New Video Games/ Movies

[Evil Tim]

I still think the funniest observation I've heard about the movie's terrible science is that the nuke they use is so puny that even if it somehow split the comet into two halves, it wouldn't overcome their gravity and so the halves would immediately slam back together. That would have been kind of hilarious to watch.

[funkychinaman]

Okay, perhaps I was a bit harsh. Armageddon was bearable, Aerosmith song notwithstanding. The wheels totally came off with Pearl Harbor, and he's been in freefall ever since.

[SPEMack618]

Agreed. (Despite the fact that I like Aerosmith) Pearl Harbor made me want to puke. Repeatedly.

And I think the worst thing to come of it, was that for about three months after the movie came out, every prop plane my sister saw was a Zero.

I feel like Armageddon did what it set out to do. A squad based movie about strong men armed against impossible odds. Think the Green Berets or The Dirty Dozen in space. With a giant extinction causing asteroid instead of Nazis or Commies. However, I never saw where Pearl Harbor knew what it wanted to be, and didn't do anything well, other a couple of cools shots of computer generated P-40s in pre-war markings.

[Evil Tim]

I think the problem with Pearl Harbor was that Bay was trying to make it his version of Titanic (love story over big effects movie) but missed that in Titanic the event is what brings the two together and then threatens them. In Pearl Harbor you know the movie isn't over for a long while after the raid itself, which means Kate can't die in it, and you know Ben and Josh aren't going to die in the raid itself because then you'd be coasting the entire Doolittle Raid with the B plot already resolved.

Not to mention the entire B plot is impossible because it relies on Ben being listed as killed in action in a situation where he was missing in action.

Originally Posted by funkychinaman

I'll give him a break on the first Transformers movie. As I said before, it was close to being about as good as we could expect from a live-action Transformers movie. (Seeing the GI Joe movie only made it look better.)

I don't know, you'd think that he'd get the core "it's about robots fighting" part down a bit better and have less of the boring puny humans and extremely awkward physical comedy. Plus the confuso-cam fight scenes where it seem the cameraman is the third combatant are entirely his fault.

[SPEMack618]

I would have been far happier with Colonel Lennox and Chief Epps as the basis for the G.I. Joe team than Channing Tatum and Dwayne Johnson.

A gritty reboot for G.I. Joe perhaps?

[funkychinaman]

Originally Posted by Evil Tim

I don't know, you'd think that he'd get the core "it's about robots fighting" part down a bit better and have less of the boring puny humans and extremely awkward physical comedy. Plus the confuso-cam fight scenes where it seem the cameraman is the third combatant are entirely his fault.

I went back and watched a few episodes of the original Sunbow series. By today's standards, it wasn't great, and it definitely benefitted from the rose colored glasses of nostalgia. (Sepia colored glasses?) Given the source material, I think the writers and Bay did a decent job of it.

[Evil Tim]

Originally Posted by funkychinaman

I went back and watched a few episodes of the original Sunbow series. By today's standards, it wasn't great, and it definitely benefitted from the rose colored glasses of nostalgia. (Sepia colored glasses?) Given the source material, I think the writers and Bay did a decent job of it.

Oh yeah, I mean the old series is goofy as hell when you're not a kid anymore, but nostalgia is about remembering things as they should have been, not as they are. Though some of those episodes were utterly hilarious.

"It will take more than your puny arm to stop Devastator!"
"Riiight...Which is why it's lucky that the hand at the end of that arm...Is holding a gun!"

City of Steel, goddamn wonderful it was.

Anyway, I don't think it's as much a case study in point-missing as, say, John Frakes' absolutely godawful Thunderbirds movie, I'd just rather have had a director who was willing to let me see what was going on in fight scenes and mechanical designs that weren't confusing jumbles of tens of thousands of tiny moving parts. And for Bay to sign a declaration that he does not understand comedy and will stop trying to perpetrate it anyway.

[funkychinaman]

Originally Posted by Evil Tim

And for Bay to sign a declaration that he does not understand comedy and will stop trying to perpetrate it anyway.

Or race relations.

My God, "City of Steel" was TERRRRRIBLE. It had to be some of the worst animation of the entire series, and that's saying a lot given the hit or miss quality of the animation. (If you want a really gorgeous episode, check out "Call of the Primitives.")

Who exactly was the intended audience for the Thunderbirds film? And if you were going to make one, why wouldn't you make it with marionettes?