"We'll Always Have Paris" is the phrase that came to my mind.
If we are lucky, the Ghibli will be the empty shell holding the royalties/rights/etc of the Miyazaki (and other) produced movies.
If we are unlucky, someone will use the brand name to start producing (en masse) garbage, selling it to Netflix, and Netflix will be pushing garbage low-quality, hi-speed cartoons.
> If we are unlucky, someone will use the brand name to start producing (en masse) garbage, selling it to Netflix, and Netflix will be pushing garbage low-quality, hi-speed cartoons.
I would really hate to see the Ghibli version of "rings of power"
> I would really hate to see the Ghibli version of "rings of power"
Then, don’t see it.
Fans need to stop enabling these awful reboots: by withholding their wallets. These IP vampires are only motivated by money, and if we give them money as a reward for milking past franchises, then they will continue to do it.
I agree in principle, but it can be difficult in practice to vote with your wallet.
In the case of movies, once you have a ticket or purchase it or even rent it, they've got your money and have learned the lesson that people will pay, regardless of how you felt about what you watched or whether you intend to boycott future productions.
In general, though, I do try to send the signal that I'm not personally a garbage dump for low effort content, by doing a few things:
- No "guilty pleasure" watching of things that I'd prefer didn't exist, i.e. junk reality TV
- Actively avoiding clicking on things that have clickbait titles, especially if they're part of an algo-feed
- Read reviews / get reviews from friends first
- If a streaming show is bad, stop watching ASAP. Stopping at episode 2/10 is a reliable signal for Netflix et al.
Yeah; I've come to the point where I don't really want to watch "fresh" content. There's so many great movies in the back catalog, I'll probably never run out of great stuff to watch.
And if there's something great that's come out, I'll check it out after a couple of years when the reviews have settled down and all of the parts (I'm looking at you, Dune) have come out.
Prime is subsidized by a million other things. Cancelling does not send a message, or rather, the message isn't nearly specific enough to be interpreted by Amazon as "we should make a better show and/or stop making this one."
The entire feedback loop for the media industry has been perverted by tech companies and Venture Capital vampires, and it wasn't in a great place before.
Huh? I'm sure Amazon has no trouble gathering data about exactly how many of its Prime members are watching various shows/movies on their service. They're not going to pour money into something if no one is watching it. It's not like the old days of regular TV where they needed Nielsen to try to guess how many people were watching something.
People don't vote with their wallets with clear minds though. People vote with half-asleep notions of what's good based on an onslaught of direct and viral marketing combo that threatens to ostracize them from their various social/support groups if they don't consume said product. No one has the time and energy to fight that on every front, nor has the know-how in every conceivable field to understand what is a lie and what isn't.
After Game of Thrones season 3 I've began ignoring film adaptations of books I enjoy. I think the risk of tarnishing my experience with a good book is much worse than any possible film enhancement I've experienced.
The screenshots from Blade Runner 2 and Dune do look cool though.
IMHO, Denis Villeneuve (and the rest of the crew) did a wonderful job with the visuals in Dune; there's some aspects of it I don't care for, but it definitely looks cool. But then again, I also think David Lynch (and the rest of the crew) did a wonderful job with the visuals in Dune, although somethings were a bit over the top; OTOH, I first watched this one when I was like 10 and got sucked in, so I'm not unbiased. I think both films did a great job of practical shooting that will continue to look good well into the future unlike a lot of recent films that are a lot of short takes in front of a green screen (cough Star Wars after the first two; most of Marvel cough). I'm looking forward to Dune: Part 2 this year, even if I'm pretty sure I'll dislike the same things I dislike from Dune: Part 1, because the visuals are likely to be going to be wonderful.
The SciFi channel had zero budget and it showed; but I think they stuck to the book a lot better; but I don't think I'll ever rewatch them, because the visuals are so bad.
Anyway --- we can always treat adaptations as inspired by rather than based on. I, Robot is a fun action film that name drops the three laws, but is otherwise unconnected to the book. The song retains the name, as they say.
Blade Runner 2 is basically .. fan fiction done by one of the best directors ever.
The story is pointless. The movie aimless. The visuals and acting and directing absolutely stunning. As lovely as it was to look at, I'd just like my 3 hours back. The original movie was a somewhat campy but beautiful film-noir sci-fi detective thing that actually didn't take itself that seriously, despite being aesthetically quite serious. The new thing took itself way way way too seriously.
But Dune 1 is amazing. Highly recommended, and I'm a deep Dune nerd (... but not the Brian Herbert crap, that's not Dune) for decades.
It's not the "same" as the book -- it lacks a lot of what's there -- but it's enough of the book and amazing in its own right that it's absolutely worth the experience.
