War of the Worlds...

[Guest El Satanico]

Well the problem is that his "happy" endings often do feel forced.

 

I'm not the biggest Spielberg fan, but I know he's a good director. Calling him a genius is taking it too far, but he is good and great on occasion.

 

 

I still don't get the widespread love for Saving Private Ryan. When you look beyond the great opening, it's a very mediocre war movie. This may get me crucified, but Shakespeare in Love was better and was more deserving of Best Picture.

[2GOLD 0]

Spielberg WAS good, just like George Lucas WAS good.

 

Also, if we want to "aliens die by something so INCREDIBLY STUPID IT MESSES UP EVERYTHING" then we have ID4 which at least had that speech by Pullman.

 

This is a bad idea, Cruise and Spielberg will mess it up because Steve is gone insane and Cruise will sleepwalk through it cause it's a huge budget and he seems to sleepwalk through big budget films.

[Guest El Satanico]

Spielberg WAS good, just like George Lucas WAS good.

Lucas was really only good on the original Star Wars, so that's not the best comparison.

[spiny norman 0]

Well the problem is that his "happy" endings often do feel forced.

 

I'm not the biggest Spielberg fan, but I know he's a good director. Calling him a genius is taking it too far, but he is good and great on occasion.

 

 

I still don't get the widespread love for Saving Private Ryan. When you look beyond the great opening, it's a very mediocre war movie. This may get me crucified, but Shakespeare in Love was better and was more deserving of Best Picture.

I completely agree.

 

But I think Life Is Beautiful was the film that should have won. And it probably would have won were it not foreign.

[Guest El Satanico]

I think Life Is Beautiful was the film that should have won. And it probably would have won were it not foreign.

Yeah I didn't mean Shakespeare should've won BP overall(I forget the other noms), just that it was the better choice between it and Ryan.

[Kahran Ramsus 0]

Spielberg is still good when he is focused, like with Minority Report or Catch Me If You Can.

 

And the Best Picture for 1998 should have been The Truman Show and it wasn't even nominated. I get the feeling it was before its time. In the post Survivor world it would get more recognition.

[tommytomlin 0]

A FIFTH of the profit for Tom Cruise?

 

That's absolutely ridiculous. Yeah, he's a big draw, but actors don't make movies like these. Why not hire someone like Guy Pearce and draw $10 million less, but keep the profits?

 

And I'm sure if the movie makes a loss, Cruise won't have to pay 1/5th of that.

 

Hollywood is stupid.

[Vyce 0]

And dare I ask what Serenity is?

Firefly movie.

Oh Christ.

 

Yeah, that's going to rake in the dough at the box office - a movie based on a failed TV show that didn't even last one season.

[2GOLD 0]

Spielberg WAS good, just like George Lucas WAS good.

Lucas was really only good on the original Star Wars, so that's not the best comparison.

 

Well, he had American Graffiti.

 

Ok, so he used to be a good writer. It still sorta kinda works in a warped society where flies rule.

[Guest TheZsaszHorsemen]

That means there won't be another blockbuster to take away from Serenity.

Doesn't that come out around the same time as Batman?

 

It'll get killed if it is.

[Guest SP-1]

That means there won't be another blockbuster to take away from Serenity.

Doesn't that come out around the same time as Batman?

 

It'll get killed if it is.

Bingo. They're essentially drawing from the same broad audience: teh geeks. And Batman under Nolan's direction with a darker take will win that battle no problem.

 

 

Also: ID4 didn't have a stupid ending. The virus angle was set up from the beginning with the bad TV reception and David's discovery that the aliens were filtering signals down to the other ships. It was also set up with the Area 51 craft coming online only when the Mothership showed up. It worked just fine and fit the context of the story.

 

But Pullman's speech does own.

[Guest El Satanico]

Perhaps he was referring to the mothership being defeated by a common earth computer...which was stupid.

[2GOLD 0]

Perhaps he was referring to the mothership being defeated by a common earth computer...which was stupid.

 

Thank GOD the aliens had such ADVANCED technology and yet they were Apple compatible.

 

You can barely get most computers to be compatible with most of the crap we have on Earth yet the simple little laptop was not only able to hack into an alien language it should have had no CLUE how to figure out but was able to upload a killer virus.

 

Sorry, I can only suspend so much logic before some forehead slapping happens.

[Corey_Lazarus 0]

Yeah, that did kinda feel forced, but it made sense in the way that a huge alien invasion makes sense.

 

Re: 2GOLD

The original ending for War of the Worlds was that the aliens couldn't tolerate the bacteria on our planet and died off because of the common cold within hours. I'm not sure if that's what you were referring to, but yeah.

 

Also, the problem I have with Spielberg's happy endings in recent movies (AI and Minority Report, mostly) is that they seem tacked on just to please some people. AI would have been a stellar film if not for the final 20 minutes, which ruined the ENTIRE flow of the movie.

