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Movie Reviews:Mission Impossible 2
The last one was kinda James Bond for Dummies and this one sorta follows suit. The plot is pretty cheesy: evil biotech corporation creates killer bio disease and a cure... controlling the virus makes the cure valuable... its more complicated then that, but if you can't figure it out before the movie tediously explains it (complete with ridiculous comments about stock options that are so stupid that they make MI 1's scene about the new artificially intelligent risc chips seem like grad school level CS) then you probably should just wait for the next Pokemon movie or something 'cuz this ain't rocket science (hell, it isn't biotech either ;) There's an evil corporation complete with an evil CEO, an evil terrorist group complete with a lunatic leader and a suffering sidekick or 2.
Anyway the "Plot" is really just an excuse to show us lots of explosions, car/motercycle/helecoptor chases etc etc, along with gratuitous cleavage shots from the hot co-star (which is worth the price of admission assuming you go to a matinee), and Tom Cruise performing stupid backflip karate kicks that might work if they were in Cowboy BeBop, but don't even come close when actual human actors pretend to perform them in slow motion.
So its the roller coaster hollywood film and if you like the genre, you'll probably enjoy this one. It starts off fast and furious, but by the end I was yawning... like so many movies these days, it blows its wad in the first half hour: it just can't sustain the heat for the full 2 hours to keep you interested.
If you like your action fast and your plots brainless, you'll like this movie. If you just want to go for a good ride, you'll enjoy it. But if you gotta choose between Gladiator and MI2, grab your battle axe.
"This is not mission diffiult, it's mission impossible. Difficult should be a walk in the park for you."
Sure the line's pretty funny, but the deadpan delivery really kicked the ass!
There is a perfectly valid reason why you couldn't understand the plot in the original Mission: Impossible,
...mumbles to himself...
...probably thought Fight Club was about soap, too...
You're just stupid
I know that's not nice, but truth sometimes isn't.
And if you really think that Gladiator is at all similar to Braveheart, they you win the DOUBLE dumbass award. Braveheart was a story about a man who started Scotland's movement to freedom, and I don't recall Wallace ever being sold into slavery, or fighting the King of England in a duel pit. Perhaps the beginning of the Gladiator can be likened to the end of Braveheart, but, with that reasoning, every movie with fighting in it is the same. Russel Crowe is definately just as good an action star as Mel, but that probably has something to do with the fact that they both are Aussies.
To say that Mission: Impossible was confusing is like saying that Barney the dinosaur would make a decent role model. Au contrare, Mission: Impossible was way to easy to predict; the entire plot can be predicted when Phelps resurrects himself at the train station, just as Hunt tells him.
If MI2 is a dumbed-down version of the original, there is no way in Hell I'm going to see it now. Although I began this post as a flame, I feel I should thank you for saving me $8. And as long as my soapbox hasn't collapsed yet, please do the gene pool a favor and kill yourself before you reproduce. Thanks in advance.
supruzr
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Windows 2000: Is that the year or the bug count?
One of my friend dragged me to the premier of this Movie. I had high hopes for it specially when I saw John Woo's name in the credits. But sadly I'd have to say that the action was slightly offbase, MI-2 seem lack the heart pounding Bang-bang that I expected out of Woo. There does seem to be a higher concentration of action at the end of the movie but this does not go well with the melodrama in the rest of the movie. Yes it's a great movie to take a girl to (since I can see several reasons as to why a girl would like this love story over the rest of this summer attractions (even over dino)). The plot in this movie seem to be weak, a virus (ok close your ears if you have not seen it) that could kill all of mankind has been made at a biotech firm (they also made an antidote). The bad guys want the virus or the antidote (cause if they spread the virus and then sold the antidote they'd make tons of $$'s) and the good guys try to stop the bad guys. This movie has a similar tone as some of the later James Bond offerings (specially the one where they send a nuclear submarine off the cost of Turkey -- suposdely to vanquish the 'i kiss you' virii). Overall I give it a low 3 out of 10 and point people to other great summer attractions (Gladiator) and hope the rest of the Summer action movies has more action than B-rated love lines. I have high hopes for X-men and Titan AE
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Mambo dogface in the banana patch
And Sturgeon's Law is:
"90% Of Everything Is Crap".
With a bonus 9% if it's a Hollywood movie.
But then I'm an old fart who still thinks the greatest think George Lucas has ever done is THX-1138.
--
Peter
If I could hear his thoughts, they'd be saying: "I'm eeeeeeevil. And I like it."
There were SO many lines in the movie that I (and others in the theater) just couldn't keep ourselves from laughing at! And, of course, the burning doorway-smoke-dove-Hawke-slo-mo John-Woo-wants-you-to-know-this-is-HIS-film-dammit shot.
Gladiator was better, if implausible in its own way. At least it had thought and political import. Replace "Rome" with "The U.S." and you had something to think about.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
I would hardley call the vast majority of Linux users discerning. Most of the ones that I have talked to just don't know any better. They think that since it's not MS, it must be good. They don't realize that there are other OSes that are better in many ways then linux. I think these same sheep are using the same similar logic on movies. Its a big budget movie, it must be bad. Well, actualy MI:2 was quite entertaining, and about 3 billion times better then the first one. Just because something is mass produced, and mass marketed, does not mean its bad. Look at Dr. Pepper, or Snikers bars.
It was true to its roots: it had an actual team of people doing all sorts of cool secret agenty stuff the whole time.
You obviously didn't see the same movie I saw. In the first Mission Impossible I saw, the team was killed in the first fifteen minutes. Seeing Emilio Estevez get killed was cool mind you. The rest of the movie was the Ethan Hunt show. It was not about teamwork, it was about Tom Cruise.
MI2 tries too hard to be James Bond. Too much leg, too little plot. I'm currently blaming the movies big faults on John Woo's lack of english skills, the dialogue just does not work on a grand scale. I felt that the team worked much better than in the first one though. The action was cool just not sustainable.
BTW it was Versacchi not Armani.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
Doesn't this sound a bit like Horizon Corp and Shiva in 'Rainbow Six' (the book)?
I haven't seen this movie, and probably won't.
You said that Cruise found the vaccine for Ms. Hot Chick after she injected herself. Considering that a vaccine is just a weakened virus made to stimulate the "memory" of the immune system, what good is a vaccine going to be after the host has already been effective against the unweakened form of the virus? It won't do a damn thing, and she should die anyways.
I shouldn't even bother to point out holes in movies like this, I suppose.
Well, I am told I have certain abilities in that depar- HEY!
Okay, who told? >:(HEY! Why din't you ever tell me!
:(
Damn, that biotech company creates virus and cure and tries to unleash it on the world thing has blatantly been ripped from Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, that was supposed to be made into a film at some point.
I think R6 made much better use of this idea as a plot line and I think it would have made a pretty good film. I suspect that'll be the last we hear of it.
Can Hollywood action writers actually think for themselves? I'm excluding a few from this of course.
Given that it was spliced from various strains of influenza, Chimera should have caused *real* flu like symptoms, ie sneezing, sniffling, runny nose, & stuffy head that even NyQuil won't fix. The flu needs these symptoms to spread to other people. Neither carriers showed any of these symptoms to any great degree, they just look liked they were not feeling well.
The virus itself supposedly destroyed blood cells, but there's the problem of mechanism. As viruses consist solely of DNA and some protein, they require the hosts' builtin mechanisms of DNA replication and protein production to reproduce. However mature blood cells do not contain any DNA or replicative processes, as their sole function is gas transport (they eject their nucleus at the last stage of development). So it seems highly unlikely that Chimera could reproduce via infecting blood cells, as the blood cells would not have any ability to produce more Chimera. The sole exception is if it infects a different type of cell first, *then* attacks the red blood cells.
Lastly, I think that Ebola works by attacking the connective tissues or something to that effect, not the blood cells, so that the person bleeds to death because their blood vessels disintegrate and their internal organs liquify. Chimera's symptoms should be a rather rapid clotting of the blood, due to the high rate of cell lysis, and the person dying of lack of oxygen. They shouldn't be bleeding out their various body orifices, the breakdown of the blood cells would cause clotting factors to activate beforehand.
Anyhow, the rest of MI:2's plot is so weak I don't think the science behind their plot really even matters, but it would have been nice if they had tried to make it plausible.
Now look what you did! Stupid AC, can't even keep one little secret...
I remember Mission Impossible the TV show.
I don't remember explosions, chase scenes, or fights.
In fact, it seems that the whole point of the Mission Impossible as seen on TV was doing dangerous things and exicting missions Without using force but instead employing brains, reason, deception and cleverness.
I like the TV show.
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
Ah yes - Cowboy Bebop is just wonderful. Next disc comes out in a couple weeks...
Since there are 26 episodes and 6 discs they'll probably be broken up like so: 5,4,4,4,4,5. Don't expect 5 episodes on every disc. Though the extras from the Japanese Session 0 will get split onto the various 4 episode discs to make up for it, I hear.
Best news on the net for this kind of thing: www.animeondvd.com.
Now if only Otaku no Video would come out. Or Wings of Honneamise. Or Patlabor 2.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I agree about the comparative silliness of the plots. Also, no one seems to remember that Gladiator really wasn't all that good-looking a movie. The battle sequence at the beginning looked good, but then all the computer-generated backdrops throughout the rest of it looked lousy.
M:I-2 looks great throughout. It has all the weaknesses people keep mentioning, but at least it looks and sounds great.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
And how did Ethan know to bring along a mask of the guy with the hurt finger when he raided the compound near the end? That was really thinking ahead!
The thing you have to keep in mind about this movie is that it is an action flick. Even more then that it is a John Woo action flick. The plot is not going to be impecible, and the action scenes are going to show his style.
You have to keep in mind that the target audience for a movie like this is not 18-35 geek crowd, its the 13-24 testosterone crowd. They don't care if the plot has a few holes in it, so long as 1)The explosions are cool. 2)The fight scenes are cool. 3)They get to see something to titilate them.
Take a look at the Bond films, they follow a very similar formula, and have been wildly succesful. They say imitation is the sincerist form of flatery and I think that it shows true for the Mission Impossible movies.
"You can't fight in here! This is the war room" --Dr. Stra
Who needs reviews? Go to www.moviecritic.com and find out how much the collaborative filtering engine thinks you'll like the movie.
Amazing magic tricks
Honestly, why pay $7.50 plus to a see a fifty year old dance round the screen in slow mo and forget about the laws of physics? I'd rather be stuck in my basement working on my VR project (oh wait, that's fictional too!)
Nuff Respec'
DeICQLady
7D3 CPE
hey,
i thought the movie was enjoyable, but that's neither here nor there. what i want to know is -- what kind of motorcycles were used in the conclusion? or, how would i find out?
