Today's movie was the newest installation of Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes saga and I am calling it a saga because the ending had epic amounts of sequal bate put into it and why not, since Richie has managed to create a fairly entertaining action film adaption of the classic detective novels. Yet again there will be spoilers.
Basically the movie revolves around Sherlock's epic war against his arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty. Moriarty naturally has a diabolical plan to acquire wealth and power at the expense of the rest of humanity and naturally Sherlock is stop Moriarty's plan. Asside for a few homages to the original stories, the plot has nothing to do with Conan Doyle's famous stories. That is not necessarily a bad thing since the mystery novels would be hard to translate into an action film. Overall the plot is fairly predictable, to the point that you can pretty much guess what is going to happen next, based on the less than subtle clues that the movie throws in your face. Plot isn't really this film's strong point and its not really trying to offer anything new, instead of settling on offering us what anyone who has seen most of the James Bond films have come to expect.
What makes this film gets right is the humorous interaction between Watson and Holmes. Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law play their roles extremely well and Downey Jr. seems to take real pleasure in dragging his sensible comrade through some pretty bizarre situations. The humorous banter between the two provide most of the entertainment in this film. Most iterations of the famous detective portray Holmes having some sort of mental illness, Jeremy Brett's Holmes was Manic-depressive, in the new series he is sociopath and Downey's seems to suffer from ADD. Law's Watson follows the traditional faithful Watson who suffers through Holmes's insane plans as a loyal friend should.
The other characters are OK, but nothing truly memorable. Moriarty is sophisticated, intelligent and ruthlessly evil. I liked the Moriarty in the new modern version of Sherlock Holmes more, who was bat shit insane. This films Moriarty went down the traditional path. Other character Richie failed badly with was Irene Adler, the only woman capable of outsmarting Holmes and the only woman he has ever been attracted to. She is dispossed of early in the film and Holmes shruggs of her apparent death without much adoo. I am generally against needless love plots, but in this case the amount of attention the relationship between the two deserved a better ending. Especially since the only motive for having her killed was plot convinience to give room for the new female lead, who's name I can't remember(as you can see this move worked brilliantly well). Adler was a part of Moriarty's organization so being torn between her love for Holmes and her obligations to Moriarty, would have offered potential plot points that were left unexploited.
The action scenes were fairly well done and were pleasent to watch. I liked Richie's style of first showing the fights in slow motion, describing Holmes's analysis of the likely outcome of the fight, before he shows it in high speed. The only scene I didn't really like was Holmes & Co escaping from Moriarty's weapons factory, where there are slow-mo shots of them being shot at by a wide variety of weapons, ranging from pistols and rifles to mortars and howitzers.
The one thing that started to bug me in this film was that it was set in 1891 and it featured a crap ton of weapons that were anachronistic. Most notable of being the Mauser C96 pistol, which wasn't produced untill 1896, a model 1895 Maxim machine gun, the Big Bertha-looking Howitzer which wasn't built untill 1914 and some type of submachine gun again not invented untill WWI. Another weapon really out of place was the Gatling Gun, a weapon that was obsolete in 1891 was being actively built at a modern weapons factory.
Another thing that really bugged me was Moriarty's grand plan, which was basically to take over a company manufacturing war materials and starting World War I to make a profit by selling supplies to all involved, basically by orchestrating basically a fictional version of the events that started the real WWI. There are few massive flaws in his plan. The greatest being that his main factory is Germany, so when Germany goes to war with France they are just going to let you ship vast quantities of war materials from Germany to France? I think not.
It isn't necessarily the most profitable plan to have a weapons and ammo factory in country that is in war, since governments in war basically tell you the price their are going to buy the materials from you, if you refuse they will just send some troops to take over the plant and let someone else run it. Also during war governments want cheap, functional weapons and equipment in bulk, with low profit margins. They are not interested expensive and complex weapon systems and even if they are, their faults are easily discovered by testing the weapon in actual combat conditions. The threat of war, that fuels an arms race, is the best time for the weapons industry, that is the period of time when governments go for the expensive fancy weapons system to get ahead in the arms race. Moriarty could make some profit, but most likely the countries involved would takeover his factories. Generally weapons industries are thightly controlled, especially in war time.
But I digress, overall the film was relatively good light action entertainment in the tradition of the James Bond films of my childhood. If you liked James Bond films by Roger Moore, then you will probably like this film.
perjantai 30. joulukuuta 2011
torstai 29. joulukuuta 2011
Customer service and Social Media
This is something different after the string of movie reviews, we will be discussing customer service and the effects that Social Media has on it. The rise of Social Media has made providing a good customer service experience ever more vital. If your customer is an avid user of Twitter or Facebook and an owner of a smart phone, any failure or success can be reported to the world at large instantly. This can be a powerful marketing tool that gives potential customers real life reviews of your products and services by actual users. In my personal experience I would trust more in reviews made by users and customers like me, than on reviews made by journalists. One great example from my life is Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a game that I purchased based on a Lets Play video on Youtube by some random guy I have never met in real life. This is the first game in years that I bought that wasn't from the bargain bin and it solely happened due to me seeing someone else having a good time playing it.