> The screenshots from Blade Runner 2 and Dune do look cool though.
Good news about Dune! It's actually a good movie. It's both close to the book and makes the right calls in changing what needs to be changed for the big screen. It looks amazing, too. Give it a chance.
Bad news about Blade Runner 2: it's not good. It looks good, but the movie is pointless and jarringly bad acted at times (Jared Leto, enough said). And I say this as someone who absolutely loves Blade Runner, so I'm not one of the naysayers who found it "boring". It's not boring -- it's bad and pointless. Someone here called it "fanfiction", and that's what it is: fanfiction by a very competent director who doesn't truly understand the source material.
No, not run scremaing! God Emperor and beyond are awesome. But they're not the same thing, no. They're far more philosophical, and kind of about something else.
I think the second and the third was okay, but the fourth was... hmm maybe "decline" is not the right word, it was as if I walked into my favorite coffee shop and they decided to drop a bunch of bricks and PVC pipes on my laps because that's what they do now. (Can't talk about later books - I kinda stopped there and never picked up again. Maybe I should.)
God Emperor is a slog, but sets the groundwork for Heretics and Chapterhouse, and they're in my opinion very good. I've re-read Chapterhouse more than any of the others.
But I think he meant for there to be a final one to follow it, and so it closes off somewhat unsatisfactorily.
Blade Runner 2 was a great film. I think made slightly worse by its connections to the original. But I would recommend it. It’s nice that it is far enough in the future that it is a different world concept and there is no inclination to care about the canon.
I'm a fan of Blade Runner and really disliked Blade Runner 2.
To be honest, it didn't stand a chance with me: BR2 is a movie that didn't need to get made. Someone else in this thread called it "fanfiction", and that's what it is: technically very well made, but pointless fanfiction nonetheless.
But if I had a slightly open mind about it, the inclusion of old Deckard, the chew-the-scenery overacting of Jared Leto (and actor that is always hard to like), and that ridiculous "I'm the best" Luv -- which is miles behind the marvelously inspired Roy Batty -- were the final nail (nails?) in the coffin of this trainwreck of a movie.
The only saving graces are set design, K and the implications about Joi and her mass-produced but convincing displays of affection. The rest of the story is pointless and most of the characters are unlikable and badly acted.
Again, no movie would have satisfied me. I think the very concept of a Blade Runner sequel is wrong and a mistake; but Hollywood must march on, I guess.
Idk. I thought the hooker scene and the android test scene were phenomenal and interesting. If the first one asked if synthetic life could be human, this one seemed to argue that it’s arguably inevitable if the beings are living real lives; and the ultimate meaningless of the distinction. I thought that was great.
I agree Ford and Leto were distractions to the detriment of the film. Would have been fine as an independent original film and not blade runner although the reflections of the original did help highlight the themes.
The hooker scene did nothing for me, but the replicant alignment test was interesting. I think K was an interesting character.
I do agree there were some good questions asked by the film (just not anything to do with Wallace's "vision" -- boy did this ruin the movie for me!).
> Would have been fine as an independent original film and not blade runner
Yes. I would have received this way better had it been an original film with echoes of Blade Runner (so I would have been spared, for example, the ridiculous execution of clone-Rachael) instead of an official sequel.
I can accept "I'm a director who admires Blade Runner and want to do a film that is a homage to it", but cannot accept "I want to do Blade Runner 2".
For the record, I think Villeneuve is a good director and also think this was a genuine attempt at doing something good. It just happens that it was a bad idea, doomed to fail.
I can't believe how many people in this thread are dunking on Blade Runner 2. I thought it was phenomenal.
The "fanservicy" stuff in this movie fits really well with the rest of its themes. It's not like Indiana Jones 5 or Star Wars 9, where the directors are just pulling back old characters in the hopes that you'll overlook shoddy writing because you like the characters. K is a well-developed character, without a sense of purpose, identity, or agency, caught in the crossfire of cartoonish and 1-dimensional characters who are just using him to advance their cause. The reprisal of old characters, and the eccentricity of other characters, all of it adds to the feeling that K doesn't belong.
There's so much more that I want to say about it but I'm worried about spoiling the movie to people who haven't seen it. I'd recommend it to anyone remotely interested in it.
I don't begrudge you for liking the movie, I just cannot bring myself to like it. Mostly because the movie was unnecessary, but also because of all its crappy details.
I do like K and I agree with you his lack of agency and his helplessness is a plus. Gosling does a good job, too. And Joi is an interesting reflection on manufactured feelings and appealing to consumers who all think they are special.
