I don’t have a problem with the concept of Hollywood updating an older film. Some movie stories are good enough to be timeless, but they just need an update for the current culture. The Karate Kid is one such movie story.
I saw The Karate Kid in the theaters in 1984, when I was a high school teenager, and I firmly liked the film. It became part of the American culture at the time. But looking back at it now, the presentation is a bit dated.
The story can still resonate with kids today; it just needs modern actors and modern scenery. The script could almost be reused as is, but some tweaking for modern culture would help it. This is why I think the idea of a new production of The Karate Kid is a good idea.
But then I saw the trailer:
A couple of things jump out at me:
First, why the big difference in the story? Why a completely different story? The original script and story didn’t need to be scrapped.
1984 move is to another American city. 2010 move is to China? 1984 Daniel was 16 years old. 2010 Dre is 12 years old? These drastically change the mood of the story.
If a story is good enough to be retold, isn’t it good enough to be retold without being completely rewritten? If they’re going to tell a totally different story, why reuse the old name?
The move to China introduces two oddities:
One: Will the movie be subtitled, (I doubt it), or will everyone conveniently speak English for us, (I expect so).
Two: Chinese martial arts is not Karate. It’s Kung Fu, (as said in the trailer). Calling this film “The Karate Kid” is like naming a movie “The Baseball Kid” and having it be about cricket.
So, they invoke the name of a classic film, but then rewrite the script in such a way that it is only very vaguely related. Why bother presenting it as a “remake”? How about just calling it, “The Kung Fu Kid”? (Upon deeper reading about this film, it seems it will be titled The Kung Fu Kid in other countries.)
By reusing the original name, the producers seem to expect to bring in people who liked the original (a demographic old enough to remember the original). But anyone familiar enough with the original to be drawn to a remake will immediately see (from the trailer) that this isn’t a remake at all. People will either like it or dislike it regardless of their feelings for the original, because this is essentially a whole new movie.
This is like the Starship Troopers movie. For some reason, the producers wanted to associate the film with the name of a great novel, but then they made the movie in such a way that the story had no relationship to its namesake. And anyone who would be interested in the movie because of the novel would see immediately that it wasn’t related to the novel at all, (and would probably be pissed, as I was). Anyone who didn’t know of the novel wouldn’t care that the film pretended to tie in to it.
Too often, Hollywood thinking and marketing just makes no sense whatsoever.
I liked this movie. I enjoyed it just fine. But for some reason, I wasn’t blown away or awed by it. And I don’t know why.
It was exactly what I expected from the trailer, and this is absolutely the kind of movie I would like when done well — and this was done well. Very well. But it just didn’t grab me by the geek organ and hold me tight.
I saw the 2007 Transformers movie 3 times in the theater, and bought the DVD. I saw 300 twice in the theater, and bought the DVD. But this, for some reason I don’t understand about myself, I was satisfied with just one viewing; and I don’t expect to buy the DVD.
This lack of strong feeling for this movie puzzles me. When I left the theater after viewing this, I didn’t feel like I had wasted 3 hours — I was happy with my time and money spent on this. But I also didn’t feel the need to bother seeing it again. I didn’t even feel a need to talk or write about it. (That’s why I’m just now getting to my review of it, about two weeks after my viewing.)
I’m a full-blooded man-geek who loves science fiction and fantasy, loves big action and shooting and explosions. And this movie provided all of this. But I didn’t love it.
It kind of bothers me that I don’t understand why I’m not moved.
Yeah, I know it’s been out for several weeks. I actually saw it about two weeks ago, but I’ve just now gotten around to writing something about it.
I was hesitant to go see it at first, because the trailer made it look like a silly romp. I’m not really interested in a silly zombie holocaust. But a friend, whose movie opinion I trust and tend to agree with, said it was good and funny, but not silly.
It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve gotten an interest in zombie movies, and I’m not sure why. The only zombie movie I remember seeing in the theater was Return of the Living Dead in 1985. The next zombie movie I saw was 28 Days Later, on DVD. (I know, you can argue all you want, but I still call 28DL a “zombie” movie.)
Then I saw I Am Legend, (again, I know it’s not a true “zombie” movie), and something about the zombie apocalypse genre snagged my interest. Since then, I’ve watched about half a dozen other zombie flicks (including the original, black-and-white Night of the Living Dead), and I’ve even bought a couple, including the recent Dawn of the Dead remake.
