Hatrack River Writers Workshop: 2012---**SPOILERS*** Honestly, do you really care?

This is topic 2012---**SPOILERS*** Honestly, do you really care? in forum Grist for the Mill at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by LAJD (Member # 8070) on :

So, I am an aficionado of all things disaster. It comes from going to school in tornado alley and moving to the home of fires and earthquakes.

I loved the Core (really, I did), the Day after Tomorrow and both Armageddon and the chick flick version, Deep Impact. So lets just say I ran to see 2012 yesterday.

I never thought I'd say this, but there was too much dialog in that movie, not enough explosions. And they did not start early enough and ..HELLO...PLOT?

And did you see? They used the same "plane through the falling buildings" routine in both LA and Vegas. C'mon let's have some originality! What about a train through a collapsing mountain? It would work!

And don't get me started on the ending.... what-ever.

I came home and watched the spoof trailer...2012! Its a Disaster! Waaay funnier and just the right length for the subject matter.
Here it is..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW2qxFkcLM0
Enjoy...

Posted by BenM (Member # 8329) on :

Haha, great video. I'm so out of touch with what's on in the cinema I didn't even know there was a 2012 movie.

Posted by Dark Warrior (Member # 8822) on :

But the Russian accents were spot on! lol

Posted by LAJD (Member # 8070) on :

ohmigod..the russian accents made that movie. that was the best!

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

It's not the kind of movie I'd see, unless I happened on it while flipping through channels. (That's how I saw part of "Independence Day.") After seeing it for real, I've lost all interest in any fictional destruction of well-known buildings. I'm surprised movies have carried on with it.

And, from media reports, the (fictional) destruction of various landmarks associated with various religions, leaves an important landmark and religion out. Cowards.

Posted by Dark Warrior (Member # 8822) on :

haha...even the dog barked with a russian accent.

RN- I was curious about the recent trend of destroying aircraft carriers. The USS Roosevelt in Transformers 2 and the USS Kennedy in 2012.

Suppose the next movie will be 2062? The year that Sir Isaac Newton time-lined the biblical apocalypse

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

If I hadn't'a known about the so-called "calendar cycle" that ends in December 2012 (I forget the exact date), I might've thought that "2012" was some kind of knockoff of "2001."

I think what movie producers look for is an image that looks cool, whether it makes much sense or not. Destroying an aircraft carrier probably beats destroying a rowboat in this case. Is there ever much point to the wanton destruction in these movies?

Posted by LAJD (Member # 8070) on :

That's the point, it's disaster porn. No point at all, just silly blow stuff up nonsense. The overbearing smack you up against the side of the head symbolism was the worst too, the JF Kennedy ship coming home (crashing into) the white house, the crack in the Sistine chapel between the finger of God touching the finger of man, Puhleeeze. <eye-roll>

RN- what religious symbol did they miss? I guess they missed Mecca...not up on my religious symbols...

I must say the family had much mocking fun with that movie! I thought my physicist-trained husband was going implode with the neutrino induced boiling water....LOL!

Ahhh, Hollywood.....where do they get the investors for that crap?
Leslie

Posted by Dark Warrior (Member # 8822) on :

And it is only going to get worse. He is a status update from Michael Bay's Facebook page. He is the director of Transformers and The Island, I met him on that set and he is quite a dynamic character.

quote:
Michael Bay just saw Roland Emmerich's "2012". Good job Roland...but I'll do better!

Guess we can look forward to the movie 2012 the Sequel: 2013? Ironic quote since Michael Bay destroyed the first carrier, which pissed me off since i served in The Gulf War on that ship, and Roland Emmerich/Ute Emmerich destroyed the second carrier. Most likely he is talking about Transformers 3...btw, according to his facebook he is close to signing Spinal Tap to do the soundtrack...bizarre.

Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

What would be cool is if the next aircraft carrier IS a transformer. (Or have they already done that, and I missed the movie?)

Edited to add:

I've decided that movie special effects are an art form all their own, and there are some people who appreciate such movies just because they appreciate that particular art form.

I figure it's a valid art form, after all. You don't expect some kinds of paintings or sculptures to have plots, right?