On the downside negative experiences shared can have devastating consequence to your business. For example if I were to invest my money on something, the last place I would go to is Alexandria Bank, largely due to learning from customer experiences of other people. Based on customer comments I see Alexandria as a cut-throat sales organization that is looking only at their own bottom line. That doesn't sound like the type of people I want managing my investments. But these experiences are not what inspired me to write this. Alexandria isn't the worst example out there, they are a successful banking company largely due to them being cutthroat sales people. No there is an infinitely worse example how bad customer service and online PR can lay waste to your tech start-up.
Enter Ocean Marketing. You can read the whole story here. For any studying marketing this should be hilarious. http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/27/ocean-marketing-how-to-self-destruct-your-company-with-just-a-few-measly-emails/
Not only do these people completely fail at communicating with their customers, they also manage to piss of the founder of an influential gaming site, a rather important communication channel for a start-up that is trying to market a gaming peripheral. To add to compound their disaster nearly all of the emails are possessed by the sort of bad grammarz that are prime building material for internet memes. And guess what a bunch memes have been spawned out of this incident , here is one of them.
When your business has failed so badly that you are the unwitting father of several not so flattering internet memes, it is time to say goodbye to your career in e-commerce and find a new one. The amount of stupid shown by these people it is clear that a good career move would be to become a test subject for psychological experiments on human stupidity. Failing that other types of medical experiments would work as well. This way these people would contribute to the society at large in a more meaningful way than just being a cautionary tale for marketing textbooks and an internet meme.
On the downside negative experiences shared can have devastating consequence to your business. For example if I were to invest my money on something, the last place I would go to is Alexandria Bank, largely due to learning from customer experiences of other people. Based on customer comments I see Alexandria as a cut-throat sales organization that is looking only at their own bottom line. That doesn't sound like the type of people I want managing my investments. But these experiences are not what inspired me to write this. Alexandria isn't the worst example out there, they are a successful banking company largely due to them being cutthroat sales people. No there is an infinitely worse example how bad customer service and online PR can lay waste to your tech start-up.
Enter Ocean Marketing. You can read the whole story here. For any studying marketing this should be hilarious. http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/27/ocean-marketing-how-to-self-destruct-your-company-with-just-a-few-measly-emails/
Not only do these people completely fail at communicating with their customers, they also manage to piss of the founder of an influential gaming site, a rather important communication channel for a start-up that is trying to market a gaming peripheral. To add to compound their disaster nearly all of the emails are possessed by the sort of bad grammarz that are prime building material for internet memes. And guess what a bunch memes have been spawned out of this incident , here is one of them.
When your business has failed so badly that you are the unwitting father of several not so flattering internet memes, it is time to say goodbye to your career in e-commerce and find a new one. The amount of stupid shown by these people it is clear that a good career move would be to become a test subject for psychological experiments on human stupidity. Failing that other types of medical experiments would work as well. This way these people would contribute to the society at large in a more meaningful way than just being a cautionary tale for marketing textbooks and an internet meme.
keskiviikko 28. joulukuuta 2011
Alien Hunter - When Contact meets the Thing
Watch this nice little Scifi film last night and it wasn't that great or that bad either. It about an alien pod that crash lands into the Antarctic and a group of scientists that discover it. The pod also emits a mathematics based signal that the lead scientist tries to decode. Sound familiar? Its basically the Thing mixed with the Contact. The movie even uses stock footage from the Thing, since the makers of this film didn't have the funding to shoot their own "finding an alien on ice"-scene. Just a warning there will be spoilers.
The protagonist of the movie is played by James Spader, who is a mathematician of sorts, sent to the remote Antarctic research station to decode the message. Not at all surprisingly he has a shady past, with SETI where he did something bad and since he is James Spader he also ruined his career by sleeping with a student. Naturally his fling is also posted on the research station.
Much of the film is spent decrypting the message the alien pod is sending, while the other half of the group tries to open the pod. Not a smart idea since the message ends up being "DO NOT OPEN", naturally the message gets to the group too late and the pod is opened, revealing the first surprise of the film. The alien, while technologically advanced, is actually benign and the only thing it really wants is to make contact with humanity. Sadly however the alien carries a deadly disease that it is immune to, but that will instantly rot nearly any living organism on Earth. I really liked this twist, I was expecting a poorly made CGI monster to pop-up and start massacring the crew, but thankfully they went for something more original.
Due to a misunderstanding the alien gets killed. The station gets a call from the US Government that promptly informs them that this incident happened once before and the procedure set for this event is the immediate incineration of the area with nuclear weapons. The group has a couple of hours to live until a Russian submarine gets into position to nuke the area. The rest of the movie is spent watching the group come to terms with their fate and preventing the two assholes, who were willing to gamble on the fate of the entire planet on the off chance of them not being sick, from escaping. The ending sort of sucked, Spader chases the one guy trying to escape to the outside of the station. Where the aliens, who were looking for their lost comrade, appear. They kill the asshole and save the remaining scientists. The Russians nuke the research station and the world is saved.
