Ah, bad sci fi
May. 27th, 2008 01:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficThe last few weeks have apparently been for me to catch up on classic genre film series.
Blade II
Hm… Can't really say how I felt about this one. It was the movie equivalent of a dungeon crawl. I actually found myself thinking at the end of the first hour, right, you need to have the first battle sequence where they lose to prove how bad-ass the villains are; then the second battle where they win, then realize the villain's not who they thought it was; then the final battle sequence against the actual bad guy. And that's pretty much exactly what happened. There was a lot of bad CGI fight sequences with CG stunt doubles, and they certainly went out of their way to make this one as gory as possible. In the end it didn't really feel like a movie (wait—there's a plot? and dialogue?) so much as a video game demo.
Blade Trinity
Okay, this movie is terrible. And at the same time the most fun of the Blade movies to watch. Ryan Reynolds? Awesome. Blade actually getting funny dialogue? Awesome. ("Koochy-koochy-koo.") Jessica Biel—god, I don't even know what was going on there with the long lingering shots of her fiddling with iTunes. Is that where the budget for this movie came from? Cause wouldn't it be a bad thing to not be able to hear people approaching in a battle?
I also have to spend a moment whining about the archery. There's a montage in the middle of the film that shows her "using" her grief to become a better fighter by shooting arrows faster and faster with her bow. And here's the thing—you can't do that. Especially with a compound bow. Unless she's fiddling with the pulleys in between takes. Compound bows are designed to shoot at one speed—that's kind of the point. They have elliptical pulleys so when you draw past a certain point it will apply the same amount of force to every shot. This is what makes compound bows so accurate. On a traditional bow, if you pull back to different points your arrow will go different speeds with every shot, and since you have to compensate for the distance the arrow will drop before it hits the target, this is a bad thing. In conclusion, the only way to shoot faster and faster is to trade bows for one with more resistance. My brain just hurt during that montage—yes, I know, that's what made my brain hurt. As opposed to the rest of the film.
For all that this movie is a Mary Sue fic, they actually had a few good ideas in here, like the vampires siccing the police on Blade (cause, duh), and the saran wrapped food source. If only they didn't keep killing Whistler and bringing him back and killing him and then trying to pass off Jessica Biel as the daughter "born later, out of wedlock." Who talks like that?
This is for you,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
trinityvixen. I can see how this movie would inspire fic, but given how incredibly self-indulgent and bad the film is, I can't see any way for the vast vast majority of the fic not to suck. I'm going to leave you on your own in that quest.
Pitch Black
This pretty much rocked. It was a straight formula horror film, but very well executed. The cinematography was beautiful, the creatures unique and terrifying, and the sequences after dark where you only get glimpses of how completely surrounded they are really worked for me. I was wrong as to the order the people would die (I was figuring the antiques collector for much earlier, and I was surprised how quickly Claudia Black bit it), but not at all surprised at who died. What worked really well for me was that our heroine, Fry, is introduced to us at her moment of greatest cowardice, and she spends the rest of the movie trying to redeem herself. Vin Diesel is captivating to watch, but in the end I feel like Fry was the more morally ambiguous character. And that's what made the film work—that even with such a standard plot, they populated it with complicated characters. Had they just dropped in your average hero types, it would have been a pretty boring film.
The Chronicles of Riddick
Wow. This really sucked. It was beautiful—I remember seeing the trailers in theaters and thinking how amazing it looked. The production design was gorgeous. Unfortunately, it was also very matte painting in style, so once you put actual actors into those elaborate suits of armor they wind up looking ridiculous. Especially when you take the beautiful Karl Urban and give him the most hideous haircut I've ever seen.
Not a single thing about the plot in this movie worked. It was a mess. The Necromongers might have been scary—had we not been brought inside their world and been forced to listen to dialogue worse than anything Urban had to say on Xena. The bits of continuity they brought over from Pitch Black they ruined. I'm supposed to believe that Riddick was left in a dumpster with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck not by his mother, which was the clear implication in Pitch Black, but by the all powerful leader of the Necromongers? He went down to strangle newborns individually? Really? Even though he has world destroying technology that he has no problem using?
This one was bad, but in a way that was mostly pretty to look at. I feel no need to ever watch it again, though.
