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here's the quickest review i can muster after seeing T4 this evening....

No julia sarpong for a start!

ahem

well, its average, with several homages to the previous film - a cgi arnie is in it - and there's shades of Frankenstein's Monster throughout...in one scene i wanted someone to shout "It's ALIVE!"

there you go...

I also saw it and thought it wasn't bad. I did wonder whether Arnie got paid anything for using his image though

loads.


i see that they are going to remake total recall.

why?

daleshrimpton wrote:i see that they are going to remake total recall.

why?

'Remake and rework' is the phrase I read this morning - again, why 'rework'? Total Recall is a superb film and ought to be left as is, no need to hijack it for a remake and certainly no need to rejig the storyline, just go out and make a new film from scratch!

Saw the ad for the playstation game Red Faction Guerrilla, sounds and looks like Total Recall for the new gen.

I agree, it is a fantastic film and doesn't need reworking. Do you think it's writers being lazy " i know, we'll rehash [Insert Name of Classic Film Here], we cant think of another plot" or is it down to the producers and financiers not willing to invest in too many new ideas and prefer to back a previous winning formula with added special effects...... Shame

G

daleshrimpton wrote:loads.


i see that they are going to remake total recall.

why?

Oh, I'm not so sure that this is a bad thing.

I was disappointed with Total Recall for all sorts of reasons:

Firstly, it was the second Paul Verhoven movie I saw - the first being Robocop. Robocop was sublime and intelligent, and Total Recall just didn't match up.

Also, the first-choice of director/screenwriter for Total Recall was David Cronenberg. I'm a big David Cronenberg fan. And, by all accounts, his plans for adapting the Philip K Dick story were going to be mindblowing.

Ultimately, though, the producers asked him to dumb it down and make an action movie. Cronenberg had a real actor lined up for the lead part, but they replaced him with Arnie. So David walked away and made Naked Lunch instead.

So, a new adaptation of the original story will probably bear very little resemblence to the 1990 version.

Incidentally, Spielberg's Minority Report was initially titled Total Recall 2.

I was quite excited when I saw that Christian Bale is in it. Then I saw that it was rated a 12 and my excitement waned somewhat; Terminater a 12?! Don't be ridiculous. However, I shall reserve proper judgement until I have actually seen it.








12?!

Replicant wrote:I was quite excited when I saw that Christian Bale is in it. Then I saw that it was rated a 12 and my excitement waned somewhat; Terminater a 12?! Don't be ridiculous. However, I shall reserve proper judgement until I have actually seen it.








12?!

The Dark Knight was a 12, and it was one of the most vicious movies I've seen in a long time.

and the BBFC changes all the time so films that were a 15 twenty years ago would maybe be a 12 if released today

Jimmy Carr wrote:On a wet Birmingham afternoon Terminator passed the time. In one incredible bit of CGI the Terminator franchise turned to sh*t.

BBC1 showed Terminator last night and ITV showed T2 a few days ago. Classics, both.

i see that they are going to remake total recall.

why?

Minority Report (Tom Cruise) was the sequal to Total Recal and Arnie turned it down after reading the script. That's probably why it wasn't billed as such.

dat8962 wrote:

i see that they are going to remake total recall.

why?

Minority Report was the sequal to Total Recal

pardon?

Just my tuppence worth...

I saw the new Terminator movie last night.

To my surprise, the cinema was packed with 'oldies' such as myself—not with youngsters as I'd imagined.

From the onset, I found the pace slow, the movie very predictable, the characters flawed and the acting mediocre.

The cameo from Bonham Carter was a waste of time—it just further fuelled the argument that the movie was Bale-centric.

Aside from some great effects, the film had totally lost the original part of what makes Terminator a great movie—which is terror.

And after hearing about the 'hairs on your neck' moment of seeing the Arnie clone appear, I was pretty disappointed to see how easily the heroes were dispensing of Terminators after the indestructible image that we all hold for the shiny beasts.

There were numerous plot holes and dead ends—the biggest of which for me personally was the lack of respect for the original well-rooted characters. John Connor was very familiar with the T series in his youth, and yet the fear and suspense which was used in the originals was lost by the fact that all of a sudden Connor is a fearless rebel (yes, I know this was his future destiny, but in all honesty, who wants a film full of bad guys which we now know aren't as indestructible as we were lead to believe?).

On the whole, it was two hours of eye candy, but as both my brother in law and I had sussed the plot within the first half-hour, this seemed like a step backwards in the franchise.

The development of the film from conception to finale was colder than ice, as we gradually saw the story unfold by trying to add the 'humanity' aspect in far too many large mouthfuls... just as we're swallowing a gulp of action, we're 'treated' to a gulp of soppiness.

The end of the movie was a huge disappointment too... with a total lack of thought at what came at you for the first hour and a half. The fans of this franchise would have certainly been expecting a lot more I'm sure—because I sure was.

On the upside, I can safely say that although I didn't warm to it as part of the Terminator series, as a stand-alone it was watchable. And it kept us watching.

One thing that's always concerned me about the expectations of a movie like this is that back in 'the day' when Terminator was released the director had to rely on the tools available. Much like the original Star Wars, this leads to huge amounts of creativity in as much as delivering the story by conveying a thought to someone's own translation to celluloid. In the aforementioned movies, this involved a lot of thought going into creating a world of escape where the viewer's own imagination fills in a lot of gaps.

Unfortunately for this movie and a lot of modern movies, this 'user brain interaction' is not needed as the directors can pretty much give any visual rendition they need using CGI. This leads to a movie which has great visuals, but far less imagination.

Gone was the terror, gone was the suspense, gone was the feeling of a 'world' unfolding before your eyes. What we got was cliched post-apocalypse landscapes, gritty and predictable survivors, and what I can only describe as a movie which owes more to the Matrix series than it does to the original Terminator movies.

In a lot of ways, I wish I'd not have seen the movie at all.

i especially liked them escaping a nuclear explosion via helicopter near the end...lets not worry about radiation poisoning or anything like that eh..just fly directly over it...

it just a badly done remake of Frankenstein's Monster if you ask me...

it would have been better if Bale and the aussie guy who played Marcus swopped roles...

IAIN wrote:i especially liked them escaping a nuclear explosion via helicopter near the end...lets not worry about radiation poisoning or anything like that eh..just fly directly over it...

Yeah, it's not as if EMP would have killed the 'copter's electronics and caused it to plummet. Maybe they were using the EMP-proof 'copter in Goldeneye.