But the trailer for Zombieland hinted at silliness like I saw in Planet Terror — stupid silliness that I didn’t find the least bit funny. My friend assured me that this movie was not silly like Tarantino’s goof-ball project, so I decided to give it a try. My first theater zombie experience since 1985.
Much to my happiness, I found this movie good. It’s funny, but not silly. It’s zombies eating people, but not gore just to gross the viewer out.
I love the survivor characters and actors. The story is decent and well enough thought out that I wasn’t jolted by dumb plot holes. (There was only one spot/action that was dumb enough to irk me, but I got over it and let it slide quickly.) I like the way Columbus’ rules for surviving in Zombieland were integrated into the story, through both dialog and visual effects.
And the cameo role: brilliant. Since seeing the movie, I’ve read that this actor wasn’t the first chosen for the role, but it worked out so well that I just can’t imagine anyone else pulling it off like he did. And it completely got me — I really didn’t see it coming.
After going to see this film, I emailed my brother to get his opinion on whether I should see it or not. He constantly tells me that I should check with him before going to watch a movie. He claims to know what’s best for me at the theater. I didn’t tell him that I had already seen it, and he said that I would probably like it. So he was right this time. <golf clap>
I just bought the Watchmen DVD (widescreen edition). I love this movie, and I can’t wait to get a chance to watch it again.
Looking at the DVD cover, front and back, I see that whoever wrote the blurb material apparently didn’t bother watching the movie. This kind of sloppy marketing work is pathetic, especially for a blockbuster hit like this.
The front cover blurb says, “WHO WILL SAVE US NOW?” Huh? That doesn’t really make sense for this movie.
Then on the back, there’s this description of the movie:
Someone’s killing our super heroes. The year is 1985 and super heroes have banded together to respond to the murder of one of their own. They soon uncover a sinister plot that puts all humanity in grave danger. The super heroes fight to stop the impending doom, only to find themselves a target for annihilation. But if our super heroes are gone, who will save us?
Aha. The front blurb is just taken from this back blurb, which also doesn’t make sense. Whoever wrote this copy didn’t bother to watch the movie, and apparently didn’t even bother to get someone who had seen it to explain the general premise to him or her. I hate when a marketing writer does crap like this.
This kind of writing shows a complete lack of interest and responsibility, and it pretty much insults the movie’s fans and potential purchasers. Either the copywriter thinks the movie isn’t worth the effort to get the blurb at least relevant, or he/she thinks anyone checking the packaging before renting/purchasing isn’t worth the effort to give accurate information.
For those who don’t know anything about the movie, it’s useless at best, and misleading at worst. It’s written like a horoscope; it’s vague, but sort of sounds like a general plot for the genre.
“Someone’s killing our super heroes”? One guy is murdered. (I won’t even bother quibbling over the fact that only one of all the heroes in the movie is actually super, and he isn’t the one murdered.)
“Super heroes have banded together to respond to the murder”? Only one of the living heroes “responds” to the killing in any way more than just speaking of it.
“A sinister plot that puts all humanity in grave danger”? The grave danger is the general threat of nuclear war between the US and the USSR — this was the “grave danger” that we all lived through in 1985.
“The super heroes fight to stop the impending doom”? No they don’t. The doom is decidedly over by the time the heroes learn of it.
“Find themselves a target for annihilation”? Oh come on. This might arguably describe just one guy.
“But if our super heroes are gone, who will save us?” Geez. Maybe the same someones who’ve been saving us over the past several years since the “super heroes” retired? Only one of the characters has been active as any kind of “hero” when the movie started.
There is a big plot to this movie, and the central characters are sort-of super heroes (they call themselves “costumed adventurers”), but the description on the box is so unrelated to the actual story as to be false advertising. Here, let me try:
The murder of a costumed adventurer brings his old compatriots together again. The year is 1985, and the United States and the Soviet Union are reaching a boiling point for a global nuclear war. The reuniting members of the costumed hero group known as the Watchmen uncover a plot connecting their friend’s death and the threat of world annihilation.
There, I just wrote a more relevant and accurate description for the movie with just few minutes of thought. All it took beyond these few minutes is 2 hours to actually watch the movie. Is that too much to ask a marketing writer?
My friends asked me if I was going to see Transformers 2, and I said, “No, Hollywood has struck out with me.”
Hollywood had what should have been three easy slam dunks for me this year: Wolverine, Terminator: Salvation, and Star Trek. But they completely failed to entertain me; they bored me. Me, a member of their core geek demographic. So I decided to not bother with anymore Hollywood in the theater this year.