But seriously it's hard to defend the other, cartoonish characters, who constantly ham it up to 11. Contrast, you say? Maybe.. but you cannot have a movie of bad actors (or good actors acting badly) and expect me to enjoy it.
Also, Roy Batty is so much better an antagonist than Luv (or anyone else in BR2, really) that it hurts. Luv and Wallace are seriously the worst in this movie; every second of Wallace is painful to watch.
Harrison Ford didn't seem particularly inspired, either.
Aliens and Terminator 2 are beloved by fans, but most sequels seem to be either overt cash grabs, or a director trying and failing to recapture what made the first movie special.
> Again, no movie would have satisfied me. I think the very concept of a Blade Runner sequel is wrong and a mistake; but Hollywood must march on, I guess.
I hope out hope that a very special directory/writer team could pull off something wonderful, but in practice you're probably right.
Dune has the opposite problem, the movie by itself is quite confusing and even boring to newcomers, but people who had read the book can really appreciate its effort to stay true to the source material. It is a very difficult story to adapt.
I'll be calling it that from here on, so thanks for that, but I admit I was pleasantly surprised by how good it is. Studio Mir rarely disappoints in terms of quality (although I still think The Legend of Korra was their best work), but I really wasn't expecting the rest of the show to be worth watching.
Animation style—eh, it changes, cartoons have been getting more stylized/less detailed since, like, the 80’s. It turns out characters don’t need a million belts and pockets to be compelling, haha.
Theme-wise, Steven Universe is pretty well received.
Oh I agree, its just that Superman has always been painted as a wholesome softie only in contrast to his more brooding teammates (JLA, anything that DC has produced).
Yet, here he is in a cutesy setting where rarely anyone is brooding, and somehow it just works. It even feels more true to his character, as the lightness of his personality and others is even more contrasted to the seriousness of the situations they face (similar thematically to old school Teen Titans perhaps), and also makes the argument that Earth influenced him for the better as a child much more compelling.
The stakes are high, but goodness and strength of character prevails. Best animated version I've seen so far.
Who cares? The past has happened, and nobody can change it, nobody can go back and unmake those movies we saw. Nobody can take the memories away.
The point is it doesn’t matter anymore. Someone can take the name and make mass produced garbage, you don’t have to watch it. Ghibli doesn’t mean anything. Let it go. People care too much about keeping everything exactly the same.
I agree, but it seems like many people are incapable of thinking this way. See the number of people who say that new star wars ruined old star wars, "ruined their childhood" even. How? How can a new movie ruin an old movie? Causality does not work in that direction. But some people think it does and the illogicality of their position doesn't change the fact of how they genuinely feel.
People who claim a new movie ruined their childhood are just being over-dramatic, are using it as a shorthand for it destroyed a thing from their childhood, or both.
I do think, though, that sequel can make a story worse pretty easily. For example, the combined story of the Star Wars sequels, prequels, and originals is simply worse than the originals alone. When you just watched the originals, you could imagine your own Clone Wars, they could be whatever cool thing you want. Dropping neat-sounding hints and letting the audience fill in the gaps with whatever cool thing they imagine is a classic storytelling technique get a free feeling of depth. Replacing that cool thing the audience imagined with trade negotiations makes the story worse.
Similarly, character arcs are a thing. The protagonists usually win and end up in a happy place, at least in a non-grimdark universe like Star Wars. Making a sequel that says: Actually Luke Skywalker spent the rest of his life failing and ended up as a miserable old grump makes his story arc worse.
You can just watch the original movies and ignore the rest of course, it is after all fiction so getting the whole story doesn’t really matter. But these are huge releases that get lots of press, and I think it is unrealistic to expect fans to just ignore them.
Maybe I'm making too much of it, perhaps it's just the modern style to use hyperbolic rhetoric in movie reviews.
But for new movies to make old movies worse used to be an uncommon attitude I think. I remember in the 90s and 00s, lots of movies had really shitty sequels, often straight to DVD, but nobody talked about these cash grabs ruining the original movie. For instance Aliens 3, Alien Resurrection and then all the AvP crap... some people like these (I think Aliens 3 is defensible FWIW) but a lot of people really don't. Still, nobody talks about Alien or Aliens (e.g. 1 & 2) being ruined by the later movies. Aliens 3 is frequently criticized for the way it killed well-liked characters from Aliens, but that doesn't stop people from still enjoying Aliens. People just choose to ignore Aliens 3. And why shouldn't they, because Aliens 3 is canon? That's just a legal IP relationship, that doesn't matter.
