heywood on 16/5/2017 at 16:48
Upstream Color was Shane Carruth's follow-up to Primer. It sadly went under the radar. I think Primer was smart but somewhat over-rated. The story was not particularly creative, basically "what would I do if I had a time machine." The appeal of the Primer was the mental challenge of trying to keep up with and unravel the time loops as the story progressed. I liked it, but thought it was a bit of a one-trick pony. Upstream Color is less overtly a puzzle, but Carruth still leaves it to the audience to connect things and interpret the plot. It's probably a bit too abstract and existential than Primer fans will like, but it gives you more to contemplate. The film-making is quite a bit better too..
I was disappointed in Europa Report. I'm having trouble recalling specifics now. IIRC it started OK, but the plot never went anywhere: they landed on Europa and the rest was just a series of one contrived crisis after another. When I saw a preview I thought it might turn out kind of like The Abyss, but it wasn't nearly as good.
Renault on 16/5/2017 at 21:13
Quote Posted by SubJeff
Upstream Color?
Weird - haven't I heard you raving about it before? I thought this actually was one of the reasons I decided to watch it a few years back.
SubJeff on 17/5/2017 at 04:28
You have. I really liked it, and I love that it's so different to Primer. UC is kind of terrifying in many ways, but really beautiful too.
Primer is great though. Yeah, it's the most complicated time loop likely to ever be made but it's great on so many levels. The time travel method is really interesting and brings a lot of cool headaches with it. The concept of being essentially erased from your timeline every time you travel felt much more realistic than in other films. And that ending... if you followed it all the way through it's brilliant. Shame you can only hold the plot in your head for about 24 hours.
Naturally I'm looking forward to The Modern Ocean.
Sulphur on 17/5/2017 at 05:22
Quote Posted by heywood
We could argue all day about what is original vs. a retread since a critic can take just about any sci-fi flick and complain that this or that has been done before. So for purposes of discussion, let's define an original story as something that is not part of an established plot-line from another film (no sequels or prequels), doesn't re-use any characters from another film, and doesn't exist within the fictional universe created by another film.
Awright, that's a good enough base.
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Since you brought up Interstellar, let me use Nolan as an example of my point. His Batman flicks got a lot of love here, and the last two grossed over $1B. But his original stories, Inception and Interstellar, failed to get the same level of attention and admiration and didn't do as well at the box office. Inception has to be one of the most original sci-fi films I've seen in a long time, and it was extremely well made, but aside from Scots Taffer I don't recall it having many fans here. Interstellar was an overly ambitious effort which suffered from trying to cram too much plot into a single film, but it was different and interesting and enjoyable to watch. The Dark Knight and TDKR were enjoyable to watch too, but in the end they're just Batman flicks and will soon be forgotten. Inception and Interstellar are far more notable in the genre.
I'm going to have to disagree here. TDK and TDKR may have done over $1B USD, but Inception did $825 million, which is incredible by most metrics, especially for an original property not from Disney or based on comic books. And while I love Inception - if you check that thread you'll know I was squarely in the camp for it - I will say that The Dark Knight was still the better effort. It's not as burdened with exposition or as muddled in its plot structure, had better acting, and remains a viciously dark tale about human nature that, quite frankly, has no right being lumped in the same camp as most comic book movies. TDKR, in comparison, was an inevitable letdown.
Interstellar did a decent amount of business, but there was a profit fall-off for it, yeah. Around 600 million or so - not a small sum and still three times the return on production investment, but it didn't do as gangbusters as Inception.
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I'll use Joseph Kosinski as another example. Tron: Legacy had a discussion thread here that went on for like 10 pages. It wasn't a bad movie. It had some great visual effects, a good soundtrack, and Jeff Bridges had good screen presence. Worth a movie ticket, but not so interesting or original that it warrants pages and pages of discussion. Oblivion was (by any standard I can imagine) a much better movie. But it was comparatively ignored and if I remember correctly, the few comments about it here were somewhat meh or negative.
You seem to be equating the length of a discussion around something with the amount of popularity for it. This isn't necessarily true. Some of us love taking things apart (see: Inception, Interstellar threads), and generally discussions spiral out when opinions clash. If everyone had liked Tron: Legacy, the only thing you'd see in that thread would be a rapid succession of posts boiling down to, 'Yeah, is good!'. But Tron is an essential part of most people's childhoods here, so obviously there's going to be more discussion about it and picking apart of what it did than something like Oblivion.
And, quite frankly, Oblivion was... okay? I didn't like it, but that's just my opinion. It had a plot that was questionable from a few angles, but it also couldn't figure out if it wanted to be an impressionistic Tarkovsky-ish piece or a pacey sci-fi thriller. It didn't cohere too well for me.
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I don't understand how we can spend pages and pages fan wanking away about engineers and whatnot after the awful Prometheus, or talking Star Wars or Star Trek for the Nth time, or getting excited about yet another Marvel movie, and then complain about the lack of original sci-fi. Some of the recent "original" sci-fi I've enjoyed are the aforementioned Looper, Moon, the Nolan films, Oblivion. Also Ex Machina, District 9, Upstream Color, Edge of Tomorrow, Contagion, Melancholia, Source Code, Never Let Me Go. And some of the cutesier and funnier stuff too: The World's End, Super 8, WALL-E. The Martian and Coherence weren't too bad either. I haven't seen Arrival yet.
