Films The Official bit-tech Movie Thread - What have you seen lately?

What does world building mean?

 

Give me half a chance, and I'll bore you to tears. I'm just usually too knackered and worn out/down to bother by the time I finish work

 

Establishing an interesting and somewhat plausible fictional "world" or "universe" that is in someway fantastical (rather than based in the real world). Peak examples include the Lord of The Rings where Tolkein went as far as to generate entire mythologies, creation stories and multiple languages for Middle Earth.

 

To continue: in film it usually refers to visual design, sound design and script elements that mesh together to naturally suggest a plausible world beyond the immediate filmed scenes. In LotR, for example, different groups of people having distinct weapons and costumes whose designs are informed by their species, location, history, industry, values and lifestyles. The design of Faramir's plain, underwhelming sword in film 2 tells us that he is a less favoured son; the crudely angled black steel weapons of the orcs tell us that they are utilitarian, unsentimental and working to economies of scale rather than through a process of refinement. The intricate detail and impractical excess on Eowyn's domestic costume tells us that she's socially important, yet ornamental, shut away, precluded from practical activities, in stark contrast to most of the other Rohirrim, whose outfits are ruggedly practical and slightly unattractive.

In the Predator franchise, a good example of worldbuilding is the shot we see in...#2?....of the ship interior with various alien species' body parts cleaned and presented as trophies. It isn't strictly new information about the Predator species' behaviour but it codifies that the Predators visit many worlds, dominate on all of them, and have a deep and elaborate culture of trophy hunting (where film #1 left the exact motivations of its Predator fairly obscure; he could have been a lone serial killer from his species for all we knew).

Aside: one of my pet peeves in modern cinema is that, in a well-intentioned push towards colour-blind casting and inclusivity, a lot of modern projects (particularly fantasy films) totally fail to use ethnicity and genetics in casting to tell a story, casting mixed ethnicities within one group who in-lore are supposed to have been geographically locked for many generations, and casting visually dissimilar, clearly non-related actors as family members or even as the same character at different ages. Complaints about this point are often misconstrued as basic racism in the viewership, but it's actually a failure of worldbuilding, because the creative choices being made are directly undermining the sense that the world is a really existing place. To intuition pump this one only need look at the sci-fi genre, where films like Alien never receive flak for their scattershot ethnic casting because it's not only plausible, but excellent world-building that the ragtag crew of a deep space mining ship in the future would all look totally ethnically dissimilar and unrelated.

(Rant over; the LotR thing reminded me of this, because it was one of the more conspicuous talking points when Rings of Power came out, and the quality of the discourse on this point was atrocious, everybody talking past each other and nobody getting into the weeds of why ethnic casting matters for worldbuilding in a fantasy setting of this type.)

Predator Badlands still on my watchlist. Still got no idea what to expect.

 

Days of Thunder: I want to become a NASCAR driver/10

Never watched this before this weekend. Bit of a weird film as it doesn't really go anywhere, but it's fun to see the competitiveness and camaraderie Cruise and Rooker's characters have. Definitely a manly film for manly men and I enjoyed it. A whole load of famous supporting actors too.

 

Project Hail Mary: Amaze amaze amaze (8/10)

Very well-done adaptation of the book. Despite all its sci-fi trappings, it’s ultimately a human story at its heart. The amount of scientific detail has been massively reduced from the book, but there’s still plenty of detail to keep nerds like me interested. The detail that is there is presented in a very accessible way - for example, instead of “days of course calculations” as described in the book, there’s a few quick shots of Ryan Gosling scribbling calculations on a whiteboard. Visually, it’s absolutely fantastic: the sets are amazing, I didn’t notice any intrusive VFX “weirdness”, and the fact that so much is practical really shines through on camera. The Hail Mary itself is massively expanded compared to the book, but it works very well and nothing feels out of place. On an initial watch, there were a few things I didn’t think worked too well for me, but that’s very much an “I know the book too well” thing and it’s mostly how characters are portrayed - I’ll reserve proper judgement until I’ve seen it at least once more.

Honestly though… I’m not sure if it eclipses The Martian for me. Project Hail Mary is definitely the better of the two books, but at the moment I think The Martian is the film I enjoy more. But it’s a pretty high bar to clear: The Martian is one of my favourite films of all time.

The latter is very much a subjective personal preference, and I think it comes down to the fact that The Martian feels much more like a science fiction film than Project Hail Mary. For example: Hohmann transfers are a big plot point in The Martian (I don't think that term is actually used in the film, but that’s what they are), but getting from one astronomical body to another is not an issue in Project Hail Mary. That’s not a slight on the writing or “scientific plausibility” of Project Hail Mary; it’s more that space travel in The Martian relies on technology we could theoretically build right now, whereas Project Hail Mary has… without wanting to give too much away… “better solutions”.

