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Most Disappointing Sequel

Started by Maybe Im Doing It Wrong, September 15, 2010, 09:32:41 AM

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pigamus

Quote from: Maybe Im Doing It Wrong on September 15, 2010, 10:06:06 AM
Gregory's Two Girls is the winner I think. An incredible saddening piece of legacy-pissing.

No. If you watch it on its own terms it's a very sweet, if totally ludicrous, film.

Custard

#31
When people (quite rightly) knock the Matrix sequels, I like to point them in the direction of the Matrix De-Zionized fan-edit.

http://fanedit.org/448/

It combines the two into one, pretty good film.

QuoteINTENTION:

After the fantastic movie "The Matrix" everyone was awaiting the sequels, but somehow the writer/directors were not able to continue the epic they started in the way they began. In our humble opinion they lost themselves in detail, wanted to much and definetly to show off with effect orgies. We tried to continue the Matrix withing the Matrix wherever possible. Leaving out the Zion scenes was a major improvement of pace and plot development and the most interesting thing about it is that these scenes are not missed when left out. We tried to be smart and reduced the Matrix sequels to the max. Also we cut out several scenes that just did not feel right or felt to be unnecessary, e.G. when Morpheus talks to Link about trust, it just feels wrong and Morpheus seems to become a stereotype of himself. When Trinity dies on the rooftop and is saved by Neo with an inside heart massage, it just is to much to take (at least for the men in our group). The ending scene that most people criticised about Revolutions becomes reat, when the Zion battle is just not fought.

CUTLIST: view:

   1. removed Trinity dream sequence
   2. removed the "trust me" speech of Morpheus with Link
   3. removed all Zion scenes from both Reloaded and Revolutions except for the oracle request, but this will be assumed to happen on the Nebuchadnezzar
   4. removed "Trinity dying on the rooftop" scene
   5. removed Niobe traveling to Zion
   6. removed all talks and discussions about Zion people and Zion battle tactics wherever possible
   7. added "I can feel you now" speech from The Matrix
   8. removed Trinity mentioning the rooftop scene
   9. removed Rama Kandrar speech
  10. shortened Burly brawl
  11. shortened Merovingian guards fight
  12. shortened highway action

It can be a little clunky at times, especially when you know the original films pretty well, but somehow, it works. It's long too, but consistantly action-packed and exciting, so it flies by. I really enjoyed it, actually.

Highly recommend it. It's making the best out of a bad lot, but it's a good job, and far superior to what they actually made.

Serge

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on September 15, 2010, 03:19:43 PM
I really enjoy The Lost World, actually. It's fun.

All of you can die in a fire.

I probably should mention that I have seen it about three times, and if I happened to chance across it whilst channel hopping, would probably end up watching the rest of it again. Actually, I'm pretty sure I've seen '3' more than once, too.

Bingo Fury

Quote from: Phil_A on September 15, 2010, 10:49:46 AM
Mission Impossible 2 was a massive disappointment after the first film. All the intrigue and paranoia ditched in favour of MOER STUNTS and SHIT BLOWING UP. And it coincided with the point where Cruise had jacked up his smugness to ridiculous levels.
Mission Impossible 2 is top of my "Guilty Pleasures" pile. At that moment in time, Thandie Newton was arguably the most beautiful woman in the world and Cruise's haircut was fucking outstanding, a marvel to behold. Dougray Scott was even given lines that included phrases like"gaggin' for it" and "put a sock in it" to make him sound proper Scottish.

In my dictionary, "over-rated" is defined by a photo of John Woo and a snide counterblast against his "balletic violence" bollocks, but, strangely enough, I love this.

biggytitbo

All the misiion impossible films are guilty pleasures. I actually feel the progressive absurdity of each film improvises them, so 1 I quite like, 2 I like, and 3 I really like. The more twisty turny and far fetched the plots and scenarios become the more I enjoy it.

mobias

The Matrix sequels win hands down for me. I loved the first film. I remember the summer of 99 when it came out and it was about a week or two after the Phantom Menace. Never have I been more disappointed by a film than by the Phantom Menace. There was so much hype that perhaps it couldn't fail to not live up to the hype but it really didn't need to be that bad. Then all of sudden out of no where there was an intelligent and original bit of Sci-Fi cinema. The sort of mainstream mega budget summer movie that they don't seem to make at all these days, infact the sort of movie Hollywood makes rarely at all! Something that actually makes you want to go back and see it a second and third time so you can truly get your head round it. It was a great movie and even today it still seems reasonably fresh.

