Posted on 06/17/2011 1:36:19 PM PDT by pabianice
"Super 8" is an almost scene-by-scene remake of "ET." That is not a compliment. Same-same. Kids. Evil U.S. military. Robotic killer soldiers/airmen. Misunderstood monster that just wants to get home. What a waste of time. Even the CGI is second-rate.
There are a few differences. This time the alien is big and can raise hell with the military that has kept it captive and tortured it for 24 years (it's set in 1979 for absolutely no reason except to trot-out old cars, hairstyles, and music). The plot is moronic, with the kids saving the day, of course. The US Air Force could successfully sue Speilberg for slander. His repeated characature of the US military as neo-Nazis is so ugly as to make the viewer turn away from the screen. In this movie the Air Force tortures aliens, destroys entire towns to hide their guilt, and murders civilians that become inconvenient. The character of the Air Force colonel in charge is a copy of Col. Kurtz in "Apocolype Now," except this actor isn't fat and can remember his lines. Adults are portrayed as, at best, bunglers and losers, and at worst, careless monsters. The kids, of course, have all the bravery and all the answers.
I have watched with dismay as Speilberg has gone to exciting director in "Jaws" to this shambles of a film. Shame on him and shame on anyone paying to see this fiasco after being forewarned.
It’s a great piece of child psychology. It follows the emotional ups and downs of a child in a way that very few American films do. It was also evocative filmmaking. I know some people just don’t like Spielberg’s approach. You probably think Close Encounters is also hokum?
The “special edition” of Close Encounters was hokum, 8 minutes worth a white screen “on the alien ship” with actual good scenes from the original cut. The original is still a pretty solid movie, and actually the SE would be fine if it was the only version, but that re-release for basically no payoff was a screw job.
And ET is just too annoyingly cute.
Speilberg is hit and miss for me. I think Duel is a great movie.
I don’t like the stuff in the Mothership at all. I like the version where they took the best stuff from the SE and put it back into the original leaving the Mothership stuff out. E.T. has enough lyrical moments to overwhelm its faults. And I miss when Spielberg would be that compact...under tho hours!
It’s terrific.
There are rumors he directed most of Poltergeist but he’s not credited. The stuff at the start with the typical suburban family is certainly Spielbergian.
I don’t remember any lyrical moments, I just remember being annoyed at how cutsie and kiddie it was. I was only 13 when the movie came out, theoretically right in wheel house. But I hated it. 2 weeks later when Blade Runner hit, that was my kind of SF.
Well BR is something else entirely. The Halloween scenes were lyrical - scattered bunches of costumed kids floting across a strangely lit suburban landscape. The opening pan across the starscape, and the obvious examples of the bike floating past the moon. It’s all about kids and their emotional experience. People don’t remember what a big risk that was. A film about kids intended for kids hadn’t been a big hit in almost 20 years.
Problem is as a kid when it came out I found it, like most other movies “about” kids insulting. I don’t really care if it was a risk, it was stupid and annoying. I don’t really see those scenes as “lyrical” kind of pretty maybe, but some kind of pretty scenes is no reason to put up with an annoying stupid insulting plot.
How was it insulting? It bears comparison with the great Disney features like Pinnochio and Bambi.
I just remember the feeling, like in most “kids” movies of the era, of being talked down. In between the era of great Disney and the rise of Pixar the hallmark of “kids” movies is they’re dumb with kind of hackneyed plots. Just look at the ET “powers” they don’t make sense, OK he’s got a psychic link to Elliot, he can heal wounds, he can come back from the dead, he can make bikes fly, but he can’t find his way back to his ship and he gets sick and dies for no apparent reason. Throwing a plot like that out there and expecting people to not say “that’s %^&$ing stupid” is, frankly, insulting to the target audience. Of course it gets great reviews, so maybe he’s right and the target audience are a bunch of morons.
And don’t even get me started on Bambi. 90% of the idiot anti-hunting environmentalists dingbats we have screwing up the country today started on that path when they saw Bambi’s mom get shot. And 2 generations “humans are evil” talking animal animation spawns from that movie. The world would be a much better place if Bambi had never happened.
I’m talking only about the artistry and not whatever political movement it spawned. Bambi is a great and disturbing piece of popular Art. E.T. is structured like a child’s dream so it doesnt bear close logical. It isn’t Hard SF. Besides what makes you think the alien didn’t WANT to sticmk around for a while to help Elliot and faked his death to get the others out of the room.
I don’t really care about the “artistry” if the movie itself was stupid. I loathe the “all humans are evil” plot that appears in talking animal movies, it was stupid and insulting when it was new and it’s repetitive now. Yeah the drawings are pretty, but the characters are mostly annoying and the story is awful. It might be disturbing but it ain’t great.
If the story can’t bear logical examination then the story is stupid. I get rid of the “close” there because it doesn’t take “close” examination to see that ET’s powers make no damn sense. How could ET that didn’t know Elliot or English decide to stick around for Elliot, and why was it sick before hand, if it hadn’t gotten sick it wouldn’t have had a bunch of people in the room to watch it die in the first place. See, you’re showing the problems with the story. It doesn’t add up to even the slightest amount of examination. It’s just another “kids are dumb, keep the eyes big and they’ll like the movie” kids movie. Right there with Herbie and all the other shlock they foisted on kids during that time period.
Except that unlike the Herbie films, it’s great filmmaking. Like I said it doesn’t need any more logic than a striking dream has (and it actually has much more). The plots of Jane Austen novels are flimsy too - No one cares.
FR is hands-down the worst site on the Internet for a movie review. There are some fuddy-duddies on here who think all movies without Jimmy Stewart are The Worst Films Ever Made!!1!11! And even most of those WITH Jimmy Stewart are Insulting Hollywood Leftist Propaganda!
Mechanically sure ET is well executed. But story and characterwise it’s exactly like a Herbie movie. The characters are 1 dimensional, mostly not that bright, and the story just plain doesn’t hold up. My dreams make a hell of a lot more sense than ET. And Jane Austen novels are crap too, I couldn’t even finish the cliff notes for Pride and Prejudice, for exactly what you point out: flimsy, not to mention stupid and filled with annoying women that need to be slapped in the face.
It’s not all of FR it’s just this guy’s reviews. He’s hilariously wrong about everything.
Elliot is one of the fullest characterizations of a child in American film history. Though that has as much to do with Henry Thomas’s performance (and Spielberg’s direction of it) as it does with anything in the script. Austen was a satirist and was chuckling at the characters’ foibles all along the way.
"See this guy? The guy in black? He's baaaaaaaaaaaadd. Did you see that? He just stepped on some guy's face! Do you know why? Well, he's baaad. See? Listen to the music! Isn't it kind of dark and threatening?? I'm telling you this guy is baaaaad. Hey, maybe you're not getting it. Okay. Okay. He's -- he's crushing a kitten now. Okay? Get it? He's baaaaaaaaaad.
"Oh look! New guy! New guy entering the scene! And look! He's wearing white!! And -- and the music! Yes! It's rising up! I think ... I think ... yes, I think I'm sure ... He must be a good guy!!!!"
I swear that prior to Lucas and Spielberg there was some expectation that the audience could figure some of this stuff out for themselves.
How did ‘Jaws’ or ‘Close Encounters’ fit that template? In CE, the people you think are bad really don’t turn out to be in the end. The most popular films in the early 1970s were disaster movies. Spielberg helped kill those off.
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