I have to admit that for a low budget direct-to-rental movie I was suprised it actually had pretty good special effects (at least all the ship scenes). It may not hold up to hollywood standards but the Helios, Skytown and Freddie the bomb all looked realistic and kind of had a slightly 2001ish feel to it. Some of the parts with the jets/helicopters flying around looks alittle dated but overall I thought the sfx was good. Does anyone agree? What do you think?
sharewell it did cost 55 million, thats more than 3x what Aliens cost.
share$55 mil for this?!?! Holy Shizzle... I can't beleive they spent that much on this direct to rental turd. Thats about what some current mainstream movies cost to make.
shareDid you really think that Charlton Heston would simply lend his name and such a large portion of the screen time to a low-budget movie? He only ever did that for charities and biblical readings.
Something obviously went very, very, very wrong between the time that Heston was cast and the filming wrapped, to make the producers decide to bypass North American Theaters altogether and only really release it in Japan.
I would bet that Heston's scenes were shot first and foremost, because Heston was by far the most famous castmember, and that after Heston's final scene went to be processed is when something went completely wrong.
Heston's is the best-directed role in the movie. Maybe Heston ignored the directors, and without Heston to keep the directors in line thereafter, all the other scenes tanked.
Maybe because of getting Heston involved, they ran out of budget and had to cut corners with the rest of the scenes they filmed just to get the filming completed. They certainly didn't shoot enough takes of The albino assassin's death to prevent themselves from having to use a shot where the actor's wig comes loose (at 1:22:55). They sure didn't spend enough time, effort, funding, or anything, on a decent music score.
When budget cuts or whatever caused Mike Kelso's "chopper" (a.k.a. helicopter) crash (mentioned at 0:44:44) to become a much less expensive to produce model airplane crash, they apparently decided not to get Heston back in for him to re-shoot that scene to change those lines.
This is neither a low budget nor a direct to rental film. Despite being filmed in English, this is a Japanese film which was founded by Japanese companies and foremost marketed and theatrically released in Japan.
Of course the producers intended a North America theatrical release as well, however that intention didn't work out.
I even think that at the time of its release (1990), this was one of the most expensive films ever made ($ 55 million in 1990 currency is, by the way, much more money than nowadays).
The Japanese version of the film also is a different and longer edit than the common international version.
Here we go
For a movie this expensive( in a time BEFORE Terminator 2 ja Dick Tracy which were the first to go over the 100 million mark) this was a really big thing.
What happened then? Big production values reduced to a Roger Corman type plot and characters.
I would really be intrested to know what happened to all of this. An obscure sci-fi novel by an obscure novelist in japan was turned into a really big bugdet movie with the co-operation of american and japanese filmmakers. Some good actors like Jack Palance and Charlton Heston working this and seemingly knowing what a cheese fest this all was.
To tell you the truth, I really would like to know what this all was about. And why 17 years later they managed to make a decently good movie with the same plot(Sunshine) while this is a complete disaster.
This film was notorious at the time for having been massively re-cut and re-shot. Have always wondered about that International Cut and whether it was an improvement...
shareI don't know why people do not think Charlton Heston would not act in some z rated movie. I saw him some flick and he was actually playing some Godfather type. What about Two Minute Warning and all of those soap opera's night and day he acted in. I think this movie was suppose to be a big deal and it ended up nowhere.
shareHeston and Palance's presence don't guarantee a quality movie. Palance in particular hammed it up a lot in some pure cheese (hey ham and cheese, didn't plan that out).
Go check out Palance's 80's acting slump. He was in at least half a dozen movies featured by MST3K and RiffTrax. And to be honest in most of them he was a major part of the problem not the solution.
Don't believe me? Check out Hawk the Slayer, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080846/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1. He chewed up so much scenery they were left with only about 2 sets to work with.