Unfortunately mostly the veneer of the 1980s is recycled into some commitee test audience mashup. In a way we succeeded in making “machine learning” movies “by hand”. An awful lot of movies aren’t from the human spark.
I don't think telling a story out of sequence from existing material means that it's a cash grab.
Personally I think Chris Hemsworth was a big miscast and just plain boring and weird. If they would get somebody like Rob Zombie it could’ve been much more fun and menacing xD. Otherwise it just doesn’t take you on an emotional journey. They tried to cramp as many story lines as possible, but it just has diluted the whole experience. They didn’t use any dynamic and rememberable soundtracks. Technically they did a great job and many moments were quite similar to original one.
But at the end I left with only single thought. That this is gonna be a future of LA with all water supply issues, AI taking jobs, and poor actors, models, stand up comedians and homeless people inheriting the land xD. If only Hollywood won’t come up with an entertainment so epic that they will be able to compete with passionate creative people creating new kind of movies using AI for pennies.
Yes, and cosmetic surgeons slashing people, Sendero Luminoso conquering territory, Carjack Malone living on a tanker ship, Peter Fonda surfing on a stormdrain.
It's called Escape from LA, and it is glorious.
Huh, I’d call out his performance as one of the best elements of the movie (which I also liked a lot overall, this isn’t a backhanded compliment)
[edit] this though:
> They didn’t use any dynamic and rememberable soundtracks.
Yeah, it bucks some stupid and bad Hollywood trends (you can see what’s happening in night scenes! You can understand the dialog!) but does follow the nigh-universal trend of having a boring soundtrack that zero people are humming on their way out of the theater. I wouldn’t have guessed I’d be looking back favorably on the original soundtracks of middling 90s movies but here we are.
Fury Road was IMHO the blockbuster movie of the 2010s.
I didn't have time yet but very much looking forward to see what George Miller has cooked up this time around!
Hollywood can’t make great smaller movies like that anymore without spending $100M which raises the stakes and it also comes with a ton of studio baggage afraid of any sort of risk
And AFAIK this is built almost entirely off the extensive character background notes developed while writing her for Fury Road, so it’s not like they just cooked up this story because they needed something.
It also feels thick with influence and fluency in cinema per se, in a way that Fury Road didn’t to me, and I think it may mean this one rewards repeat watches to an exceptional degree.
Also they often don't seem to have a clue what kind of living legend George Miller is.
There is a ton of ink on the topic, but the core problem is that executives get fired for failures more frequently than they get expanded upside for hits.