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Reviews
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
Annihilation, proudly sponsored by: McDonalds.
As with most remakes, I had very low expectations for this film. I anticipated your standard big special effects, a well-cast Keanu as an emotionless humanoid, and, at best, perhaps some creepy and / or imaginative diversions from the original - as in War of the Worlds.
That would have been just fine with me.
What I got, was 104 minutes that amounted to nothing. That's 104 minutes of my life, gone, and I want them back. Keanu surprisingly contributed the most substance to this limp piece of work. Jennifer was OK. John Cleese, I love you, but where did you go? The kid was mildly annoying but tolerable, considering the over-bearing faults of this film which left me yelling at the TV in a dumb-founded stupor...
To put it nicely (as I grit my teeth), this movie feels like someone really wanted to take a classic and remake it into an environmental statement, and rightfully so. But then about halfway through, a corporate exec from McDonalds stands up and threatens to pull back the funding if they don't make him feel less guilty about his career choice. So they had to edit out an hour or so of intelligent, substantial, and profoundly necessary content, if they still wanted the film to be released. So they hacked away at what could have made this movie watchable like it was a cow carcass on its way to Big Mac land. Perhaps this hypothetical edit was a mercy killing. One can only hope. Either way, it hurts. It hurts bad. I mean, the slap-in-the-face HYPOCRISY of discussing humanity's inexcusable destruction to the planet in a MCDONALDS of all places, makes me physically ill. I am not even going to think about the wake of waste, the butchering, the crops, water and fuel - squandered, all over the globe; or all that money that lines the walls of the golden effing arches. I mean, really? REALLY?! If that scene was supposed to have been ironic, why couldn't they have made it a bit more obvious? Why why why why why. Maybe it was a super hidden message. Maybe they were saying, "Here. This is why the film goes nowhere. We are so so sorry." Alas, at first watching, it still looks, and stinks, like blatant corporate sponsorship - nothing more. I mean, the scene wasn't even necessary to the plot (or lack thereof).
The only possible thing that they could do to remedy this utterly depressing waste of time and resources, is if they made a pseudo-sequel, and really, REALLY stuck it to the man. Hard.
I'm sorry, this movie pains me in a way that no other has.
Thank you for reading. I have to go cry now.
Une nuit sur le mont chauve (1933)
my comments are brief.
flipping channels, late at night, stumbled upon this obscure gem. i have been around a few blocks in my time, and this has to be one of the strangest, eeriest flicks i have ever seen. morphing, 3-dimensional shapes, bizarre and addicting. i want to buy this but can't find it anywhere. what tim burton would have done had he been alive in the thirties.