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Post by recumbentrider on Jun 6, 2005 2:08:01 GMT
I just purchased this movie today, and just finished watching it. Before I say what I thought about this movie, I would like to say that I have been looking forward to this particular version of The War of the Worlds ever since I heard about it last year. I have been lurking on this board for some time, and have found the discussions on this board about this film very interesting, both the pros and cons. Although I didn't agree with much of what he said, I particularly found Rusti's comments about the first trailer very interesting, since he seems to know about CGI and sci-fi artwork. When I first read that a few people were able to buy this movie at Wal-Mart, I was very excited and immediately started looking for it. I checked two stores yesterday without success, but I was able to find it earlier today.
It is with some pain that I have to say what I thought about the movie: I thought it was bad, folks, really bad. The whole movie looked like it was thrown together at the last minute. The acting was somewhat better than what I have seen in most porn movies, but that is about as much praise as I could give it. (I found it particularly difficult to not laugh during a scene at the beginning of the movie that takes place in an observatory with 'Ogilvy'.) A lot of the editing of scenes was very sloppy, and there were many scenes that seemed to go nowhere and were randomly thrown in. The special effects were particularly bad; the vast majority of them looked like 'pre-visualizations', and were very crude. (I am very sorry to say it, but I thought the 'Thunder Child' scene looked particularly pathetic. I swear I could hear Rusti's derisive laughter as I was watching it.) I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that most video games have better effects.
Like many of you, I do not know if this movie will ever be shown in any theaters. Frankly, if I were a theater owner, I would need to see no more than the first twenty minutes of this film before deciding not to touch it with a ten foot pole. Some people on this board compared what was released in the trailers with 'Ed Wood' type films. At the time I read these comments, I thought they were unfair. After seeing this film, I have to say the movie did have a sort of 'Plan 9' feel to it. I truly cannot imagine any theater showing this film unless they were paid a very large sum of money.
The only parts of this movie that had any hints of quality to me were the scenes with the narrator and the curate at the abandoned house, and some of the scenes that followed. I thought the fighting machines were badly done, not in their design but in their movement. However, I did find the films visulazation of the Martian flying machine very interesting. Even with these tiny redeeming qualities, I think the only enjoyment most people will get out of this movie will be of the 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' kind. (God, how I miss that show...they would have had a field day with this movie.)
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Post by FALLINGSTAR on Jun 6, 2005 2:25:00 GMT
Are you having us on there recumbentrider I thought this film wasn't out yet?
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Post by recumbentrider on Jun 6, 2005 2:31:07 GMT
Are you having us on there recumbentrider I thought this film wasn't out yet? With all of the drama that has taken place on this board, I don't blame you for your doubts. If you look at other threads, you will see at least one other person who has managed to buy the DVD at Wal-Mart, and has reviewed it. (He had a much higher opinion of the film that I did, as a matter of fact.) The DVD was not on the shelf with the other 'new releases'. I found it on a shelf that was promoting specially priced DVD's for Father's Day at the Wal-Mart where I found it. (Trust me, most dads would rather have another tie than get this movie!) |
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Post by FALLINGSTAR on Jun 6, 2005 2:40:51 GMT
If what your saying is true there [ and I've no reason to doubt you ] then what a flippin joke!
What other thread is this review on?
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Post by recumbentrider on Jun 6, 2005 2:45:15 GMT
If what your saying is true there [ and I've no reason to doubt you ] then what a flippin joke! What other thread is this review on? If you visit the thread titled 'Pendragon version purchased at:' you will see a few posts by 'Tony' describing how he bought the DVD at Wal-Mart and read his review. |
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Post by FALLINGSTAR on Jun 6, 2005 2:51:19 GMT
God how did I miss that. I'm off to read it now.
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Post by themaster on Jun 6, 2005 18:36:21 GMT
At last the pro hines brigade and the anti hines brigade begin to meld together in beautiful harmony! Now the majority see what the minority saw from the begining and the fandom becomes as one.
A bitter sweet happy ending.
Wait and see they said, well the wait is over!
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Post by Marcus on Jun 6, 2005 19:12:59 GMT
Whats the Flying Machine like then?