- pal
Maybe I'm wrong, but didn't the same director (you know, that guy named JOHN WOO) also do Face Off and many Hong Kong films before that - which Matrix BLATANTLY COPIED. Jesus Crust I'm sick of people thinking the Matrix invented that style of action. BTW, do not waste your time seeing movies that use the same action director (forgot his name) as the Matrix. Boy did he blow before he got a Hollywood budget.
My fav line was..
;)
"wait, I got to boot this suckah"
Or something along the line
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I saw Shanghai Noon yesterday as well, and while I loved it, jackie is slowing down A LOT in his old age.
Jet Li has pretty much taken over the fighting title Jackie Chan had, but Jackie still rocks.
-Frums
Not to be picky, but I thought that influenza was a retro-virus - that means it has RNA, not DNA as is continuously mentioned in the movie. Anyways, it sucked. I should have seen Gladiator again.
They make most of the fake OSs in Director, or at least they used to. So not only do you get a fake screen, you can have the mouse moves and window openings all scripted events so the actor doesn't even have to click on the fake boxes.
come for the naked robots, stay for the zombies
Does anyone on slashdot *like* anything (besides linux)? I am seriously asking. I almost never hear anyone on slashdot say good things about movies. And not all of these movies are bad.
:) ).
I seem to remember everybody thinking Austin Powers II rocked (just off the top of my head, I saw your comment, thought that, posted it
Believe with me, my saplings.
That's because Anthony Hopkins freaking rules. Only two other people could have delivered that line that well: Sean Connery and James Earl Jones.
bleh. i thought m:i-2 and gladiator were both semi-limp flicks. they've both got some good blood-and-guts action, but neither one really has much of a plot IMHO. my advice, if you like bloody hand-to-hand gore, go for gladiator; if you like high-tech specials and explosions, go see m:i-2. neither one's really worth the $8.25 anyway, movies are going so downhill...
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Well in Sneakers the big bad Mafia guy is using Excel 4 on Windows 3.1 to balance the books. I just finished watching the Anime series Lain (Highly excellant, IMHO) and some of the screenshots look like NeXT boxen but the main Navi OS is called "Copeland". Of course there was the 3D file browser from Irix that was shown in Jurassic Park (Yes that actually shipped with old versions of Irix). That's all I can think of right now.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
I had poor expectations based on the first film (which made ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE to me).
This film was fine. Basically a totally retarded way to spend two hours, but a fine distraction for a summer film. It only made slightly more sense then the first one, but I guess this time I was more prepared.
If I were in a bad mood, I probably woulda hated it it. It's the kind of thing I'll be completely forgetting in about a day or so, much like its predecessor.
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The movie sucked... at least that's what my SOBER friends told me... I started drinking some orangejuics/VODKA as soon as ads ended... and I have to say: I REALLY ENJOYED THOSE SPECIAL EFFECTS and I didn't question myself about unrealistic stuff... It seemed quite normal to me :) SO IF YOU DECIDE TO GO: GET DRUNK! later dudes! dropsonic
The plot was painful and the ending simply absurd. Which is more unlikely, Cruise's nutty aerobatic fighting style, or an EMPEROR challenging a SLAVE to a duel?!?!?
:-)
:-)
Actually, I read in Newsweek that the real-life Comodus (whose name was different, can't remember the spelling now) _did_ actually fight in the Collesium, but never against anything as dangerous as an armed man
The brief article listed several other historical problems with the movie, but I don't think they mentioned the tech related stuff.
And then if you're willing to suspend disbelief enough for MI:2, might I suggest going to see Battlefield: Earth? You'll be treated to the sight of cavemen learning how to fly Harrier jets in less than seven days. Not to mention 1000 year old harriers still functioning perfectly
Yeah, sure. Whatever.
I stopped going to movies a *long* time ago because I would be "in" the movie when the an actor said a particularly dumb line and *bam* I'm sitting in a dark room surrounded by a bunch of slackjawed droolers. That's why I ROTFL'ing during Keanu's "wake-up" sequence in _Matrix_ -- I've been there!
If the "error" is critical to the plot I'm able to live with it. (E.g., who monitored & unplugged the traitor in _Matrix_? Obviously the meeting occured while he was sitting in the chair & Neo approached, but if he could interact like that then why did anyone need to get plugged in?)
But a lot of these errors are totally pointless oversights. E.g., the Star Trek: Borg movie (which may be the last movie I saw in a theater) had people casually walk around as an ICBM launched a few feet away. I've been a few *miles* away from a Shuttle launch, and seen plenty of footage of actual silo launches. People will *not* casually notice a launch a few hundred feet away... and that 2-second sequence left me sitting in a dark room. How hard would it be for them to put the launch silo a few hundred yards out of town? Did this missile base have a *single* silo?!
Maybe I'm being "unreasonable," but I don't have the same problem suspending disbelief when watching older movies. To be fair, that might be a "selection effect" where only the best 5% of movies from the 30's through 60's are aired, vs. *all* contemporary movies. Somehow I doubt _Battlefield Earth_ will be aired on the classic movies channel in 2035.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I think the virus was supposed to become infectous/airborne after the 20 hour incubation period. I don't know why the bad guys dropped the girl off and then just left her alone for however much time she had left (they never did tell you after the first 20 hour window, although Cruise apparently did have a watch on that he checked at the end of the film) and assumed that she wouldn't incinerate herself or something.
I read the internet for the articles.
At which time a new team consisting of Hunt, Luther, Franz, & the chick (forgot her name) was assembled. And they did things. Together.
There was none of that in MI2. I guess Ving Rhames had a minor part, but like I said...
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
[Warning: Tedious historical trivia ahead.]
> I would tend to agree that his debating techniques need a little refining, but so far nobody has decided to call him on any of his facts.
Best they didn't. I don't have the resources on hand to check the details of every claim he made, but he is by and large correct. For instance, I have a copy of Art and Myth in Ancient Greece, and by thumbing through it it took me about a minute to find five depictions of recurved bows on ancient Greek pottery. No, not Roman, but it does show that the type was known in the Mediterranean basin at least 500 years before the period in which the movie is set. Longbows? I just found a Web site (O Dubious Authority) claiming that archaeologists have found a cache of 36 Roman bows ranging 5'7" - 6'0" in length. Ballistae? Even advanced torsion types were invented in the Hellenistic era. Spears? My wargamers' guides show that Legionaires were progressively rearmed away from the pilum starting right about the time under consideration - Praetorians retaining the traditional weaponry longest - though I can't find a good description of what the new spear looked like. However, one of the new legionary types were called Lanciarii, the lancea being a long thin spear, or "lance", so draw your own conclusions.
Re stirrup, I'm not so sure. I think thong stirrups are quite ancient, with the iron stirrup being the late invention. At any rate, lancers were known to the Parthians, Sarmatians, and Romans (Catafractarii), with the Romans even experimenting slightly later with lancers mounted on horses pulling scythed chariots! As far as "effective cavalry" goes, an army of lancers and horse archers destroyed an army of good legionaires under one of Caesar's cronies as early as 53 BCE, long before the Roman army started its decline.
> Maybe it was just a response to what he felt was a 'know it all' attitude in the original post.
Yeah, that kind of rubbed me the wrong way too.
However, I do have to agree witht the original poster that Shanghai Noon is well worth the toll.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Sadly I've never liked Woo's "lets make that kick just a little cooler/wilder than the last one" style. Nor his "every action sequence must involve explosions or slow-mo no matter what it is".
But that's just me :)
The movie sucked because it has no plot. Really. It was being rewritten as late as two weeks prior to opening night. No, I didn't make this up. You can read it yourself in Entertainment Weekly. Robert Towne, the only credited writer in the movie, offers very candid comments on what happened behind the scenes. Why this move is so bad can be summarized in (Mr. Towne's quote): "'Hey, Robert, here are the action sequences, how'd you like to write us a story?' I had never even tried to write something that way before, and it was frightening."
I love thrillers. Well-crafted spy movies have always had a soft spot in my heart. Mission: Impossible was actually quite good if you followed the plot line, which wasn't as convoluted as it was touted to be. There was intrigue, and while the action sequences were very Hollywood, the script writers got all the spook-jargon straight (what's an NOC?). Those little touches of authenticity set M:I appart from other summer fare when it came out.
M:I-2 sucks simply because there is really no plot, as it was publicly stated by the only credited writer. The action sequences were too far over the top, and they don't come close to the action sequences in the latest Jackie Chan flick Shanghai Noon. Thandie Newton can't measure up either as a beautiful woman nor as an actress (think the latest James Bond flick: The casting of Denise Richardson was for pure eye candy). The movie sucks so much, that Oscar(TM) winner Anthony Hopkins, the only person delivering witty lines in the film, doesn't appear on the credits.
Movies are about escapism and fun. Other than the opening scene with Tom Cruise rock climbing, this movie provides neither. Save yourself $8.75 (if you live in San Francisco); wait for it to come out on video.
Have an excellent Memorial Day,
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
I'll take your word that those are perfectly valid fighting moves, but my biggest beef was with the bad guy. Whenever Tom Cruise started one of these run forward 10 paces, jump up in the air, with a backflip and catch the guy right in the face manuvers; I kept saying to myself "Why isn't he trying to block or dodge that? Why is the bad guy just standing there with his arms at his sides? Why is he ignoring all of these gigantic openings Cruise was leaving when he was setting up for these jumps?" But I guess it is just a movie, just like the Harlem Globetrotters are just Basketball...
I read the internet for the articles.
Regardless, it is painful to watch any Porsche tarnished. At least it was realistic; most cars are magically repaired in the next frame.
>I refuse to see any MI movie that doesn't have the theme song in 5. Lalo where are you?
For what it's worth, Schiffren later acknowledged in an interview that if he'd thought of the trick of introducing the theme in 5 and then switching to 4 like U2 did for the original MI movie, he'd have preferred to have done it that way.
But yeah, 5 is cooler; confuse the dance crowd.
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I saw it with my girlfriend last night too. It was pritty good, but I thought that the motercycle scene was unrealistic (primarly driving road motercycles on wet sand, and crossing a road on your front wheel, at full spead, then flipping around and being stopped on a dime)
There is not one single straight punch in this movie. I mean, geez. It's a fun movie the first time, but I think it would be unwatchable more than once. Not enough plot depth for a repeat viewing... Not enough variety to the fights either: kick, kick, kick...
Also, I don't think the bad guy was really a lunatic. That's cliche, and I think that they tried to keep that from happening. I think that part of the reason for the love triangle in the movie is so that we get a good idea of why he hates Ethan Hunt so much. In that light, he's just an extraordinarily greedy, jealous human being. But I don't think he's just a cliche movie villain.
This is slashdot material? Geeze. Tomorrow, I wonder if we are going to get a post on where someone ate lunch and who they ate it with. Get on the ball, already.
futang futang!
After two hours of first nearly falling asleep, then rolling my eyes, and then becoming outright disgusted that I spent $7 (!) to see this movie, we were treated to the coup de grace ...
