|
Improbable Lobster posted:It was more prominent with the toys but Kylo toys were significantly overproduced and sold worse than Rey/Finn/Poe while Rey, the only woman, was the best selling character even though her toys were significantly underproduced in comparison to the other characters. Probably doesn't help that Kylo is a whiny little bitch who completely fails to be intimidating or edgy or compelling except in a "Jesus Christ THAT'S what the dark side has to work with these days?!" sense.
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2017 04:04
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 12:20 |
|
|
Gatts posted:Terminator Genisys was mostly good but they miscast Jai Courtney and the whole thing took a hit. Genisys also suffered, in my opinion, from badly miscasting the male and female leads for the romance. She was half his size, and looked to be about half his age. Made the entire thing really drat creepy.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2017 15:26
|
|
|
Rirse posted:Is the person who played the Architect still alive to do this? As it's a neat idea if it a anthology of the various failed versions, like the one with mythology monsters in it. Yep, Helmut Bakaitis is still alive.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2017 02:27
|
|
|
Sir Kodiak posted:He does show up without makeup at the end. Well, with less makeup. I finally saw Beyond last week thanks to my local library, and while undoubtedly my favorite of the reboot Treks it still struck me as a fine sci-fi action flick rather than a Star Trek film. But like Eccleston in Thor 2, it puzzles me why you'd get an actor like Elba and give him half a dozen lines in the entire movie while buried under makeup.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2017 18:21
|
|
|
Sir Kodiak posted:Also would have played better if Kirk's boring retirement wasn't running a crazy mega-city station on the edge of known space. And if the destruction of the Enterprise had had some real gravity to it, a story climax. In Beyond, it was just "Here's a scene showing how dangerous and powerful the villains are to establish the threat."
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2017 21:51
|
|
|
Phylodox posted:But, like I said, Beyond tried to play it both ways. They wanted to go for the big emotional gut punch of The Enterprise being destroyed without earning that emotional investment. By that point in the rebooted series, we haven't really been given a reason to care about the Enterprise in and of itself other than franchise nostalgia. Compare that to, say, if they had destroyed the Millenium Falcon in Return of the Jedi. We'd care, because the effort had been put in. The Falcon was practically a character itself. Also, they destroy the Enterprise for the standard "Look how powerful this villain is!" scene. Rather than making its destruction an emotional climax like the death of an Enterprise traditionally has been.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2017 21:15
|
|
|
They should have gone with what was supposedly the original plan for Generations: the Romulans were the villains, and the Enterprise-D would have gone out in the much-teased knock em down drag em out head-on battle with a D'Deridex warbird.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2017 03:31
|
|
|
Decius posted:That's because Star Trek is basically tall ships IN SPACE, and tall ships always limped away heavily damaged in a equal or nearly equal fight, simply because offense was so much better than defense - wood, which also splintered and maimed killed a lot of people this way -, being a slow moving target, that was very slow to manoeuvrer (the actions you see on screen inside of seconds in movies often took dozens of minutes or even hours in reality) and the ships made out of wood and canvas were of course comparably fragile. However, being made out of wood they were also comparably easy to repair again. Translating this to space combat makes it seem quite odd, even with magic like shields added. Also, the Enterprise has never been a warship. Every version of the Enterprise on screen to date has been designed as a ship of exploration and research, not designed for frontline combat. Voyager, too, which was explicitly designed as a science vessel. If you want Federation warships, look at the Defiant. Small, fast, cheap, minimal possible expenditure on things like crew quarters (captain has a small cabin, everyone else is in bunks), and armed to the teeth. Traditionally, the ships that kick the Enterprise's rear end are purpose-built warships like birds of prey (killers of the -A and -D) or warbirds (killers of the -C).
