When Good Directors Go Bad
Yesterday I was talking with one of my friends about Quentin Tarantino, how every one of his movies rocks: Resevoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill. Not only are his characters interesting, but they have interesting conversations and talk like real people. Not to mention QT has never sold out.
Which brought to mind a couple of directors who started off great, then devolved into suckiness: George Lucas and the Wachowski brothers. Star Wars and The Matrix are classic films, vitually untouchable unless one wants to nitpick. The immediate sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and The Matrix Reloaded, are really cool but miss just a little bit of that timeless quality.
Then you see any film after that and think to yourself, "What the fuck happened?" A classic, timeless tale gets muddled right at the end. Did these guys lose their talent, sell out to toy companies and video game manufacturers, or simply focus their sights on money instead of crafting a deep, compelling story worthy of the franchise? If Peter Jackson can keep Lord Of The Rings consistent, to the point where the last film is hands down the best, then why the hell did these guys drop the ball?
Which brought to mind a joke that perhaps I'm carrying to the extreme:
What if George Lucas directed the Matrix sequals?
- Agent Smith reveals he is Mr. Anderson's father. Morpheus later agrees that he lied to Neo about his father.
- Neo discovers that Trinity is his twin sister
- The Architect reveals his evil plan in plain detail (ala "Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design"), none of that "Vis-a-vis" bullshit.
- When Neo won't become an Agent of the system, the Architect gets up and shoots lightning bolts out of his hands. Then the Architect gets thrown into a pit and explodes for no reason.
- A group of small children (lead by the little Indian girl from the third film) throw rocks at Agent Smith and his clones, causing them to explode.
- Then the little children all sing a song.
What if the Wachowski brothers directed the Star Wars sequals?
- Luke Skywalker gets blinded instead of losing a hand. He uses The Force to see, which involves lots of glowy special effects.
- Luke meets the Emperor, who makes no sense at all and doesn't even get up out of his chair or fight.
- Luke and Vader have a flying fist fight over the Death Star. This ends with Luke's lame death.
- Light comes out of Darth Vader's helmet and he blows up for no reason the audience can comprehend.
- Morpheus and the humans in Zion almost die fighting off Stormtroopers, who suddenly receive new orders and just walk away.
posted by Rothar at 1:29 PM
3 Comments:
I almost went as far as "What if the Wachowski brothers directed the Star Wars prequals", but they're bad enough on their own and don't need retooling.
I won't even go into Matrix prequals. After seeing Revolutions, I can only imagine how crappy those would turn out.
The above is my comment, I forgot to click "post as Rothar"
BTW, this is the type of stuff I've always wanted to put up on a web site; my rants and jokes about stuff, movie reviews, what-not.
I came back and reviewed some of your earlier musings on such things. I've never seen a Tarantino film and cannot comment on them.
To your comment:
"A classic, timeless tale gets muddled right at the end. Did these guys lose their talent, sell out to toy companies and video game manufacturers, or simply focus their sights on money instead of crafting a deep, compelling story worthy of the franchise? If Peter Jackson can keep Lord Of The Rings consistent, to the point where the last film is hands down the best, then why the hell did these guys drop the ball?"
To Lucas: I think he sold out and depended more on the movies being a 2.5 hour long toy commerical with some action filler and impressing people with FX and the technology to bring people a file instead of film.
That may or may not be true with the "Brothers" of Matrix fame, but it sounds like they reached a story telling impass and didn't know what to do so they let the FX run the film and came up with the simul-launch on a global scale to impress everyone with their ability to schedule an event of that magnitude, but they left their fans dazed, confused, and disappointed.
To put Jackson on the same stage as the others isn't really a fair assessment of talent or dropping the ball. Jackson didn't WRITE the Lord of the Rings, he "adapted" it for the big screen. To me, that makes a huge difference. Jackson had a directorial vision of how to bring Middle Earth to the silver screen, which probably relied heavily on the technology developed by the aforementioned Lucas and his folks at ILM.
Jackson didn't have to worry about creating a world, it was there for him in Tolkien's books. The other thing was the consistency of his world and characters being the creation of ONE author, not having simply a concept and passing each chapter off to new author, which is blatantly obvious in the Star Wars movies/novelization. Heck, we've got everyone from Lucas to Terry Brooks, to a TSR forumla novel writer. [rolls eyes]
Personally, while Star Wars is a wonderful film and a good story, I think Empire far outstrips it in story. People didn't like it because it was dark. I think Jedi is where things started to go south. Then the prequels just messed up everything.
The Matrix was a cool FX film and the concept was interesting, it seemed to lack substance. I have yet to see the others as I don't think I could handle the disappointment.
~J
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