Metallica plays the music in the ending credits.
I stayed for the movie, but walked out immediately after Metallica started playing.
Truly the icing on a particularly horrible-tasting cake.
This didn't really strike me as a true "Mission: Impossible" story. Rather, as Taco mentioned, it was more of a creative outlet for John Woo. The stunts are _great_ - but after awhile there's only so many ways you can kill a guy. This movie started wearing on me at about the 1:15 mark, and never came around after that.
If you ask me, the first M:I was a lot better. For starters, it was true to its roots: it had an actual team of people doing all sorts of cool secret agenty stuff the whole time. There was a mission. It was impossible. And so on.
MI2 really wasn't like this at all. There are three competing strands or directions in which this movie meanders: Woo's fetish with windy slo-mos and 2x Berettas, Cruise's totally incongruous, undying love for Thandie Newton (more on that later), and same vague, yarn about diseases and Greek gods. They take precedence in that order.
Now, if you ask me, that is just stupid. The original MI never dealt with sex in the manner this film does. Nor did it have such incomprehensible plots. I don't deny the directors a little creative freedom here, but through the whole movie I kept thinking about how they were trying to turn Ethan Hunt into a James Bond, minus the smarm. Cruise literally gets smitten (in the span of three minutes, another hiccup in the plot), and from there out his whole motivation is to get this girl back and screw the pants off of her. There are a few cool gadgets, but nothing like the first movie.
The final straw was the portrayal of Ving Rhames. Now, I thought he really stole the show in the first movie. His swagger was the perfect foil to Cruise's cold, calculating, "Kittridge - you have never seen me upset" demeanor. Compare that to this movie, and he is reduced to an annoying caricature of himself, kind of an amalgam of John Shaft and a corner street pimp. He utters lines like "That bastard put a hole in my Armani" with total seriousness. Ugh.. I found myself yearning for the much cooler, much geekier Rhames in M:I, the guy who drooled over kickass hardware and didn't seem to worry too much about his suit.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Go watch Battlefield Earth and THEN make up your mind again ...
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
The whole 'evil biotech virus and cure' plot has been done many times before - A few weeks ago, the mighty Joe Bob of TNT's Monstervision aired Body Armor, which has the exact same plot. Perhaps not coincidently, it is currently (1:30PM EST) being shown on the local WB affiliate in Connecticut. Check your local listings. Its pretty amusing - it has Ron Perelman, a Dynasty chick, a bunch of stunt guys trying to act, and the mandatory comic relief in the form of Ron Howard's brother Clint. Also putting in a brief appearance at the beginning is John Rhys-Davies, of Sliders ?fame?. Don't waste the eight bucks - just watch Body Armor. Btw, if you can't stay up to watch Joe Bob, you should tape it. His analysis of movies is brilliant, brutal, and incredibly funny.
They use Macs, because Macs simply look better than a boring Windows Box.
Yes, but Taco's review wasn't long, meandering and stupid.
Anyone saying this was even a decent movie needs to give their head a shake. I used to be a big fan of John Woo, but when he tries to get all artsy (dramatic music/slowmo at absurd romantic interludes) and doesn't focus at all on what works - action and lots of it. The bottom line is that this is not even close to MI1...At the very best it is a very bad Bond. A total of 15 minutes of action means too much John Woo, and not enough John Woo!!
belgin butters his butthole quite nicely, eh? I'll bet Linuk can hardly wait!
crap generating idiot
Current day DNA analysis can identify the fingerprint of DNA (it's signature, similar to a hash value) to come close to proving that DNA A = DNA B, but it that hash value cannot be reversed to give you the complete DNA code.
Not that anyone can test DNA in 30 seconds like they depict, but every spy movie advances technology 5-10 years before filming.
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
In American Pie, the computers that everyone uses for videoconferencing look like Macs, but if you look closely you'll see that someone just made a screen capture of a Mac desktop and used it as the background. The titlebars have an ugly set of Amiga-like pixmaps in the minimize/maximize/etc. button, but the windows have an equally ugly Motif-like resize border. All of the window decorations have a hideous looking beige-ish color to them. I think, although I'm not sure, that it was an Irix box that they were using (I'm judging based on a Kaleidoscope theme named "Irix" that looked exactly like that, so it could be a Mac after all, although I don't see why they would have bothered to do that).
-Chris Andreasen
-Chris Andreasen
1. Jousting motorcyclists: This has got to be the worst of the lot. People are supposed to be fighting for their lives, but no, they would rather tease you with a school-kid-type-i-dare-you stunt first instead of just using their guns.
Granted, I was waiting for one of them to just let off the throttle, raise a gun and blow the other's head off. Oh well, here's to an extra half hour of movie and a gratutious fight scene with misguided nobility, etc. Anyone properly trained would have simply sliced the guy open with that knife. But no, the thought that "she will die a horrible death" (wait, didn't I send my people to take care of her? Oh well, I'll not kill him anyway) drives him to not kill him, just beat the crap out of him so he can show mercy at the end of the fight anyway.
2. The villain knows exactly how the hero is going to penetrate the building and that his aim is to destroy the virus. But no, instead of doing something about it, the villain and his cronies would rather wait to get their asses kicked. See, that's so much more cool.
Again, agreed.
3. The hero is trapped behind a small desk at the laboratory. Instead of just killing the guy, the villains want to engage in conversation. "Oh, let's chat, for we may die soon."
Well, they could certainly have thrown people at him until he died, unfortunately those people were busy covering the conversationalists. Of course, bringing in the girl to make a point AFTER Hunt may have already been dead is sort of odd as well.
4. The hero could have taken out the last remaining sample of virus with a single gunshot. But no, he would rather take longing looks at it,
hiding behind a desk, waiting for the bimbo to do something stupid with it. And don't tell me the hero can't aim. We all know how many times
in the movie he takes out grenades/villains with a bullet from afar.
Good idea, take out the virus when you don't know how many modes of infection it has? What if it is airborne? Do you think the villains OR Hunt wanted to live the rest of their lives out in that lab ib quarentine?
5. The building is worth less 10 seconds of free fall (anyone bother to note how long it took for the hero to free-fall-penetrate or which floor
the laboratory was on?). But, it's apparently enough for a parachute to save the guy.
Alright, let's do some math here...acceleration due to gravity is 9.8m/s^2. Over the course of 10 seconds, that is a final delta V of 98 meters per second. Assuming Hunt started at 0 m/s, which it looks like he did, the average velocity comes out to 49m/s. A velocity of 49 meters per second over the course of 10 seconds is 490 meters, or about half of a kilometer. All this really says is that 10 is an unlikely duration for that freefall. Especially considering that the tallest building in Sydney is the AMP Centrepoint Tower, at ~305m.
It looked from the diagram that the lab was about halfway down the tower, so we can presume that it is about a 150m max freefall. Over the course of 150m one will fall for about 6 seconds or so.
If you payed any attention at all you would know that the lab was on the 4-somethingth floor, not the 42nd, but above that. Either the 45th or 47th if I recall correctly. Considering that the Park Avenue Plaza building in New York is 44 floors and 175m tall, this is a reasonable benchmark.
Normal minimum height for a freefall parachute jump is 800 meters. B.A.S.E. jumpers have made VERY risky jumps from as low as 300 meters. I find it unlikely indeed that a person can jump OUT of a building at around 175m and survive.
Thanks to Google for the research involved in this post. I learned something about both parachutes and Sydney.
Mycroft-X
For some reason some browsers report the link above as "broken". If you can't view the web page, go to http://www.ew.com/ew/daily/ then click on the Mission:Impossible 2 on the left, then click on the featured "MI:2's screenplay was a last minute work in progress" link on the right.
Here's the link for what it's worth: http://www.ew.com/ew/daily/0,2514,3068,mi-2sscreen playwaslast-minute.html. I think it may not work because of the embedded URL "cookie" (the numbers and commas prior to the document name).
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Man, your reply to every one of his comments is "I didn't know that." Maybe this should be a lesson: Next time you know virtually nothing about a subject, maybe you should keep your mouth shut and let those who know speak. If he hadn't corrected you, a lot of ignorant slobs like myself could have assumed what you said to be true.
Can you really see Peter Graves as Jim Phelps wake up one day and say, "Hey, the Cold War's over and all I got was this lousy T-shirt... Maybe I'll just brutally murder the rest of my team to make a quick buck!" Not me.
Up until the betrayal of the IMF agents, the movie almost looked like a cool update, but instead espionage and intrigue were tossed aside for Yet Another Summer Action Vehicle.
I saw a clip on MTV the other day that kind of sums up this kind of contempt, or at least ignorance, of the source material. Kennedy was at the first MI premiere, and asked Martin Landau what he was doing there-- "What? There was a TV series? What, you were in it?"
He was understandably annoyed, and not-too-politely told her to do her homework next time; she made faces behind his back and said "Whatever;" she was there for Tom Cruise.
For one, how did a hard-core nerd like Taco get a girlfriend, esp. when he never leaves the house :). Secondly, how did she become more important than perl scripting... so much more important that you would watch this shite at her command!
I mean coooome ooooonnnnnnn!
Those girls who took your cash and told you you were "dating" - they are called "prostitutes".
OK, there is a strange connection between M:I 2 and the game Rollercoaster Tycoon. Around the middle of the movie, Tom Cruise and "the love interest" are on a balcony. In the background, you can hear someone say "Tara, Tara, Tara". This is the same sound that you hear from the crowd in Rollercoaster Tycoon.
Is there a conspiracy here? I think so...
Roman Legion was using Mongol recurve bows
What you saw were Syrian auxiliaries with their typical bows. These exact archers are depicted on Trajan's (beginning of 2nd century AD) column. Shorter bows (the ones that you mistakenly call Mongol) were in use at least in the 6th century BC (that's right, almost a millennium earlier) by the Scythians.
This is roughly equivalent to Mel Gibson using a machinegun in Braveheart.
I wanted to let this comment stand in all its singular glory. Feeling good about yourself yet?
The Roman Legions used javelins.
During the Roman empire (as opposed to republic), soldiers became less dependable and therefore less likely to use the sword to good effect. The spaces between cohorts lessened and the battle line again evolved to a phalanx. Pila (which is what you are thinking of) evolved to longer and sturdier spears, appropriate in a phalanx type formation.
12th century ballistas in the 3rd century AD.
The same evolution required more artillery for the defense of camps and for softening up the enemy's line of battle. This is perfectly illustrated in Gladiator. What you assume to be 12th century was in fact in widespread use in the 4th century BC.
The stirrup, allowing effective cavalry, also had not been invented.
I did not notice stirrups. OTOH, I was not looking for them, as you were with your expert eye for such things. I was amused, however, by your implication that effective cavalry did not exist since there were no stirrups. Go tell Alexander's Companions, or Attila.
an EMPEROR challenging a SLAVE to a duel?!?!?