So I was well and truly looking forward to the sequels. The Wachowski Brothers had proven with Bound and The Matrix they knew how to make good, intelligent movies so how did they duff it up so badly? Neither of the Matrix sequels seemed like they were even directed by the same people that did the first. There was a story floating around for a while that The Matrix story and screenplay utterly rips off an un-produced movie called the Third Eye. The Wachowski Brothers knew about the Third Eye as they were offered it to direct but they simply robbed ideas and dialogue from it for their own treatment. It makes sense to me because left to their own devices with the second and third movie's they certainly couldn't come up with the goods themselves.

Like Blade Runner if they had left the Matrix alone it would have survived in isolation as an untarnished piece of classic sci-fi cinema. Unfortunately my perception of it will forever be clouded by knowing that Zion looks like something out of an 80's shampoo commercial and that the guy that designed the Matrix, the 'architect' looks like the guy from the box photo of Mastermind the board game.     

Bingo Fury

I saw The Matrix having encountered neither trailer nor spoiler, and absolutely loved it. One of the things that appealed so much was that it felt lean and concise. References to Buddhism and fate-vs-choice were in there, but applied judiciously enough that they simply made a flashy action flick seem a little richer thematically without ever swamping the story. I was really excited about the sequel, even as I was buying my ticket and sitting down. Then, about five minutes before the main feature started, the thought occured for the very first time, "This is going to be shit, isn't it?" And, oh boy, was it ever.

Ignatius_S

With The Matrix films, I didn't even enjoy it that much but I really did find the next ones among the worst follow-ups I have ever seen.

Quote from: pigamus on September 15, 2010, 04:24:20 PM
No. If you watch it on its own terms it's a very sweet, if totally ludicrous, film.
I missed that Gregory's Two Girls had been nominated! I agree with you - also, it's absolutley works as a standalone film, perhaps more than it should be.

Pepotamo1985

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on September 15, 2010, 03:05:04 PM
It still manages to surprise me when I remember that The Lost World was directed by Spielberg. It feels like such a nothing film that I always think it must have been helmed by some second rung director.

I was forced to watch it when it was on recently and I was struck by how badly it's directed and shot. Early on in the film, when Jeff G goes to the professor's house, he has a conversation with a lawyer(?), but he's standing so far away, and it's shot from behind the lawyer's head, that you can't actually tell whether it's them having a conversation in the first place. There are loads of instances of similar nonsense, with scenes being shot from comically cack angles so you never be truly sure what's going on - it definitely had the feel of senseless running around with little rhyme or reason, clattering from one set-piece disaster to another relentlessly. I rate Jurassic Park, even if it is a bit silly, because the catastrophe is incremental - everything just gets steadily more and more fucked, and it's genuinely unclear who's going to get out alive.

I don't know what it is, but I'm really curious as to why so many films made between 95-99 look absolutely terrible contemporarily. It's not just the now in some cases laughable special effects (which are evidently the result of an over-eagerness to use new technologies liberally before they were even halfway decent or realistic capable), it's the actual look of the film - Jurassic Park just looks so much crisper and clearer. The same is true of loads of others, often irrespective of budget.

Jemble Fred

To be fair, the second Jurassic Park book was crap too – it even featured as a hero a character who unequivocally died in the first book. I did see the movie version, but remember nothing about it except that bit where they're stuck in the van. It's a shame how many great set pieces from the books have never been attempted on screen, the sequels could have been wall-to-wall greatness.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

The transition between the mixed use of model shots/stop motion etc to cgi is one of the more interesting aspects of modern cinema.

Models and animation can look very tacky and awful now, even if they still have a certain hyperreal charm, they often look appalling. But they still beat cgi hands down because you can tell it's actually physically there and the actors are clearly reacting to something that is actually there.

