Griffith
With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
Rhombaad said:Nice review, Griff! Stephen Lang was awesome.
Yeah, he's the best I've seen in the Sergeant Badass mold for a while.
Rhombaad said:
To me it was still representative of the modern epic movie: overly long, self-indulgent, extremely high production value but at the cost of a sort paint by numbers quality, even with the drama. That sounds like I'm bashing it, but that's just the way movies have been this decade, even the good ones and the "serious" dramas seem very self-aware now. Like, scenes used to be played like they should for realism, it was practical, craft, and if material was strong and they did their job, they were great scenes, if they had that extra something or it quality to boot, that made them transcendent, it was like finding a diamond in the rough, and so craft translated into art. Now I feel like it's the opposite, it's constantly being forced. Dramatic scenes aren't just played straight, to be the practical realization of what they're portraying, they're done intentionally to look and sound like good dramatic movie scenes. So, instead of the actors and directors discovering gold, they're trying to manufacture it, and it always comes across as sort of synthetic to me, whereas a lot of older movies are more genuine and human simply by being a bit more straightforward and... appropriately unsophisticated (just compare Avatar to Aliens in that regard). It's like live action movies are of such high production value and precision, they're almost entering the uncanny valley.