Blade II
Hm… Can't really say how I felt about this one. It was the movie equivalent of a dungeon crawl. I actually found myself thinking at the end of the first hour, right, you need to have the first battle sequence where they lose to prove how bad-ass the villains are; then the second battle where they win, then realize the villain's not who they thought it was; then the final battle sequence against the actual bad guy. And that's pretty much exactly what happened. There was a lot of bad CGI fight sequences with CG stunt doubles, and they certainly went out of their way to make this one as gory as possible. In the end it didn't really feel like a movie (wait—there's a plot? and dialogue?) so much as a video game demo.
Blade Trinity
Okay, this movie is terrible. And at the same time the most fun of the Blade movies to watch. Ryan Reynolds? Awesome. Blade actually getting funny dialogue? Awesome. ("Koochy-koochy-koo.") Jessica Biel—god, I don't even know what was going on there with the long lingering shots of her fiddling with iTunes. Is that where the budget for this movie came from? Cause wouldn't it be a bad thing to not be able to hear people approaching in a battle?
I also have to spend a moment whining about the archery. There's a montage in the middle of the film that shows her "using" her grief to become a better fighter by shooting arrows faster and faster with her bow. And here's the thing—you can't do that. Especially with a compound bow. Unless she's fiddling with the pulleys in between takes. Compound bows are designed to shoot at one speed—that's kind of the point. They have elliptical pulleys so when you draw past a certain point it will apply the same amount of force to every shot. This is what makes compound bows so accurate. On a traditional bow, if you pull back to different points your arrow will go different speeds with every shot, and since you have to compensate for the distance the arrow will drop before it hits the target, this is a bad thing. In conclusion, the only way to shoot faster and faster is to trade bows for one with more resistance. My brain just hurt during that montage—yes, I know, that's what made my brain hurt. As opposed to the rest of the film.
For all that this movie is a Mary Sue fic, they actually had a few good ideas in here, like the vampires siccing the police on Blade (cause, duh), and the saran wrapped food source. If only they didn't keep killing Whistler and bringing him back and killing him and then trying to pass off Jessica Biel as the daughter "born later, out of wedlock." Who talks like that?
This is for you,
trinityvixen. I can see how this movie would inspire fic, but given how incredibly self-indulgent and bad the film is, I can't see any way for the vast vast majority of the fic not to suck. I'm going to leave you on your own in that quest.Pitch Black
This pretty much rocked. It was a straight formula horror film, but very well executed. The cinematography was beautiful, the creatures unique and terrifying, and the sequences after dark where you only get glimpses of how completely surrounded they are really worked for me. I was wrong as to the order the people would die (I was figuring the antiques collector for much earlier, and I was surprised how quickly Claudia Black bit it), but not at all surprised at who died. What worked really well for me was that our heroine, Fry, is introduced to us at her moment of greatest cowardice, and she spends the rest of the movie trying to redeem herself. Vin Diesel is captivating to watch, but in the end I feel like Fry was the more morally ambiguous character. And that's what made the film work—that even with such a standard plot, they populated it with complicated characters. Had they just dropped in your average hero types, it would have been a pretty boring film.
The Chronicles of Riddick
Wow. This really sucked. It was beautiful—I remember seeing the trailers in theaters and thinking how amazing it looked. The production design was gorgeous. Unfortunately, it was also very matte painting in style, so once you put actual actors into those elaborate suits of armor they wind up looking ridiculous. Especially when you take the beautiful Karl Urban and give him the most hideous haircut I've ever seen.
Not a single thing about the plot in this movie worked. It was a mess. The Necromongers might have been scary—had we not been brought inside their world and been forced to listen to dialogue worse than anything Urban had to say on Xena. The bits of continuity they brought over from Pitch Black they ruined. I'm supposed to believe that Riddick was left in a dumpster with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck not by his mother, which was the clear implication in Pitch Black, but by the all powerful leader of the Necromongers? He went down to strangle newborns individually? Really? Even though he has world destroying technology that he has no problem using?
This one was bad, but in a way that was mostly pretty to look at. I feel no need to ever watch it again, though.
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Date: 2008-05-27 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2008-05-27 08:02 pm (UTC)And have strong opinions! I do! More people should!
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Date: 2008-05-28 06:44 pm (UTC)