|
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2017 14:32
|
|
|
Phanatic posted:
Not the way the Federation treats ships in Star Trek. Kirk says more than once that the Enterprise is prepared for battle but that isn't the ship's primary purpose. The Galaxy class (the -D) are referred to as dreadnoughts a couple of times, but combat isn't what the ships are designed for and Starfleet officers usually get annoyed when non-Federation people refer to Starfleet ships with military terminology like destroyers and battlecruisers. There's some talk about in DS9 that the Federation designs ships to be modular. It's mentioned a few times in the lead-in to the Dominion War that Starfleet is recalling much of the fleet and refitting ships for combat rather than their normal tasks. The Enterprise being a warship defeats the entire theme and aims of the villain in Beyond, for one. Starfleet's whole thing is that they've moved beyond being a military organization crewing warships and that Starfleet ships are built for exploration and scientific research and humanitarian aid. They go armed, of course, because it's a dangerous galaxy, but only in times of crisis does Starfleet evacuate the civilians from their ships, replace the science labs with shield generators, and exchange the data collection probes for more photon torpedoes.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2017 15:45
|
|
|
The MSJ posted:There are dragons in Transformers this year. Just the one, and it's apparently an Autobot combiner.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2017 15:51
|
|
|
Too Shy Guy posted:It's still huge with children. If you have little girls and you let them socialize with other little girls, your life inevitably becomes an inescapable vortex of Disney princesses, ponies, and Shopkins. Or you're a librarian like me. We still can't keep Frozen on the childrens' dvd shelf for more than a day or two at a time.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2017 17:33
|
|
|
Guy Mann posted:Yeah, millennial is especially hilarious because between contempt for young people and being terrified of getting older it just keeps getting broader and broader until now it's being used to describe people in their 40s all the way down to current elementary schoolers. Everything makes so much more sense if you have a thing for your browser that replaces the word "millennial" with "kids these days."
|
|
#
¿
Jun 30, 2017 16:10
|
|
|
A Rainbow Six adaptation? Oh boy. Wonder how they'll handle the radical ecoterrorist pharmaceutical megacorp.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 12, 2017 23:41
|
|
|
Humbug Scoolbus posted:1989 had the underwater weirdness. Deepstar Six, The Abyss, Lords of the Deep, Leviathan The Abyss was a drat good movie.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2017 02:05
|
|
|
FELD1 posted:I remember enjoying Jurassic Park 3 the last time I saw it, but all I can really recall about the film was the pterodactyl dome, the cast digging through mounds of T-Rex poo poo, and the deus ex marinas at the end. Overall, to me at least, not a bad takeaway. It is the only movie that comes to mind where the military arrives to fight the monsters and the military actually wins. Maybe The Mist.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2017 18:18
|
|
|
Crichton's main MO for writing was "What's a new and emerging field of science or technology that's causing anxiety in our society, and write a book that yup that's terrifying." Card, on the other hand, is a devout Mormon who wrote a book series about evil technocratic liberals trying to take over the country.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2017 17:35
|
|
|
kiimo posted:If in Timeline people are traveling to parallel dimensions instead of the past how are they leaving messages for the future? In the book, at least, I took it to mean that someone else from another dimension traveled into *their* past and went through the same things.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2017 21:45
|
|
|
Schwarzwald posted:I'm looking forward to the combined five minutes of these cool robots before they job. It's okay, Gypsy as the most boring of the robots will survive most of the film. The unusual and creative ones will be relegated to flashbacks or killed off to show how dangerous the new kaiju are.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2017 18:03
|
|
|
GrandpaPants posted:Thinking about Pac Rim 2, there's like, no way that the various (remaining) nations of the world didn't use Jaeger technology to dick each other over once the alien threat was eliminated, right? Do we know what the premise of the movie actually is besides "Giant robots fight"? A long while back, so no idea how valid this is anymore, but GDT said he wanted the villains to be the black market guy and the wacky scientist from the first movie - people who based their livelihoods around the kaiju now reacting poorly to the kaiju no longer being a thing. And that one thing he really, really wanted to do was a jaeger/kaiju hybrid.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2017 21:07
|
|
|
Edit: Wrong thread.