I really liked the concept of this film. The aliens were not evil, they didn't want to harm humanity, in fact they wanted to contact humanity, but they understood that humanity wouldn't survive the encounter due to the disease they were carrying. The pod being where it was, was an accident, an alien pilot who used an escape pod to survive whatever disaster his ship encountered. The threat was from a disease, which follows in the tradition of the first contacts we have had on this planet of ours. The Native Americans were wiped out by European diseases they didn't have any immunity to and we still get fun stuff like AIDS and Ebola from the jungles of Africa. This would be probably the greatest threat this planet, when we encounter an alien species. A single bacteria or virus from them could wipe out all life on this planet and one of ours could do the same for them.
The ending well at least they set up the aliens desire to make contact with humanity well in advance before they showed up at the end. It was a bit of deus ex machina, but I can live with it, but they could have played a heroic ending for the scientist who saved the planet through their sacrifice. The second thing that bugged me was that if this wasn't the first time this happened, why did the fairly simple message DO NOT OPEN sent in such a complex way. If the aliens met humans before and have been listening to our broadcasts they could have set a simple morse code message, something in the order of "DO NOT OPEN. Yes that means you Moron. Leave the alien pod alone. Just walk away. We will come and collect it."
Overall it was a decent film that provided interesting new perspectives on the "aliens of doom" and "first contact" genres.
The protagonist of the movie is played by James Spader, who is a mathematician of sorts, sent to the remote Antarctic research station to decode the message. Not at all surprisingly he has a shady past, with SETI where he did something bad and since he is James Spader he also ruined his career by sleeping with a student. Naturally his fling is also posted on the research station.
Much of the film is spent decrypting the message the alien pod is sending, while the other half of the group tries to open the pod. Not a smart idea since the message ends up being "DO NOT OPEN", naturally the message gets to the group too late and the pod is opened, revealing the first surprise of the film. The alien, while technologically advanced, is actually benign and the only thing it really wants is to make contact with humanity. Sadly however the alien carries a deadly disease that it is immune to, but that will instantly rot nearly any living organism on Earth. I really liked this twist, I was expecting a poorly made CGI monster to pop-up and start massacring the crew, but thankfully they went for something more original.
Due to a misunderstanding the alien gets killed. The station gets a call from the US Government that promptly informs them that this incident happened once before and the procedure set for this event is the immediate incineration of the area with nuclear weapons. The group has a couple of hours to live until a Russian submarine gets into position to nuke the area. The rest of the movie is spent watching the group come to terms with their fate and preventing the two assholes, who were willing to gamble on the fate of the entire planet on the off chance of them not being sick, from escaping. The ending sort of sucked, Spader chases the one guy trying to escape to the outside of the station. Where the aliens, who were looking for their lost comrade, appear. They kill the asshole and save the remaining scientists. The Russians nuke the research station and the world is saved.
I really liked the concept of this film. The aliens were not evil, they didn't want to harm humanity, in fact they wanted to contact humanity, but they understood that humanity wouldn't survive the encounter due to the disease they were carrying. The pod being where it was, was an accident, an alien pilot who used an escape pod to survive whatever disaster his ship encountered. The threat was from a disease, which follows in the tradition of the first contacts we have had on this planet of ours. The Native Americans were wiped out by European diseases they didn't have any immunity to and we still get fun stuff like AIDS and Ebola from the jungles of Africa. This would be probably the greatest threat this planet, when we encounter an alien species. A single bacteria or virus from them could wipe out all life on this planet and one of ours could do the same for them.
The ending well at least they set up the aliens desire to make contact with humanity well in advance before they showed up at the end. It was a bit of deus ex machina, but I can live with it, but they could have played a heroic ending for the scientist who saved the planet through their sacrifice. The second thing that bugged me was that if this wasn't the first time this happened, why did the fairly simple message DO NOT OPEN sent in such a complex way. If the aliens met humans before and have been listening to our broadcasts they could have set a simple morse code message, something in the order of "DO NOT OPEN. Yes that means you Moron. Leave the alien pod alone. Just walk away. We will come and collect it."
Overall it was a decent film that provided interesting new perspectives on the "aliens of doom" and "first contact" genres.
maanantai 26. joulukuuta 2011
Starship Troopers or Sam and the Art of War
Starship troopers is once again a sucky movie based on a much superior book. The book was written by Robert Heinlein one of the masters of science fiction on the level of Asimov and Clarke. The book describes the live and adventures of a unit of Mobile Infantry, a group of hand picked highly trained elite soldiers who fight against horde's alien "bugs" using powered exoskeleton armor festooned with advanced weaponry. This is the first instance in literature of the fabled Power Armored Space Marine, which have since become the cornerstone of any space military game or story.
Heinlein's world is a one where to become a citizen with full voting rights you have to complete a set number of years of Federal service. Before you start screaming "militarism", you should know that the military service is not the only option, in fact since the Mobile Infantry is an elite unit, they only accept the best candidates. The real kicker is that if you volunteer for service the Federation is required to find you a position that fits your skills and abilities, this maybe something as benign as teaching a group of orphans or something more dangerous like being a guinea pig for medical experiments. I like this concept a lot, if you want to volunteer there is always a place for you to go to, which is in stark contrast to Finland for example, good luck getting into the national service with a serious medical condition.