Commodus, Caligula and a couple of others fought in the arena while emperor. Sue your history teacher.
If you mean fly through the wireframe boxes representing the filesytem,yup that was an sgi demo for quite a while. Another version of text in 3D, seems neat before you see it, tedious and pointless afterwards
Dracosystems - Virtual Reality Engines and Applications
Has anyone else noticed the bad guys in *both* the MI films to date are current or former MI employees?
Seems to me the fastest cure for this is to just shut down the MI office.
Did anyone else have more fun seeing Nicole Kidman and George Clooney in "The Peacemaker" than her husband in both MIs to date?
I'm pretty sure the 20 hour thing was that the cure wouldn't work after that. If the virus wasn't contagious until /after/ your showing symptoms, it doesn't stand a chance of being the menace they wanted.
The big thing with the big epidemics is person A gives it to person B, person B gives it to person C. Person A starts to show symptoms. And so on...
She was already looking like death warmed over as the 20 hour mark approached.
--
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Hard Boiled is available on DVD - and in a Criterion Collection version, no less! Despite the obviously much lower-than-Hollywood production standards used in making the film, and the monaural soundtrack, it is one of the nicest-looking, best-sounding discs in my collection. Stop whining and go buy it!
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
That movie had some the sweetest action scenes ever. And of course you can't have sweet action scenes and expect them to be realistic or plausible- they're supposed to be eye-popping "NO FSCKING WAY!" shots. The almost complete disregard for the laws of physics is to be expected when you want a really, really cool scene (ala the kick in sand -> vertical jump of gun).
Take the the Matrix- while it did have a reason for action being unrealistic, noone would have found it heart-pounding if everyone stood there slowly taking aim, shoot, take aim again, shoot, etc. And that's exactly what MI2 did; it gave you the action and explosions you went to see. It would have been better if the plot was cooler and didn't resort to simple scene-twists instead of real plot-twists that MI did, MI2 still held up.
I will be the first to admit that the plot wasn't up to par with the first, but there was nothing cliche about it. Nothing more cliche than "honorable and noble general-turned-slave fights the underdog role to fame and glory against evil guy."
I give it a 9 out of 10 for action and 5 for an average plot.
-AU
Heya all. I went to see this movie with my family for my father's birthday last Wendsday. Overall, I'm pretty undecided about this one here. I really liked the first one. I don't know why, I guess I just love DePalma's style. I LIKED the fact that it was confusing as hell to most people. I LIKED that they didn't spit out every damn detail in your face. So, that puts in a bit of a position for this sequel. The overall thing that pissed me off about this movie, was that it was James Bond. I really HATED the "Ladies Man" angle. WTF? In the first movie it wasn't like he was trying to bone Emmanuel Beart every 5 minutes, as he was with Thandie (Sandy with a lisp?) Newton. I was really disgusted with the last Bond offering, and this "homage" didn't excite me one bit. Ok, fine, there were plot holes out the ass, I didn't mind those as much. If you have seen more than 1 John Woo movie, you know that these, along with continuity errors, happen ALOT. I've come to forgive those in leiu of some BADASS ACTION SCENES! Yes, I really really enjoyed the action sequences. Give me slo mo, give me 2,000ft cliff climbing, give me wheelie-popping motorcycle chases, I dig it all. The only action sequence that I thought blew was the Thandie/Tom car chase. Ok, the script really did treat you like an idiot, *SPOILER WARNING* ok who here just did NOT see it coming whenever Thandie shot up. I sure did. A mile away. Overall, I thought it was pretty good. The last fight scene just did it completely for me. However, I will take M:I over M:I2 anyday. On a sorta tangent here, is it just me or does it seem like the M:I franchise is just going to be "such and such famous director's" interpretation of the M:I world? I mean, Tom Cruise was trying for quite some time to get Oliver Stone to direct this movie! I'm not so sure that this approach is going to work; it'll be like a tribute album that never dies.
Dyslexic.
This comment is brought to you by the drug caffiene, and the number 5.
Ebola doesn't really spread until the person has been showing symptoms. In fact ebola mainly spreads after the person dies and their internal organs are dripping out through their pours.
Actually, I looked it up online, as I was curious about whether or not Commodus was an actual Caesar. Turns out, he was, and did often go into the Colloseum (sp?). In fact, he was killed when the senate conspired, and hired an athlete to kill him in the ring.
Maximus, (Note: NOT the Maximus who was a Caesar.) was a little-known person who through by some unknown reason, took control of a segment of the army, and defeated a number of German posts. Don't ask me for the URLs, this was done after MANY MANY hours of online looking.
Joe Carnes
I need to get a grep on reality.
He was definitely a cliché lunatic. If you consider someone who kills everyone on a commercial jet just to steal a brief case from one man on the plane, or cuts off part of his "trusted" sidekick's finger just for suspecting that his "girlfriend" is the enemy, not a lunatic, then you have some soul searching to do.
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." --Saul Belloe
Disclaimer: I haven't liked Cruise in anything since Risky Business (I haven't seen Magnolia), so it should come as no surprise that I consider his performance bland and underwhelming here. He is a pretty boy, though his looks are rapidly fading into a sort of roguish version of George Hamilton. However, looks alone do not an actor make, though they do, unfortunately, make many a star.
.02 cents worth.
Thandie would look marvellous with or without the cleavage. I don't know whether she can act. I hadn't seen her previously, and nothing in this film tests her enough to pass any serious judgement.
As for Woo... I love everything he has done except for this, though I might be alone in considering Face/Off one of his weaker works. I attribute the failure of this work to the PG-13 restriction. The storyline was no better or worse than is usual in action-adventure fare, but, frankly, this film was still twice as exciting as the original (which isn't saying much, as I thought the first film sucked).
Just my
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Actually, it's the same as how doctors offices have been able to determine that you are or are not the father of a baby for decades now, even though it's only recently that we've "mostly" mapped the human DNA. You're not looking at individual nucleic acid-chains, but the size and location of the genes ( and maybe the average composition ).. I'm not in the medical field, but it's just common sence. It's like using the time stamps in Make to determine which files have changed and require recompiling. Doesn't actually look at the code to make the determination.
-Michael
Complex plots and nifty gadgets have always been the hallmarks of Mission Impossible. Unfortunately, this movie had neither.
This movie seems to have simply stolen the title Mission Impossible and the theme song to apply to a movie that was in no way related to the feeling of the origional show. They didn't even bother with characterizations of the team members.
I was extremely disappointed with this movie. It was explosions without content.
Doesn't anyone go to the movies for just fun anymore? Do you always have to be intellectually stimulated by every movie you go to? Geez, people, lighten up. Have some fun, relax, blow some steam. If you thought it sucked, you probably went expecting a deep flick.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I assume you're excluding Jurassic Park
-Michael
Cowboy Bebop is one of the better Anime series to come out in a while. Good storyline, funny, good action scenes. Not too much gratuitous sex or gory violence. Definitely worth renting. Props to Bandai for making it a 5 TV episode/DVD release.
That said, MI2 is all about style. But it's copied style - they took the Matrix and Face Off, and added a cheezy sub-Bond movie plot. I mean halfway through they have a guy EXPLAIN the plot. Not worth seing, unless you don't care about any semblance of a story.
I guess Asterix comes in useful for something! :)
---------------------------- "The audience is listening." [THX promotional tag line]
I believe the computer system in Jurassic Park is Unix. (I'm sure it's Unix in the book).
Worst movie you've seen this year? At least you were lucky enough not to be subjected to the horror that was Mission to Mars. Ugh, that movie sucked. As an aside, hopefully one to cheer you up, usually when a nice car gets destroyed in a movie, it isn't really said nice car. It's a Fiero with a body kit. Ever seen The Rock? That wasn't a real Ferrari. Even so, it still hurts to look at.
Fortunatly, it was not infectious to humans. It was definitely ebola and more simmilar to Ebola Zaire than to Ebola Sudan. I have read several accounts of the Ebola Reston outbreak. The book "The Hot Zone" (i think) was a easy to read and quite chilling.
An outbreak of Ebola Zaire this close to Dullas and National Airport could have ended the world as we know it.
-- I am not a fanatic, I am a true believer.
You forgot one small element that is continuously adding to the mediocrity of this movie:
In MI2, it is so-ooo obvious it gets your mind of the main track every 15 minutes. Using the Porsche Boxter and Audi TT is OK because you definitely need them if you want a sexy car chase, but why is there such an obvious zoom on the inboard Motorolla mobile? It doesn't contribute anything to the overall plot! And where is the need for an AVIS truck in the middle of a motorbike pursuit? At least in The Matrix, they used the Nokia to get in synch for the phone-teleportation, and in James Bond, when Pier accidently rams into the Avis Rental shop, he tells the guard he is returning his BMW!
Yes, it's alright to put commercial products in a movie, but please use them, don't show them. Now we have a MI2 that looks like The Truman Show: full of blatant advertisements. But unlike the Truman Show, here it is not funny at all.
Actually you can create fake and realistic looking OS's with Director for Windows *or* Mac which is likely how they do it but that has nothing to do with it.
The reason is Apple has always spent a lot of money on product placement in films and television, like when you see a barrage of name brand products being used by characters in a lot of movies. Like a movie targeted at children where the characters pass by or enter a McDonald's or a Burger King- so the advertiser can do a tie-in in real life. Apple has had tie-in promotions with movies too; just can't remember which ones. Kinda realated, the US Navy has a large PR office that actively lobbies Hollywood studios and gets involved in projects; lending advisors, equipment, etc, ala 'Top Gun'. Notice that there are a lot more Navy themed movies out there in the last 15-20 years from H'wood than other military branches? The Navy is more active: it's just another form of product placement- a recruiting film that people pay to see.
So, I figured lots of slashdotters would be bothered by this:
It is important that the bad guys have their arse covered! (hostages, whatever) So 30 minutes into this movie my mind is racing as to HOW they have assured their lives!...
Oh, they DON'T have the virus, just the antecdote. Problem solved. Stop following them and put a bullet in them at the race track.
Mission: Accomplished. (-:
Don't go bashing Woo based on only one Hollywood flick. While Mission: Impossible 2 may have sucked big time (I have yet to see it), his Hong Kong films like the Killer and Hard Boiled have great action, stories and characters. Woo directed and wrote those too, instead of the duo who brought us the latest batch of Star Trek movies.
The way you keep going on about people wearing masks, you'd think it was a Jim Carey movie.
Yes, of course, I didn't say the Navy cooperates with every film that has them in it- of course they refuse to work on some of them. The US Army gets involved in very few of them and I remember they were aksed for some help with 'Courage Under Fire' but they clearly wanted nothing to do with that one either, similar to the tarnished image idea of 'A Few Good Men'. And something tells me the Navy probably didn't help out with 'GI Jane' either! ;-)
Like Braveheart before it, Gladiator played merry hell with the real history. But the real Emperor Commodus really did fight in the arena, repeatedly. (Presumably against slaves. And with or without cheating? You make the call!) Commodus styled himself after Hercules, even to the point of wearing a lion skin, and adopting the demigod's name as one of his many titles.
