well, thanks to this thread I didn’t choose this move last night at the cinema. Went and saw Unleashed instead.
[quote=“Richardm”]It’s just a movie. You’re allowed to suspend belief for a couple of hours. That hitch hiker guide movie is coming on the 15th. I’m sure that will be totally believable.[/quote]That’s like saying that movies aren’t real 
I liked it but I didn’t understand something . [color=red]Spoiler alert[/color]:
[color=white]The aliens sucked up people and mulched them to make food for the blood vines, is that right? What were the blood vines for?[/color]
[quote=“Maoman”]I liked it but I didn’t understand something . [color=red]Spoiler alert[/color]:
[color=white]The aliens sucked up people and mulched them to make food for the blood vines, is that right? What were the blood vines for?[/color][/quote]
No. That is not right. The answer is in the book.
They get the funding for a film on the condition that there are certain number of fights, a certain number of flatulance jokes and/or on the condition that John Travolta or Brad Pit gets a certain amount of screen time. They don’t care if the thing makes sense or deals with an aspect of real human experience because they know that if the sound bite is “cool” and they have a big name star people will pay to see it. Hollywood films are as bad as they are because they’re produced by business people and not by artists, and because there literally hundreds of millions of people in the world who “just want to be entertained” and bring almost no intelligent critical judgement to their movie viewing choices. As long as we keep paying to see stupid movies they will keep making them. It’s show business. Show “business.” With no “business” there’s no “show.” That would perhaps be preferable.[/quote]
There you go again, Bob, being logical, factual, and informed. Really! I must say that your post was just not very entertaining.
Exactly. The ending was so bad, especially the part with the voiceover.
I was getting pretty sick of the standard mindless Hollywood movies before I moved to Taiwan. Since being here, I really have crossed some line where I don’t want to watch any more movies where the main theme is blowing things up or shooting people. Especially for NT $285 at Warner. That has to be more expensive than movies in New York. I think W.O.W. pushed me over that line.
I desperately miss my Indie movie channel on cable.
I feel Hollywood insults us when they give us one-idea movies, movies driven only by action or star power, without providing good dialogue, logical consistency, and realistic characters. I do mean ‘insult’ – these are just the basics of a good story, and shouldn
[quote=“Dragonbones”]
So I end up not watching movies, and go for DIY entertainment. At least my cat gets more company 
[/quote]
not sure if “DIY entertainment” and “Cat” belong in the same sentence. 
Call it subtlety…
Suspending disbelief for the purpose of engaging in fantasy is one thing but swallowing whatever moronic plot line Hollywood decides to throw at us is entirely another.
Fortunately these days there are great reviews available on line from places like rottentomatoes and critics like A.O. Scott who can help us to avoid that kind of empty headed crap.
Suspending disbelief for the purpose of engaging in fantasy is one thing but swallowing whatever moronic plot line Hollywood decides to throw at us is entirely another.[/quote]
Yeah! A movie can be based on fantastic ideas like alien invasions or magic or something, but it should at least follow its own rules. EMP kills electrical circuits, therefore there is no functioning camcorder. Earth bugs kill aliens, therefore the aliens pretty definitely didn’t make an earlier trip to bury all those machines.
Funny you should mention the HHGTTG movie. I remember reading the script and accompanying notes, and the author described the difficulty of arranging for the heroes to escape from an almost inescapable situation. In Hollywood you can just come up with some improbable solution which doesn’t really make sense. Douglas Adams used the improbability of any escape as the basis for the escape, which is far more cool.
Apparently he was prompted by watching a TV program on judo, in which the opponent’s strength is used against him. The Hollywood response to meeting a big opponent would be to pull out a gun, something they learned from Monty Python but failed to make ‘work’.
[quote=“Richardm”][quote=“Maoman”]I liked it but I didn’t understand something . [color=red]Spoiler alert[/color]:
[color=white]The aliens sucked up people and mulched them to make food for the blood vines, is that right? What were the blood vines for?[/color][/quote]
No. That is not right. The answer is in the book.[/quote]
I’m not about to buy the book. What’s the answer?
four words:
fan
tas
tic
four
I’m thinking, here, all will be well.
Hmmmm… this movie proves my beleif that Iexpectation setting is the key to life.
I went in expecting very mediocre, came out thinking quite good, or at least much better than I expected. SFX were very good, the real monsters were at times the people. Of course after watching all of those fallujia videos it’s hard to look at the military in the same way - I felt for them much more than I would have normally.
Idea wise, I thought it was very faithful to the book, even if storywise it wasn’t.
The ending made me burst out laughing. I have to reread the book to see if there’s an appearance of an unblemished ascot and smoking jacket in the doorway of a undamaged brownstone after an attack on the world by a superhuma alien fleet or if it was just artistic liberties.
Spoiler
Kinda sweet how they drain all the people of blood and use it as fertilizer. When they all started to die, my woman said to me "I think they are dying because all the blood they are getting they probably caught AIDS. 
I thought it was funny.
Blood sucking aliens in giant robots…this movie rocks! What can you ask more in a movie? Really?
[quote=“Maoman”][quote=“Richardm”][quote=“Maoman”]I liked it but I didn’t understand something . [color=red]Spoiler alert[/color]:
[color=white]The aliens sucked up people and mulched them to make food for the blood vines, is that right? What were the blood vines for?[/color][/quote]
No. That is not right. The answer is in the book.[/quote]
I’m not about to buy the book. What’s the answer?[/quote]
I don’t know where you guys get the idea about fertilizer. The red plants were just something that they brought with them and started to grow like weeds. The aliens drink the fluids for themselves. Mars is the red planet. Why is it red?
Well, I just saw it. Yeah, nothing like jumping in late. 
I, too, went in not expecting much and came out thinking wow. Holy sh*t.
Yeah, lots of holes but Spielberg made a horror movie so what do you expect? If you go to movies unwilling to suspend belief at the door, well, I don’t know why you’d go to movies at all. 
That said, part of the oomph may have been due to the theater in which I viewed it. Local rich guy, a theater magnate and former mayoral candidate who lost due to a scandalous and bizarre war he declared on the local newspaper mid-campaign (possibly insane), likes to build luxury megaplexes, emphasis on luxury (possibly insolvent). Further emphasis on mega, but thanks to the first emphatic part I don’t mind. The theater’s sound was a-w-e-s-o-m-e and definitely added to the overall horror. Man, the sound was as truly as if the ground were being ripped open. When the first infected tripod fell to the ground, tossing one poor bastard up over a car and then smudging over his poor pathetic body, I swear the THX had the hairs on my arms waving like wheat on a windy day. Not loud; perfect.
Key-rist, highly memorable. The movie takes place in the fall, too. This should be an instant Halloween classic, I think.
[quote=“Richardm”]
I don’t know where you guys get the idea about fertilizer. The red plants were just something that they brought with them and started to grow like weeds. The aliens drink the fluids for themselves. Mars is the red planet. Why is it red?[/quote]
I just saw it, and the Tim Robbins character says something about people being used for fertilizer- plus Tom and Tim both end up sprayed with blood.
I think the idea of the red plants was that the aliens were wiping out terrestrial life to seed the Earth with their own eco-system; this may have been lifted from the great Thomas Disch book “The Genocides”.
So which ETs win the competition for “Stupidest Alien Race in the Galaxy”- ‘WotW’ or ‘Signs’?