[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited November 17, 2009).]

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

Mecca it is---or isn't, as the case may be. Wasn't Michael Bay the director of Pearl Harbor? Boy, there's three hours of my life I'll never get back...

Posted by Dark Warrior (Member # 8822) on :

Pearl Harbor, and Bad Boys. He was blasted for those movies but actually gained some positive crits for The Island, which led to Transformers and some decent acclaim. Not so much for Transformers 2.

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

quote:
I've decided that movie special effects are an art form all their own, and there are some people who appreciate such movies just because they appreciate that particular art form.
I figure it's a valid art form, after all. You don't expect some kinds of paintings or sculptures to have plots, right?

To a certain extent, I expect a work of art, whether a story with plot-and-character, or just a representation of some scene, to move me on some intellectual or emotional level...I react to the painting, or the sculpture, or the movie, in some way...I engage with the work.

And the work also has to engage with me. Back in the 1990s, maybe I might have been more moved by something like Independence Day...but the events of September 11th, 2001, eliminated that for me. I see a building collapse and I can only think of how many people died in it. (How many people would have died in the events of 2012?

The movies that have moved me the most lately were the two most recent Disney / Pixar movies, Wall-E and Up. Certainly they are special-effects-laden---you could hardly do an animated movie on computers without special effects---but they have a story, they have characters, they have a point...they go somewhere and get somewhere. (The segment in Up called "Married Life" on the DVD is among the saddest film sequences ever done.)

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

I'm glad the above posted---as I clicked on "submit reply" my AOL program cut me off. I don't think I would've had the heart to attempt it again if it'd had been lost in cyberspace...

Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

quote:
I see a building collapse and I can only think of how many people died in it.

I certainly agree with you there, Robert. That's why I probably won't go see 2012, and why I'm not really interested in disaster films in general.

There are other kinds of special effects, as you pointed out, and lots of different ways they can be used in movies. And I prefer a plot with interesting characters as well.

Just trying to explain (understand?) the people who pack the box offices for movies with little or no plot and characterization, but gazillions of special effects.

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

Yup, movies-of-today generally leave me out, too. I never got into the habit when younger, and I only go to a few movies over the course of decades. (The last one I saw was Up, and that because I enjoyed their previous WALL-E so much that I regretted not seeing that in a theater.)

But some movie do use their special effects to move character and plot along. Ghostbusters or The Lord of the Rings or even the Star Wars movies---it's not all about the bang and the boom. And some manage to be monumentally big hits at the box office, as well.

Posted by philocinemas (Member # 8108) on :

I saw this disaster (movie) on opening night with some friends I've had for the last 25 years (yes, someone can stay friends with me that long without killing me). It was their idea to see it. Anyway, I hated this movie, but at the same time, I laughed all the way through it in an "Ed Wood" kind of way.

I cannot remember ever watching something so preposterous in my life. However, the special effects were amazing. Whoever said that seeing is believing?

Grade - D (It would have been an F if the effects had been as bad as they were unbelievable)

Posted by philocinemas (Member # 8108) on :

Oh, and I agree with Robert about Pixar movies - I liked Wall-E a little better than Up. Finding Nemo and The Incredibles have been my two favorites. Pixar is the best movie studio by far - live action or animated!

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

I generally prefer preposteous stories in the movies if I go in knowing they're true. Titanic or A Night to Remember...iceberg hits a ship on its maiden voyage...not enough lifeboats for everybody...yeah, right, nobody'd believe that if it weren't true...

I got a certain amount of enjoyment out of the disaster movies of the 1970s, like The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno. (Saw the latter in a theater---it wasn't my idea to go, it was my parents', and we spent about three hours in line to see it---this was way before multiplexes were common.) I don't think they neglected character and plot (and mostly-better actors) as much as their mordern-day successors...The Poseidon Adventure in particular had a neat way of playing off the notion of "weak" and "strong" in who survived and who didn't as they journeyed through the sinking ship. Would that something like [i2012 put as much into it as they did...even though it wasn't much.

(Come to think of it, the first movie I ever went to see all on my own was Star Wars. Now there was an interesting movie with bang-bang explosions and a plot and characters. And Alec Guinness, too.)

