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    Skyline



    I know it's probably going to be terrible. I know it looks like a massive ripoff of "Independence Day" and "Cloverfield". But I'm a complete sucker for any big disaster/alien invasion/apocalyptic movie, and this looks like it'll sate my craving for something loaded with excessive special effects.

    #2
    Skyline

    Hmmm...

    I can't disagree with any of that. :-)

    I watched 'Cloverfield' again, when it was on telly, the other week, and I have to say that, in retrospect, it was really poor. The effects were great, of course, but just about everything else was poor to annoying. It almost felt like a comedy.

    I'm just glad we now live in an era where we can mute the volume via remote control. (Anyone else remember the days before then and the jumping up and down to the TV?)

    Anyway, I loved the hype building up towards 'Cloverfield' and I thought that had real potential. However, the film was basically bungled.

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      #3
      Skyline

      * Over the top CGI?
      * Plenty of product placement?
      * The focus on 'babes & hunks' only?

      Yup - It's one of those films that I shan't be bothering with...

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        #4
        Skyline

        Jesus, I'm still recovering from watching 80% of that 2012 thing earlier this year. It's definitely the worst film ever made: a fresh form of cinematic torture every five minutes, for three hours or something. Just amazing. Like an apocalyptic version of Michael Jackson's 'Black or White' video, only not interesting or funny.

        But I am curious about what sophisticated, suave types such as the present company get out of this stuff. To me it's like watching someone else play a really weedy computer game; I just don't get the attraction.

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          #5
          Skyline

          It's a very shallow and somewhat inexplicable thing for me. I enjoy, for reasons I don't understand, "big" films where "big" things happen to lots of people. I've always been like that, whether it's fims, TV, books, any medium. Maybe it's some kind of crude extreme escapism - not in the fine art of storytelling well, but in making a shit story that involves the whole world. Disaster movies, alien invasion movies, anything like that.

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            #6
            Skyline

            These type of movies are a guilty pleasure for me too, although a lot of them are crap really. 2012 was appalling but it's not the worst movie ever made, "Battlefield Earth" takes some beating in that department.

            The best disaster movie I've seen in recent years was "Armageddon," good script, believable story, great all-star cast, dramatic without going over the top.

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              #7
              Skyline

              Lucia Lanigan wrote:
              But I am curious about what sophisticated, suave types such as the present company get out of this stuff. To me it's like watching someone else play a really weedy computer game; I just don't get the attraction.
              LL - it's like this, but on a huge scale:

              -



              -

              Robot* go BOOOOOOMMM!!!

              (* - Substitute monster, building, spaceship as necessary.)

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                #8
                Skyline

                Lucia Lanigan wrote:
                Jesus, I'm still recovering from watching 80% of that 2012 thing earlier this year. It's definitely the worst film ever made: a fresh form of cinematic torture every five minutes, for three hours or something. Just amazing. Like an apocalyptic version of Michael Jackson's 'Black or White' video, only not interesting or funny.

                But I am curious about what sophisticated, suave types such as the present company get out of this stuff. To me it's like watching someone else play a really weedy computer game; I just don't get the attraction.
                I couldn't agree more on 2012, my wife 'took' me to see it for my birthday with her sister and niece. After about an hour of barely being able to stifle gales of laughter at how bad the whole film was I left to go and get a beer.

                Not really that keen on going to the cinema at the best of times as I get bored and don't like being stuck with something when there's other things I'd rather be doing but 2012 took the biscuit, absolute drivel. Last film I went to see in fact, I used to go along with the whole cinema thing to keep the peace but that was the nail in the coffin.

                That said I quite like seeing famous landmarks getting blown to smithereens but there has to be some form of believable plot (and acting).

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                  #9
                  Skyline

                  I like the idea of OTT, blow-shit-up cinema but I'm struggling to think of examples I've enjoyed in practice. I'm not sure how you can get that grain of reality in there now when the most advanced effects have come full circle to look like those used in computer games. And games obviously have the upper hand in involving their audience. Still, my loss.

                  I definitely love plotless, sensationalist cinema, but it tends to be what people call arthouse cinema. Like Carmelo Bene's demented version of Salome, which looks amazing throughout but which is basically really daft and histrionic.

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                    #10
                    Skyline

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                      #11
                      Skyline

                      ZumaBeach Manningtree wrote:
                      The best disaster movie I've seen in recent years was "Armageddon," good script, believable story, great all-star cast, dramatic without going over the top.

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                        #12
                        Skyline

                        Lucia Lanigan wrote:
                        I like the idea of OTT, blow-shit-up cinema but I'm struggling to think of examples I've enjoyed in practice. I'm not sure how you can get that grain of reality in there now when the most advanced effects have come full circle to look like those used in computer games. And games obviously have the upper hand in involving their audience. Still, my loss.

                        I definitely love plotless, sensationalist cinema, but it tends to be what people call arthouse cinema. Like Carmelo Bene's demented version of Salome, which looks amazing throughout but which is basically really daft and histrionic.
                        Yes, this. All of this. Although I suppose I'd choose a different example as I've not seen that Salome.

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                          #13
                          Skyline

                          I'd have added Enter the Void, but that actually has got a fairly strong, linear plot (albeit a melodramatic one).