And Disney has dozens of straight-to-vhs/dvd cashgrab sequels of their classic animated movies, people who don't care for them just ignore them and they aren't said to ruin the originals. There used to be a general understanding that sequels are very rarely good, people were pleasantly surprised when it was otherwise and nobody said their life was ruined by a bad sequel. Because who cares about cannon in animated disney movies?
I've seen Lucas's Clone Wars, but if I watch the original Star Wars I'm not compelled to relate it to the Clone Wars movie. By simply choosing to ignore it because I don't like it, I free myself to imagine my own clone wars.
I think new movies ruining the originals is some relatively recent cultural phenomena that was brought on by internet culture's obsession with canon. The existence of popular sites like wookiepedia both evidence it and drive it. If I'm wrong and it's not an overabundance of respect for IP laws that is the root of this, then why isn't bad fanfic also said to ruin the original?
Of course, it is fiction, so if you want to have your own version of the story and cut off the bad parts, that’s definitely not hurting anyone.
Nowadays studios really lean into the idea of establishing an expanded universe and canon, since then it becomes a recurring revenue stream and all that. So, I wonder if this is an aspect of that trend, just a different way people tell stories and, as a result, consume them.
I think people ignore 90’s disney cash grab sequels mostly because they were so garbage that they didn’t get integrated into the cultural zeitgeist (and also, people who loved Lion King when it came out were too old to care about the sequel).
Stuff like the Star Wars prequels is not quite at that level of badness, might be marketed toward everyone, so it enters the general conversation about the movies. Of course, it is possible to not engage in that stuff, but then, I guess people who are talking about Star Wars in 2023 are interested in the whole thing, right? You can only think about 3 movies for so long, haha. So, I bet lots of people saw them movies, have fond memories, and then moved on, but they aren’t talking about it anymore.
I think some of the reason for the strong reaction is Star Wars is for kids while Aliens is not. There are a lot of people who were in an age of innocence when they watched Star Wars and it gets them upset if the new movies aren't entertaining to them as adults. Even if you did watch Aliens as a kid it's a horror movie in space with a giant bug in the shadows making it a lot less relatable.
I think it must be kind of like desecrating a corpse. Maybe watching someone dig up and do something prolonged and unthinkable to the body of your dead grandmother can't undo all the lovely years you had together, but if witnessing that act enraged you, you might find that suddenly every time you see her photo or visit her grave you're reminded of what you saw and that it upsets you all over again.
Not saying I fully buy it but I think the fans’ point is that what Disney is doing to Star Wars today is diminishing the entirety of Star Wars, the average of past + present. Every new Transformers or Indiana Jones or Ice Age makes the overall work worse, regardless of whether you even see it.
> I think the fans’ point is that what Disney is doing to Star Wars today is diminishing the entirety of Star Wars, the average of past + present
Lucas was at the helm for Return of the Jedi, Star Tours, and the three prequels. I think we can't lay the blame for the Holiday Special on him, but that certainly happened too. There's the Ewok tv movies too, which thankfully I've never seen.
Even if all the Disney Star Wars films are crap, they're just continuing the trend. I prefer to simply believe there are two Star Wars films, and let others believe what they want to believe.
I think it is not just diluting the quality to get a worse average. Fiction often involves the audience filling in the gaps: Someone drops a hint that characters have known each other a long time; you can imagine that as you’d like. In the end, you get “and they lived happily ever after,” you decide what “happily ever after” looks like.
Sequels and prequels need to add more drama and action, so happily ever after never ends up being all that happy.
Narrative causality does work that way; a later-made prequel can ruin a story element that was fine in an earlier-made sequel. This is infohazards 101.
The Star Wars brand means one experience to said person.
You mix other experiences into the soup and he'll say it's ruined.
It's true that his experience has been changed and it's also true that we are allowed to change his experience of the Star Wars brand.
The positivity/negativity of people's reactions is a red herring. They are both valid.
The real danger is when people try to gaslight people who have had a bad experience and then try to fuse/melt people, into yet another new Star Wars themed experience.
It makes you stop wanting to feel anything positive about the brand entirely.
It shouldn't be so difficult to get older generations and younger generations to watch the same product and come off with a positive experience.
Star Wars doesn't do it though, they fragment off the older generations into niche media, trying to recapture the past.
Maybe it's because they re-released modified versions of the original Star Wars trilogy[1]. Although timing wise, some of the re-releases happened before the Star Wars prequels, including the "Han shot first" controversy[2]. Some people's childhood might be ruined by the altercations, but it seems unfair that the new Star Wars are fully to blame.
If we are unlucky, someone will use the brand name to start producing (en masse) garbage, selling it to Netflix, and Netflix will be pushing garbage low-quality, hi-speed cartoons.