Something for another thread perhaps.

Pepotamo1985

I don't know, with models it's 50/50 - sometimes they can look realistic, or in the least, charming, even when you obviously know it's a model. Sometimes it can look really embarassingly terrible, beyond even allowing the segment some dispensation because of its vintage. I find a lot of older Dr. Who quite neatly demonstrates this, sometimes the models are absolutely inspired, sometimes they look like a toilet roll (and their use in one season of stock space shuttle footage in more than one serial is almost sweet in how pathetic it is). In The Robots Of Death (LOL), for instance, the model they use for the mining rover looks well proportioned, and it roves round a really good set, so you're willing to suspend your disbelief - disregarding the absolute certainty that it's probably the size of a shoebox and consider seriously that just maybe it's a really really big vessel which people live and work in.

Quite why they found it incumbent to replace the gorgeous model segments in Red Dwarf with CGI (which doesn't look too bad, but still - why go out for hamburger when you can have steak at home? eh?) I don't know.

One of the MANY reasons the new Star Wars are some of the worst films ever is that none of it's real. If you have the patience to sit through the making of sections (I didn't, redlettermedia did it for me), it seems like pretty much every set was a fucking blue screen. Fuck's sake.

SavageHedgehog

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on September 15, 2010, 02:42:36 PM
As I understand it, Miller wrote the first draft but there was a lot of executive meddling and the final result bore little resemblance, which caused him to swear off Hollywood for years. He later produced a comic of his original script, although I haven't read it, so I don't know if he's just talking rubbish.

Interestingly, or perhaps not, I read something where he said he had a "much better experience" with Robocop 3 than the (vastly superior IMO) second film, so maybe that one was actually closer to his "vision".

Serge

Quote from: Jemble Fred on September 16, 2010, 03:14:15 PMTo be fair, the second Jurassic Park book was crap too – it even featured as a hero a character who unequivocally died in the first book.

I'd forgotten that Malcolm died in the first book! Isn't that just tossed away with him saying something like, "Reports of my death were grossly exaggerated," or something?

One thing that really annoyed me about the second book was that he introduced a dinosaur with chameleonic skin at one point and then did absolutely nothing with it. Although the whole book was pretty bad - even though I got a free proof copy I still felt like asking for my money back.

Mister Six

Quote from: mobias on September 15, 2010, 10:42:46 PMThere was a story floating around for a while that The Matrix story and screenplay utterly rips off an un-produced movie called the Third Eye. The Wachowski Brothers knew about the Third Eye as they were offered it to direct but they simply robbed ideas and dialogue from it for their own treatment. It makes sense to me because left to their own devices with the second and third movie's they certainly couldn't come up with the goods themselves.

It definitely ripped off a comic called The Invisibles - the author even claims he'd been given reports saying that there were copies of the comic on set.

If you didn't know, The Invisibles is about a young tearaway who is destined to be 'the one' and finds himself targeted by suit-and-shades-wearing agents of a mysterious power. After being kidnapped by them he is freed by a bald rebel leader (also wearing round shades) who explains that reality as we know it is an illusion maintained by sinister forces of control against which The Invisibles are fighting, hoping to liberate humanity. He's introduced to a team of quirky, moniker-bearing rebels and taught how to fight using un-reality in ways that appear to be magic. The bald hero gets kidnapped by the baddies and the team are sent in to rescue him. Oh, and there's a magic, liquid mirror that can enter peoples' bodies.

Peru

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on September 15, 2010, 03:05:04 PM
It still manages to surprise me when I remember that The Lost World was directed by Spielberg. It feels like such a nothing film that I always think it must have been helmed by some second rung director.

