There's been some discussion of Olympus Has Fallen on the other movie thread, but I'm putting mine here because this film deserves it. I just posted the review under the spoilers at IMDB, but it won't be up for a few days so I'm also copypastaing it here.
Plan 9 from North Korea
I could write pages on the imbecilities of the plot, but I'll just concentrate on one aspect: Cerberus. Spoilers will be involved, if it's possible to spoil something that was so rotten at the outset.
The purpose of the whole takeover of the White House was to gain access to Cerberus, a top secret fail-safe system for nuclear warheads that everybody in government apparently knows about. Presumably this was how Kang learned of it too. The fail-safe system works by detonating the nuclear warhead in flight before it reaches its target. Any fallout suffered by the people below or in the path of prevailing winds is just their tough luck. Depending how high the warhead is when detonated, it could also destroy electronics for miles around. Bear in mind that all this has been planned by the best minds in the military and the government.
This failsafe system is controlled at a bunker underneath the White House with three 8-digit alphanumeric codes only known by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, and the President. This is eminently reasonable because it's well-known that none of these people ever leave the Washington D.C. area and because in a time of crisis what you really want are complex protocols that can be stymied by traffic or a late lunch. Surely the emergency FAA and NORAD protocols that were in place on 9/11 taught us that much.
At various points in the film, the Chairman of the JCS is threatened with execution and the SecDef is beaten up until the president relents and orders his colleagues to give up their codes, vowing that they'll never get the final code out of him. You might wonder, as I did, what happens to this elaborate system if any one of these people is ever in an accident that kills them or puts them in a coma. Even better, we're shown an accident that nearly kills the President and does kill the First Lady at the beginning of the film. If there's an answer to this conundrum, the movie doesn't resolve it.
But I digress. The North Koreans have two of the codes in hand, and then we cut back to the bunker and we see them entering a third code. What? Was the President a wuss and gave it up willingly? No, the head of the Secret Service has the answer: "They only needed two codes." Get it? They got the two codes they needed, then they began inputting every possible permutation of the third 8-digit alphanumeric code until they found the one that clicked. At many internet forums I'm only allowed to get my password wrong five times, then my account is locked. No such safeguard was implemented for this vital piece of our defense infrastructure, making it less secure than a bunch of lolcat macros.
So Cerberus is cracked and the program activated, meaning that every missile in every silo will explode and turn the U.S. into a nuclear wasteland. Wait... WHAT?! Aside from the fact that these missiles have to be armed with nuclear warheads first, you will remember that the purpose of Cerberus was as a fail-safe to destroy any accidentally launched nuclear-tipped missile. So the way to halt just one errant missile is to simultaneously destroy EVERY LONG-RANGE MISSILE IN THE UNITED STATES? They shouldn't have called it Cerberus; they should have called it Samson.
It astonishes me that there are any positive reviews here for this derivative and incoherent piece of crap, let alone those that praise the plot's believability and realism.
Last edited by Nullifidian; 04-22-2013 at 07:39 AM.
The dumbness of Cerberus doesn't end with the idiocy of the triple coded passwords. What's really dumb, as in Hollywood made it dumb on purpose, is that destroying a missile isn't the same as detonating its warhead. There is no way in all of Man's Green Earth that anyone would be dumb enough (outside of Hollywoodland) to make the failsafe of destroying a missile (let alone ALL the missiles) mean detonating its warhead.
Yeah, I meant to include that but my brain was seizing up from the stupid as I was posting my review.
I think the fundamental problem was that the screenwriters thought nuclear missiles were built on the same plan as Fat Man and Little Boy. They had no idea that you could treat the warhead and the missile as separate things. This is what happens when you let Mitchell and Webb's Lazy Writers write screenplays for major studio films.
I wanted to love it, I really did. Film noir, cyberpunk, animated movie? I'm there!
There are some positives to the film, like every single shot has great visual composition, the animation quality is decent, I like all of the actors who lent their voices to the roles, and future Paris is interesting . . .
That's all I can give it. The pacing is awful. The high contrast absolute white and absolute black of the animation style gets old fast--it physically tires the eyes to look at for almost two hours. Lastly, I must object to its ideology:
I'm so sick of the hoary, pro-death message that virtually every movie that features realizable immortality sells. Death does not give life meaning. Death is the greatest evil in the world, and fuck any art-house philosophy that tries to spin it as a misunderstood good.
Shooting Creek, a post Civil War drama about Southerners and their love for their battle flag. It was so badly done I quit watching barely 10 minutes into it.
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Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink.--W.C. Fields
I'm so sick of the hoary, pro-death message that virtually every movie that features realizable immortality sells. Death does not give life meaning. Death is the greatest evil in the world, and fuck any art-house philosophy that tries to spin it as a misunderstood good.
I agree, and I've always found that sort of thing annoying, too.
My guess is that it's at least partly "sour grapes" on writers' parts. Maybe they're thinking something like, "Dying sucks, but immortality would surely be even worse -- right? Right?".
Every time I see a book or movie or television show claim that immortality would really suck, I want to tell the writer(s), "I'll tell you what, you arrange things so that I can live for thousands of years, and I'll get back to you on it."
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Being literally unable to die would eventually mean that you'd eventually be stuck in a pit for millions of years or some other similarly unpleasant thing. So it might not be good to live forever forever.
Of course, if you were stuck buried in a mountain or something, you'd probably eventually go insane so maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
But if I have the ability to end it all when I want to, I don't really see much of a downside.
