I like Braindead and Heavenly Creatures as much as the next guy but I don't feel he is as great a director as people say.
shareNo, he's a hack if you ask me. Paints by numbers.
If you take out the "LOTR" films, then he's the guy who made some fun indie films, and then that fantastically good "Heavenly Creatures", and whose career went to hell when he Went Hollywood.
Of course I would have given up on him some time after the deadly "King Kong", but I'd always remember "Heavenly Creatures" and give him the respect due a director who could make a film of that quality. Once.
Peter Jackson released Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Braindead that earned him a cult status well before LOTR. Some of the best nights of my life was the screening of these three films at our university.
What he was able to do with Bad Taste is just impressive beyond belief.
shareIt's funny because I stopped watching it before Derek took on the multiple aliens on the cliff. But, my wife assured me that I had to continue and she was right. The movie becomes an epic showcase of talent, comedy, ingenuity and gore.
If it wasn't for her, I would never have finished the awesomeness that is Bad Taste.
Your Wife is obviously pretty cool. You definitely were ready to give up way too soon.
Absolute showcase of talent and ingenuity. A passion project like this could have so easily been complete garbage. Jackson was a legend from the start.
I've never heard anyone refer to him as a "film legend", but more like a really solid genre filmmaker who's able to imbue his films with more heart and emotion than most other big scale Hollywood directors out there. Which is exactly what he is. Jackson will never be seen in the same league as people such as Tarantino, the Coens, Kubrick, Scorsese, PTA etc. But that doesn't matter, as that's not what he set out to be.
He's in the same class as directors such as James Cameron, George Miller, and Robert Zemeckis (pre-motion capture). Like them, he's a phenomenally gifted yet straight-forward and unpretentious storyteller who aims to please the masses, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I feel that if you take out the LOTR movies, most film lovers wouldn't even find him that great to begin with. Maybe a level above Matt Reeves.
shareWell, to be fair, if you take away LOTR, half of what you have left are just silly splatstick horror comedies. Despite the flack it gets though, I actually really liked the King Kong remake he did. He also did Heavenly Creatures, a film I personally consider to be one of the best and most underrated of the 90's.
To me, it's really only after King Kong that he started to have his slip-ups. The Lovely Bones was awful and The Hobbit trilogy was largely forgettable.
i liked the king kong remake for what it was, it was long and epic but boring at parts like when they are on the boat
shareFunny, I didn't feel the boat parts were boring, but it could have used some tightening of that CGI mayhem on the island (15 minutes or so).
sharewatching this as a kid i was bored as fuck of the boat part. i have not watched this movie since so i would probably maybe have a different opinion of it now. the cgi was what made the movie. this movie was a lot like titanic for me as a kid. fast forward thru the majority of it to watch the mayhem parts only
shareAbsolutely not.
shareHe would be to horror fans. I find his ingenuity with Bad Taste to be on Par with Evil Dead.