But. None of that diminishes the fact that Project Hail Mary is a great film in its own right. And also you should absolutely read the book - or, better yet, listen to the brilliant audiobook. But this is the “films” thread not the “books” thread, so I’ll save further gushing until another time .

 

The ship set was a transformer!

 

Bizarrely, the new missus and I also watched this last night, unintentionally. I chucked it on as a throwaway because she was faffing about but we ended up watching it through. It's basically Top Car with an almost identical plot, but it's still loud and good. However...

Bore Machine (Netflix) was absolutely atrocious. Dull, derivative, unimaginative, clichéd and whatever other words in a similar vein you can think of. Utter waste of time. Yet another of those "how did this get signed off?" budgetary wastes.

 

I watched those the day they were released - the ship set is flipping awesome.

Seriously, an incredible amount of effort and attention to detail went into it, and it absolutely shows through in the final result. The fact that every screen, switch, doodad, and widget on every panel was made, and had custom RGB lighting, is insane. And a lot of those controls actually did something. None of the screens were just blank green to be filled in by VFX/CGI later, they were all working screens with their own custom animations & graphics.

Speaking of the screens… check that first video from about 12:10 onwards (direct timestamp link), where they walk through the printed graphic of the cockpit panel design. Some of the screens have text on them which reads “Pimoroni HDMI 10" LCD Screen Kit (1024x768)” - it’s flipped horizontally, but it’s there. I sure hope the production company did some kind of deal with Pimoroni, because they’d get a bit pricy at £120 a pop .

 

Tron Ares: These aren't the droids you're looking for / 10

I would just summarise as lacking any charm at all. The first Tron isn't exactly a master piece but it had heart, a novel concept and visuals. Tron: Legacy also far from a perfect film but the visuals and soundtrack at least gave it a sense of spectacle and "cool". This just seemed to think it was being cool whilst poorly imitating the others. Jared Leto seems devoid of any personality - maybe he was acting was being a "program" but I just didn't care about the character one jot. This could equally apply to the whole cast who seemed to be such obvious character tropes (evil CEO, visionary CEO, geeky CTO) that it was bordering on parody.

The set pieces / action was sometimes compelling and othertimes increadibly janky with obvious green screen use during chase sequences. The highlight really being re-entering the 1980's Tron world (though Ares announcing that he loves the 80s made me want to switch the movie off!). It could have been a really interesting story direction if it had been Flynn junior following in his fathers footsteps, or Flynn Senior reliving his previous adventure, but it just felt hollow with Ares and barely moved the story along.

Sound track was okay, some tracks felt "tron" like but others just were a bit bland. Obviously impossible to follow / one up daft punk (at least in my eyes) but it just didn't quite hit the mark.

Overall I just wouldn't bother watching - not enough redeeming qualities.

 

The audiobook is narrated by the same guy who narrated the Bobiverse books, which is definite plus for me

 

Aye, the Bobiverse books have cropped up a few times here and there recently, been meaning to pick them up. My OH started the first book on Audible recently, but couldn’t get too far into it: it was too distracting hearing a voice she so closely associated with Project Hail Mary

 

Predator Badlands.

Not a Predator movie, but I get it - it would stand up on its own as a mediocre sci-fi right of passage type deal but tying it to predator canon is an economical way of giving it a back story while saving on a ****-ton of exposition.

The problem is the disservice it does to the Predator franchise. Seriously, a ****ing puppy?!

 

The Mask: 11/10

There are films out there that are essentially perfect. The Back to the Future Trilogy, Alien & Aliens, Scarface etc.

The Mask is one of those films.

It is not big. It is not clever. What it is is a relatively short, tightly delivered family friendly comedy film. I was watching it with my 7 year old nephew, and like I did when I watched it over three decades ago in the cinema, loved every minute of it.

I'm sure everyone here has watched it. If not, please make time for it - you'll not be disappointed.

And Cameron Diaz is jaw droppingly gorgeous in it.

 

Is she as gorgeous as me though?

 

Sorry chap, you can't pull off the high heels and red lipstick in quite the same way.

 

BUT HOW DO YOU KNOW?!

 

Thanks all the same, BUT I DON'T WANT TO KNOW

 

FFS, switch off your webcam, fella.

My eyes!!!

 

Your name suggests a resemblance to the WoW Draenei race. Somebody must like that squid-face look...