Dragon Ball Super: Broly
Probably one of the best bits of Dragon Ball anything to be honest. Odd to completely retcon Goku’s origin, but I really like the Broly rewrite to make him more of a Character with Feelings instead of just a walking meat grinder.
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I love George Miller’s work, while also recognizing that that first film in the series was dangerous as hell to film. It looks fantastic, but safety guidelines in place now make it so that big budget movies aren’t able to do things that someone with 350k did in the seventies in Australia. (Not that movies should ever be dangerous, just noting the context of the business side of making movies as I understand it now!)
Action shots in that one are fantastic and it was kind of mildly panic inducing to see how some of the chase scenes were filmed!
A few years ago I opened up the original Mad Max to find a clip (since we’d just seen Fury Road). And I accidentally the whole thing…
It’s not the best movie, but it’s got a compelling energy that isn’t common in film. There’s a tension that never lets up, and Fury Road captured it similarly.
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Mad Max has the best energy for sure. But I think Road Warrior is a better movie in terms of story and general movie stuff. And then Thunderdome has more interesting world building than the first two, even though I think it’s the weakest movie.
What makes Fury Road such a triumph is that it captures the energy of the first, the story of the second and the bonkers world of the third, and combines them together into one package better than all three.
I can’t think of another director who has looked at his previous works and fully understood what made them popular, and managed to improve on that for the later installment. I’m looking at you Prometheus and Crystal Skull and Phantom Menace and…
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I generally agree with you, but I think the argument could be made that the Mission Impossible movies (at least the most recent 3-4) have all been better than the previous ones, and the Fast and the Furious movies are all more fun (better I don’t know) than the previous ones.
Those had different directors. Brian de Palma kicked things off, and John Woo took it in a different direction. It was JJ Abrams who worked out the proper formula and after Tom Cruise took over, it’s been Christopher McQuarrie pumping put the same thing over and over (which is a good thing in this case). The analogy would be to Brian de Palma directing the next installment, and not having a cool heist or any stunts.
That’s what it felt like watching Prometheus. How did Ridley Scott not understand why we liked Alien? Why did he bring across the weakest elements from other directors’ Alien movies? Gah!
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That’s a good point. I forgot that the directors for the Mission Impossible movies have changed. I guess I really only remember the most recent ones directed by JJ Abrams and Christopher McQuarrie. The Fast and the Furious movies have had different directors as well so that’s also not the same as your point above about the Mad Max films.
Other directors can take on a franchise and do a good job though. That’s why I liked Blade Runner 2049, because Denis Villeneuve liked the same things about Blade Runner as I did (despite me not enjoying the original movie as much as many people), and so his followup movie felt like a true sequel, rather than a reboot or reimagining or a re-anything. He did a waaaay better job than Ridley Scott could have done with a sequel, judging by Prometheus, although Scott can still do a good job on new projects, as we saw with The Martian.
I am reasonably confident that Ridley Scott is an artist up his own ass, and that’s what made Prometheus the movie that it is. I think I differ from 95% of humanity in that I actively enjoyed it, but it’s also a very intentional step away from what the fandom took away from Alien, and I’m sure that it was driven significantly by Scott staking out his artistic vision, consequences be damned.
There was some script fuckery which I think definitely hampered the movie, but the actual directorial choices struck me as being intentionally against what he had already done with Alien.
Whether or not it was a good idea…well, that’s certainly up for discussion. I liked the big ideas and wanky philosophical things that Prometheus touched on, but it was also less driven and tense than Alien. It had ideas but no drive to see them implemented, no pressure that tests the musings of an artist convinced of his art.
There’s a parallel in a band I love to death - Opeth - who had always used some 70’s prog rock elements in what was otherwise typical death metal. And then one day, the artist said “I’m bored of death metal, this prog stuff was what I was always trying to do,” turned up the prog, and alienated nearly half of his previous audience. No fucks given, they’re just a trippy prog band now.
Franchises of any sort are an interesting phenomenon to which I give a lot of thought. They evolve into this sort of exchange with the audience - an artist puts an idea out there, and the audience takes up their interpretation of that idea. I do a lot of in-person storytelling, and this kind of transactional approach to storycraft can lead to very powerful brand development - and also a gilded cage of the artist’s design. When the audience falls in love with a specific angle of your work, and you care about continuing to make money or whatever from this work, you are then tasked to continue delivering on audience expectations while also trying to be true to your artistic soul, and it’s hard for many to walk that line.
You can do a lot with a franchise if you understand how to respect your audience and the work that has come before, and I think that’s a lot of what you’re pointing at. It’s not just that a director liked the same things that you did - it’s that they saw what you liked, and respected your input as an audience member, so they took their cues from that. Those are directors who think that the audience’s vision is nearly as important as their own, and when approached thoughtfully they can make some truly compelling work.
There’s a fine line there between respect and fan service to be sure, and IMO the mark of a good director is one who can simultaneously respect what has come before while also inserting their own take.
Ridley Scott kinda strikes me as the guy who has to have artistic control, and isn’t terribly interested in respecting what came before - he already said that, so why say it again? You can do that as a director, but it’s tricky, and few people navigate that well.