Apparently he didn't direct all of it. Allegedly he palmed off scenes on scriptwriter David Koepp while he went off to prep Amistad - so you can see how much love went into The Lost World. It is possibly Spielberg's worst film (vying with Amistad) - and I say that with full knowledge of some of the other cack he has directed. It is so evident that the personm in charge - and most of the actors - are just disinterested and lazy. The film looks like absolute death (as others on here have pointed out) - the crisp and shiny yellows and reds of the first film turn into a soup of green and brown with shot composition that is flatter than an anorexic pancake. For some reason they cast three identically dressed bald men who look indistinguishable from more than three feet away - two of them are actually wearing the same bloody glasses, and one of them dies apparently offscreen, so you have no idea who is who. The film is cut for shit - lots of linking footage and character work clearly ditched in favour of more monsters - and Vince Vaughn's characters literally disappears three-quarters of the way in, with no apparent reference to where he has gone.

The final insult, and unequivocally the worst sequence Spielberg has directed, is the 'T.Rex in San Diego' finale. Why is everyone in bed at 9pm? How does no-one notice a fucking great dinosaur immediately? The real bottom of the barrel comes with two things - joke movie posters in a video shop of Arnie and Sly in 'funny' inappropriate films, and a group of Japanese businessmen running away shouting 'we came here to get away from this!'. Just read that last bit back again. Steven Spielberg did that - so unbelievably tacky and awful!

Phil_A

Quote from: Peru on September 18, 2010, 07:42:56 PM
Apparently he didn't direct all of it. Allegedly he palmed off scenes on scriptwriter David Koepp while he went off to prep Amistad - so you can see how much love went into The Lost World. It is possibly Spielberg's worst film (vying with Amistad) - and I say that with full knowledge of some of the other cack he has directed. It is so evident that the personm in charge - and most of the actors - are just disinterested and lazy. The film looks like absolute death (as others on here have pointed out) - the crisp and shiny yellows and reds of the first film turn into a soup of green and brown with shot composition that is flatter than an anorexic pancake. For some reason they cast three identically dressed bald men who look indistinguishable from more than three feet away - two of them are actually wearing the same bloody glasses, and one of them dies apparently offscreen, so you have no idea who is who. The film is cut for shit - lots of linking footage and character work clearly ditched in favour of more monsters - and Vince Vaughn's characters literally disappears three-quarters of the way in, with no apparent reference to where he has gone.

The final insult, and unequivocally the worst sequence Spielberg has directed, is the 'T.Rex in San Diego' finale. Why is everyone in bed at 9pm? How does no-one notice a fucking great dinosaur immediately? The real bottom of the barrel comes with two things - joke movie posters in a video shop of Arnie and Sly in 'funny' inappropriate films, and a group of Japanese businessmen running away shouting 'we came here to get away from this!'. Just read that last bit back again. Steven Spielberg did that - so unbelievably tacky and awful!

JP2 was the first movie I remember seeing where the sound mixing was noticably poor, in fact so bad in places that key dialogue was rendered inaudible. I think I may've actually fallen asleep at one point.

Jurassic Park 3 was a bit of an oddity. I'm still not entirely sure why it was made, it's not as if people were begging for another sequel. It had that same perfunctory, thrown-together feel to it as the second one, but also it seemed like in places it had noticably ripped-off scenes from several other movies, including, oddly enough, Quatermass and the Pit.

SavageHedgehog

I enjoyed both JP sequels. The Lost World is hit and miss but there are some great set-pieces in it like the scene with the caravan(?) and the cracking glass. As far as phoned-in Speilberg efforts go I had a hell of a lot more fun than I did with the last Indy anyway. Jurassic Park 3 is a jolly, breezy B-movie given a huge budget.

BTW last time I was in ToysRUs I noticed they had a shelf of JP toys. This struck me as a little odd as I wouldn't really have thought the series was all that popular with kids these days.

Cerys

Dinosaurs.  If your kid likes dinosaurs, you'll probably show them Cretaceous Jurassic Park at some point - whereupon you open yourself up to a whole new slew of possible Christmas and birthday presents.

ToysRUs know this.

hummingofevil

Battle Royale is the bestest film.
Battle Royale 2 is the worstest film.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Battle Royale is very good fun but it must be one of the most talked-up overrated films I've ever had people bend my ear about.

Yes, it is quite good actually and I'd recommend it to people.

Maybe it's because it seems to attract some types of morons who haven't got any idea whatsoever what constitutes a good film.