Most of the bad sci-fi I've seen in recent years has come from established franchises: Prometheus, Star Trek, Force Awakens, Transformers, X-Men, and Avengers sequels. Although I've also watched some original stinkers e.g. Europa Report, Sunshine, Elysium.
As above, just because we trade theories over something doesn't equate to people liking it. We kept going on about Prometheus because there's a difference in opinion about what it did well, and what it didn't -- there's some apparent room for interpretation there. I think Prometheus was easily one of the more awful sci-fi efforts of the recent past because it's pretty disingenuous to the first Alien movie, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to discuss it at length.
As for the other movies, I only mentioned stuff from the last year or two. If we're talking good movies from a wider timeframe, yes, Ex Machina and District 9 were pretty good efforts. I enjoyed Edge of Tomorrow while also wishing it didn't play it safe like a normal AAA blockbuster; The Martian was fairly good, and if we can count a survival movie transposed to space as sci-fi, Gravity is a benchmark as well. I think we've had threads or at least a decent amount of mentions for each of these.
Thirith on 17/5/2017 at 06:46
To be honest, this is simply not my go-to place for movie discussion. I'll engage in the occasional chat about this film or that, but when I already see a categorical list of "all these are bad", I'm not particularly interested in engaging in discussion, because the lines are already drawn. It's simply not a starting point that I tend to be interested in.
heywood on 17/5/2017 at 16:22
I’m not trying to equate post count with popularity, but I am equating the amount of discussion around a movie with the amount of interest there is in the movie.
As you noted, there was a lot of interest in Tron: Legacy because of Tron. There was a lot of interest in Prometheus because it’s part of the Alien franchise. And so on with other franchises. What I observe is that the level of fan interest translates into box office performance, regardless of whether the movie turns out to be good or not.
On one hand, we periodically gripe about a lack of new/original sci-fi. While on the other hand we keep voting for more sequels, prequels, and remakes with our wallets and our posts. And we’ll keep going back to drink from the same well even after the water starts tasting bad (see Alien franchise and Transformers franchise).
Starker on 17/5/2017 at 16:29
Did Transformers ever taste good? I saw the first movie and that was enough for me to never want to watch another. Was the cartoon particularly good or...?
heywood on 17/5/2017 at 20:25
I saw the first one too and stopped there.
Transformers were big when I was a kid. Not just the show but the toys.
The first film wasn’t good enough to get me to watch the second, although it did receive lukewarm positive reviews. The second film was universally panned by critics and aggregators but it still made over $800M. And people still went back for a third helping. The third movie was panned too and it made over $1B. And then the fourth film, universally panned again, made over $1B again and was the highest grossing film of 2014. Must be a guilty pleasure or something because nobody seems to admit to liking the sequels.
Sulphur on 18/5/2017 at 04:39
Quote Posted by heywood
I'm not trying to equate post count with popularity, but I am equating the amount of discussion around a movie with the amount of interest there is in the movie.
As you noted, there was a lot of interest in Tron: Legacy because of Tron. There was a lot of interest in Prometheus because it's part of the Alien franchise. And so on with other franchises. What I observe is that the level of fan interest translates into box office performance, regardless of whether the movie turns out to be good or not.
On one hand, we periodically gripe about a lack of new/original sci-fi. While on the other hand we keep voting for more sequels, prequels, and remakes with our wallets and our posts. And we'll keep going back to drink from the same well even after the water starts tasting bad (see Alien franchise and Transformers franchise).
I think it's a fair point that we're generally interested in new entries to tried and tested properties; the hope is that they measure up to or exceed the originals by some margin, which is only basic human psychology. Whether that correlates to inflated box office performance is a supposition that may well be true, but I can't agree or disagree with that without someone doing an analysis with hard data. The only trend I've personally observed is that, in general, if a movie or sequel does well, the expectation for the follow-up becomes greater, and if that fails then the subsequent sequels get a lesser turn-out.
I don't disagree with anything else you've said in principle: I also think it's time people started looking at things critically and stop paying money for trash. The only nuTransformers movie I've seen was the second one, and all I remember is the feeling of being vaguely offended by how stupid it was. But hey, kids love it, I guess, which is why the series keeps doing well.
In the larger scheme of things, I think we're getting a decent (not a lot, but an okay) amount of sci-fi if you average releases out over a long enough timeframe - say, every five years. It's just that while there's a lot of decent to good work in 'em, I've yet to see much that can be called great. I'll keep on hoping and watching for that, though.
Queue on 18/5/2017 at 05:34
Quote Posted by Sulphur
The only nuTransformers movie I've seen was the second one, and all I remember is the feeling of being vaguely offended by how stupid it was. But hey, kids love it, I guess, which is why the series keeps doing well.
See, I took it the other way. I figure the reason films like Transformers or the 28th reboot of Spiderman do well is not because kids like it, but because adults are (now-a-days) incredibly stupid and have zero taste when it comes to the art of film. How else can one explain the allure of yet another Pirates of The Caribbean?