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Post by FALLINGSTAR on Jun 6, 2005 19:21:04 GMT
At last the pro hines brigade and the anti hines brigade begin to meld together in beautiful harmony! Now the majority see what the minority saw from the begining and the fandom becomes as one. A bitter sweet happy ending. Wait and see they said, well the wait is over! I've never been pro or anti Hines - just extremely sceptical of their ability and hopeful that we might end up with a really decent film. Looks like that dream has certainly turned sour now though. |
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Post by wargasm on Jun 6, 2005 22:43:22 GMT
At last the pro hines brigade and the anti hines brigade begin to meld together in beautiful harmony! Now the majority see what the minority saw from the begining and the fandom becomes as one. A bitter sweet happy ending. Wait and see they said, well the wait is over! I've never been pro or anti Hines - just extremely sceptical of their ability and hopeful that we might end up with a really decent film. That was my feeling as well. But hey! We can look forward to Chrome now! |
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Post by wargasm on Jun 6, 2005 22:45:07 GMT
Whats the Flying Machine like then? It's somewhat like a Stealth Fighter, just not as good looking. |
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Post by mctoddridesagain on Jun 6, 2005 22:47:43 GMT
Man, that's ugly...
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Post by recumbentrider on Jun 7, 2005 0:05:21 GMT
The design of the Martian flying machine was one of the extremely few things I liked in this movie. To me, it looked 'alien' enough that I could believe it was designed by Martians. The CGI for the machine did seem on the crude side, but since the views of the machine had very little other scenery (since the machine was set against the sky), the lower-quality CGI was not as noticable. |
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Post by wargasm on Jun 7, 2005 0:36:12 GMT
It also didn't have anything moving, only blinking lights, so even that CG team couldn't screw that up!
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Post by quaderni on Jun 7, 2005 1:23:02 GMT
Stupid question - is the black smoke in the film?
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Post by Carioca on Jun 7, 2005 1:48:55 GMT
I'm sure Spielberg and Cruise will be pleased with this review!
I'll poll my contacts at the Science Fiction Museum for their thoughts and report back. After all, there are some production models from Pendragon in their TWotW exhibit!
Cheers!
Carioca
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Post by Lensman on Jun 7, 2005 2:20:55 GMT
[NOTE: A re-edited and (I hope) improved version of this review has been posted to the "Movie Reviews Only" thread. I'm leaving this here for archival purposes only.]
It is with great sadness that I must report I agree with nearly all of Recumbentrider's comments. Regulars on this board know that I've taken the AHB (Anti-Hines Brigade) to task many times for jumping the gun in condemning this movie before it had been seen.
Well, now I've seen it and I must say all but the most paranoid of the AHB's fears have come true. This is a truly awful movie. I can accept the very stagy acting, even from the Ogilvy character, but some of the other acting-- particularly by whoever plays Miss Elphinstone-- is on the amateur level. I was also completely unimpressed by the depiction of the Curate: one-note blubbering and whining.
But the acting is, if anything, the best part of the film. The direction varies between uninspired and incompetent, and the editing is worse. Someone has already mentioned there are all too many scenes of the Narrator walking along a road. Even if this movie were as good as Hines apparently thinks it is, it doesn't deserve 3 hours. A lot of those walking scenes need to be trimmed. I also found some of the expository dialogue to be excessive. There are enough "talking heads" scenes in the book-- why did Hines think it needed even more padding?
But all this truly pales in comparison to the grade-Z "special" effects. (...or not-so-special effects.) Remember that "floaty" Big Ben shot in the earlier trailer which caused so much argument, with us PHBers insisting that was an unfinished shot? Well it *was* an unfinished shot... and that's what most of the CGI shots in this movie are-- unfinished. They're monochrome, and haven't had "skins" put on (to make the surface look like a real object). The shots of buildings look like the 3D "virtual reality" walk-thrus you can see on the Internet. They also appear to be lacking the final series of CGI detailing. Virtually all current video games have better CGI than this.
And the Thunder Child scene is particularly embarrassing. No wonder they didn't show it in the trailer! It looks like much of the background-- the water-- is from helicopter shots. So imagine many shots thruout this entire scene showing the ferry and the Thunder Child set against water that's racing by at a speed far faster than any ship of the era could possibly achieve-- let alone the slow ferry! The Thunder Child looks like something from a particularly *bad* fan film, with an astounding lack of detail, again monochrome CGI with a lack of surface texture or detail. It's nearly as undetailed as one of those toy wooden boats your great-grandfather may have been given. You never see any human figures on deck. I dunno what happened to that CGI shot on the computer monitor in that staged publicity shot Pendragon put out-- the level of detail in that is *much* better than that of this movie's Thunder Child.
Now as if this weren't bad enuff, the pacing and the direction of this scene are just as bad. The Thunder Child whizzes around on the screen for quite some time, closely passing by several Tripods without firing a shot-- and without being fired at. Eventually a tripod hits it with a heat ray, which merely punches a hole in its side; the ship continues on its merry way. Finally it guns down a tripod which is much farther away than some it had already passed, and the other tripods just stand around gawking as it continues whizzing around for awhile longer-- the hole in its side magically having disappeared-- before it finally rams a second tripod, then suddenly lists and sinks as quickly as if it were indeed a small toy boat. And apparently no human was killed-- at no time do we see anyone on board the ship.