Steven

During the Lost World I stood up in the cinema and shouted madly at the screen at the cheesiness of it. It was after the bit where Goldblum's adopted black daughter is being attacked by a raptor and jumps up and swings 360 degrees on a bit of scaffolding and decks it before dropping down for Goldblum to say "And they DROPPED you from the athletics team?"


hummingofevil

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on September 19, 2010, 06:18:16 PM
Battle Royale is very good fun but it must be one of the most talked-up overrated films I've ever had people bend my ear about.

Yes, it is quite good actually and I'd recommend it to people.

Maybe it's because it seems to attract some types of morons who haven't got any idea whatsoever what constitutes a good film.

But compared to Battle Royale 2 it is Citizen Kane, The Godfather and Big all rolled into one.

God yes Battle Royale 2 was titanically bad...up until then I thought the Japanese were incapable of making a bad movie.

Hated Kill Bill Vol.2, after loving Vol.1- long, boring and just a pointless waste of time generally.

Another vote for The Lost World- I remember being quite excited about it at the time, boy was I crushed after seeing it. JP3 is pretty good fun though.

I never understood the clunky political message of Battle Royale 2, which was bizarrely anti-American in sentiment. The acting was oddly hammy from what I remember with drawn out death sequences.

As far as disappointing sequels I'd say that Rocky II, III and V are terrible, however Rocky IV and VI are fantastic. In fact if you watched I, IV, and VI as a trilogy then it would'nt be a bad series of films and cut out most of the unneccesary garbage.

lazyhour

Quote from: ThickAndCreamy on September 15, 2010, 10:15:24 AM
Was it very disappointing though? I mean the original Cube is nothing at all special, it contains a laughable amount of predictable tripe. [...]

Then there is the plot which is just contrived shit of them being locked up in a cube. It's vaguely ambiguous how they got there but it's still utter shit and takes dystopianism to new levels of self parody. Sci-fi is often great as it highlights the problems of today that if not dealt with soon, will exacerbate to becoming something dangerous to the human race. However, when they say the
Spoiler alert
excesses of military spending in the US will ultimately lead to them creating a huge cube to kill people within due to the military industrial complex
[close]
you can just fuck off.

Cube is like Equilibrium, both want to send out a message and they do. The trouble is the message is so lazy, uninformative and unoriginal that it's the equivalent of someone in a pub constantly saying 'they're all the same' whenever the subject of politics comes up.

Admittedly I haven't seen it since it came out, but one quite effective message I remember getting from Cube is that people are too willing to unquestioningly do their jobs and not question what the higher agenda/purpose might be. And that something like the Cube might conceivably just happen because no-one stops to ask why on earth this thing is being devised, planned and constructed.  It reminded me at the time of IBM and the Nazis - "As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s." I doubt that the developers at IBM actively wanted the Nazis to do wipe out a race of people - everyone just did their jobs...

Of course, I could be looking at this a bit too deeply. And this could be a message that wasn't in the film itself, but one that my friends and I talked up afterwards.

Maybe I should watch it again before pontificating any further.

neveragain

I was pleasantly befuddled by Donnie Darko, but S. Darko just shat the shit out of me. Mercy, what dross!

papalaz4444244

Aw c'mon... Highlander 2 surely is the biggest disappointment.

It shits on the first movie from a great height. I will never forget the crushing horror of going to see that piece of shit.


El Unicornio, mang

Quote from: Ghost of Troubled Joe on September 20, 2010, 08:06:02 PM
God yes Battle Royale 2 was titanically bad...up until then I thought the Japanese were incapable of making a bad movie.

Hated Kill Bill Vol.2, after loving Vol.1- long, boring and just a pointless waste of time generally.


I have pretty much the reverse opinion of those two films.

Superman III was a big disappointment, Richard Lester clearly had no clue what he was doing so put loads of crap comedy in there (see also Superman II, thankfully the Donner cut removes all his garbage), although the fight between bad and good Superman in the junkyard is ace, and that woman turning into a robot at the end still freaks me out. I never saw Superman IV and from what I've heard I'd do well to stay away from it.