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| REALLY? WITH ALIENS?!!! |
Last week, I happened to catch the trailer for Peter Berg's Battleship, supposedly based on the board game (which I enjoyed as a kid) of the same name, and let me tell you, it looked completely and utterly terrible. It looked like some weird and pointless amalgamation of a naval war film and either Transformers or Battle: Los Angeles, and Liam Neeson being in it aside (he's becoming more and more of a paycheck actor these days anyway- remember Unknown and Clash of the Titans from not too long ago??), it looks the latest crapfest infesting the summer box offices. The film industry, a business just beginning 100 years ago, has now been heavily mined of any original idea still lingering on the surface, and while there's endless source material to draw from, the fact that we've now arrived at movies based on board games and toys shows that the industry's original ideas days are numbered. Of all the films I've seen in the last five years or so, the only one that I could really argue for being original is Christopher Nolan's Inception, and even that owed strands of its DNA to films that came before, such as The Matrix. Other than that, we've had an endless deluge of comic book movies (WAY TOO MANY SUPERHERO FILMS), previous film franchise sequels, reboots, remakes, or re-imaginings (coming out this month alone is a reboot of Planet of the Apes, another sequel in the completely pointless Final Destination series, another sequel to Spy Kids that Robert Rodriguez has basically forced upon us, and a remake of Conan the Barbarian). In addition, we're getting re-imaginings or reboots of classic fairy tale works of film and literature that no one is exactly clamoring for, such as last year's Alice in Wonderland (which grossed over a billion worldwide, showing that people just don't care), or Sam Raimi's Wizard of Oz "preboot" Oz, The Great and Powerful, and hell, there are TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT films in development based off of Snow White. Another clear sign that original ideas in film is dying is the top-grossing success of James Cameron's Avatar. With many critics hailing it as a "masterpiece" when many of its ideas were directly ripped from other films, as well as it grossing nearly $3 billion, shows that even unoriginality can pass for the opposite these days. However, there are a few projects that show at least a little hope on the horizon, such as Ridley Scott's upcoming Prometheus (which I will surely be reviewing when it comes out next June), as well as Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (or well, really anything that guy comes out with is eccentric and original). Prometheus is an especially interesting concept, as it started out as an Alien prequel (which, despite my criticisms of lacking in originality, I would admittedly be excited about due to Scott's participation), but then apparently evolved into something "more" of deeper meaning. As much as we forge ahead through boring and pointless studio pics like Battleship or Final Destination 5, there will hopefully always be a Prometheus or Inception there to remind us what true imaginative filmmaking is all about.
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| This one image is about all I have to hope for |
Prometheus (image above) opens June 8.
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