But then later in our conversation, I mentioned that my family was going to see UP this weekend. “I thought you weren’t going to anymore movies?” They said.
PIXAR is not Hollywood. PIXAR has never made a bad movie. I’d go see a PIXAR movie even if they made a movie about talking cars or the life of a bug. PIXAR is exempt from my theater boycott.
So, all the Grits went to see UP Sunday afternoon. This was Calfgrit4’s first movie theater experience, and Calfgrit8’s first in at least two years (he didn’t like it when he was younger). I’m happy to announce that all Grits seemed to thoroughly enjoy this show.
It’s a real tear-jerker in places, completely silly in other places, and totally entertaining throughout. Frankly, I’m kind of surprised I liked it as much as I did. It’s a ridiculous romp, but it was up front and self-admittedly a ridiculous romp. It didn’t wrap itself in a cloak of realism or believability. There was nothing serious about this movie other than some of the emotions it pulled out of the audience.
In the beginning of the movie, there’s a series of scenes with no dialog at all, and Calfgrit4 asked, “Is this a commercial? Is the movie going to start soon?” These scenes laid the emotional groundwork for the old man character, and made me want to hold Cowgrit’s hand.
Later in the movie, both Calvesgrit were laughing out loud. The theater was filled to near capacity with whole families, and all the kids (and many adults) were laughing fully out loud through much of the show.
After the movie, during our walk through the parking lot back to our van, our boys were repeating lines and scenes from the movie, and laughing all over again. It does a parent’s heart good to see their kids so filled with humor and joy.
I said I wasn’t going to bother seeing this movie. But my friends all told me it was good. Really good. Even outside my circle of friends, every review and mention I’ve read or heard about this movie said it was great. Even fantastic.
So, I went to see it. I shouldn’t have. I hate it. I should have trusted my own personal gut instinct.
I’ll give props to the idea of using a time travel plot creating a paradox to explain the “reboot” of the series. That concept is a good way to avoid rehashing the series, and lets writers not worry about matching everything to the known Star Trek history of the future.
But every other plot device and piece of plot logic just utterly fails for me. I’ve mentioned in other recent reviews how plot holes and logic failings hurt my enjoyment of a movie, especially when those failings are the core drivers of the story. Well, Star Trek’s foundation is built on these kinds of not-thought-through problems.
One such core plot piece in this movie is that Kirk goes from cadet non grata to permanent captain of the Star Fleet flagship in one freakin’ day. One day! Apparently, being overly cocky gets Star Fleet cadets promoted over all other experienced officers, and awarded the prestigious flag captain’s seat above all other senior commanders.
And there’s lots of other pieces of twisted, ridiculous plot logic that the movie plot relies on. For instance, red matter is so powerful that a single drop can create a black hole, yet a small, one-man science ship carries a 5-foot diameter sphere of the stuff. A Romulan mining ship has greater firepower than a Federation warship. (Yes, the mining ship was from about 150 years in the future, but still it’s a mining ship.) A star can go supernova with no warning. A black hole close enough that you can see it huge in the sky isn’t close enough to harm you.
And what the hell is with all the bright back lights and lens flares? Damn but that got annoying.
About halfway through this movie, I considered getting up and walking out. I just couldn’t find anything to like in this show. But, unfortunately, I was sitting in the middle of the row, with 3-6 people between me and either aisle. So I continued to sit there and subject myself to further brain damage.
This is the third craptacular movie I’ve seen in the theater this year. All three franchises should have been slam dunks for Hollywood to please me, but all three have completely failed for me. But then, with all the rave reviews this new Star Trek movie has received by everyone but me, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m far too hard to please.
But my peers have also panned Wolverine and Terminator. This is the only one of the three that I am the odd reviewer. <shrug> I now, officially, give up on modern Hollywood — the writers just don’t think their shit through.
I saw the original Terminator and Terminator 2 in the theaters, but never saw Terminator 3, at all. T1 was pretty damn good — I loved it. T2 was good, too, but the ending was too much Hollywood sappy. I suspected T3 would be bad, based on the trailer, and never bothered with it.
I can’t put my finger on what pulled me into a theater to see T4. I think it had something to do with the concept of a terminator thinking it was human. Something about that idea pinged the “that might be cool” center of my brain. Sadly, Hollywood only teases that organ — it rarely delivers on the promise.