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

Come to think of it, my favorite movies of the past year tended to the preposterous all along. Up? How many balloons would it really take to lift a house, and I know sails won't work on a balloon. WALL-E? Would any mass-produced gadget, much less a robot, survive seven hundred years? Would any of them develop a personality?

(I see I left some kind of typo in the above entry, trying to italicize, I guess. Ordinarily I'd correct it, but it's been two days, and that seems a little long to go into it again.)

Posted by Dark Warrior (Member # 8822) on :

quote:
Would any mass-produced gadget, much less a robot, survive seven hundred years?

haha...yes because he was a cannibal, stealing the parts off other dead WallE's and using them on himself. I will always love that movie because it sparked the initial idea for a screenplay I am developing.

Posted by philocinemas (Member # 8108) on :

Robert, I have different believability criteria for a cartoon (animated movie), than I do for live action.

I would never hold Bugs Bunny to the same standards of The Wizard of Oz or Gone with the Wind (although Bugs did do Scarlet once). I would never hold The Secret of NIMH to the same standards as Return of the Jedi.

Good or bad, a live action movie receives greater scrutiny from me than a cartoon, especially when the movie is not portraying itself as fantasy.

Posted by Dark Warrior (Member # 8822) on :

quote:
I have different believability criteria for a cartoon (animated movie), than I do for live action

But, looking at Beowulf I believe that actors will someday be reduced to voice-overs, and all movies will be animated, and nearly impossible to distinguish from live-action.

Posted by philocinemas (Member # 8108) on :

Beowulf is a great example of this, Dark Warrior. The feats of Beowulf were beyond what I would normally accept as believable. The fact that the movie was depicted in a "near-live" format would also cause me to question the believability of the story. However, because it was fantasy, I can accept it easier. If one of the characters in Final Fantasy had been able to do these things without a scientific explanation, I would not have been able to accept it and would have been critical of the movie for that reason. This was because Final Fantasy was science fiction and not fantasy (oddly enough).

DW, regarding your comment about animation one day replacing live action, I seriously doubt this will ever occur. One of the main reasons is the tabloids. People have a certain fascination with stars - the human kind. Beowulf did not have to use the likenesses of real actors. However, it was deemed that the movie would have greater success if it did. Even animated movie-makers feel that their movies will have greater success if they use the voices of real recognizable stars. Why spend millions of dollars on voices if it didn't pay off?

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

If they could figure out how to generate sound to the same specs that they can generate pictures, then they could dispense with those pesky actors once and for all...

Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

I remember hearing more than once that George Lucas wished he didn't have to work with actors. If that's true, he may be working on the voice thing (or, at least have his ILM people working on it).

Back to 2012, though. Did the movie say what actually triggered all the disaster stuff? -- what happened on 21 Dec 2012 to get it all going, or did it just happen?

Posted by Dark Warrior (Member # 8822) on :

oh they explained it, I dont want to throw a spoiler out but it was scientific, based on the the earths reaction to the sun. Wouldnt say it was the most believable, but it was at least viable for movie purposes.

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

The voice of Auto in WALL-E was credited to Mactalk (I think that's how it was spelled), some kind of Apple-related thing that reads the printed word aloud---I don't pretend to understand how it works.

Posted by Dark Warrior (Member # 8822) on :

quote:
And it is only going to get worse. He is a status update from Michael Bay's Facebook page. He is the director of Transformers and The Island, I met him on that set and he is quite a dynamic character.
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Bay just saw Roland Emmerich's "2012". Good job Roland...but I'll do better!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Guess we can look forward to the movie 2012 the Sequel: 2013? Ironic quote since Michael Bay destroyed the first carrier, which pissed me off since i served in The Gulf War on that ship, and Roland Emmerich/Ute Emmerich destroyed the second carrier. Most likely he is talking about Transformers 3...btw, according to his facebook he is close to signing Spinal Tap to do the soundtrack...bizarre.

Oops I was joking but looks like Michael Bay really will be directing 2012 the sequel (2012: The War of Souls)...which will be out in 2011.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000881/

The untitled Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay project has me wondering too.