Cythereal fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Jul 23, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jul 23, 2017 02:32
|
|
|
TF2 HAT MINING RIG posted:I'd just like to thank Sony for making GBS threads on Starship Troopers yet again, can't wait to see how the reboot turns out next. There isn't going to be a good Starship Troopers movie again until someone remembers that the first movie was a satire.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 26, 2017 23:17
|
|
|
well why not posted:Honestly, it really defeats the point of the character's working class origin. I haven't watched Homecoming yet (and these posts are probably best suited for the CB thread) but is he the secret genetically-engineered son of spies and millionaires in that? Nope. He lives in a tiny apartment in Queens and his parents are never spoken of beyond being dead.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 27, 2017 17:16
|
|
|
I'm rewatching the recent American Godzilla from my local library, and man it still has one of my favorite little shots from any recent film: the Muto under attack at the airport as helicopters and planes start exploding, people screaming as the explosions chain react as the shot pans right, and then a giant foot comes down obscuring the Muto and explosions and silence.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2017 00:40
|
|
|
Ammanas posted:This scene gave me goosebumps in the theater, it's when I thought 'finally, this goddamn movie is about to start' After giving you the first full, proper look at Big G himself, though. I still like 2014 Godzilla, personally. Generic Soldier Protagonist dude was boring, but I think it was a good call to use Big G sparingly. Keeps it impressive when he is on screen, especially in full view fighting the Mutos. What the movie desperately needed was making the human parts, when Big G isn't on screen, more interesting. Another subtle thing I picked up on this viewing was how Godzilla was quietly portrayed as intelligent. He kills both Mutos after clearly learning their attack pattern (male) or that they're too armored to just atomic breath (female), smartly turning the tables on both of them in turn.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2017 04:10
|
|
|
Lobok posted:Well, maybe not the only change. Probably would have needed a different actress for his wife than Elizabeth Olsen... A female character having anything to do in that movie besides look frightened or concerned would have been a good move.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2017 16:14
|
|
|
Bringing back the Godzilla 2014 chat since there's no dedicated thread for movies like that, I'm very curious how they're going to handle Mothra. I've been binging on the old Godzilla movies, and I've noticed Mothra is a cue for weirdness. Faeries, psychics, Mothra being explicitly identified as a god, etc. There's a lot of talk in G14 about identifying Big G as a god of destruction, and I'm wondering if Monarch might take a more respectful if not reverent approach to Mothra. After the British, French, and Americans failed to kill Godzilla with their nuclear tests in the Pacific, and the frankly disastrous Skull Island expedition, I think setting up the Infant Island expedition and perhaps branch of Monarch could be a good contrast - that these scientists came in peace, not bombing everything, and by the 21st century might agree with the locals about Mothra's divine nature. Edit: Thinking about it, G14 is threatening to make me write an essay about that movie's portrayal of and relationship with the divine. I love the scene of the American fleet escorting Godzilla to San Francisco, and the imagery struck me of a prophet followed by a throng of pilgrims and believers. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Aug 5, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2017 15:10
|
|
|
Inescapable Duck posted:Godzilla: Half-Century War had a fun take with the team assigned to handle Mothra being hippies in a combie-van referring to her like a goddess. I dunno, the Monarch personnel in G14 consistently refer to Godzilla as a god, though I'm not sure how sincere they're being - I suspect it might be a Japanese cultural subtext thing I'm not informed enough to understand. I wouldn't have any trouble with the idea of the Mothra branch of Monarch having gone a bit native to play to Mothra's origins with the franchise. Also going to be interesting to see how they treat Ghidorah. Rodan, at least, is usually pretty straightforward.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2017 16:49
|
|
|