The movie on the other hand fucks a lot of what's great about the book. In the movie the Mobile infantry is just a bunch of dudes with assault rifles making suicidal human wave attacks against aliens that can rip a man to shreds in 5 seconds. The federal service is limited to the military and they take anyone, drowning the whole concept of well-trained well-equipped elite soldiers in a pile of bullshit.
Tactics in this movie are almost non-existent, the main idea is to run with-in 5 meters of an alien and then proceed to shoot it to bits with your assault rifle on full auto. To makes this even more stupid, the movie even has an informertial that shows how a single bullet to the aliens head will kill it instantly and yet every single scene of the troopers shooting at alien is a one where they basically blast every other part of it off before shooting it in the head. This movie tries to be a film about an infantry unit fighting aliens but it was blatantly obvious that the makers didn't have the slights idea of how infantry fights.
Here is my way of fighting a bunch of melee oriented aliens in the Starship Troopers Universe.
1) Train my troops to FUCKING AIM. If all it takes to kill one is one bullet shot into its head, it is pointless to shoot at anything else, the troopers should be trained so well in the art of head shots that they can do it in their sleep while both their legs are cut off. This simple tactic is even easier to do on the bugs since their head is basically in the center of their body mass.
2) Train my troops to shoot at FUCKING LONG RANGES. All the shooting in the film is done at virtually point blank ranges, an assault rifle in our age has an effective range of 150-300 meters. A distance where the aliens have no hope in hell of hurting you.
3) Train my troops to use FUCKING TERRAIN. Charging into close proximity of a melee monster like the aliens in this film is nothing short of suicidal. Pick an easily defensible piece of terrain like a hill, set up there, use my long range weapons to deal some serious death on the aliens while they struggle to get in close. A liberal use of field fortifications, mines, booby traps and obstacles make the prospect of the aliens ever getting to a striking distance even less likely. Even better if the cover is used properly it might even a take a while before the aliens figure out where the fire is coming from.
4) Get some FUCKING ARTILLERY. If the range of a 150-300 meters against a melee opponent sounds fantastic, how does a range of 20-40 kilometers sound like? A horde of tightly packed enemies in open is the dream of every single artilleryman in the history of artillery. A single battery of 6 modern pieces of artillery would make instant minced meat of any horde of the aliens in few minutes.
5) Use FUCKING MOBILITY to my advantage. In the movie the Mobile Infantry are usually dropped off on the planet by spaceplanes. Here is wild idea how about using those transports to move the troopers from point A to point B on the planet side as well. I would use the transport ships to move my infantry from one defensible position to another instead of moving by foot which is not only slow as hell, but also exposes my troops to ambushes. Greater Mobility+Longer Range Firepower=a bunch of dead aliens.
With these 5 simple principles you could drop the casualty rates of the humans from horrendous to insignificant and the inflict casualties on the level of genocidal on the bugs. The movie attempts to portray a bunch of overgrown insects as an existential threat to humanity, but really the only thing that threatens humanity is the apocalyptic levels of stupid exhibited by humanity, ironically when it comes to one of our favorite pass times, warfare.
Now that my major beef with this film is settled, time to move on to the minor stuff, number on being the cast. In the book as it is the film the protagonist is Johnny Rico. In the book Johnny was Rico's nickname, his first name was Juan. This was one of Heinlein's favorite tricks, he would build up a strong and likable character that the reader would love only to reveal later that the character was either african-american or hispanic, this was shocking when the book came out in 1959. The movie has no respect for Heinlein's efforts to fight racial prejudice, Johnny is played by a chicle jawed all-american white boy, in fact the whole cast is made out of soap-opera stars.
Why Hollywood, Why? Why can't you make a good movies out of good books? Why have you made fucking up old good movies and books into an art form?
Heinlein's world is a one where to become a citizen with full voting rights you have to complete a set number of years of Federal service. Before you start screaming "militarism", you should know that the military service is not the only option, in fact since the Mobile Infantry is an elite unit, they only accept the best candidates. The real kicker is that if you volunteer for service the Federation is required to find you a position that fits your skills and abilities, this maybe something as benign as teaching a group of orphans or something more dangerous like being a guinea pig for medical experiments. I like this concept a lot, if you want to volunteer there is always a place for you to go to, which is in stark contrast to Finland for example, good luck getting into the national service with a serious medical condition.
The movie on the other hand fucks a lot of what's great about the book. In the movie the Mobile infantry is just a bunch of dudes with assault rifles making suicidal human wave attacks against aliens that can rip a man to shreds in 5 seconds. The federal service is limited to the military and they take anyone, drowning the whole concept of well-trained well-equipped elite soldiers in a pile of bullshit.
Tactics in this movie are almost non-existent, the main idea is to run with-in 5 meters of an alien and then proceed to shoot it to bits with your assault rifle on full auto. To makes this even more stupid, the movie even has an informertial that shows how a single bullet to the aliens head will kill it instantly and yet every single scene of the troopers shooting at alien is a one where they basically blast every other part of it off before shooting it in the head. This movie tries to be a film about an infantry unit fighting aliens but it was blatantly obvious that the makers didn't have the slights idea of how infantry fights.