Check it out...
Well, not quite. The Navy reserves the right to review any script before they lend a helping hand, so to speak. Ever watched "A Few Good Men"? The Navy refused to help out on this film because they felt it tarnished their image (rightfully so, I might add). This is why, in the opening scenes of the film, where there are a bunch of Navy guys twirling their rifles, they don't look quite as good as real life officers. The producers had to borrow cadets from the Virginia Military Institute in place of them. Other than that you are completely right. Some of the stories I have heard about the lengths the Navy will go to accomodate a film that promotes the Navy would make your jaw drop :)
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I, for one, was glad to sit down for about 2 hours and just go 'ooooo.'
Gratuitous slow motion? Hello, meet John Woo. I was glad enough that he had a budget to use hi-speed cameras as opposed to slowing down the frames.
Plot holes and no character development? Hello, meet Action Genre.
Insult to intelligence? Hello, meet the PG-13 rating. This was a concious choice to broaden the audience. Think of it as backlash from the loud "What the hell?" the audience gave the first one.
Matrix ripoff? Hello, what the fuck did you think the Wachowski brothers are inspired by? They had Jet Li's choreographer for crying out loud.
I walked in expecting some nice-as-hell fight scenes, explosions that weren't re-shot from five different angles, an attempt at plot, no attempt at character development, and a hot member of the opposite sex. I walked out getting what I expected.
All in all, it's a fun flick, I'd go see it again at matinee or something.
someone recently wrote:
"Assuming your facts are correct, wouldn't it be much nicer to educate your fellow man than to insult him? you fucking moron."
indeed."You wouldn't know her. She lives in Niagra Falls."
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
First off, did anybody else notice that there was a rope hanging down the cliff to the left of Cruise in the rock-climbing scene? At first I thought it was just a crack, but I'm pretty sure it was a rope. Whoops.
Second, what's up with him throwing himself off the cliff, then magically managing to catch himself with just his fingertips? I doubt even the buffest rockclimbers could do something like that.
Third, that car chase scene was not only criminal (in that it destroyed two of, IMO, the two most beautiful cars in the world), but also stupid. That 911 would have eaten the TT for lunch, both in terms of handling and acceleration. Zero-to-sixty in 3.7 seconds? I'd like to see a TT even approach that.
Fourth: How the hell did that SUV manage to catch up to Cruise in the chase scene? Anybody who's ever seen a motorcycle (of any type) pass a car knows that motorcycles have acceleration and top-end speed that no car, not even an exotic, can touch. There's no way that SUV could have caught up with Cruise ... that is, unless Cruise doesn't know how to ride a motorcycle, which wouldn't surprise me. Or actually ... it's more likely his stunt double doesn't know how.
And don't even get me started about all the laws-of-physics-out-the-window stuff that happened during the fight scenes. It was all way too much like the Matrix, but wait! We aren't in a computer-generated world here! This is supposedly real!
Don't waste your money!
Mission: Impossible II - an impressionistic review, done as a spoken word performance.
(steps up to the microphone)
*ahem*
"Mission: Impossible II: an impressionistic review.
Boom! Blam-blam-blam. Boom. Surprise! Boom blam-blam. Twirl-blam-blam. Look, doves! Blam-race-blam-blam-boom. Thwap-thwap-thud-Surprise!-blam.
Awww...."
(And the Triumph Speed Triples make nice horses for an extended chase/fight scene.)
How is it possible that "Hard Target" with VanDamme is a much better movie than this one? Perhaps they should have got someone to write a script. It's like they just pieced together some scenes, and worked out what to say on the fly... very clever... erg...
Shanghai Noon, on the other hand, was absolutely great. Entertaining action, and farcical comedy. Delicous summer movie (no plot, just comedy and action, eh?).
Did anyone else notice that the theme song, just like the movie, was awful in comparison to the first? Handy hint: re-use/re-license work done by Bono and The Edge, they're better musicians than whoever they got for this MI2, eh?
FWIW, the 3D filemanager she was using (besides being useless) was entirely real. It can be downloaded at http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3 d_navigator.html.
Ummm, Jurassic Park had SGIs ("this is a UNIX system. I know this."), and so did Jerry McGuire, on every desk.
-----
Wake up.
Movies based on astronomy (e.g. Contact, The Arrival) use UNIX systems. How I remember watching Elly Arroway doing full-screen videoconferencing using Netscape... ahh :)
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Overall, I am disappointed that John Woo decided to direct this movie, because even "Ethan Hunt" isn't the same "Ethan Hunt" anymore. Shame shame. Go see Gladiator instead.
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
But you're geeks! Is that even allowed?
(runs off to check rulebook)
seriously, the poster above who said it went bad after tom cruise stopped climbing the mountain was pretty accurate. there was some action at the end, but it was way overdone and would've been better if it had been spread throughout the movie a little bit. no kidding, the the guy next to us was asleep, and you could hear several other people in the theatre snoring during the middle 45 minutes of the movie....
--
actually, im pretty sure that it wasnt bono and the edge, it was larry mullen and adam clayton (alternatively larry clayton and adam mullen, i cant remember which) from u2 that did the theme you're referring to.
supposedly limp bizkit's Take A Look Around was supposed to be the theme, but they only played about 30 seconds of the intro to it.
I saw the preview of "Scary Movie" before MI2 went on, and I guess that preview was as enjoying as watching Cruise's one man show.
Especially when that girl does a Matrix in front of the masked boogey-man ala scream. That was hilarious.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Have you wondered how fast did they (and their motorbikes) smashed into each other?
For all I'm concerned, they should have ended being a big bloody pulp, end of story. How did they manage to pull something like that?
I'll toss in another one- at least in Universal Soldier, the hacker kid was running some sort of a UNIX box with MWM. :)
Just like in the real world.
-Chris
The movie talked about a Chimera virus that would cause your blood cells to disolve, give flu like symptoms, and be uncurable after 20 hours. I am not a medical expert by any means but doesn't this sound a lot like the ebola virus. They never discussed how it was transmitted but if I remember right the ebola virus is transmitted through contact by blood. There was also an airborn strain that only affected chimps. So much for the super virus, its been around for a while. Feel free to correct me if I have any facts wrong, I am going off memory.
if you didn't want plot spoilers, why did you read this review? Why did you read the comments?
Damn, you're dumb.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Don't want to read movie reviews?
Don't read them, then.
Damn.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
First thing that glares out at me from the trailers: Humanity hasn't left Earth yet... We're at 6 billion and climbing, and people like sex. If tech was at the level it seems to be in the trailers, we'd probably even have gotten Venus colonizable by then. I have major problems with the idea of humanity confining itself to earth in a hundred years.
This right here shows me that that movie's going to be action--not intellectually--oriented. Don't even bother, IMHO.
-=Canar=-
More like: It's a big budget movie, they also spent a lot on marketing, marketing which suggests the movie will be great, I'm tired of being disappointed, I'll lower my expectations, thereby the film can only fail by matching my expectations for it. All this gives actually seeing the movie a bigger "upside."
about 3 billion times better then the first one
Can I see the math on that? I thought anything times zero was still zero. Just kidding. The first one didn't suck. Completely. Seriously, though, it's not unfair to think this movie could be rotten. Woo makes the same film over and over (the same good film, mind you), which means his films are only as good as the acting (the only thing different from film to film, see?).
In this case, you have Tom Cruise, who isn't anyone's idea of the greatest action hero. You want someone who seems wither very mortal (Bruce Willis, Nicolas Cage) or completely inhuman (Arnie). Since Cruise produced it, his decision-making was less about doing something original than marketing: remember the complaints about the original film? That's because they cut out the whole subplot with him and the girl, per market testing.
No, I think these "sheep" as you so kindly refer to them have developed an intuition for films: this film falls on the 'maybe sucks, maybe not' borderline, so assuming it's bad only gives it a better opportunity to impress us later.
-jpowers
-jpowers
To be honest, I found Impossible:Mission on the C64 more thrilling and entertaining than this stinker.
;) ]
[Okay, actually I live in Japan, so when it finally comes here in about 6 months, I'll let you know what I really think.
I think that it is for this reason that it gets stopped dead in its tracks if it pops up in a developed country. You see the symptoms in a dying patient, quarantine them, and that's it.
It needs to spread in asymptomatic people if it has any chance of being a world-wide epidemic.
--
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
There are also DNA viruses that exist in nature. So engineering a DNA-based virus wouldn't be a far reach at all. Saves having to package in reverse transcriptase to convert the RNA into DNA once in the target cells.
I see the IM2 trailer and think to myself, "Sunglasses with built in headphones, what a great idea.. Where can I buy some?"
The answer seems to be no where.. Jeez.
www.lowpass.net
1. He was a MI team member before, he knows you gotta make it look like an accident--thus the destruction of the whole plane. Go in, achieve the goal, get out, leave no traces.
People steal briefcases every day. Wanna know how they do it? They walk up to the person, grab the case, and run away. You don't have to crash a plane just to steal a bag. That would leave no traces, because it would just look like an everyday mugging.
Any real professional would know to keep it simple, stupid.
Besides, they didn't fool anybody! They didn't even dispose of the pilot's fucking body!
No comment at this time
I had not thought of it that way. But after reading your post, I agree.
For another movie with a lot of Capoeira, see the fun flick "Only The Strong", starring Mark Dacascus.
Be prepared for a mediocre plot, but great Capoeira!
(Well, I liked it a lot, anyway!!)
Important info:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
http://www.peakoil.net
The matrix is almost an exception, but for people endlessly bitching about keanu (sp?) reeves.
I don't see why more people don't realize that Keanu Reeves was a perfect actor to play Neo. The problem most people have is that Keanu isn't a martial artist badass, and they thought Neo was supposed to be a martial artist badass.
He isn't. Neo is no more a martial artist badass than I am a rocket-launcher-toting Strogg killing machine; both of us are just skinny, pasty white computer geeks who don't sleep regular hours. Neo just got to play with a much better computer.
And c'mon, didn't Keanu do the "pasty white computer geek" thing pretty well? He spent all weekend in his cluttered room developing a healthy monitor tan, he acted appropriately just a little dazed each time he was forced to confront the "real world" (at least I'll give Keanu the benefit of a doubt and assume that dazed look was intentional), and he hammed it up like a goofy kid beating his dad at Soul Calibur when he finally got the chance to kick a little computer-enhanced ass. If you were a wuss who suddenly was taught every form of fighting imaginable and could move with superhuman reflexes, wouldn't your behavior be a little corny and a lot cocky too?
I know ive seen fvwm running in a couple of movies. which ones you ask? i dont remember..