I see a downside, but then I've already told all my loved ones that my ambition is to die first and not have to mourn any of them. I also think that being immortal would necessarily make you different than humans. Not necessarily worse or better, but definitely other because consciousness of our own inevitable death is an integral part of being human.
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
Being unable to die would indeed be awful. But being able to live as long as you want (particularly if you retained your youthful health and vigor) would be a wonderful thing, it seems to me.
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Being unable to die would indeed be awful. But being able to live as long as you want (particularly if you retained your youthful health and vigor) would be a wonderful thing, it seems to me.
I see a downside, but then I've already told all my loved ones that my ambition is to die first and not have to mourn any of them. I also think that being immortal would necessarily make you different than humans. Not necessarily worse or better, but definitely other because consciousness of our own inevitable death is an integral part of being human.
For the impact that would have on the rest of society read Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress which deals with a group of people genetically altered to not need sleep, which has the side-effect that they don't age.
Thanks, I'll put that on my reading list. I came to that conclusion about immortality in my studies of vampire myths. Among many purposes, I think they worked as a cautionary tale about the drawbacks of immortality.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
Being literally unable to die would eventually mean that you'd eventually be stuck in a pit for millions of years or some other similarly unpleasant thing. So it might not be good to live forever forever.
Unless you want to posit the existence of magic, being unable to die is an impossibility. Anything made of matter can be broken. Anything that does work (such as living) requires an input of some sort of energy from an outside source.
Any sort of immortality that may be possible in the real world just means that you won't die of "old age"--not that you're invulnerable and don't have to play by the laws of thermodynamics.
Unless you want to posit the existence of magic, being unable to die is an impossibility. Anything made of matter can be broken. Anything that does work (such as living) requires an input of some sort of energy from an outside source.
Any sort of immortality that may be possible in the real world just means that you won't die of "old age"--not that you're invulnerable and don't have to play by the laws of thermodynamics.
No fucking shit.
Are you trying to be a parody of yourself or something?
The tag line and the major thrust of Now You See Me is "the closer you look the less you see." Sometimes it made me think of the line from MIB theme "what you think you saw you did not see." And throughout Now You See Me it is honest with its intentions. The closer you look the less you see.
The superficial layer of the movie is straight up honest stage magic. It's a variety of mentalist's tricks, sleight of hand, illusionist stuff that magicians have been doing since the beginning. I was hoping for more of an Ocean's Eleven show about who the Four Horsemen are and why they are chosen. The Four Horsemen, so you know, are Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher and Dave Franco's characters. They're each moderately successful magicians but each with aspirations to something more. One day they all receive a card, an invitation really, to do and be something more.
And then suddenly it's a year later and they're in Las Vegas. The big bank robbery that's in the preview is only their first illusion. See, they only do three stage shows and then they're all done, with all the wealth and knowledge of a mystery year's training can bring. Each illusion on stage is explained as the movie goes on. And they are all pretty good illusions - but as you understand how each performance isn't real don't think too closely or you'll get entangled in thinking through the Batman's Gambit.
If all this was just a magic crime drama it could have been a fun movie. But there was the secondary and a tertiary layer in the movie. Though true to the maxim of "the closer you look the less you see," it didn't deliver as promised. When you watch a well crafted multi-layered movie like The Usual Suspects or The Sixth Sense, there is a valuable rewatchability to them. There are hints and nods and nudges that exist that you weren't seeing the first time. The pay off for the other layers of Now You See Me wasn't very satisfying to me. I even felt a little betrayed by the movie, throwing the big reveal at me with a What a Twist! smirk as though the movie knew it had me fooled, when really it was more of an out of nowhere And Then There's This!
Alright, that doesn't make a lot of sense in those words, but I'm trying to be as non-spoilery as I can.
I didn't enjoy this experience. There are some things that I thought it did well but a lot more things that weren't as well done as it could have been. So much so that I'm wondering if seeing After Earth might have been the better idea.
What turned me off the idea of Now You See Me was that it was billed as a steal from the rich, give to the poor situation. But they are giving the money to their audience, which means it's steal from the rich, give to the people with enough disposable income to spend on a ticket to an arena-sized magic show.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
I didn't enjoy this experience. There are some things that I thought it did well but a lot more things that weren't as well done as it could have been. So much so that I'm wondering if seeing After Earth might have been the better idea.
Wow.
Anyway, I was coming to this thread because we saw This is the End last night and it was a total stinker. On the way there I said to Sou "this probably isn't going to be your kind of movie" and she said she was actually pretty hopeful, that she was hoping it would be like Superbad (which I loved and she thought was OK).
I thought, hmmmm she needs to lower those expectations. So I told her it was going to be weed-humour, dick-humour, gore-humour and swearing-humour and that was probably about it. First, I was bang on, in fact the advisory warning before the movie basically said exactly that and Sou turned to me and we laughed. Second, I could not have possibly lowered her expectations enough to give this movie any chance. I imagine Sou would give this movie about 0.1/10 and even I couldn't give it more than about 2/10. And I like movies like this, I liked Pineapple Express.
There were some laughs, but just so few. I can't even imagine that a stoned 16yr boy would think this movie was more than about 5/10 and that pretty much has to be their demographic. I mean so many of the jokes were related to dicks, wanking, cum, puke, etc... that no one else could probably stomach it.
I was really hopeful going in that at least I would like it. Seth Rogan, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson... even Danny McBride. I like those guys, they all have movies I've enjoyed. But it just sucked.
The best parts were the cameos by Michael Cera and Emma Watson.
Re: Seen any crappy movies?
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