Summer SciFi Thread

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes

Opening July 11th.

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Directed by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield)
Andy Serkis
Gary Oldman
Jason Clarke
Kodi Smit-McPhee
Judy Greer
Keri Russell:popcorn:

A growing nation of genetically evolved apes led by Caesar is threatened by a band of human survivors of the devastating virus unleashed a decade earlier. They reach a fragile peace, but it proves short-lived, as both sides are brought to the brink of a war that will determine who will emerge as Earth's dominant species.

Youtube trailer

another
 
A good deal of talent and dynamic range. I've always liked him.

ts


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Coolest family in LA: Gary Oldman, his wife and his two children hit the Beverly Hills shops on Christmas Eve
 
Gary Oldman as Nikola Tesla would be pretty cool.
 
Jupiter Ascending

Tn theaters July 18th.

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Directed by The Wachowskis (the Matrix)

Mila Kunis
Channing Tatum
Sean Bean
Eddie Redmayne

From the streets of Chicago to the far-flung galaxies whirling through space, "Jupiter Ascending" tells the story of Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), who was born under a night sky, with signs predicting she was destined for great things. Now grown, Jupiter dreams of the stars but wakes up to the cold reality of a job cleaning other people's houses and an endless run of bad breaks. Only when Caine (Channing Tatum), a genetically engineered ex-military hunter, arrives on Earth to track her down does Jupiter begin to glimpse the fate that has been waiting for her all along-her genetic signature marks her as next in line for an extraordinary inheritance that could alter the balance of the cosmos.

Trailer
 
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Well, saw it this afternoon. It was everything I hoped for. Highly recommended.

Spoiler :
Godzilla is the "good" monster. There are a couple of bad monsters who like to wreck our cities and we're powerless (they have EMP:crazyeye:) to stop them. They eat atomic bombs and the military kindly delivers. Godzilla saves San Francisco. Though Vegas is wrecked.

Oh yeah, the HALO is the hero human and a Special Forces team going in to defuse the nuke in the bad monster's nest in downtown San Fran. That doesn't go so well.:sad:

I saw it at the weekend. One of the worst films I've seen recently. Godzilla himself was very well done, and they understood what he is supposed to be, more or less. In every other respect it was just dire. A real example of what happens when a script goes through so many iterations by so many hands that it simply loses all coherence. Such a disappointment after that wonderful trailer.

Seriously, if you want to watch an American Godzilla film, watch the one with Matthew Broderick. It was better than this one. I mean it.
 
I saw it at the weekend. One of the worst films I've seen recently. Godzilla himself was very well done, and they understood what he is supposed to be, more or less. In every other respect it was just dire. A real example of what happens when a script goes through so many iterations by so many hands that it simply loses all coherence. Such a disappointment after that wonderful trailer.

Seriously, if you want to watch an American Godzilla film, watch the one with Matthew Broderick. It was better than this one. I mean it.

I respect your opinion, but I judge monster and comic book movies differently than serious film. I went into Godzilla looking for mindless fun, and found it.
 
I enjoyed it. There were enough familiar themes to sate the Godzilla fans. At no point did they ruin my suspension of disbelief, except maybe the explosion at the end. I wanted more monster vs. monster fight pr0n, but ehn. I adore monster films. This one might have been a little slow, but they were clearly trying to homage previous film themes.
 
Looking at the Kaiju films of the series, the monsters tend to look like dumb and partly destroyed dolls that an inexperienced mental-asylum inmate was made to create.

The 'smog-monster' being as good an example of that as any:

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I respect your opinion, but I judge monster and comic book movies differently than serious film. I went into Godzilla looking for mindless fun, and found it.

