Worst movie marketing ever...

MattinSTL said:
Alien and Aliens still give me chills.

You know... sometimes I wonder... is it really a bad thing that Hollywood's pumping out so much CGI and techni-candy-colored fluff? Or... is all that sugary "perfection" just making it that much easier for truly good films to rise above the rest?

Can you imagine if a really gripping film experience like the original Alien came out this year? (with modest and appropriate updates)... When I first saw Alien I was freaked out by how effective it was.
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Well, you might get the answer when Ridley Scott's Prometheus is released next year. Supposedly it has some aliens in it and is going to tie into the Alien films in some way while also possibly acting as the starting point for a new sci-fi film series. Originally it was going to be a prequel to Alien, but now they are going in a different direction but still setting it in the Alien universe.

Batutta said:
What I worry about is whether the younger generations have gotten so accustomed to CGI that they think it looks more real than reality. I was watching an old Harryhausen monster movie and my 7 year old caught a glimpse and said, "It doesn't even look real!"
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Yeah, the point is not necessarily whether it looks real or not. In the end it is all about compelling storytelling. That is why in comparison to old classics like the Harryhausen ones or the original King Kong, we can have still films like 300, Sin City, Watchmen, and to some extent even Avatar fall into a similar category. The effects in those are either super stylized or almost hyperreal to some extent.
 
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If I were to make a list of the top 10 mistakes made by most modern movies... "showing too much"... would be near the top of the list for anything that's supposed to be scary. Our own imaginations are far more terrifying then a meticulously designed CGI monster.

I'll bet if you turn down the lights and give your kid a viewing of Alien(s) that he/she won't sleep through the night for weeks :)

The younger generation may think the old effects look outdated (and in many films, I agree... "the thing", for example)... but CGI is in it's own "non-scary" category. CGI, unless done perfectly... and by that I mean NOT showing everything you can... is very comforting in it's cartoony perfection. The really good filmmakers use all the tools available, but also use their heads to discriminate between using "all" of the visual CGI available... vs. using it the right way for the most effective story.

I often see CGI as akin to a filmmaker that spent a lot to get a location, and hence feels compelled to fully show and light every inch of it so we see the total investment.

Put one of those CGI monsters in the dark... with only 10% of it rendered beyond a silhouette... and they may actually scare the audience with the effect, instead of showing off every detail of how good the CGI is. Anybody see the trailer for Dylan Dog? Sheesh... compare that with a GREAT concept... the old Night Stalker series... where you had a bumbling investigator with his brownie camera, who never got any hard evidence on his investigations, which always nearly killed him... or else you can fully reveal all your CGI effects, get an overly perfect protagonist without apparent vulnerabilities, and congratulations... you just made another forgettable movie.
 
Agreed Matt.

Many films have no set-up to a scene, just wanting to blurt everything out a the screen. Horror movies may be the worst culprits. It's crappy jump scare after crappy jump scare, zero atmosphere created. Scream 4 is the latest example I've seen of this, pathetic.
 
MattinSTL said:
Put one of those CGI monsters in the dark... with only 10% of it rendered beyond a silhouette... and they may actually scare the audience with the effect, instead of showing off every detail of how good the CGI is. Anybody see the trailer for Dylan Dog? Sheesh... compare that with a GREAT concept... the old Night Stalker series... where you had a bumbling investigator with his brownie camera, who never got any hard evidence on his investigations, which always nearly killed him... or else you can fully reveal all your CGI effects, get an overly perfect protagonist without apparent vulnerabilities, and congratulations... you just made another forgettable movie.
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The Night Stalker is a pretty cool series. I heard it was a huge inspiration for Chris Carter when he was creating The X-Files. Both series have that darkness to them that keeps things mysterious and tense. Also, not just for the visual effects, but for the actual storytelling The X-Files kept the characters in the dark about all the mysterious conspiracy stuff about the government cover-ups and alien abductions. They might have dragged it out a bit too long over the show's nine seasons, but they kept the show compelling for so long because there was always this big labyrinthine mystery that Mulder had to work so hard to solve.

So in a sense, it was sort of the same as the clever ways in which classic monster films like Jaws and Alien slowly revealed their monsters, but in this case the story was what was slowly revealed. If some character on The X-Files just blurted out the whole story and all the motives behind the conspiracy in the first couple of episodes, it would have been a much less interesting series. Speaking of characters, The X-Files had some great enigmatic ones that sometimes hardly ever spoke a word. The cigarette smoking man and the alien bounty hunter were fascinating because they were like a walking mystery that the audience would then discuss later on, and attempt to guess what were these character's true motives.

I think this same thing applies to other TV shows like Twin Peaks, Lost, and the new Battlestar Galactica. So in a way, the less is more concept can also apply to plotting a story and not just in regards to visual effects presentation.
 
X-files is in the top 10 shows of all time, IMO. Seasons 1-6 were just epic television.

And I still think that CGI (3d created elements, not FX), even at the level it's at now, is still only really perfect for non-living elements. Robots, cars, buildings, windows, etc.

If lighting is used effectively (like some of the night scenes in Avatar) or if it's something completely beyond our scope of experience and done to perfection (Jurassic Park), I think CGI can convince us at times. But in the end, every 10 years or so whatever we were doing in CGI loses its realism. I mean, staying with the Alien motif -- look at the mind-numbingly bad CGI in Alien 3. :P
 
I think that was very wise for Scott to use the title Prometheus and set it in the "Alien Universe", it may be a small distinction, but having another Alien film with Aliens doing the same Alien thing would be doom, no matter who is directing it.

That Conan trailer looks worse than the Planet of the Apes sequel remake.

Agree those first posters are awful.
 
Back in the original zombie-fest I wanted to do a Prometheus script... we had a really good idea and a really good script for it... but I just couldn't pull it off. I'm both excited and bummed that a real filmmaker is running with the Prometheus concept.
 
If it makes you feel any better, way back in the late 1980's John Carpenter had a Prometheus project planned that never came off.

Wait, wait, found a link. It's not so much the same story.
 
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