Here is my way of fighting a bunch of melee oriented aliens in the Starship Troopers Universe.
1) Train my troops to FUCKING AIM. If all it takes to kill one is one bullet shot into its head, it is pointless to shoot at anything else, the troopers should be trained so well in the art of head shots that they can do it in their sleep while both their legs are cut off. This simple tactic is even easier to do on the bugs since their head is basically in the center of their body mass.
2) Train my troops to shoot at FUCKING LONG RANGES. All the shooting in the film is done at virtually point blank ranges, an assault rifle in our age has an effective range of 150-300 meters. A distance where the aliens have no hope in hell of hurting you.
3) Train my troops to use FUCKING TERRAIN. Charging into close proximity of a melee monster like the aliens in this film is nothing short of suicidal. Pick an easily defensible piece of terrain like a hill, set up there, use my long range weapons to deal some serious death on the aliens while they struggle to get in close. A liberal use of field fortifications, mines, booby traps and obstacles make the prospect of the aliens ever getting to a striking distance even less likely. Even better if the cover is used properly it might even a take a while before the aliens figure out where the fire is coming from.
4) Get some FUCKING ARTILLERY. If the range of a 150-300 meters against a melee opponent sounds fantastic, how does a range of 20-40 kilometers sound like? A horde of tightly packed enemies in open is the dream of every single artilleryman in the history of artillery. A single battery of 6 modern pieces of artillery would make instant minced meat of any horde of the aliens in few minutes.
5) Use FUCKING MOBILITY to my advantage. In the movie the Mobile Infantry are usually dropped off on the planet by spaceplanes. Here is wild idea how about using those transports to move the troopers from point A to point B on the planet side as well. I would use the transport ships to move my infantry from one defensible position to another instead of moving by foot which is not only slow as hell, but also exposes my troops to ambushes. Greater Mobility+Longer Range Firepower=a bunch of dead aliens.
With these 5 simple principles you could drop the casualty rates of the humans from horrendous to insignificant and the inflict casualties on the level of genocidal on the bugs. The movie attempts to portray a bunch of overgrown insects as an existential threat to humanity, but really the only thing that threatens humanity is the apocalyptic levels of stupid exhibited by humanity, ironically when it comes to one of our favorite pass times, warfare.
Now that my major beef with this film is settled, time to move on to the minor stuff, number on being the cast. In the book as it is the film the protagonist is Johnny Rico. In the book Johnny was Rico's nickname, his first name was Juan. This was one of Heinlein's favorite tricks, he would build up a strong and likable character that the reader would love only to reveal later that the character was either african-american or hispanic, this was shocking when the book came out in 1959. The movie has no respect for Heinlein's efforts to fight racial prejudice, Johnny is played by a chicle jawed all-american white boy, in fact the whole cast is made out of soap-opera stars.
Why Hollywood, Why? Why can't you make a good movies out of good books? Why have you made fucking up old good movies and books into an art form?
keskiviikko 21. joulukuuta 2011
The Thing - The old and the new
So I went to see another remake/prequel/sequel of a horror classic, the prequel to John Carpenter's masterpiece The Thing. The original The Thing is one of my all time favorite horror films, its a near perfect blend of psychological horror and gory horror, so I was very interested in seeing how badly Hollywood would butcher the film. On that department I wasn't disappointed the makers of the prequel pretty much missed completely what made the original so good.
The premise of the film is that an isolated research station in the Antarctica that gets attacked by an alien being that can perfectly imitate any living organism. In the original much of the psychological horror came from not knowing which of the characters are aliens and which are human. Another point of interest comes from the different ways the characters interact with each other in the situation where no one can really be trusted. It wasn't just about a bunch humans killing a lurking alien before it kills the humans, like in the Alien, but it was also about the internal conflicts in the group, the group had to deal with an external threat of the alien as well as the internal threat of the group disintegrating due to the lack of trust. The original also had some pretty good effects that made the alien look terrifyingly otherworldly.
Sadly the makers of the prequel completely forgot the psychological part of the plot and we are treated to a cavalcade of CGI Gore and jump scares. If you really, really, really love jump scares then this is a movie for you, there are about 10 scenes of characters walking in dark room and something jumping at them. Another favorite scene of the director is "the-character-is-looking-at-something-and-the-monster-appears-behind-her/him"-scene. Its really boring to watch basically the same scenes redone 20 times with different characters in different locations and its not scary when you can guess that in 5 seconds something will burst through the wall.
Another big problem this movie has is the characters, there are waaayyyy too many of them, I can't even remember most of them, they were your basic horror movie cannon fodder, that die for the sake of getting some gore into the film. When will Hollywood learn that feeling disgusted by gore isn't the same as being scared? I simple death can be scary if the scene is done well and its a character that we the audience we care about. Seeing some dude who said three lines in the film getting torn apart by some alien monstrosity isn't scary as much as it is sickening.