[Addendum June 7: I'm not sure I've conveyed exactly why this scene is so bad. What the viewer sees is shots of real people on the top deck of the ferry, intercut with what looks like a poorly drawn cartoon of the Thunder Child whizzing around. So the impression the viewer gets is that these people are just watching a cartoon, rather than them watching the action of a British warship against the alien invaders.]
Now I have no doubt that some of you reading this are saying "Oh come come Lensman-- surely you exaggerate!" All I can say is-- you haven't seen it.
More bad FX #1: When the Heat Ray hits people, we see small bits of CGI fire obviously pasted on them (when they move, the fire doesn't wave around with the passage of air-- it continues to burn straight up). Then after a bit the human figure blurs to white and then a gray skeleton fades in. Apparently the heat ray has the magical ability to remove all the carbon from the body, so there's no burnt or blackened remains. How tidy! Oh, also-- when the Heat Ray hits people, the vegetation behind them is magically unaffected. And I really "liked" the shot where the artillery soldier was turned into a skeleton-- which continued to thrash around for several seconds! Amazing that a dead skeleton with no muscles left on it can thrash around like that. *snicker*
More bad FX #2: While we see what appear to be real artillery (cannons) loaded with real charges, apparently they couldn't afford to actually fire a gun even once; all we see, every time a cannon fires-- and there are a lot of such shots-- is a tiny cotton-ball puff coming from the gun's muzzle, as tho the cannon were merely smoking a pipe and had just politely emitted a small puff of smoke. I've seen real cannon fired in an American Revolutionary War re-enactment. Even with 1/4 charges, they put out a heck of a lot more fire and smoke than that!
More bad FX #3: Now in many previous posts, I've repeated the mantra that even if the FX look bad, we could still enjoy the live-action scenes. Unfortunately, all too often this is untrue because they use bad GCI in scenes where there's nothing going on which would actually *require* FX. There are lots of shots of people running by in some street in some city. I could understand it if they had planned to put in background shots of various real places-- but no, it's always the same spot on the same street, and the building is more of that badly done, unfinished CGI! Why the heck did they do that? It would have been *far* better to have found some bit of street somewhere that looked like Victorian England and shot it there. Surely even in the U.S. Northwest they could have found at least one place to double for Victorian England???
More bad FX #4. The scene showing the Martians feeding is also particularly egregious. First we see some sort of vague CGI blob which, from the four projections (legs?) at the bottom and something shaped like horns on the head, I would guess is supposed to be a cow. Now these Martians aren't content to merely suck the blood out of their victims as in Wells' novel-- no, apparently they inject their victim with digestive juices like spiders do, then suck out their victims' liquified insides, leaving only skin stretched over bones as a husk sucked dry. After the "cow" (?) is disposed of, the handling machines spend some time pointlessly waving their claws around a woman before she-- or rather, what is obviously a bad CGI stand-in-- is similarly sucked dry.
More bad FX #5: There are quite a few scenes where the foreground actors were obviously matted in on a background shot filmed elsewhere. I haven't seen matte lines this obvious since before "Star Wars" (1977). Particularly glaring is a shot where a woman has frizzed-up hair. Now, the director should have *known* there is a problem with hair when doing blue-screen matting, and should never allowed that sort of hairdo (or, lack of hairdo) in a bluescreen shot.
In summary: I guess now we know why Hines had trouble getting a distributor, don't we? Cinemas don't like booking movies that run much longer than 2 hours. This movie is 3 hours long, so it would have to be better than average to find a distributor.
Unless you really have some desparate need to have a complete collection of Wells material, SAVE YOUR MONEY AND GIVE THIS TURKEY A PASS!
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Post by FALLINGSTAR on Jun 7, 2005 2:51:24 GMT
I'm absolutely stunned. Don't know what to say!
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Post by thed0ct0r on Jun 7, 2005 3:49:18 GMT
My GOD! If Lensman says it's bad then I shudder to think how horrible it actually is!
Here's a tip: if you post a review on Amazonn.com make sure to include a link to the Stuffo trailers. If people want to see how bad it is then let them. Let's see how long it takes for Hines to pull his own trailers from the web!
He said he wouldn't let the fans down (and he did). Now he's gonna let the average consumer down too!
Unreal. Absolutely unreal.
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Post by wargasm on Jun 7, 2005 4:07:43 GMT
At one point during the Thunderchild part you see one of the tripods get close and reaches it's tentacle out toward the ship, just near the railing and then a cut to the people on the boat with a saddened look on their faces.
It looked to me like something was supposed to of happened there, like maybe picking up someone off the ship and throwing them.
There are also scenes where a tentacle will pick up a person and throw him. It's actually more comical than serious because of the bad CG.
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