I’ll be honest, while I enjoyed The Martian, I think a lot of it had to do with Matt Damon’s specific portrayal of the material. I could see Ridley Scott’s touch, but also I felt like he phoned it in somewhat. He did a good job, but he didn’t do his best job, IMO.
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In most of these cases I admire the impulse to do something new, or take something in a new direction. But Prometheus had so many nods and references to previous Alien movies, many creating moments or scenes that didn’t stand up in their own right, and only “worked” when viewed in that light, or failed because only the director and a vast minority of viewers even understood the reference.
You’re not breaking new ground if you are relying on the tracks of previous movies to get there.
Pick a lane. New direction? Fine! The second and third and fourth Alien movies all went somewhere new! Prometheus is the biggest failure of taking the franchise somewhere new.
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Alien is just a straight horror movie done exceedingly well. Replace the lonely cabin in the woods with a space ship. Replace the laughably unrealistic monster with a more plausible (at least sci-fi plausible) one that is truly terrifying. Sure, there was some world-building going on, but it wasn’t about the world building. Nobody cared about the Alien universe when Alien came out (obviously). But the movie made people care because the little world building they did was so compelling.
Aliens didn’t have to be an Alien movie. It would have still be great if it were in some brand new sci-fi universe. Rescue mission of badass space marines to save people from an infested space colony from something so dangerous that the space marines get owned is also compelling. They dug deeper on the world building in this one, but it wasn’t the focus. It also served to add meaning to the movie for those who cared, but didn’t detract for those who did not.
The rest of the Alien franchise is where we get problems. None of these movies could stand alone very well without the universe. They are for people who know about Alien and want to know more. Very Silmarillion territory. What’s even worse is that even if you are a fan, the way they flesh out the universe is not particulary interesting, satisfying, or complete. The terrible secret of space is just weird, not cool or anything.
Here’s what they should have done. Instead of using Alien universe as the starting point and building out, they should kept doing what the first two movies did. Take proven successful movie formula and apply Alien universe on it like a skin.
We had the horror movie, we had the action movie. What next? Obviously comedy or romance probably won’t work. But a war movie could work. Make Paths of Glory only make it Alien. Mystery could work. Make The Third Man, but make it Alien. Heist can work really well. Make Oceans 11, but make it Alien. That was the formula for success in the first two, should have stuck with it.
Dang, now I really want to see the Alien war movie. Some sort of revolutionaries trying to take down Weyland with some space battles. Weyland finally deploys the xenomorph bioweapons it’s been trying so hard to develop. I bet they backfire in a satisfying way!
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I really like Prometheus and Covenant but they are ultimately dragged down by needing to exist within the Alien IP even if that’s probably the only reason they exist.
Just give me more Michael Fassbender as an evil android dammit!
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I think might be called Starship Troopers.
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Mmm, no. Alien War movie would be serious, not comedy.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, since ST is a 100% serious film.
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Let’s be honest here, I like The Martian a lot. I was today years old when I realized Ridley had fuck all to do with the movie.
For all I knew it was Matt Damon making a movie where he gets to play his favorite character from a book he read, and that was accurate enough that learning any more about it was dis-required.
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To a degree what you’re suggesting here is what the authors of the Expanse books did when making their works, and is one reason it has stood up well through what is about to be the ninth and final novel. It was directly inspired by Alien to boot, as far as “blue collar workers in space” premise. But then each novel is essentially a different genre placed into this one universe/world. Mystery, Political Thriller, Western, Haunted House, War, Heist, etc. So I feel like they were doing what you suggest Alien stuff should have done. And I concur.
Now, to be honest I feel the final 3 books have started to become just “Expanse” genre in the same way that any larger series eventually just is so much itself that it eclipses whatever subtler genre cues and tropes might get worked in. But by the time you’re 6+ stories deep you have the established formula. Early on, it can really help to hang on those existing formats.
If the Alien franchse had 6 solid movies all from the same team and all well liked, by the time they were doing 7+ I’d trust em to do whatever they want.
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But he directed it?
Watched School of Rock with my kids over the weekend and it holds up. We’re now on a regular schedule of Jack Black films.
Yeah and I just, I dunno, didn’t process that either time I saw the movie? Maybe I saw it and it just went in one eyeball and out the other, or maybe I wasn’t paying that much attention during credits. Maybe I just already had the understanding of who was involved in making it:
I would say a big part is because everyone made such a big fuckin’ deal about this Andy Weir person being the author of this book that dared to make hard, realistic, gritty, accurate sci-fi that was also funny and had some grit and hope and so on and so on. That narrative seems to have overshadowed any directorial involvement.
The assumption in my brain (and I assume a lot of people’s) is just that The Martian is a movie where someone directed it, just like someone directs an episode of some TV show, but that person isn’t particularly important to make note of because they’re just doing the job of director and not filling the role of creative vision; to our mind it’s Andy’s story, and Matt Damon’s movie.
And so yeah the idea that Ridley Scott liked the book enough to be involved in adapting it is actually news to me, along with the news that apparently I never had any clue who directed it.