two other major reasons:
1) TOO LONG - the movie is easily 40-50 minutes too long. It could easily be trimmed down to be a lot leaner and meaner without such a convoluted plot in the last hour. A little added voiceover could smooth things over. I was reluctant to watch it in the theater because I basically had to sacrifice an entire evening to do it, and I am sure a lot of other people felt the same and decided against going.
2) Not different enough from FURY ROAD to be worth it. All the Mad Max movies are pretty radically different from one another except this and FURY ROAD. They have different lead actors for sure but thematically and in terms of imagery and editing they look and feel very similar. The film's marketing failed to make it seem different enough to bother with if you have already seen FURY ROAD and felt satisfied with that experience. The only people who saw it are those who wanted "more of the same" which is exactly what the movie is. It has so many call-backs to the other Mad Max films that it gets to be head-spinning. The entire ending of the movie is patterned closely after the 1979 movie's climax right down to the torture scene.
It would have been an even more comical movie if Kirk and his crew kept going back and forth in time to deliver messages one-by-one until the probe was satisfied that the conversation was concluded.
I think the whole reason Kirk sends the message is because he and his crew need to be exonerated of their piracy charges and this was their only shot at redemption. If they went back in time, got the whales, and then took them to the future, who would have known if they hadn't warmed them up with the message beforehand. Similarly, if they merely went back in time to 1986, got two whales, and then repopulated the species in 2100 or something BEFORE coming back to their own time, they would have saved the earth from all kinds of death and destruction but would not have saved their own skins as the probe would have not caused the ruckus in the first place. They would have saved more lives but ended up in jail (except for Spock I guess), so Kirk made a self-serving utilitarian decision in when to time travel, how many lives to save, and when to send his message.
yeah I agree they look fake and hate them too but unfortunately market conditions mean that CGI-generated movies are going to be ever more ubiquitous into the future.
I think MSNBC viewers might be the only ones. They are a small but loud portion of the population, but as THE MARVELS proves, they don't actually go out and pay for the diverse films that they champion anyway.
Oddly enough "Diversity" is a new category that movie critics take into account when rating movies, along with a portion of the audience. Instead of a movie graded on story, cinematography, editing, effects, scares, thrills, etc., a lot of people now look at how "diverse" a movie is to decide whether or not they enjoyed it.
This isn't exactly a brand new phenomenon. There was some effort back in the 1970's to do things like make the gangs integrated in movies like DEATH WISH or THE WARRIORS... to both widen appeal and to not look like the movie is picking on one group. Even the 1990 Seagal movie MARKED FOR DEATH had an evil Jamaican gang so what the movie did instead of throw a white, asian, or hispanic bad guy in there, was to make a positive afro-Jamaican character to "balance things out".
It all annoys me because it makes films ring hollow and false as they don't follow reality.
AI makes a lot of things possible that didn't used to be practical. You could potentially make a Mad Max movie today with Mel Gibson reprising the role on a relatively tiny budget of under 20 million dollars and it would definitely make a profit. You could either make a movie about an elderly Mad Max on one last suicidal drive (the role could be easily written around him being old since Mad Max was not an extremely physical role anyway) OR you could do a de-aging/face-replace with Mel onto a younger actor similar to the opening of Indiana Jones 5 (the technology is much better and cheaper than it was then). Either way, most of the chase sequences and background replacement could be heavily augmented with AI, or you can just write a script where there aren't a lot of expensive production design or effects. Within a few years, you'll likely be able to generate an entire feature with AI for free, but it's just a question of whether audiences will accept it or not (they certainly will at first, before they all get smart enough to realize they can generate their own movies at home).