The perfect martial art for MI:2. ;)
Despite what someone said about the historical inaccuracies in Gladiator, the movie took you back to a time that no longer exists. I became completely engrossed with the movie and I wanted to swordfight after I watched it.
I agree with the reviewer in that MI:2 is so... blah! The plot is alright, but where were the gadgets? Where was the espionage??
In fact, MI:2 was not a Mission Impossible movie but just a "generic action flick". They just needed another name besides "Ethan Hunt".
MO
From what I can gather, he (the bad guy) wanted stock options in the biochem company, and when the outbreak is supposed to occur in the busiest streets of Sydney, the biochem company will go rich by supplying the cure.
however, was the "outbreak" supposed to occur because of the girl, who was told to be dropped off in a crowded place in Sydney, or or some other fashion? Clearly the virus is not airborne, and not contagious (everyone in contact with the girl, including Tom Cruise, would surely be dead, and they never hit themselves with the vaccine), so did they plan to run around with syringes injecting people with Chimera, or spray Chimera'ed blood at people?
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
Thadie Newton was off the hook. That alone was worth the movie. On the part of the acting, I think it would have been better if Jet Li did the fighting scenes. You could obviously see that Tom did the stunts, his martial arts are nothing to be proud of. The motorcycle scene was really cool, except the part where they both jumped in the air and jumped off their bikes. A little unrealistic there. But sliding under a truck, that was awesome. I wasn't execting a great plot, just looking for the action. Though it wasn't as good as I expected, the chick made up for it.
__________________________________________________ ___
rooooar
As far as the plot went, I did think it was a nice touch that the bad guy was obviously smarter than the good guy, and anticipated his every move.
Anyone going to this movie for intellectual stimulation deserves to be disappointed. It was exactly what one should expect - lots of stunts, very well directed and filmed - the car and motorcycle chases were very well done. (i know there are cries about killing the porsche and audi, but if you really want to cry, there is also the hidden: victim a ferrari 308gts, the original gone in 60 seconds: victim tons of valuable muscle cars, including a hemi cuda tboned by a semi, and others)
in fairness, i didn't have to pay to see it - not having to shell out $9 for a movie helps (what does silicon valley think it is? - midtown manhattan?!).
anyway go to have fun, if you want intellectual stimulation - go to something else.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
I have to ask. do you go to the movies to see some explosions or a sex flick or is it a chance to be alone with the grilfriend? Personally, I take the old lady, (cuz it's too wierd to go and see a flick alone.) and I WATCH the movie. I try to read past the lines, and the cool shots. Sure, alot of movies are unrealistic, but would you like to watch something that you do in everyday life? Movies are supposed to entertain. People see movies because they want to be entertained, not because they want to see the realism. Realism isn't flashy explosions or the hero getting (and having) the girl, it's Joe Shmoe in front of the TV, wearing underware, watching the NHL. With occasional farts thrown in for excitement. To me that sounds too boring. Give me an unrealistic movie any day of the week.
10 = 2 SilkyHog
Oh god, that poor Carrera. I almost wept. Not to mention the poor TT.
:)
What's the point of putting great cars in movies just to destroy them? Bond's beautiful Z8 also comes to mind. Damn them. If they want to throw one of those machines away, give it to me. Hell, I think I'd pay $8 just to watch a Z8 or Carrera zip around for two hours.
Weeping,
Galen
I'm wondering if anyone assciated with either movie ever bothered to watch the TV series. Jim, Roland, Barney, and crew could do anything, and they did it with style, stelth and intelligence. This is just more Hollywood pap not worthy of the MI name. I refuse to see any MI movie that doesn't have the theme song in 5. Lalo where are you? The best thing that can come of this movie is FX putting the tv series back into rotation again.
- daniel
- daniel
Turn off your computer and go outside
--Ben
Luckly I won a bet earlier this month so I didn't have to pay for this movie. I thought the plot was incredibly cliche. The cinnematography was cool, but that was about it.
That being said, I wasn't all that impressed with Gladiator either. Perhaps my hopes were too high after reading all the good reviews on that one.
I usually base my thoughts on a movie by the way I feel when I'm walking back to my car after it's over. If it's good, I'm saying to myself "wow, that was just amazing". I haven't had that feeling about a movie since The Matrix.
--Ben
Why is it that apologists for really bad movies always pull out the same tired cliche about ``intellectual stimulation?'' I may be pretty dense at times, but I assure you I wasn't thick enough to walk into MI2 expecting to see some sort of european art film or anything like that. Nevertheless, I don't think it is asking too much for the holes in the plot to be smaller than the helicopter our heroes were flying around in. I mean, the bad guy's master plan made no sense whatsoever, on any level (as if he's going to just walk in and take his seat on the board of directors after having released a super-flu on the world. Hello, McFly?). Add to that a love story between two characters that had no chemistry whatsoever, mix in some glaring continuity errors, add a dash of fight scenes that would make an anime director blush, stir, and simmer for two hours, and you have a recipe for a seriously mediocre film.
I'm not saying I hated it; it had its good points. Some of the stunts were cool, and the soundtrack was pretty good, but a film can get a hell of a lot better than this without venturing into ``deep flick'' territory. If you haven't seen it already, wait for it to come out in the $2 theatre.
-rpl
Also, don't forget Men In Black. The MIB headquaters was run on SGIs apparently...or at least some unix with MWM or FVWM.
I went and saw this last night after my friends told me it was almost as good as the Matrix-I was right to be skeptical. Sure, the rock climbing was interesting, barring a few laws of physics that would have killed Tom Cruise. But then the next hour and fifteen minutes (i looked at my watch frequently) was pretty damned boring. 1 mediocre car chase. Some cleavage. Oh boy. There was plenty of action in the last hour, but is anyone else as sick of slow-motion as I am? And I'm sorry, I don't think that doing flip-kicks are going to be that effective. This movie was far too predictable-not one mask being pulled off surprised me. My friend and I were able to predict everything about the whole tower scene, including the parachute and the injection, 20 minutes before it even happened. The movie had this problem-it billed itself as an action movie, but didn't have enough. The plot was too boring to be a spy movie. They tried to combine both and got a worse product than they would have had by doing either spy or action. I think the original was far better than this one: it actually had a team working together, instead of just Tom Cruise doing kicks. And it wasn't like the plot of the first one was hard to understand-I just think film critics must be morons if they couldn't understand it.
Colin Winters
Apple spends a lot of money getting Macs into movies. Doesn't matter that the computers are usually running HollywoodOS, the important part is that people see the little apple logo. When you see a giant Subway wrapper almost full frame in Terminator 2, you know Subway paid a lot of money to get it there, right? Any time you see a corporate logo in a movie, you should think about that.
Speaking of the plot, I've heard quite a bit of commentary in different reviews and 'hollywood' type stuff that said that they purposely dumbed down the plot, because one of the largest weak points of the first movie was that nobody understood what the hell was going on. I admit it, after the first time I watched the first movie, I didn't have a CLUE what was going on.
This movie was not like that. You could actually understand what was going on, even though there was quite a bit of artifice in different parts.
I thought that the plot was not the greatest, but in terms of action, this was one of the most badass movies I've ever seen.
Much better than gladiator anyway, which was just an extremely bloody remake of Braveheart in Roman times. (If you've seen Braveheart, you roughly know the entire plot of Gladiator except that instead of fighting for freedom, the gladiator is fighting *for* the republic of rome after a fashion)
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Since he started on Hollywood movies, Woo has put out a lot of average to mediocre movies.
Who can remember "Hard Target" (his first US movie) or "Broken Arrow" without shuddering? I know I found them painful.
No, Woo should have stuck with what he does best, gritty Hong Kong Action Theatre movies.
Movies like "Hard Boiled" or "The Killer".
Where having two handguns, slow-mo sequences and unbelievable acrobatic fighting moves is not only accepted, but expected!
Throw in some comedy (keeping the action!) in "Once a Thief", and your HKAT experience is complete.
Put Chow Yun Fat in a Woo movie, and I'm guaranteed to be in the audience! (he's in both "Hard Boiled" and "The Killer")
"The Replacement Killers" and "The Corruptor" - both excellent movies with C.Y.F. and without Woo, for people who don't like his style.
Important info:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
http://www.peakoil.net
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
All of my friends have told me to go see it. So me and my GF are going to watch it tonight. I hope it is as good as the first one. Tho most the time the first one is always the best, cept in James bond movies, in which case it was the worse, Never mind that. I just like to babble on bout nothing at all! I'd recommend Shanghai Noon which I saw last night, pretty fun stuff.
-= Majere =-
Aren't you people boycotting The Man's movies? I know I am, unless and until the DeCSS suit is dropped. There are plenty of fine independent films that don't make you fund a witch hunt against a computer programmer.
I just have one question for the script writers: if the biotech scientiest could "look at" the DNA sequence of the virus to confirm that it was actually it, then why the hell would they need the virus anyway? If you know the DNA, you have the virus....DUH!
Lets see what else...
There's the mandatory self destruct button...
The movie goes for at least an hour without any action happening or anything the least bit interesting going on to keep you from walking out...
I love the way they combined the matrix and outbreak...
I love the way the laws of physics are defied on a regular basis...
I'm sure there's more but I'm tired of bitching
This is a basic consumer movie. There were aspects from almost every genere: action, suspense, chick-flick, thriller, etc... maybe even some horror, depending on how you look at it. The plot was terrible in order to make room for all the different aspects.
The whole mask thing was waaay overdone. Too terribly predictable. You could snap your fingers on almost the exact moment when a 'special event' would take place. The characters were poorly developed and they had little interaction with each other, as was the case in MI.
I personally enjoyed MI, and enjoy the James Bond flicks. However, mixing the two just doesn't work. They're not the same type of flick.
I was fairly disappointed too, cuz the theater didn't have teh speakers up very loud. Gay.
However, I did enjoy the movie. I'd not see it again, and it wasn't a good movie, but I enjoyed it. My fiance and I made fun of it the whole way through. There were sooo many rip offs from other films. She said there were even some from Tron. (I've nto seen the whole thing.)
I doubt I would have enjoyed it at all, if I had watched it on my own. It would have been nice if it was a good, solid action flick. OR a good solid suspense, thriller, etc. That's the type of movie this guy likes. This was too terribly kludgish.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Director's name is John Woo!
This is the funniest signature I could ever think of.
"There was a mythical SGI laptop used in Twister to track the tornadoes, although I think that was basically movie magic"
Magic? Wasn't the SGI label just a piece of tape with SGI written on it?
There is nothing that could be done to make M:I-2 "better". If every critisizm on slashdot was somehow incorporated into the film, "fixing" all it's perceived flaws, it would not be "better", it would only be different.
Much as you might like to think differently, your aesthetic taste is no more valid than anyone else's. And any thing you might have changed in the film to make it "better" for you would probably make it "worse" for someone else.
