What kind of an incompetent asshole takes a sure thing like a movie about aliens vs. Vikings and comes up with dreck? I thought there was no way I was going to dislike this film; the Vikings alone give it all manner of leeway in my book. Throw in good actors (Ron Perlman, Sophia Myles, John Hurt, Jim Caviezel, also Jack Huston, an up-and-comer from, yes, Those Royal Hustons) and a dragon-like alien attacker, it's got the genre-crossing that makes my knees weak, it ought to have been a cake-walk, really, easy money, a sure thing. Any halfway decent effort and I'd have been eating from the palm of his hand.
"He" being Howard McCain, the fellow who wrote and directed this. The fellow at whose besmirched doorstep this mangy, halt and lame buck stops.
Man. I'm so tired of the way movies look these days. The same teal and orange palette. The washed-out lighting. The fight-scenes too fast to reveal any detail, designed only to smear across the top of it and communicate a vague sense of violence, rather than a real occurrence made out of real particulars. I hate the way the movies sound now, with the overweening, perpetual bombast-musik and the fist-and-weapon blows turned up to volume 12 to emphasize that it's all a fake, don't worry folks, don't have to take it seriously.
I'm so tired of the hackneyed scripts, the shallow moralizing, the cheap sentiment. Tired of incredible plot-turns, of story which grows not up from the world in which it's set and the people among whom it's set, but imposed from without by commercial demands. More shock here! Another explosion there! So the monsters were destroyed by fire before? Not anymore! Suddenly they can resist it. Will we tell you why? We will not! We are not interested in facts, only in effects!
I'm tired of lazy imitation. I'm a big fan of the homage, and I'm a big fan of remaking a thing that you love in a way that is personal to your own vision. This is not that. There's enough Lord of the Rings in here to keep reminding you how lazy and uncreative these filmmakers are (the alien has a fire-tail extraordinarily reminiscent of the Balrog's whip, for instance, and there's a character named Boromir, for God's sake, and that's just the tip of the Peter-Jackson-wannabe-iceberg), but there is no love inside this particular icehouse. Just a scrambling for money, a scrambling for easy success, and I'm tired of it.
If you want Vikings (and why wouldn't you?), watch Valhalla Rising or the 13th Warrior. Or even the Antoine Fuqua King Arthur, which is heavily flawed, but has on the plus-side Mads Mikkelsen as Tristram and Stellan Skarsgard in a wonderful performance as a Viking warlord, and an awesome full-bore battle atop the tentative ice of a frozen river.
3 comments:
Very disappointed to hear this, but glad too. There's no time to waste on crap like this. I heartily agree about VALHALLA RISING. I've watched it three times in a month or so. Brilliant and hypnotic. And the violence has a real physical weight to it that's been missing from most action movies of the last decade or so. The director understands space and how to frame an actor in that frame. It's such a fundamental part of filmmaking, but just look at how many directors can't do it any longer.
Yeah, too bad about this. And, yes, about the framing: I often wonder if that's why everyone's addicted to shaky-cam, so they don't have to think about how it's actually going to LOOK. Thank God for Quentin Tarantino, huh? That man still cares.
Remember when Mel Gibson was slated to make a Viking film? If only he'd done that instead of having his meltdown. The world would be a happier place for both Mel AND me.
I think Gibson is still going to direct it next. That's what I read somewhere. Fingers crossed. And yeah, QT is really brilliant in using the widescreen. Seems like a lost art at this point sadly.
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