Neo Rasa posted:It's sort of a subtext thing but more how we translated "Godzilla." Like the way in G14 they keep teasing him finally being referred to as King of the Monsters at the end. Serizawa/etc. keep using different terms like apex predator/and him being the balance of nature/etc. a bunch of designations that all basically mean the same thing and are each technically correct interpretations of "Gojira." Literally Gojira is basically contraction of "gorilla whale," but meant not to describe him cosmetically but to describe him as huge powerful animal that goes wherever the hell it wants whenever it wants. I liked that about the movie because it finally settles on the very primal King of the Monsters again because he's such a unique thing and we're so insignificant to him that that's about as far as our real comprehension of Godzilla is gonna go. Personally, I agree with many of the reviews I've seen: Godzilla as a series has typically reflected the fears of the nation and time producing each film. These days, in America, that fear is of an apocalyptic force of nature that doesn't even deign to notice us when we die in its wake as it goes about its business. We can study it, we can learn a lot about it, and there's not a drat thing we can do about it. It's Godzilla as a natural disaster, and the cinematography of the film played up that angle enormously. This particular incarnation of Godzilla, I think it's worth noting, wasn't woken up by the American, British, and French nuclear tests in the Pacific. It was woken up by the USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear powered submarine, as it plied the Pacific deep. Nautilus wasn't an act of malice, it was a feat of human engineering pushing back the boundaries of what was possible and what we could do. And it awakened something that makes that achievement utterly irrelevant and insignificant. I'll be very interested to see what Legendary does next with this franchise. It is, I think, a very American interpretation of Godzilla: we, so long top dog of the world, come face to face with something we don't have a prayer of stopping or even doing anything about but enduring it. All our fancy toys, all our weapons and planes, none of it matters against this force. Japanese Godzilla, I think, is usually something of a living stigmata. It's an embodiment of Japan's sins and guilt and arrogance come back to take its toll. American Godzilla is an uncaring force of nature come to topple the mighty and challenge America's view of itself as the king of the world.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2017 17:46
|
|
|
Neo Rasa posted:Totally agree with this. I really love the shot of Godzilla swimming and the US Navy surrounding him and his lack of acknowledgement that these huge powerful boats are all around him. The bridge scene was great with that too because of the way he sort of like studies the bridge briefly before the army starts shooting at him, which annoys him so he just sort of continues on his path and his tail completely owns the US military just from him walking around. The part where him and Aaron Taylor Thomas make eye contact for a moment is awesome too. I liked that the movie had these moments where it kinda sorta teases that Godzilla could knowingly be cool with humans but doesn't actually pull the trigger on that, which keeps him scary. I think it's a fair criticism for those used to Japanese Godzilla that the scene with the fleet escorting Godzilla wouldn't have happened in a Japanese film - the hotheaded military would have started shooting, Godzilla would have killed them, end of story. But this isn't Japanese Godzilla or the Japanese view of the military (American or otherwise). Here, both Godzilla and the military understand there's no point to getting in a fight here. The military understands exactly what would happen, and Godzilla considers humans irrelevant unless they annoy him. Another subtle bit reinforcing the natural disaster scene is the TV display where they're plotting Godzilla's course across the Pacific - it looks exactly like a hurricane course plot, and not by accident. I also personally disagree with those critics who say Legendary ruined Godzilla by removing the atomic bomb/nuclear power connection. Hiroshima was 69 years ago at the time G14 was made. I can't speak for any scars that may linger in Japan, but for an American Godzilla any sort of nuclear metaphor would be lost. We've never had a particularly bad experience with nuclear energy. Three Mile Island, sure, but that was decades ago and its cultural impact on the US has faded. We've never had a Chernobyl or Fukushima, much less an atomic bombing. We're even past the Cold War. A 2014 Godzilla that's an atomic bomb or nuclear disaster or nuclear war would not, I suspect, resonate with American audiences except maybe the older generations. But a natural disaster? Oh yes we can relate to that. The specter of American superiority coming crashing down before a hopelessly superior force? It's a theme that's echoed in American fiction for decades, and unlike the classic manifestation of an alien invasion, in G14 American ingenuity and valor do not prevail... though they do help a little when we blow up the Muto nest. I think Gareth Edwards was a fine choice for G14, for much the same reasons as he was a good pick for Rogue One. Yeah, the human characters are lacking and dull except for one or two elevated by their actors' performances, but there's a palpable sense of dread looming over the entire film. You're never allowed to forget how dire the situation is and the level of the threat at work, and how insignificant the characters are before it. But I've rambled enough about Godzilla, I think. Christ, I've been hanging around CineD too much. 
