Anyone who takes a sci-fi flick personally needs to either get a life, seek therapy or both......
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.
ROTLA was a direct tribute to Republic Serials so it’s not like the source was a model of intelligence either. A lot of the Baby Boomer directors tried to reinvent what they grew up with. But Lucas is a lot more to blame than Spielberg for the current state of affairs...and Tony Scott (Top Gun is the true precursor of films like Transformers).
OMG, do not get me started on Duel. I watched that gem a hundred times and almost wrote a term paper on it. Type of the car? A Valiant. First known publication? Playboy magazine. and on and on and on.
“1 minute of your life and there you are right back in the jungle....”
He’s just a whiny kid. Austen might have been chuckling but they gave me a headache.
There’s a lot of people that think the invention of the summer blockbuster killed movies. I think summer blockbusters fund a lot of good movies. There’s a lot of good stuff that comes out that isn’t aimed at being a blockbuster.
He’s a whiny kid but with a real emotional core. He’s not a wisecracking sitcom kid like you see so often.
Whether or not you have to like a character to enjoy the fiction of whic they play a part is a long standing question. Austen said that the title character of Emma was someone only she would like...and in the modern-day version, ‘Clueless’, Alicia Silverstone played it pretty accurately.
I suppose he’s more than a basic kids movie kid. But that just plays into how bad kids movies tend to be.
My big problem with Austen is that none of the characters are likable. A book can survive with one unlikable character if it’s done well, but if they’re all shallow dinks I want to punch it’s time to move on. I will give her props for one thing though, the suffering I did trying to read P&P definitely taught what type of woman to avoid at all costs in life. Other than the aversion therapy though a completely worthless book.
Elizbaeth Bennett is regarded as one of the most likable heroines in English Literature. Everyone loves her. P&P is funny and insightful. Austen was the first to treat marriage as something more than a simple sentimental cliax tacked on at the end. She saw it as a serious social and moral neogitation that reveal character.
‘climax’
Nobody asked me. They’re all superficial and annoying, and P&P is the boring story of their petty quest for status marriages.
Marriage was a crucial event in womens’ lives back then. Not marrying correctly or at all was an almost surefire route to poverty.
Yeah but that doesn’t mean I should have to suffer through their pointless discussions on it. Or actually that I even could. 60 pages in it was obvious there was no way I could ever finish that book, I was alternating between painfully bored and wishing I could punch the characters. It’s simply awful. There’s a reason why woman hating gay men like Austen so much, the characters deserve the hatred.
One of my favorite Anglophone novels of all time.
Hands down the most boring book I ever stuck my face in. It was the only book I ever turned to cliff notes for, and I couldn’t even finish the chapter run down of the notes. It’s just painful how petty and pointless their lives are.
I’d loathe them all. Everything I’ve heard about any of her books they’re all about that same type of person, leading pointless lives. They’re great proof for why that kind of aristocracy died, any subculture which requires half of its members to be that vacuous is going to have a really hard time feeding itself in a few generation. But other than showing how Paris Hilton happened there really isn’t much point.
Anyone who takes a sci-fi flick personally needs to either get a life, seek therapy or both......
Neither ET nor the Super 8 alien tear up downtown anywhere, and the Super 8 guy only kicks the crap out of a few military guys, most of whom were well established as jerks. If you’re going to pick reasons to not see a movie they should have some grounding in reality, what you outline really only describes about 30 movies through the entire history of cinema, globally, mostly from Japan.
You weren't "a kid" when it came out............and if you were, my condolences.
I was a month shy of 13 when ET opened. I was a kid. Cinematically it was a bad time to be a kid, that time period between Disney’s “classic” period and the rise of Pixar featured a lot of really painfully stupid movies. I still have a knee jerk “if it’s G it must be stupid” reaction because of it. Luckily there were tons of good not kid movies out there.
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