Don't get me wrong, I work(ed) in VFX and really hate to have been laid-off along with most of my coworkers, but it's obvious that it's no longer practical to make giant SFX or VFX-laden movies with hundreds of artists working on them when you can file it down to a streamlined crew of 10-15 people and make a decent enough feature film for pennies on the dollar. I think that's the future of filmmaking whether we like it or not. Giant Hollywood feature films have become high-risk, low-reward uncontrollable and ineffective juggernauts akin to that melting superweapon creature in NAUSICAA.
look, I'm not the biggest fan of Trump by a long stretch either as he was a very ineffective president. However I will be voting for him because Biden is an absolute disaster. Inflation (which albeit was partially started by the C.A.R.E.S. act which Trump signed off on, though the Democrats were pushing harder on it) has soared under Biden and the administration has no plans to cut government spending to balance the budget rather than continuously print new money and offer more freebies (like forgiving student loans) which are making inflation even worse. The border, even if they are indeed enforcing it, appears wide open to the rest of the world, so we are getting swamped with illegal 'newcomers' at a time when young people are having to compete with them for low-skilled work and also to buy houses, which are already too expensive to ever buy. This isn't even mentioning Biden's terrible foreign policy blunders which has pushed Russia, China, and India closer together and made them consider dropping the dollar (which will lead to, you guessed it, even more inflation).
So it's not that I love Trump. I just love not getting totally robbed of so much of my wealth and future opportunities year over year. It was Biden who threatened everyone's job if they didn't inject themselves with a brand new experimental vaccine and has us closer to WW3 than any other President in history, something I hope we don't forget this coming November.
I sought this movie out in my High School days because I heard it was one of the most disturbing movies ever made. I remember expecting some nearly snuff-movie-like cruddy ugly film shot on 8mm or something, but was surprised that the film has a pretty glossy and professional feel to the whole thing. The only thing that makes it an obvious Italian B-movie is the dubbing. Otherwise it's very well shot and edited. The script is a bit sloppy in places and some of the acting feels amateurish, but it's overall not a bad film. Ruggero Deodato's previous cannival outing LAST CANNIBAL WORLD aka JUNGLE HOLOCAUST is a much better film in my opinion. It's a lot smaller in scope but tells a very engrossing survival story focused heavily on one character. It also features beautiful photography and another excellent musical score.
Granted the negative to all these cannibal films would be the staged animal killings either by tribespeople, other animals, or actors in the movie. This never really bothered me ethically but these days I do find those parts of the movie viscerally a little tougher to watch and still wince. That is, of course, the desired reaction on the part of the filmmakers who were looking to make these films have a harder edge to them. So you can say the non-appeal is part of the appeal, because even though people do not like to feel fear, they will still pay good money to visit a haunted house.
I grew up on this version when I was age 4-5 in Italy in the mid-80's (it must have been 1985). My parents had taped it off of TV. I remember being entranced by it as a kid with its thumping disco musical score and since it was the only movie I knew of that was set underwater. It also made my existence in those crummy Livorno apartments a uniquely bleak one since it opened and closed with live shots of Copenhaagen, which reminded me a lot of where I was living, and then I'd look out over the Meditterrenean and wonder if Mermaids were really out there. Then the film's overall themes (along with the Toei version of "Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp") were ultimately what clued me in on my mortality. The tone of this film, especially when one knows how it ends, really is a somber one for a small child, and definitely impacted me more than any other animated movies I grew up with.
Nearly 40 years later, I am a bit torn on what version I'd want to show my own kids. The Disney version is so much brighter, cheerier, and sleeker... but the 1975 Toei version teaches so many more valuable lessons about consequences and mortality that kids need to learn to become responsible adults.
This is an amazing election cycle with both candidates so old. Trump has certainly lost a step or two, but Biden is just a disaster. I really wished that RFK would have taken off further as a candidate, but his expensive big-government ideas would be disastrous as well. It really was a shame that Vivek Ramaswami didn't suddenly rise up as the right's version of Obama, but I imagine that he'll be a big player in future cycles. Vivek dominated all the debates he was in and can really talk and sound intelligent. He rose up through the populist-libertarian side, only lost the populist vote because Trump has the name recognition and that a vote for Trump is as big of a middle-finger as angry rural voters can give to the establishment as possible.
View all replies >