I wanted mindless fun too - but I didn't find it! Instead I got a hero with literally no personality at all (his sole defining trait was the ability to defuse bombs, which in fact he couldn't do), characters who served no purpose of any kind (why was Sally Hawkins in it at all?), major plot points (e.g. the existence of Godzilla) glossed over quickly in brief moments of info-dump, and worst of all, even Hal from Malcolm in the Middle made into a boring 2D stereotype (yes, I'm vaguely aware he's been in other things since then). That's before we even get into the flaccid plot with key points that defied any kind of logic ("No, don't leave the city safely with the trained, professional evacuation crews! Stay there while the giant monsters stomp towards it, and I'll come and get you out, even though I'm hundreds of miles away, because you're just a weak girl who can't go anywhere by herself!"). Oh, and the promised "This explosion will make the nuclear tests of the 1960s look like firecrackers" in the event looked rather less impressive than the real 1960s nukes they showed going off during the opening titles. The whole thing was boring, partly because of weird illogical flaws, partly because of flabby pacing, and partly because it utterly failed to make you care about the characters.

I got the impression that the script must have been through a number of radical changes and still retained vestiges of earlier plotlines that had been scrapped. e.g. the existence of the second monster being dissected in Nevada, before reanimating and escaping, sounds like it should have been an exciting and key plotline, but it evidently got drastically shortened into a boring bit of exposition and a single scene - astonishingly anticlimactic given how much fuss was made about the discovery and escape of the first monster. I think that at an earlier stage, the two scientists had probably been the main characters, perhaps with a larger role for the Bryan Cranston character, and that the Monarch organisation had been much more important; they got mostly cut out to make way for a more macho hero; but instead of being removed altogether were just hanging about not doing very much. They all became completely irrelevant once the monsters were on the move. Ken Watanabe's sole purpose seemed to be to have someone Japanese say "Gojira" before spending the rest of his time staring in horror, mainly into empty space.

Also there was a woeful lack of humour. As one reviewer said, to have a gigantic bloated monster stomping its way through the Vegas strip and not manage even a minor visual gag about Elvis is bordering on the criminally negligent.

(I'm really just annoyed with myself for not seeing X-Men instead.)
 
I thought the Hero was Godzilla - the humans were just for context. None of it really makes any sense - or is supposed too.
Spoiler :
A life form can't live off uranium or plutonium. A life form can't generate EMP. A living thing can't endure heavy weapons fire and just go on with it's business. Can't have dragon breath. Can't fly under it's own power if it's that big, etc., etc. It's a monster fantasy.:crazyeye:


It's OK not to like a movie. Everyone has different taste. But to over-analyse it seems a bit pedantic - you go in knowing it's fiction, not true, not reality based, fake. "You pays your money and you takes your chances". Escapism.
 
:/

So, was there an electric field created by the giant electric heel/pteurosaurus/something?

Not quite.

Spoiler :
The villain monsters could generate an EMP field, knocking out city power, military weapons and comms, dropping planes from the sky, etc. A lot of this stuff is nuclear age angst. Radioactivity, mutations, random death and vilolence - heavy drug use among the screenwiters.
 
I thought the Hero was Godzilla - the humans were just for context. None of it really makes any sense - or is supposed too.
Spoiler :
A life form can't live off uranium or plutonium. A life form can't generate EMP. A living thing can't endure heavy weapons fire and just go on with it's business. Can't have dragon breath. Can't fly under it's own power if it's that big, etc., etc. It's a monster fantasy.:crazyeye:


It's OK not to like a movie. Everyone has different taste. But to over-analyse it seems a bit pedantic - you go in knowing it's fiction, not true, not reality based, fake. "You pays your money and you takes your chances". Escapism.

Of course. But even in an impossible setting one still looks for some kind of internal logic and relatable characters who behave roughly believably. And one looks to be entertained, not bored. My main complaint about the film isn't that it was impossible, it's that it was tedious. If Godzilla's your hero he needs more than five minutes of screen time. If the humans are your heroes you need to make us care about them. I'm glad some people liked it - I'm just surprised they did!
 
Looking at the Kaiju films of the series, the monsters tend to look like dumb and partly destroyed dolls that an inexperienced mental-asylum inmate was made to create.

The 'smog-monster' being as good an example of that as any:

600full-godzilla-vs.-hedorah-%2528aka-godzilla-vs.-the-smog-monster%2529-screenshot.jpg


Budget:

First Star Wars: $11 million (1979)

The picture from the above movie: $250,000 (1970)
 
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