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                            #14
                            Skyline

                            Wow. This film is just...bizarre. I'm not sure what to think about a film that's so completely generic in so many ways but with such a weirdly structured plot. There's nothing wrong with a weirdly structured plot, it's a refreshing change, but it's just too odd when everything else about the film makes it clear the pitch was "Let's remake the Cruise War of the Worlds only in blue rather than red. With a lot more 'homages'* to Aliens, and a post-Cloverfield riff on Independence Day."

                            The effects are great but that's mostly it tbh.

                            *It's impossible to say homage without sounding super sarcastic, isn't it?

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                              #15
                              Skyline

                              Topped off, literally, with a stab of Starship Troopers.

                              Quentin Tarantino is the only man in Hollywood allowed to get away with "Homage."

                              I liked the insecty, squidlike, burping aliens. Noshing on humans must give them terrible gas. Maybe in the sequel that goes straight to video they'll fart as well.

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                                #16
                                Skyline

                                Dear lord, that was a terrible film. Wooden acting, bottom rung of the "where have I seen them before?" cast ladder (special mention to Turk from Scrubs and the woman from Sweet Valley High), average special effects (certainly imagination-wise; it's a pale, Giger-lite Starship Troopers with more than a nod to The Matrix, in style), and a story that just didn't go anywhere. That'll teach me to think I can enjoy any old blockbuster film.

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                                  #17
                                  Skyline

                                  Hollywood has gotten really really good at producing trailers because this one looked like it might just be worth it given I am a sucker for a Sci-Fi flick. However, given the results reflected in this thread, it seems that the megastudios continue to go ahead with scripts that seem to be written by spastic 12 year olds. Shouldn't they at least have the decency to spend the same time they use crafting an effective trailer on you know... an effective coherent script/story?

                                  This brings to mind the mindless stupid incomprehensible storylines in recent "blockbusters" such as the Pirate of the Caribbean series or the sadly continuing Transformers movies. Who the hell writes this crap? I recently re-watched the Alien movies (part I,II) and though the special effects are decidedly amateur compared to even Skyline, there is more drama, tension and just sheer joy in that movie's first ten seconds than much of the blockbuster fare of our times.

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                                    #18
                                    Skyline

                                    Yeah, the thing with trailers is that you're not obliged to tell a story, so it's relatively easy to cut together a series of hi impact scenes to sell the movie.

                                    You'd think it should be just as easy to make a really good movie as it is a bad one, but I suspect that's not really true because for one thing it's very hard to get a good script and even harder to keep it a good script even after it goes thru a million rewrites.

                                    In Hollywood it's not always about getting a decent script, it's about your ability to get a picture quickly greenlighted (project approved and financed). For filmmakers and would-be filmmakers you want to avoid the traps of development hell where scripts go thru endless rewrites and cast changes and projects getting turned around (picked up by another studio), or, deals once made that fall apart. Then the development process starts all over again. It's such a common and onerous process that it's a wonder any pictures get made at all. This is why it can take years to bring a project to the screen, so if you can put the deal together quickly and lock in your financing, you roll with it because you might never get another chance. So you just try to make the best picture you can.

                                    It's the art of the deal more than anything else, so if you have a track record of getting pictures made, you have more chance of getting another picture made so the system is self perpetuating and that's why so much crap finds its way to the screen.

                                    In the case of the Alien I & II you had two already successful directors who had good scripts and enough clout to ward off studio stupidity and get their picture made the way they wanted it.

                                    Francis Ford Coppola once said that movies were not so much finished as abandoned. Skyline looks so obviously unfinished it probably got abandoned earlier in the making than others.

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                                      #19
                                      Skyline

                                      And there are some shite trailers out there too, that's the amazing thing. Sometimes they can't even cut together 60 seconds in a way that appeals but leaves you wanting more. Unstoppable, I'm looking at you this week.

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                                        #20
                                        Skyline

                                        What was so disappointing about Cloverfield was that all the viral trailers were excellent and successfully created their own 'universe' where there was some massive corporate conspiracy going on which was leading up to this amazing disaster.

                                        However, the film itself was almost a joke and that build-up seemed almost entirely abandoned. In retrospect, the best bit of the entire movie was... [SPOILER ALERT] well, it was actually only exposed in one of those viral videos too: the final soundclip on the film - after the credits had finished running was (presumably recorded on the handheld camera) a single garbled phrase which, when played forwards sounded like "Help us!", but when played backwards sounded like "It's still alive". I've no idea how they did that, though, since the two phrases are completely different.

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                                          #21
                                          Skyline

                                          I take the point about the inherent difficulty of making a good film in Hollywood's pressure cooker but one would expect people like Michael Bay ("director" of Transformers) who has certainly has clout to produce something worthwhile given the millions at his disposal.

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                                            #22
                                            Skyline

                                            I've never seen any of the Transformers so I'll take you're word they're rubbish. When the bar is set low and you're given the budget of a third world country, a franchise based on a toy and a director who is Hollywood's go-to go guy for mayhem and blowing things up no question very little good is going to come from it. That's what happens when you milk a franchise to death and take your audience for granted. Look what happened after Aliens II.

                                            Some directors will tell you that they don't mind working within the constraints of a small budget because it forces them to solve all sorts of creative and technical problems and a script has to be worked to accommodate the limited resources at hand. Terminator 1 is a good example of that.

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