|
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2017 19:01
|
|
|
Electromax posted:The Devil with Three Heads Also getting Mountains of Madness vibes from that. Entombed under the Antarctic ice, scared the crap out of the people whose business is studying stuff like this, and by the sounds of it may have driven the head scientist mad.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2017 14:41
|
|
|
Dark_Tzitzimine posted:I certainly hope the lead scientist wasn't driven mad because is the same lady from G'14. Oh, she had a name? I genuinely didn't notice her or Soldier Dude's Wife getting names.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2017 18:22
|
|
|
Young Freud posted:It's commonly believed before and I think even spelled out later in stuff like Rebels that the clonetroopers were decommissioned following the creation of the Empire. The clones where expensive to produce (as well as involve aliens in their creation), had limited lifespans due to rapid aging, and limited numbers. With the Emperor's new authority, he started mass conscription, which gave him more manpower than the clones could offer. I think the Battlefront explanation is plausible: armies that are clones of one man coming from one planet are very susceptible to corruption and that planet going awry. Conscription and cloning from other templates were introduced after a rebellion on Kamino as a safeguard, with only a select few elite units remaining pure original clones.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 12, 2017 14:55
|
|
|
To me, the most impressive Cameron film remains The Abyss. Besides the absolutely phenomenal work it took to make that movie in the first place, it's a really good story in general. Sure he was pretty transparently going for his own personal Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but that's no bad model to have and setting the whole thing underwater was an impressive step. Undersea settings don't get used as much as I wish they would. I understand why - underwater stuff is expensive and difficult whether you're doing it in CGI or with practical effects - but Cameron makes terrific use of the dark, alien deep ocean. An alien world right here on Earth.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 28, 2017 04:28
|
|
|
Detective No. 27 posted:Lord of the Flies is about kids but it isn't a kids book. Ender's Game the book is like this as well, but didn't save the movie from being oriented towards kids. One reason I hope Hollywood never gets it in their head to adapt Greg Bear's novels. The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars are largely about children and young adults, but my God are they not YA books.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2017 01:12
|
|
|
Bruteman posted:I would love to see an adaptation of Forge done right, that scene at the end at Yellowstone Park (I think? It's been over a decade since I read it) has always stuck with me. Yosemite, not Yellowstone. I'd love a good adaptation of Forge, but I don't think it would be easy to do well. It's an alien invasion story but one where we're boned from the word go and there's not a drat thing we can do about it, so it's time to take one last look around this wonderful planet of ours and celebrate it and all the good things it's given us. That seems really, really outside Hollywood's wheelhouse. James Cameron or Steven Spielberg, perhaps.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2017 14:17
|
|
|
Olympic Mathlete posted:I sincerely hope JW's work in trying to be friendly with raptors is just leading up to this; It's been done, just not with Jurassic Park... 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2017 19:59
|
|
|
Byzantine posted:'98 was a really good Western Godzilla, it just wasn't a good Western Godzilla If nothing else I still think it was a really good Godzilla design.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2017 17:05
|
|
|
FilthyImp posted:That makes kiiiiiind of sense if you assume the force is a net positive, creative energy and Dark Side practitioners are perverting its potential for personal gain. That was Lucas' idea, yes - there is no "light side," only the Force and its dark side, and balance is the dark side not existing at all.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2017 04:27
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 12:20 |
|
|
muscles like this! posted:What I heard is that the production was hosed behind the scenes. With stuff like having to hastily rewrite the entire thing right before shooting because Hunnam dropped out at the last minute. I think the lack of GDT is already painfully obvious with how uninspired the visual design of everything we've seen is.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2017 22:28
|
|