Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go, is brilliantly paced to slowly reveal the truth about the characters and their world.
The film may be similarly well-paced but it hardly seems to matter. Everything is revealed (and explicitly stated) in the trailer.
Who makes these things? How many layers of approval do they go through? Why would anyone think it was a good idea to give away so much?
Although I really, really liked Battlestar Galactica. I didn’t like new BSG movie: The Plan. I wish I’d never seen it, that it had never been made.
Some of the dialogue was good. Dean Stockwell’s performance was great. The basic concept, telling the story of the cylon attack and its aftermath from the cylon’s point of view, is an interesting one.
However, instead of telling a new story (as they did in Razor) they weave this one in with the story we have already seen.The new material doesn’t enrich that story, it dilutes and lessens it. I’m pretty good at suspending disbelief but I just couldn’t do it while watching this. I couldn’t convince myself that in the story I had already seen, Cavil and the other cylons were lurking, undiscovered, just outside of camera range. I don’t believe that the things we see happen here actually happened.
I hope that rumours of plans to make more BSG movies turn out to false. If not, I hope their stories only intersect the one we already know and avoid trying to run in parallel with it.
Watched Wall-E again with the kids this evening. This time around it really seemed like a kids movie. This is a good thing. Too many movies that are ostensibly for kids try to appeal to adults or teenagers by including elements of pop culture or pop psychology. An example of this is the horrible Chicken Little. Wall-E has a simple story. The characters have simple motives. I far prefer this to the kind of fake depth and “darkness” that have made the Harry Potter films so unpleasant.
I remember that when it was released some people questioned whether a film with so little dialog would appeal to children. On second viewing this seems even more ludicrous than it did last year. I can’t imagine any dialog in the first half of the movie that wouldn’t be totally redundant and distracting.
Here, I am … Lonely Wall-E … Only a cockroach for a friend … Wow! What’s that light? … Hey! That’s hot! Hmmm, she’s hot.”
So much is communicated in their gestures and expressions that I actually think Eve and Wall-E talk a little too much.