But back to the characters. In the original you had an array of characters, who were all individuals in their own way. You had MacReady the helicopter pilot, a take action sort of guy who medicates the hum-drum boredom of the research station with alcohol, Childs who has authority issues and constantly challenges anyone trying to take charge, Garry who is the base commander and a law & order type, Windows, the high strung radio operator, Clark the quiet giant with a heart who is the dog handler of the base and so forth. Although not all characters are not fully fleshed out and discussed in-depth in the movie, you still get the sense that they are all individuals with strengths and weaknesses and different reactions to the situation at hand.
The remake messed up the characters pretty badly, there were the bearded Norwegians and then the American pilots, then there was the science dude, who was more concerned about his Nobel price than about human lives, the main character was Kate of whom I can't really say anything since her actions were more driven by plot convenience than by any characteristic in her character. The only character I liked was Lars, a Norwegian who didn't speak English, he was bad ass and hearing him curse in Norwegian was awesome. At one point it looked like he might become MacReady of this film and he had a sort of an understanding with Kate on how to handle the situation, but by halfway he gets taken out of the film.
Overall the film was unmemorable and watching it mainly made me wish that I was watching Carpenters version. You are failing as film makers if I feel bored watching a horror film, which was what I was feeling half way into this mess, because I could pretty much guess what was going to happen, the element of surprise was missing, what made the original fun to watch was how unpredictable the characters were, one dude starts destroying the radio and shooting at people, one tries to start doing the same, there is an argument over who should be in charge, accusations start flying around etc. The new film was a predictable as they get. I wasn't a really bad film, the makers just missed the key elements that made the original good, and that made it a mediocre sci-fi horror film. If you haven't seen The Thing, watch the original its a much superior film.
The premise of the film is that an isolated research station in the Antarctica that gets attacked by an alien being that can perfectly imitate any living organism. In the original much of the psychological horror came from not knowing which of the characters are aliens and which are human. Another point of interest comes from the different ways the characters interact with each other in the situation where no one can really be trusted. It wasn't just about a bunch humans killing a lurking alien before it kills the humans, like in the Alien, but it was also about the internal conflicts in the group, the group had to deal with an external threat of the alien as well as the internal threat of the group disintegrating due to the lack of trust. The original also had some pretty good effects that made the alien look terrifyingly otherworldly.
Sadly the makers of the prequel completely forgot the psychological part of the plot and we are treated to a cavalcade of CGI Gore and jump scares. If you really, really, really love jump scares then this is a movie for you, there are about 10 scenes of characters walking in dark room and something jumping at them. Another favorite scene of the director is "the-character-is-looking-at-something-and-the-monster-appears-behind-her/him"-scene. Its really boring to watch basically the same scenes redone 20 times with different characters in different locations and its not scary when you can guess that in 5 seconds something will burst through the wall.
Another big problem this movie has is the characters, there are waaayyyy too many of them, I can't even remember most of them, they were your basic horror movie cannon fodder, that die for the sake of getting some gore into the film. When will Hollywood learn that feeling disgusted by gore isn't the same as being scared? I simple death can be scary if the scene is done well and its a character that we the audience we care about. Seeing some dude who said three lines in the film getting torn apart by some alien monstrosity isn't scary as much as it is sickening.
But back to the characters. In the original you had an array of characters, who were all individuals in their own way. You had MacReady the helicopter pilot, a take action sort of guy who medicates the hum-drum boredom of the research station with alcohol, Childs who has authority issues and constantly challenges anyone trying to take charge, Garry who is the base commander and a law & order type, Windows, the high strung radio operator, Clark the quiet giant with a heart who is the dog handler of the base and so forth. Although not all characters are not fully fleshed out and discussed in-depth in the movie, you still get the sense that they are all individuals with strengths and weaknesses and different reactions to the situation at hand.
The remake messed up the characters pretty badly, there were the bearded Norwegians and then the American pilots, then there was the science dude, who was more concerned about his Nobel price than about human lives, the main character was Kate of whom I can't really say anything since her actions were more driven by plot convenience than by any characteristic in her character. The only character I liked was Lars, a Norwegian who didn't speak English, he was bad ass and hearing him curse in Norwegian was awesome. At one point it looked like he might become MacReady of this film and he had a sort of an understanding with Kate on how to handle the situation, but by halfway he gets taken out of the film.
Overall the film was unmemorable and watching it mainly made me wish that I was watching Carpenters version. You are failing as film makers if I feel bored watching a horror film, which was what I was feeling half way into this mess, because I could pretty much guess what was going to happen, the element of surprise was missing, what made the original fun to watch was how unpredictable the characters were, one dude starts destroying the radio and shooting at people, one tries to start doing the same, there is an argument over who should be in charge, accusations start flying around etc. The new film was a predictable as they get. I wasn't a really bad film, the makers just missed the key elements that made the original good, and that made it a mediocre sci-fi horror film. If you haven't seen The Thing, watch the original its a much superior film.
maanantai 19. joulukuuta 2011
The Wicker Man - The Old and the New
So I watch the 2006 remake of the horror classic The Wicker Man from 1973 and guess what it sucked, like nearly all of Hollywood's remakes do. The original movie is a classic film that blends a mystery and horror seamlessly, the basic premise of the plot is that the lone cop is sent to an isolated island to investigate the disappearance of a little girl. The island is inhabited by pagan weirdos who deny the girl's very existence and that's where the hunt for clues begins.
