65 (2023)
March 16, 2023 2:04 PM - Subscribe
An astronaut crash lands on a mysterious planet only to discover he's not alone.
Oof! That's a rough review. Appreciate the heads up!
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:04 PM on March 16, 2023
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:04 PM on March 16, 2023
Gotta love the dedication to make the post as a warning to others.
posted by kokaku at 4:00 PM on March 16, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by kokaku at 4:00 PM on March 16, 2023 [9 favorites]
I was planning to watch it on a recent trip to Malaysia then thought hang on if it’s coming out early release to this rinkydink theatre here, it’s gotta be a bomb. What a waste of dinosaurs!
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 10:15 PM on March 16, 2023
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 10:15 PM on March 16, 2023
This is not a place of honor.
posted by Carillon at 10:15 PM on March 16, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by Carillon at 10:15 PM on March 16, 2023 [6 favorites]
Unrelated but not sure where else to put it: John Boorman says we should stop calling movies "films" now that they're usually shot digitally. He also has this anecdote:
For the finale of my 1974 film Zardoz, I wanted to shoot a scene of Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling in which they age and die. This involved shooting with a fixed camera, so that we could take them out, age their clothes and faces, put them back in, shoot them a bit more, then take them out and age them further, until eventually they were skeletons that, in turn, crumbled away.posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:03 AM on March 17, 2023 [12 favorites]
This process took an entire day. Then, the camera assistant unloaded the camera and accidentally exposed the film to the light. This meant we had to spend another whole day shooting it. I also had to restrain Connery from killing the assistant – who soon afterwards changed his name and moved to Los Angeles. I spied him in a cafe in LA one day. “Is Sean in town?” he asked, with a quivering voice.
He tried to save the world from Zardoz and that was the thanks he got?
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:10 PM on March 17, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:10 PM on March 17, 2023 [2 favorites]
It mentioned aliens at the start but they never showed up: presumably there was originally some explanation of the wild coincidence of where and when the ship crashed, but it ended up in a digital recycle bin.
This was explained at the very beginning of the movie?? The dinosaurs are the aliens. Adam Driver & co. are not human and are not from earth, they are from an entirely different civilization that existed 65 million years ago and just happened to crash land on Earth because, by classic science fiction cliche, space is very small and when they collided with asteroids a planet just happened to be right there.
posted by selenized at 12:18 PM on March 17, 2023 [4 favorites]
This was explained at the very beginning of the movie?? The dinosaurs are the aliens. Adam Driver & co. are not human and are not from earth, they are from an entirely different civilization that existed 65 million years ago and just happened to crash land on Earth because, by classic science fiction cliche, space is very small and when they collided with asteroids a planet just happened to be right there.
posted by selenized at 12:18 PM on March 17, 2023 [4 favorites]
He tried to save the world from Zardoz and that was the thanks he got?
hey now... them's fightin words
posted by kokaku at 1:16 PM on March 17, 2023 [4 favorites]
hey now... them's fightin words
posted by kokaku at 1:16 PM on March 17, 2023 [4 favorites]
there's a really cool, *very* ahead of its time movie lurking under Zardoz's hippy-nonsense trappings
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 2:32 PM on March 17, 2023
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 2:32 PM on March 17, 2023
stop calling movies "films""Hey man, you want to go see an SD card this weekend?"
posted by Hatashran at 3:08 PM on March 17, 2023 [2 favorites]
Nah, thanks, I'm going to the photography museum to look at some old emulshies.
posted by phooky at 4:10 PM on March 17, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by phooky at 4:10 PM on March 17, 2023 [1 favorite]
This was not as bad as I was expecting. Driver made it almost salvageable.
What were those all-fours dinosaurs asposed to be?
Would it have killed them to have had the time jump scene at the end be in Mexico?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:12 PM on April 28, 2023
What were those all-fours dinosaurs asposed to be?
Would it have killed them to have had the time jump scene at the end be in Mexico?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:12 PM on April 28, 2023
Kinda tough room! I thought it was perfectly serviceable, mind you, I went in with less-than-zero expectations so mere competency was enough to impress me. Way way better than Black Adam and about on par with Bullet Train IMO.
Random notes/quibbles:
1. My spaceship is destroyed and I am stranded, please help me being met with "great, just fly off-planet to this rendezvous location" seemed like a weird way for the rescue to go. If I got a message in a bottle saying "I am marooned on this island," responding with "okay, just sail to this island" would feel singularly cruel.