In general, the special effects in this movie are fantastic, A+ quality. But the writing — the plotting, the dialog, the thinking through — is B-movie drivel. It’s like the writers just figured the action and effects could carry the story and they didn’t need to put any real thought into how the story worked.
In Terminator 2, there was a scene where the terminator (Arnold) uses a Gatling gun on a bunch of police cars intending to scare off but not harm the humans around them. After the sustained firing, its internal computer shows “Casualties: 0.0″ on its heads-up display. Now, how are casualties counted in decimal places? Could there be 2.3 casualties?
One or two “errors” like this in a movie is forgivable if the movie is otherwise decent, and the whole plot of the movie doesn’t rely on those errors. And all that error in T2 got from me was a little “heh” chuckle, and then I let it go. It was a passing, dismissible hiccup.
But T4 is chock full of errors like that, to the point that they make the whole movie stupid. For instance let’s take just one theme — fire:
[The following has spoilers.]
Several years after the nuclear devastation, L.A., (covered in rubble and ash; vacant except for two kids), still has little fires burning in the streets.
We’re told that the Hunter-Killers (essentially flying terminators) use infrared to find humans at night. A few minutes later, some main characters build a big fire out in the open for warmth.
One character sends another out to go collect “stuff to build a fire,” yet on screen at that moment, there are already three camp-sized fires burning within 30 feet of them.
And when they build the fire, for warmth, it isn’t warm enough and they need to snuggle up for body warmth.
The characters are crawling down a tunnel that gets hit with an explosion. The flames roar down the tunnel, fully engulfing the characters, but they get out of it not even singed.
And Skynet central, basically a big city run by the machines (humans are herded through the city for some never-mentioned purpose), is full of tall fire-chimneys/stacks, and random fireballs erupt from the ground. It looks like a 19th century industrial city more than a high-tech robot hub.
If any of the above items were just one or two throughout the movie, I could get over them. But these kinds of things just come rapid fire throughout the story. More (not fire themed):
While a group of humans are chatting inside an ancient gas station in the middle of the desert, they don’t hear the approach of a 50′-tall robot until its hands burst through the roof to collect them.
During a dogfight between two human-flown planes and a machine plane, John Conner was relaying specific fighting commands over a radio — with no visual connection to the action! “Take evasive action!” “Eject, eject!” This was worse than a backseat driver; imagine your spouse shouting driving directions at you over your cell phone, from 100 miles away.
A random [classic] terminator chassis (the robot under the human skin), watching over the herd of collected humans, wears a Rambo-style headband. (And I’m still wondering why the machines want living humans. The whole basis of the entire Terminator series is that the machines are trying to exterminate — TERMINATE — all human life.)
The terminator who thinks it is human has a living heart inside its robot frame. Why? And the human medics say he has a human brain. How can they tell through the steel cranium?
That human heart inside the terminator is mentioned one way or another five or six times throughout the story. Had they just mentioned the human heart once, and then ignored it the rest of the movie, it could be passed off as a minor silliness. But that human heart inside the terminator becomes the central plot point for the movie’s “climax.”
A bad terminator takes out the good terminator by punching him in that human heart. Then John Conner uses some random wiring in a factory power box to defibrillate that human heart, bringing the good terminator back to life (and full strength).
Then John Conner is stabbed in the heart. Oh no, he’s going to die!? No, of course not. The good terminator willingly donates his heart to Conner. So the docs do a heart transplant (from a robot to a human) at an open-air field hospital, next to a helicopter landing zone.
Oh God, there are just so many really stupid, stupid things in this movie. One stupid thing after another. By halfway through it, I was just shaking my head wondering if I was loosing brain cells watching this thing. I told myself, “Just ignore the story and plot and dialog. Just watch the special effects for cool stuff.” But by the end I was thinking, “I could have spent two hours huffing paint and had a better time with less brain damage.”
But then, after all that mental agony from watching this movie, I heard two different people, at different times, as we were standing from our seats and then walking out of the theater, comment, “That was pretty good.”
Apparently Hollywood has it right. Throw enough special effects and action at an audience, and many will totally ignore or miss the crap writing. To enjoy Terminator Salvation, leave your brain at home. <Insert a dumb joke about needing only a heart.>
Viewed: Theater (non-3D)
Viewed: Theater
I just bought the Watchmen DVD (widescreen edition). I love this movie, and I can’t wait to get a chance to watch it again.
Viewed: Theater
Viewed: Theater
Viewed: Theater