The main character in the old was a devout roman catholic who never married and has chosen to live in celibacy. He is sent to island because the local cops receive an anonymous letter telling of about the missing girl. He behave's as you would a devout catholic to behave towards a group pagan's, he is an asshole. This is understandable since his beliefs were almost constantly put into question and he is literally the fish on dry land when he goes to this remote place with customs vastly out of his comfort zone. This is something that most of us can relate inspite of not sharing the ideas and beliefs of the character.
In the remake Nicky Cage plays a cop who very obviously suffers from PTSD and is called to investigate the disappearance of the girl by his ex-fiancee. He is still an asshole and treats the locals with contempt. Why? What's his problem? The roman catholic vs. pagans I can sort of understand, but Nick is just being an ass, maybe its his PTSD acting, I mean it already causes him hallucinations, but still. The second problem is that in the original the cop is doing an official inquiry, so he has the full force of the law behind him, Nick on the other hand is doing an investigation of his own OUTSIDE his jurisdiction, so why exactly don't the islanders just tell him to fuck off? They have no reason to let him go around turning it upside down, unless they have an ulterior motive, this should have been the first indication of how the plot is going to turn out. Not only is Nicky's character an asshole but he is also an idiot.
Most of the film is spent on watching the cop go around the island collecting clues, the old version again handles this much better. Its an investigation, the horror and shock elements come when he encounters something related to the islands cult that he doesn't understand. The new one feels the need to add Nicky's PTSD driven hallucinations into the mix. Its not suspenseful when you know of great its not real.
In both films central to the plot is the pagan religion of the islanders, in the old one it was done with a bit of subtlety. The Islanders were basically an average small English village who just believed in a different religion, but like all Hollywood remakes always have to supersize an aspect of the old one , this one had to supersize the religion aspect. This time the island has a fertility cult made mostly out of women, in fact we never see a male islander speak. It all comes of as just weird, why do all the men in an island full of hot women who believe in a fertility cult look so miserable? That would be any bachelor's dream destination. Ergo everything is not as it seams.
Now for the SPOILERS, so stop reading if you want to watch the film and still enjoy the film. I think the new one might be more enjoyable if you don't know how it ends. You have been warned.
So it turns out that the whole missing girl thing was just a ruse to get the protagonist on the island. The islanders rely on agriculture for survival and since the last years harvest was an abysmal failure and to insure a good harvest they need a human sacrifice, so they lured the cop there to be the chosen one. Yet again the remake decided to go for the supersized route, in the original the cop was just doing his job and he was largely selected because the cult needed a virgin christian, in the new version, Nicky gets lured to the island by his ex-fiancee who apparently got on with him just so that she could get pregnant and later their past relationship could be used to lure him to become a human sacrifice. Oh and the missing kid, turns out to be Nicky's daughter. For fucks sake, so the islanders need for human sacrifices is so great that they send attractive young women to seduce men and have their children, so that years later they can be lured on the island to be killed. Do they have like a data base on these guys?
Even the sacrifice scene was supersized in the remake, in the original the 100 or so islanders basically just tell the cop that you are going to be sacrificed and then they get on with it. The chosen method of sacrifice is burning the man alive inside a giant wicker man, hence the name of the film. In the remake, the islanders first break his legs, almost kill him with bees(Nicky is allergic to bees and the cult is big on bees) and then hoist him up to the head of the wicker man to be burnt. Just a side note here, when your legs are broken being hung upside down by your legs must hurt like hell. Not only does this film indulge in needless gore, but it also forgets the whole gore literally in the next scene. For fucks sake.
The thing that really bugged even about the original, they ritually murdered a cop. Generally cops tend to go through hell and high water when one of their own goes missing or is assumed to be killed. Gee, we sent Jimmy to the weird island with the religious weirdo's to investigate a missing girl and we haven't heard of him in three weeks, I wonder what is going on. In the remake this aspect gets even worse, generally missing children in this day age lead to massive police operations, hell the Americans even have a system called the Amber Alert to mobilize the media to aid in the search. So why exactly doesn't Nicky just report the girl missing and bring the hammer down on the issue. Also murdering a police officer for religious purposes would cause an unbelievable shit storm in the post 9/11-world.
This is the thing that I hate about Hollywood in the 2000s. They really don't have any original ideas anymore, they are just making remakes, prequels and squeals of old good films, usually without much success, not that they really need to put any effort into it, the audience goes to see it because they liked the original and are generally disappointed. Hollywood you make a big stink about how much money you are losing to online piracy, well I am very hesitant to pay 10 or so euros to see anything by you guys since I mostly end up disappointed beyond belief. Its not that you are any better than the online critics who make their own videos which use clips from your films to make fun of the said film, when you mostly repackage other people's ideas in the first place. At least the online critics inject creativity into what they do and generally provide better entertainment than you guys. I would rather watch spoony, Nostalgia critic or the Nerd rage about your films for 20-60 minutes than actually pay to see most of them myself.