[Guest El Satanico]

An alien invasion is much more likely than aliens being mac compatible. An alien invasion will never happen, but at least there's a possibility of it happening.

[pochorenella 0]

And the Best Picture for 1998 should have been The Truman Show and it wasn't even nominated. I get the feeling it was before its time. In the post Survivor world it would get more recognition

 

I have to agree somewhat on this. Truman is a movie totally before its time and I get the feeling it doesn't get the recognition it truly deserves as a classic movie. That it didn't get nominated was a travesty, ditto for Jim Carrey (although he did win the Golden Globe.)

Now, if I have to balance it with Saving Private Ryan, I have to go with the war epic. One of my all-time favorites, for sure, and only in the Academy Awards Bizarro World not deserving of a Best Picture Oscar, specially against Shakespeare in Love (which I really enjoyed, mind you.)

Spielberg is a GREAT director, certainly more complete than Lucas, although he was good on SW:ANH and on American Graffitti. Still, that doesn't seem his forté, that being the writing (SW, Indiana Jones, AG). Now his dialogues (SW1, SW2): Ugh.

[Guest TheZsaszHorsemen]

Actually ID4 is an exact remake of the War of the Worlds; right down to the welcoming party being annihilated, and the aliens being housed in suits.

 

The final battle borrows heavily from Star Wars though.

[2GOLD 0]

I had no problem with the ending to WAR OF THE WORLDS since that ending is much better than say the ending to ID4 or SIGNS.

 

Bacteria killing off the aliens, that's more logical since odds are they would just have come to conquer and not thought about viruses we might carry.

 

If they do WAR, they better not change the ending.

[Guest evenflowDDT]

To be fair, the mass audience doesn't want depressing, "artistic" endings all the time.  There's a time and a place for it...

...like when you're adapting a novel that has such an ending.

 

The original War of the Worlds took two years to make. I can only hope this follows suit.

 

And dare I ask what Serenity is?

I wasn't neccessarily talking just about War of the Worlds, Flo. I want Spielberg to stick to the source material as closely as he can. I meant in general.

Ahh, OK. I thought you were referring to this film.

 

Actually, the reason ID4 is such a blatant rip-off of War of the Worlds is that it is War of the Worlds. Unfortunately, Fox was unable to obtain remake rights, so made some very minor changes to the story. A similar situation is I, Robot, which was the reverse - an unrelated story was given minor changes because rights to a major work of science fiction were obtained.

 

As for why Spielberg = teh sux0r, El Satanico hit the nail on the head, his good sentiments are totally forced. Minority Report overstays its welcome just to deliver a "happy ending". The problem isn't with the ending itself, but how you get there.

[UseTheSledgehammerUh 0]

Minority Report was incredible. That's all.

[Guest El Satanico]

But it would've been better if it ended earlier. They had the perfect place to end the movie, but they kept going.

[Corey_Lazarus 0]

It's not even that it was a perfect place to put the ending, because then the questions of "who set him up?" and "why did they set him up?" and "who really killed his son?" are raised. It's just that the movie didn't elaborate on any question but "why is he going to kill that man?"

 

I still want to know who killed his son, too. I'm guessing it was his boss, the old man that set him up, in order to bring him (I think Cruise's character was named John) into Pre-Crime.

[RavishingRickRudo 0]

I hated a lot of the Special Effects in Minority Report (liked the movie, though) - so this big budgeted sci fi makes me groan.

 

I call AIDS virus as what kills off the Aliens after one of them gets with a homosexualized and HIV+ Tom Cruise, where the real War of the Worlds is between the Right-Wing Christian Fundamentalists and the Gay Community.

[Kardo 0]

Nah they should base it on Jeef Waynes War Of The Worlds. Now that would be interesting.

[bobobrazil1984 0]

I'm pretty psyched about this. Speilberg's movies are generally pretty good, obviously there are the classic movies of the past and minority report, catch me if you can, jurassic park, schindler's list. Got a good feeling about this.

[Corey_Lazarus 0]

Unfortunately, there's also AI and The Lost World.

[Lil' Bitch 0]

According to a report on Yahoo.com the other day, Tom Cruise is gonna start work on Mission Impossible 3 which will be directed by the creator of Alias.

[CBright7831 0]

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/waroftheworlds/

[NoCalMike 0]

Overall Spielburg is great. however I seem to be one of the few that didn't really like Saving Private Ryan, sanz the opening scene. The Normandy-beach storming scene was indeed fantastic, but after that I wished I had stopped watching the movie.

[NoCalMike 0]

Many Sad/Angry/Depressing endings to hollywood films have been cut and/or modified after being screened for the movie studios because they are afraid the masses will trash an entire movie because they didn't walk out all gushy in happy. I know in Fatal Attraction, the original ending was Glen Close not being dead and I believe killing the wife. Pretty Woman featured Richard Gere DUMPING Julia Roberts after all that lovy dovy bullshit, because quite frankly it FIT with his character. I take issue with movie studios altering works of art like that in order to potentially sell more tickets.