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 Jadenim wrote:

Voss wrote:
Its a quick shot of Evil Henchman Guy sitting a few rows back on the airplane, hiding behind a newspaper, iirc. Then they jump to the travel map.

Now they don't show the legwork of one of the US agents being a double agent or someone following them to their meeting with Indy. (or however they get to the point they know they need to follow random professor/thief to Nepal), but its not really that kind of movie.

The film starts with the intercepted communiqué that the Nazis were looking for Ravenwood. Indy must have been reasonably well known at this point to have the whole rivalry with Belloch and be funded by “the museum” on his adventures; if he was known to have studied under Ravenwood it wouldn’t be unreasonable to put a tail on him

That's fair. I forgot the back and forth of who's reacting and who's instigating.

Though thinking about it, now the opening scene makes even less sense. It was weird enough that Belloch just happened to be around the cave in the jungles, but as he's already running the German archaeology project on the city of Tanis, lost to time and history... popping off to the Americas to annoy his rival over an obscure tribal treasure (as important as it is to them, internationally and in terms of money and fame, it doesn't even vaguely compare) is... unlikely.

 Overread wrote:
I felt like Crystal Skull wasn't a good film on two fronts, from what I recall

I like it better than Temple of Doom, but I consider a pretty enormous gap in quality between the even and odd numbered films in that series. Hoping it holds true for the 5th.

I did enjoy Harrison Ford playing Sean Connery; that was well done and made Mutt somewhat worthwhile for me. Also jumping to sci-fi worked fine for me since it kept in lines with the trends in pulp.

The main issue is just that its one of those films that is constantly trying to create spectacle with CG rather than creative stuntwork and the result is a bunch of uncanny valley goofiness that doesn't really feel right. The plots of these films have never really been the draw as much as an excuse to string together a bunch of stunt sequences and when those don't connect, the resulting movie is honestly just forgettable if it hadn't been a big name on the box.

True and I feel like another thing that's been lost with Hollywood over the years is stringing together scenes.

I don't quite know why and its likely multiple things; but I feel that I see a lot more films now where individual scenes are amazing (be it stunt work, CGI, dialogue etc...); however the lead in and out of that scene is very weak or sometimes not even there. The result is the film starts to stop being a story and starts to become a show of scenes. Each one on its own is great, but there's no binding between them. This is always part of any media, you can't string every part together and the viewer/reader has to be part of the process. However I feel that a lot of films now the viewer is having to do more and more legwork linking things up and putting the parts in place.

I felt it very strongly with the new Dune film. Individually great scenes, but they lack the connections between them. Of people walking from A to B or establishing why they are attending a thing at point B etc... The result is characters start to feel hollow and the viewer starts to really "see" what the scenes are trying to convey in a story sense. Ergo you're starting to see the building blocks and not the story.





I do wonder if films aren't trying to do way more than in the past and the result is a lot more material being made connecting things which then gets left out in the cutting room because you're covering so much in so little time you can't keep it all. So an issue arises that wasn't in the writing or the script and wasn't there t obe spotted until you've cut the film up because you've only got 120mins or whatever the time slot is.

 Overread wrote:

I don't quite know why and its likely multiple things; but I feel that I see a lot more films now where individual scenes are amazing (be it stunt work, CGI, dialogue etc...); however the lead in and out of that scene is very weak or sometimes not even there.

Oh! I know this one!

The main problem is that CGI takes years to do correctly and is often started in very early preproduction often before the actual script is finished. They are often constructed in their own bubble and can't really be too heavily altered by the time final editing comes around so a lot of studios just work them in how best they can.

A great example of this is the poor nanny who gets torture/killed by the pterodactyls in Jurassic World. That whole CGI sequence was created for an entirely different character (or a more prominent version of that same character depending on who you hear it from) whose roll got dramatically altered in the final script. They still had this huge sequence though and they found a character to slot in and as a result its just kind of needlessly cruel and tonally out of place.

I’d agree on the CGI.

To entirely unironically quote Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park? They spent so long wondering if they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

For those who don’t recall or haven’t encountered my opinion on SFX? Practical effects always land better with the audience. By all means enhance them with CGI, and not just a Spit & Polish. But if you can do it practically, do it practically. And if your idea can, in your opinion, only be done with pure CGI? Stop and really, really think.

I'll agree with that. It was my biggest problem with the Hobbit trilogy (beyond bloating it beyond reason). Every time the 'exciting' action sequences started, I tuned out.
There was no substance to them and they didn't carry any of the characters or the plot- they existed solely for the action, which because it was so fake, was dull.

My other stand-out is the intro to Age of Ultron. Partly because they're bullying hapless nobodies (yes, evil hydra, yaar! They still have no capacity to harm anyone), but because its empty CGI action leading the introduction to the film. That's a hard sell, when the intro is supposed to get me invested in the film.

A good contrast to that is the last Avengers film, where the intro is Hawkeye's family vanishing and he's turned away from the VFX, only catching the afterimages. The realness of that creepy moment really sells the intro to the film, while the end descends into irrelevant chaos.

I don't mind the Age of Ultron montage because it just an opening and doesn't impact the flow of the story in a meaningful way. The Hobbit movies are definitely rife with weirdly paced CG action.

The Barrel scene was also very odd. Almost felt like "Ok so we have to do this scene, but we've used up most of the budget and its got to feel like an amusement event for the new Hobby Theme Park"

Ah so the groupthink has finally circled round to me saying movies are just collages of scenes instead of a plot now?

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Ah so the groupthink has finally circled round to me saying movies are just collages of scenes instead of a plot now?

Depends on the movie and how well the CGI sequences are planned and integrated. Every form of entertainment is mostly so so with a few diamonds in the rough we remember years later.

 LunarSol wrote:
I don't mind the Age of Ultron montage because it just an opening and doesn't impact the flow of the story in a meaningful way. The Hobbit movies are definitely rife with weirdly paced CG action.

Shades of Jackson's King Kong.

It's a problem when directors get so big that no one can tell them to cut the friggin' film. Sometimes studio involvement is a GOOD thing.

Well, in the case of the Hobbit studio demanded more movies. Regardless of how you want to portion the blame, the core problem with the films is just that they weren't made with a solid vision of what the product should be.

 LunarSol wrote:
Well, in the case of the Hobbit studio demanded more movies. Regardless of how you want to portion the blame, the core problem with the films is just that they weren't made with a solid vision of what the product should be.

I think they did have a strong vision- they were taking The Hobbit and related appendices and setting the story in a Middle Earth consistent
with the films, emphasizing the connectiom to Lord of the Rings and finangling a coherent narrative from that all over the place book.

It was the audience thst didn't share that vision.


I think one of their biggest problems was 3D. They couldn't use any of those traditional techniques that kept Fellowship feeling gritty. CG effects can do some pretty cool stuff these days but they lose something you had with traditional effects.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I just got to see an old Lon Chaney film that made no sense. It was amazing.

It was called "The Indestructible Man."

A death row inmate swears vengeance on the criminals who double crossed him after he stole and hid their money. But after the execution, a doctor steals his body and runs some electricity into it. The result is that Lon can't talk but us super strong abd impervious to bullets.

The cops eventually track him down to a sewer where they hit him with a bazooka and flamethrower.

But ironically, the Indestructible Man dies in a freak electrical accident that wouldn't kill a normal human.

For me, the biggest issue with The Hobbit was the Dwarves. They just didn’t work for me, and were pretty unlikeable.

Add in that I just didn’t particularly care for any of the characters, and it was a bust.