For some reason people expect art to reflect their tastes instead of the artist's. If you liked the film, great: it was intended for you. If not, great: it wasn't intended for you. Hope you find something that is.
I'm just bringing this up to remind any creative folks out there that they've no responsibility to make art for anyone but themselves. Good luck, Mr. Woo.
Had JonKatz made this review, we would be all over him for using /. to post this sort of thing. Then again, it's not JonKatz's website so Taco can do anything he wants. But I see a contradiction anyway.
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams". Elias Canetti
On the same token, it really annoyed me how in The Matrix, every time they showed one of those sweet cell phones, the framerate would slow down just long enough so that you could read the "Nokia" label.
Character development? He's never heard of it.
Even the first MI movie had that going for it.
Take out all the slo-mo and the movie would be 15 minutes long, too
Seriously, though, if you want to laugh, go see it. It's the most incredibly bad movie I've see this year. So many editing/continuity errors that I stopped counting. This movie was made for a 6th grade level audience because of the overly-cliche and explanatory script and framing. Hey, there's a zoom-up on that cigar cutter! I wonder if it'll play an important part of the next shot?
Hey John: pick a frame rate and go with it!
And never, never destroy a piece of artwork like a new 911 Carrera Cabriolet just for the sake of spending the money! Ouch. That ridiculous scene hurt my eyes moreso than the others.
--- witty signature
this is not one of them. I'm not a woo fan, so that really tainted it for me (I enjoyed the first one). Gladiator was alot of fun too, but still pretty mindless. THE movie to watch right now is the Virgin Suicides. Amazing film. I'm likely going again this weekend.
Save yourself some money and rent Mission Impossible 1. It was a lot more fun. MI2 seemed a little too generic. It will make for a better rental (when you can fast forward through the stupid romantic scenes).
LKike the Windows 3.0 Demo?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Of course, Raleel. Damn. I now know I'm in full geek city. How can you guys not appreciate what's in this movie? I mean, were you expecting another Sneakers? Of course, I loved the motorcycle stunts because I do them all the time, just without bullets flying at me. Every stunt except the riding on the side of the motorcycle are pretty damn easy, and I can do them on my bicycle, too. In fact, I bet all of you guys could do them if you had a bit of practice. It's just that it's a little more unnerving at 40-50 MPH...
Most of them are animations with basic interactivity done in Macromind Director I suspect.
if you're interested in making cool fake OSes on a mac, check out kaleidoscope.net or on windows, check out litestep.net. these are both really nifty theming engines for their various platforms. of course, if you're lucky enough to be running X, just go to themes.org and take it away...
the bottom line is that most modern OSes can be customized much more than is first apparent, so if you want more little bells and whistles and neat stuff, you can probably get it with a little tinkering...
Enjoy!
--
What you have are a bunch of folks who take the time to be discerning about not only their operating systems, but just about everything. Whatever kind of music/movies/TV/comics/art/etc they like, they tend to hunt around for obscure gems rather than listen to what's spoon-fed them.
Thus, while I may like John Woo's earlier work, and someone (anyone?) may think Cruise worth watching, I'm not going to get all worked up over whatever Hollywood's party-line blockbuster is this week.
I have to admit I'm looking forward to seeing if Titan AE is any good, though.
-jpowers
-jpowers
It becomes very obviously, very early on that this movie is brain-candy, and you will not enjoy it if you nitpick about the impossibilities. ( Physics is, of course, the first thing to go.. dropping dozens of stories only to stop at the last second inches above ground ( Tom barely stopped above the glass floor in the first movie ), spinning of cars, motorcycles in a graceful waltz, etc ).
The character development was completely non-existant. You'll have to have seen the previous movie to be able to appretiate the hacker dude. I felt ZERO emotion in regards to the "essential" romance part of the plot. It seems to me that they didn't want to bother working out romance in an action movie, so that by making it part of the main plot it was more justifiable. Still, I have to give them credit for giving this otherwise useless female character a vital role. ( personally I didn't think she was so hot, but she wasn't bad ). Furthering the notion of character, there were no tragedies ( with the exception of the Tom Cruse getting shot scene, which was rather transparent ( though it still caught some moans from our audiance ) ). It didn't hold a candle to emotion in MI-1 in this regard.
MI-1, I think did a good job of linking to the original series. Same basic characters, repeated use of the exploding message, strong plot around the CIA, pseudo-complicated in a spy-movie sort of way. This had minimal ties, all of which could very well have been after thoughts ( oh yea, we need to add something MI-ish ). It became it's own generic action movie ( Bond, Schwartzineger, whatever ). I liked the quote "Matrix meets Outbreak".
Now, my biggest gripe. Many action fans like a pretty face or two ( Bond style ), no plot necessary ( or at least simple good-guy/ bad-guy.. Or even the modern, renegade good-guy/ imaculate, well respected bad-guy ), lots of action, and martial arts ( I'm still recovering from the bland Chuck Noris films ). So it definately has the elements for that genre. There's one slight problem.. IT'S BORING!! There were so many parts that I physically looked away from the screen in bordom. All the artsy fartsy slow-mo shots of the surrounding environment ( which supposedly sets the mood ), the various conversations, and side actions just all put me off. And it is by this token that I say it's a bad movie. If you exclusively focus on a genre, with the exclusion of at least good directing / writing, then you had damn well better fit the genre well. Action movies need non-stop action ( See Terminator II for reference ( minus some tiny plot scenes ) ).
Still, the movie had some redeeming values. Some cool quotes "when yellow dot reaches the red dot", "she's a woman. She has all the necessary qualifications", "this is not mission too difficult", etc. And in the true James bond spirit, the intro scene was better/cooler than most of the rest of the movie.
Conclusion: Go see it at a matinee JUST for the intro. You won't be disappointed. If you want, you can sneak into the ending half hour; It has the action that you might be interested in. Just ignore what the girl is doing. She's supposed to be committing suicide, even though the point of releasing her was to infect Sidney.. ( what, is she supposed to swim out there? )
-Michael
-Michael
I can't believe you guys. I guess I'm just having trouble reading these comments because I'm not part of the PBS movie review group where I have a pipe and calmly discuss John Malkovich's reaction to his co-star's emotional behavior at length. I love John Woo!@$ I thrive on his movies! I like far-fetched action scenes, karate kicks, unrealistic motorcycle chases, and the like. Yes, the stock options bit made me choke, but the rest of it kicked ass. I would strongly recommend it to anyone who likes a good action movie.
Odd, there are already 124 posts (probably a couple more by the time this shows up), and not a single one has the word "clam" in its subject.
I think with those long drawn out attack runs Cruise made, from what I gathered he was around a corner and thought ahead that the guy was there... like with the pidgeons, he was around a corner and saw them take off, realizing it would cause a commotion, and the bad guy saw it, but (of course) didn't think much over suspicion about it, so Cruise took the long quick run and jumped around the corner, and smashed his face... the other ones I got the same impressions you did, but I was in the grey about whether it was a completely visible run or not...
Okay I've been wondering since the first M:I and seeing the second one brought the question back. How do they make those "fake high tech" operating systems that Hunt uses on the Powermacs. You know what I'm talking about - the sweet looking window manager and apps that he uses to do things like interface with the satellite, etc. It has tons of beeps and clicking and lots of cool features - 3D rotating heads, etc. etc. Any ideas?
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
It was a pretty funny movie with some action but the plot wasn't developed that well. The Cowboy guy is really funny, best part of the movie. I know he was in the Haunting but I can't remember his name.
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
"And, uh...I get to keep the equipment when we're done." -- Luther
ObDVDRant: Why isn't "Hard-Boiled" available yet?
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
most of the bike scenes involved wires and cgi shots.. Most of it was not real at all... And you could tell.
I eat the flesh off the living, and I vote!
Did John Woo's famous signature make it into MI2?
You know, the one where the good guy and bad guy
aim huge guns right at each other's faces and pause at that moment?
(You see it a lot in Chow Yun Fat HK movies that Woo directed.)
... you see a pigeon flying in slow motion through a door in flames
;)
-- Martial MICHEL
Erg. Unfortunately, my standards for sci-fi are much higher than my standards for action films. (Thus, I am greatly disappointed by much of the genre that Hollywood puts out.) I expect there to be at least half a dozen mild absurdities in a Hollywood action film, but I am not quite prepared for the savant cavemen...
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
I agree, Taco...This was a stinker. Here's the spoiler:
A genius develops the Chimera virus, an insipid strain of influenza that kills within 27 hours. Some evil Russian guy poses as Tom Cruise by (guess what!) putting on a mask. He and his buddies take the virus and cure, crash the plane the professor's on, and start rambling about stock options.
Meanwhile, Tom Cruise, aka James Bond, engages in rock climbing without safety lines and makes Batman-like moves to save his stupid rear. He then finds some chick and sleeps with her instantly. Some surrealism about Spanish dancers follows.
They have the obligatory high-speed extremely-expensive car chase, then she goes off to steal information from her former boyfriend on a 32MB Kodak (Does Kodak even make those!?) memory card.
In the meantime, the goodguys capture a big CEO guy by pretending to infect him with Chimera. While he hallucinates, Tom Cruise poses as the Professor by (guess what!) using a mask to milk information from the CEO.
Then the obligatory drop-down-into-the-top-secret-riddled- with-security-measures-area. Tom Cruise, of course, jumps down into the place hanging ludicrously by a zipline, and moves stealthily into the Hackers-esque moody lighting, all the while keeping his vintage 1979 shaggy haircut out of his eyes. He destroys two out of three vials of Chimera, then has some sort of flashback that makes him pause. Idiot. Of course, the badguys attack just then, but never fear, the chick injects herself selflessly to waste the virus.
Cruise runs off and engages in the Matrix-Terminator 2-James Bond fight scenes that I need not even go into detail about. He gets the vaccine (again, by WEARING A MASK!) saves the girl, and they go to a fair to celebrate. This is when we got up and left in disgust.
'Tis a stinker. Save your $5.
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
Oh, and the music! don't get me started on the music. When you were at the most tense, action packed moment of the movie, the music was trying to put you to sleep! I don't know why, but it was. But for all these fault, i do not blame the star, director, editor, composer or writer. The editor is a member of A.C.E. not something easy to do, and something to be applauded. The writer, Robert Towne, wrote Chinatown, an incredible movie. The Director, John Woo, a master of his craft. Tom Cruise, a wonderful action hero. The composer wrote lovely music.
But you wonder, if everyone is so fscking wonderful, why did the movie suck so much? Well, i would have to say that the blame rests solely on the one who made sure the everything came together in just the right way. The producer. Because in this movie, i assure you that nothing came together the right way. well, maybe the credits did, but i was too disgusted to watch those...
my final verdict... I want my 126 Minutes back, don't waste your time.