The main character in the old was a devout roman catholic who never married and has chosen to live in celibacy. He is sent to island because the local cops receive an anonymous letter telling of about the missing girl. He behave's as you would a devout catholic to behave towards a group pagan's, he is an asshole. This is understandable since his beliefs were almost constantly put into question and he is literally the fish on dry land when he goes to this remote place with customs vastly out of his comfort zone. This is something that most of us can relate inspite of not sharing the ideas and beliefs of the character.
In the remake Nicky Cage plays a cop who very obviously suffers from PTSD and is called to investigate the disappearance of the girl by his ex-fiancee. He is still an asshole and treats the locals with contempt. Why? What's his problem? The roman catholic vs. pagans I can sort of understand, but Nick is just being an ass, maybe its his PTSD acting, I mean it already causes him hallucinations, but still. The second problem is that in the original the cop is doing an official inquiry, so he has the full force of the law behind him, Nick on the other hand is doing an investigation of his own OUTSIDE his jurisdiction, so why exactly don't the islanders just tell him to fuck off? They have no reason to let him go around turning it upside down, unless they have an ulterior motive, this should have been the first indication of how the plot is going to turn out. Not only is Nicky's character an asshole but he is also an idiot.
Most of the film is spent on watching the cop go around the island collecting clues, the old version again handles this much better. Its an investigation, the horror and shock elements come when he encounters something related to the islands cult that he doesn't understand. The new one feels the need to add Nicky's PTSD driven hallucinations into the mix. Its not suspenseful when you know of great its not real.
In both films central to the plot is the pagan religion of the islanders, in the old one it was done with a bit of subtlety. The Islanders were basically an average small English village who just believed in a different religion, but like all Hollywood remakes always have to supersize an aspect of the old one , this one had to supersize the religion aspect. This time the island has a fertility cult made mostly out of women, in fact we never see a male islander speak. It all comes of as just weird, why do all the men in an island full of hot women who believe in a fertility cult look so miserable? That would be any bachelor's dream destination. Ergo everything is not as it seams.
Now for the SPOILERS, so stop reading if you want to watch the film and still enjoy the film. I think the new one might be more enjoyable if you don't know how it ends. You have been warned.
So it turns out that the whole missing girl thing was just a ruse to get the protagonist on the island. The islanders rely on agriculture for survival and since the last years harvest was an abysmal failure and to insure a good harvest they need a human sacrifice, so they lured the cop there to be the chosen one. Yet again the remake decided to go for the supersized route, in the original the cop was just doing his job and he was largely selected because the cult needed a virgin christian, in the new version, Nicky gets lured to the island by his ex-fiancee who apparently got on with him just so that she could get pregnant and later their past relationship could be used to lure him to become a human sacrifice. Oh and the missing kid, turns out to be Nicky's daughter. For fucks sake, so the islanders need for human sacrifices is so great that they send attractive young women to seduce men and have their children, so that years later they can be lured on the island to be killed. Do they have like a data base on these guys?
Even the sacrifice scene was supersized in the remake, in the original the 100 or so islanders basically just tell the cop that you are going to be sacrificed and then they get on with it. The chosen method of sacrifice is burning the man alive inside a giant wicker man, hence the name of the film. In the remake, the islanders first break his legs, almost kill him with bees(Nicky is allergic to bees and the cult is big on bees) and then hoist him up to the head of the wicker man to be burnt. Just a side note here, when your legs are broken being hung upside down by your legs must hurt like hell. Not only does this film indulge in needless gore, but it also forgets the whole gore literally in the next scene. For fucks sake.
The thing that really bugged even about the original, they ritually murdered a cop. Generally cops tend to go through hell and high water when one of their own goes missing or is assumed to be killed. Gee, we sent Jimmy to the weird island with the religious weirdo's to investigate a missing girl and we haven't heard of him in three weeks, I wonder what is going on. In the remake this aspect gets even worse, generally missing children in this day age lead to massive police operations, hell the Americans even have a system called the Amber Alert to mobilize the media to aid in the search. So why exactly doesn't Nicky just report the girl missing and bring the hammer down on the issue. Also murdering a police officer for religious purposes would cause an unbelievable shit storm in the post 9/11-world.
This is the thing that I hate about Hollywood in the 2000s. They really don't have any original ideas anymore, they are just making remakes, prequels and squeals of old good films, usually without much success, not that they really need to put any effort into it, the audience goes to see it because they liked the original and are generally disappointed. Hollywood you make a big stink about how much money you are losing to online piracy, well I am very hesitant to pay 10 or so euros to see anything by you guys since I mostly end up disappointed beyond belief. Its not that you are any better than the online critics who make their own videos which use clips from your films to make fun of the said film, when you mostly repackage other people's ideas in the first place. At least the online critics inject creativity into what they do and generally provide better entertainment than you guys. I would rather watch spoony, Nostalgia critic or the Nerd rage about your films for 20-60 minutes than actually pay to see most of them myself.
Tilaa:
Blogitekstit (Atom)