2. As my wife pointed out, holding the reveal that L'il Vader's kid had died until later in the movie is good dramatically, but it makes his suicidal tendency in the first reel really seem like this is a dude who cannot contemplate being alone with this thoughts for two minutes before deciding to cap himself.
3. I would have found it more believable to have Big n' Lanky carrying a set of high powered binoculars and think "oh snap that asteroid is getting bigger" than to have a portable scanner that can zoom into space, analyze asteroids and start calculating impacts, etc.
4. Waterfall T-Rex was an A++ reveal and made the whole thing worth the cost of admission.
5. So they all speak English (or the movie operates under the conceit that 100% of their alien dialogue is translated), but their written materials... aren't? Why are we in a space universe where all spoken speech can be parsed to the audience as English but all the written material is still Space Squiggles?
6. I did appreciate an alien civilization where different people speak different languages! It always bothers me when all alien civilizations are presented as single-biome, single-culture monoliths.
7. Can normal humans do that "blow through cupped hands for spooky whistle" thing or is that an alien superpower? We spent half the movie going whuff-whuff through our thumbs. Impossible!
posted by Shepherd at 9:28 AM on May 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
Random notes/quibbles:
1. My spaceship is destroyed and I am stranded, please help me being met with "great, just fly off-planet to this rendezvous location" seemed like a weird way for the rescue to go. If I got a message in a bottle saying "I am marooned on this island," responding with "okay, just sail to this island" would feel singularly cruel.
2. As my wife pointed out, holding the reveal that L'il Vader's kid had died until later in the movie is good dramatically, but it makes his suicidal tendency in the first reel really seem like this is a dude who cannot contemplate being alone with this thoughts for two minutes before deciding to cap himself.
3. I would have found it more believable to have Big n' Lanky carrying a set of high powered binoculars and think "oh snap that asteroid is getting bigger" than to have a portable scanner that can zoom into space, analyze asteroids and start calculating impacts, etc.
4. Waterfall T-Rex was an A++ reveal and made the whole thing worth the cost of admission.
5. So they all speak English (or the movie operates under the conceit that 100% of their alien dialogue is translated), but their written materials... aren't? Why are we in a space universe where all spoken speech can be parsed to the audience as English but all the written material is still Space Squiggles?
6. I did appreciate an alien civilization where different people speak different languages! It always bothers me when all alien civilizations are presented as single-biome, single-culture monoliths.
7. Can normal humans do that "blow through cupped hands for spooky whistle" thing or is that an alien superpower? We spent half the movie going whuff-whuff through our thumbs. Impossible!
posted by Shepherd at 9:28 AM on May 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
It's on Netflix now. It was ... eh.
> 7. Can normal humans do that "blow through cupped hands for spooky whistle" thing or is that an alien superpower?
Wikipedia calls it the "hand flute".
posted by Pronoiac at 11:47 PM on July 23, 2023 [1 favorite]
> 7. Can normal humans do that "blow through cupped hands for spooky whistle" thing or is that an alien superpower?
Wikipedia calls it the "hand flute".
posted by Pronoiac at 11:47 PM on July 23, 2023 [1 favorite]
Wikipedia calls it the "hand flute".
It saddens me to relate that Wikipedia's primary reference, handflute.com, no longer exists. That said, I just tried this tutorial and holy sh*t it actually worked after just a few minutes of trying. I am amazed.
posted by selenized at 8:03 PM on August 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
It saddens me to relate that Wikipedia's primary reference, handflute.com, no longer exists. That said, I just tried this tutorial and holy sh*t it actually worked after just a few minutes of trying. I am amazed.
posted by selenized at 8:03 PM on August 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
would feel singularly cruel.
They do establish that his culture is cruel early on when he has to go on a risky two year mission to earn enough to stop his daughter from dying.
posted by biffa at 12:46 PM on October 4, 2023
They do establish that his culture is cruel early on when he has to go on a risky two year mission to earn enough to stop his daughter from dying.
posted by biffa at 12:46 PM on October 4, 2023
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I'm not fussy, I was reasonably entertained even by movies like "Black Adam" and "Bullet Train", but this was so dull I started reconfiguring my smartwatch to keep myself entertained.
Not even spectacular or with good visuals. Adam Driver and sidekick trudge through claustrophobic forests and caves, where old-fashioned scaly dinosaurs jump out at them metronomically, or worse just waddle menacingly towards them for ages while they back away.
It mentioned aliens at the start but they never showed up: presumably there was originally some explanation of the wild coincidence of where and when the ship crashed, but it ended up in a digital recycle bin.
Do not watch this film.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:13 PM on March 16, 2023 [13 favorites]