Hmm. The historical Commodus would have been a much more interesting character. Unfortunately, the one portrayed in the movie did not much resemble the one described in your link. I could believe that someone who fancied himself Hercules's successor would have fought that duel (with or without cheating), but the character as presented in the movie would not have save out of a Caligula-like sense of insanity. If he were remotely good enough to fight the duel, he would know the dangers of fighting a man who has no hope of life aside from killing him, even if he had not butchered the man's family. His opponent wouldn't care whether he lived or died from his attacks if it was going to be a choice between death and death... I chalk it up to another "great" Hollywood plot.
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
Please! Can the movie be anymore of a cliche? And if you know absolutely anything AT ALL about roman history, you will know just how unbelievable it was. I kept hearing about how great the plot was for Gladiator and I walked in with high expectations. The action and effects were well-done, but the cheezy plot kept me laughing for half the movie.
/.ers need to relax their left brain for once.
On the other hand, at least MI2 didn't aspire and fail miserably with some half-ass pretentious plot. It was a pure action flick with just enough plot to justify it. IMHO, I think no one comes close to John Woo's ability to lift the violence to an art form. Far, far better than the unnecessary copy-cat-of-braveheart-and-saving-private-ryan blood and gore of Gladiator and how Crowe throws a couple of spears and the chariots just tumble over themselves and break into peices. Guess they just ran out of creative ways to get rid of the chariots, something John Woo would have NO problem with =).
Anyway, that's just MHO. I agree with some of the posters that these analytical
Find and share links to celebrity profiles on MySpace! http://www.myspacecelebrities.com
;)
BlackNova Traders
I was boycotting the MPAA because of the DeCSS thing. Fortunately for me, they accidentally gave one of my friends an extra ticket, so I got in without giving the bastards any of my money. If you can manage it that way, it's probably worth slightly more than what you pay for it.
Notes:
Excluding vehicles, 6 instances of product placement that my friends and I noticed. Versacci, Motorola, (jewelry company whose name I can't remember), Kodak, Macintosh, (one more I can't remember)
Look for the mention of the DNA of a virus (viruses have RNA).
If you have a good audience (we did), this is a lot of fun. At various places, people yelled things like "kill her!" "he can't, the heroine can't die", etc. Throughout all of the second half of the film, the entire audience was laughing, especially at the fight scenes.
-Dave Turner.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
OK, I may not know a lot of things.
I don't if you can actually do a front wheelie on a street bike.
I don't know if anyone actually can flip upside down while shooting someone (the chances of me sucessfully completing a back flip are slim under the best of conditions).
I don't know if you really can make masks of other people and have them seem completely realistic.
I do, however, know system administration. In the movie, I just couldn't deal with the fact that the heros thought they could destroy all the copies of the virus, and the problem would be solved. As part of being a responsible sysadmin, I make backups every day. The dailies go in a seperate fire safe every day. The weeklies go off-site in another fire safe. So I guess the scientists in the movies never stored their data on computer?
And if you do have the genetic sequence of a virus, you may not immediately have a viable virus, but you're a long way towards such a goal. Besides, where were all the technicians that also worked on the project? To really finish the job, Ethan would have to kill all of them too.
An additional problem is that once the genie is out of the bottle, it's hard to get back in. Even if some other research group in the same company didn't have copies of the work, just knowing what was done (and knowing it's possible) can also take you a long way towards re-implementing it. We re-implement stuff all the time in the OSS world, right? Often pretty darn quickly.
The stunts definitely were cool, though.
I hated this movie.
...
Yeah, so you've heard it all from others how this shitty movie has no plot. Some apologise for it saying this is meant to be "action" flick.
As if that somehow exonerates its crappy "action". I have no problem watching senseless violence, explosions or action sequences that defy physics, especially if the movie's setting already allows for it, like Matrix or sci-fi.
But M:I2 is just a pathetic excuse. The action doesn't make ANY sense.
1. Jousting motorcyclists: This has got to be the worst of the lot. People are supposed to be fighting for their lives, but no, they would rather tease you with a school-kid-type-i-dare-you stunt first instead of just using their guns.
2. The villain knows exactly how the hero is going to penetrate the building and that his aim is to destroy the virus. But no, instead of doing something about it, the villain and his cronies would rather wait to get their asses kicked. See, that's so much more cool.
3. The hero is trapped behind a small desk at the laboratory. Instead of just killing the guy, the villains want to engage in conversation. "Oh, let's chat, for we may die soon."
4. The hero could have taken out the last remaining sample of virus with a single gunshot. But no, he would rather take longing looks at it, hiding behind a desk, waiting for the bimbo to do something stupid with it. And don't tell me the hero can't aim. We all know how many times in the movie he takes out grenades/villains with a bullet from afar.
5. The building is worth less 10 seconds of free fall (anyone bother to note how long it took for the hero to free-fall-penetrate or which floor the laboratory was on?). But, it's apparently enough for a parachute to save the guy.
... oh and list goes on
I am just so irritated that even the action doesn't deliver.
Sreeram.
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Observation is the essence of art.
During the opening credits, I just barely pay attention to who did the soundtrack. But later on in the movie, I notice that during the slow-mo scenes I'm hearing this music and woman singing that sounds remarkably like Gladiator's soundtrack. Sure enough, go to the credits and you'll see Hans Zimmer is the man responsible. I think he cut a few corners and decided to use the music, or at least the same singer and orchestra to produce MI2's soundtrack.
Kinda lazy.
I would tend to agree that his debating techniques need a little refining, but so far nobody has decided to call him on any of his facts.
Maybe it was just a response to what he felt was a 'know it all' attitude in the original post. I don't know enough about Roman history to say, myself.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Everyone keeps saying to wait to see this at a second-run theater. No way! Go see it on the biggest screen available in your city, with the best and loudest sound system.
I agree with most of the complaints people have against the movie. It's not a great movie. But what there is to enjoy about M:I-2 (the way it looks and sounds) is best enjoyed in a theater that makes it look and sound as good as possible.
Definitely don't wait til it's out on video. A movie like this you should either see in a good theater, or not at all.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
In regards to all of you who have said the fighting style used by Cruise in this movie is "bogus" or "unrealistic", need to try learning a little about the subject before you go blasting your mouths off. To quote a few: "...and Tom Cruise performing stupid backflip karate kicks that might work if they were in Cowboy BeBop, but don't even come close when actual human actors pretend to perform them in slow motion." "And don't even get me started about all the laws-of-physics-out-the-window stuff that happened during the fight scenes. It was all way too much like the Matrix, but wait! We aren't in a computer-generated world here! This is supposedly real!" "And I'm sorry, I don't think that doing flip-kicks are going to be that effective." Many/most of the moves used by cruise in this movie are from a brazilian martial art known as Capoeira, which I myself am a student of, and find it to be incredibly effective as a fighting style. Granted, the bad guy would never have been able to take the kind of punishment Cruise dished out, as several of the kicks used would cripple any normal human being, but the kicks themselves weren't unrealistic in any way whatsoever. Just thought I'd throw in my two cents.
... for mentioning Cowboy Bebop in a review of something entirely unrelated! :-)
1. He was a MI team member before, he knows you gotta make it look like an accident--thus the destruction of the whole plane. Go in, achieve the goal, get out, leave no traces.
2. The cutting off parts of the finger was the only lunatic part for me. It could be partially explained as him making sure the other members of his "team" trust his judgment implicitly, but even then, I'll give you the point.
The rest of the time, the bad guy was great. Smart, functional, able to deal with heavy situations (witness his not just killing the girl when he found out), etc. Throughout the movie he was true to form as "the anti-Hunt."
He's sane, just he pursues goals without considering "collateral damage". Thus the word "villain".
--John
And it was actually $5.50. But don't hold your breath. The theatre sucks. ;]
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
I think the thing that started Gladiator off on the wrong foot for me was the fact that the Roman Legion was using Mongol recurve bows and 12th century ballistas in the 3rd century AD. This is roughly equivalent to Mel Gibson using a machinegun in Braveheart. Never mind that longbows (the first large European bows used heavily for combat) were invented by the Welsh a noticable while later. The Roman Legions used javelins. The javelins were made with soft metal heads that would bend if they hit a shield, so that the user was stuck with dead weight instead of a useful shield. The time and place references did not get better as the movie went on, either. The stirrup, allowing effective cavalry, also had not been invented.
As far as plot goes, it was at least as predictable as MI:2, if not more so. The only three-dimensional character in the film was the former gladiator who owned Maximus. All the rest of the characters were lucky to get one dimension. The plot was painful and the ending simply absurd. Which is more unlikely, Cruise's nutty aerobatic fighting style, or an EMPEROR challenging a SLAVE to a duel?!?!?
I'm sorry. If you want a brainless plot with some good action and entertainment, go see either. If you want a good plot, respectable dialogue, etc. don't see either. I am just astounded that Gladiator can be held up as a better movie than MI:2, when the first is a poor rehash of old gladiator movies and the second is an occaisionally inventive action flick in the spy motif. The only possible reasons I can come up with is that people have seen more spy movies recently, or that they just want to see people dismembered.
Argh. Anyway, if you like John Woo movies, as I do, you will be entertained by MI:2. If you are a medieval weaponry buff, as I am, you will like the fight scenes in Gladiator. If you like to laugh, as I do, you might just like Jackie Chan's mockery of the old west in Shanghai Noon better than either one. The script is witty and the action is good. Plus, it probably cost about a tenth of what either of the other two did.
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
http://fox.mit.edu/skunk/soft/fsv/
Lars -
I mean the last one didn't have much to do with the show, it was just an excuse for Cruise to strut around (or dare one say cruise around) - is this one more true to the show?
--
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
(MINOR SPOILER WARNING - BUT IF YOU HAVE HALF A BRAIN YOU'LL FIGURE IT OUT ANYWAY :)
I thought it was a pretty good movie overall, except for one thing- those #@$(*% masks!
In the last scene, I half expected the two of them to pull off masks, and they'd actually be someone else - and how on earth did Ethan get masks for him and the other guy?
I haven't seen the movie (fortunately), but if it is a CompactFlash memory card (stamp sized) then YES, Kodak makes some 32 MB cards like these. In fact they are manufactured by Sandisk and rebranded by Kodak. I've always though that if I have to sneak some datas around I would use a CompactFlash card as a storage medium. Goes up to 192 MB (or 340 with the IBM minidrive), which is plenty to store secret plans/virus datas/prototype datasheets and you can hide them pretty much everywhere.
Obviously you've never seen the movie, or alternately have the intelligence of a brick. Or maybe just the attention span of a bowl of soup. Gladiator was an excellent movie, and I reserve the legal right to kill anyone who is retarded enough to claim it wasn't. I would be doing it to purify the gene pool, of course. ------------------ supruzr "..And if you find yourself fighting alone, in a field, with the sun at your face, worry not, for you are in Elysian, and you are already dead!"
if John Woo is going to use that hero flying sideways-with-both-handgun-firing-unlimited-ammo scene...