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Taken?
jeepliberty writes "Was I the only one to feel like I was "taken" by the latest Spielberg mini-series? It concluded last night on the SciFi channel. It started out great. The first five episodes were excellent. Then like milk on the counter, it started going sour. My sister is a writer and after she sees a movie she always picks it apart for continuity, character development and plot. I always tell here "Get a life. It's just a movie." Well after I saw the 7th installment, I started picking up my sister's habits and began picking it apart. "Taken" seems to have taken a little bit from "Firestarter", "E.T.", "Sphere" and quite a few others."
Yeah, A.I. wasn't too brilliant. Minority Report, on the other hand, was awesome.
Which is what I think is wrong with speilberg and lucas ... They are candles who have burned too brightly for too long, and they are simply extinguishing. I'm not going to talk about "selling out" because that's cliché, but its clear they lost their passion long ago.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Movies serve one purpose -- to entertain. In fact, all entities can generally be classified into one category based on one primary function that they perform. For example, computers are designed to perform fast calculations. Movies are made to entertain. Actors and actresses appear in movies to pay for living expenses, whereas they appear on Broadway and live theatre productions to hone their acting skills. Writers' purpose is to organize a lot of information into coherent articles and papers. Constructions workers build things. Engineers design things. It's really that simple.
It's often been said that there are only two things that should be used to rate a movie on its entertainment merits.
1) Does the story take you somewhere?
2) Do you care about the outcome?
That's it. That is essentially what Spielberg and every other movie creator's goal is. They want to entertain and captivate audiences, but if that's going to happen they have to address those two crucial questions.
It's not that Spielberg isn't a master, it's just that he's forgetting the whole purpose. His movies have become too cold and outsider feeling; audiences are subsequently being turned off to his stories these days because, time and time again, they don't feel taken back or captivated, and they don't have an emotional tie-in to what happens in the plotline.
I think popular films of the current day can learn a lot from the anime sub-genre of filmography. It's about interesting characters that people care about, and stories they grow to love and understand. The basic simplicities of life.
Anime is not child pornography, it's not tentacle rape, it's not insert_whatever_typical_complaint_here -- it's just captivating, wonderful film. And it's new, it's fresh, it's fascinating, it's an art form.
Spielberg no longer is these things. He's old hat, washed up, boring, dull, tantric, mundane, and irrelevant any more. He turns great Kubrick, Dickens, and Shakespeare stories into a cold abbreviated plot with characters no one cares about and actors that aren't the most skilled craftsmen in their field.
I used to love Steve, I really did. But lately it's almost as though he's just doing movies to occupy his time. I no longer leave Spielberg movies at the theatre with my mouth open and dripping. I leave with a gritty taste in my mouth and thoughts of less-than-his-best wander throughout my head.
I miss the old Spielberg, and I'm sure you do too. Perhaps a petition is appropriate. Let's just say "Steve, get back to basics. We love you and respect you, but you're abondoning your true fans and are losing out on wonderful films as a result."
Well, that's just my two cents. Like I said, I'm not a critic, and I'm not putting him down.
Um, hello. If he puts his name on it, it's his "fault." He would certainly be willing to take any credit you're willing to dish out.
Same deal with Tom Clancy putting his name on the covers of those awful Op-Center hack jobs. When you sell your own good name down the river, it's time to step aside.
Steven Spielberg did not write this. Leslie Bohem is the driving force behind the project - Steven Spielberg is the "brand," if you will.
I think it was a fine series. The writing was often subtle and thoughtful - a rarity on television these days.
Aside from that, what really sparks you as bad? Minority Report? For all of its plot discontinuities (did I spell that right?), I think that the consensus is positive - it was an enjoyable sci-fi film with good performances all around, albeit with a few cheesy moments. Let's look at his films of the late-90's. Amistad - never saw it, but heard good things. Saving Private Ryan - do I really need to go into this, it was hands down my pick for Best Picture in 1997 (Grr ... Shakespeare in Love?) At this point I'll mention his involvement with Band of Brothers. A little bit earlier, Schindler's List, another classic.
TV is a new avenue for Spielberg - don't count him out yet. Over the past few years, I think his good work outweighs his bad work.
Taken wasn't about the aliens, it was about the abductees. The reason the aliens were in it so little was because Leslie Bohem wanted to concentrate on the lives of the people involved in the "alien conspiracy". It was scifi because it involved aliens and they're "secret plot to take over the earth", but beyond that, it was, like any good scifi(ST:TNG) about the people, their experiences together, etc. Sure, it wasn't amazing in that regard, but honestly, I've never seen a film of any length that was. I thought, for what Taken was written to do, it did an excellent job. I'm glad it didn't get any more into the aliens, I was sort of dissapointed in the 9th episode until i figured it out, because I was afraid they were going to "reveal" too much about the aliens.
Oh well, what do i expect from reviews by people that read slashdot...
They started running commercials for Taken in June. With that much advance hype you just knew it was going to suck.
A lot of the less stellar movies from Spielberg 'seem' to be from the sci-fi genre. A lot of people were upset with Minority Report, AI, Lost World etc. (with the exception of Close Encounters). The Spielberg films a lot of us cherish are his more -believable- attempts; A Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Jaws. A big part of watching a movie is knowing the characters..
Let me start out by saying that "yes, it plot seemed to be less interesting as the episodes went by"...but I think this has more to do with the time compression element of the story than it does with Steven Spielberg.
I really like the first 5 episodes, I also thought Jesse K. was the best character of the show. The early episodes with Owen Crawford held me spellbound (that character was my manager at Terabeam). The episode directed by the former "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" was easily the spookiest. As the story came out of the "time compression" that they were holding to in the early episodes, the plot started to wander. There just wasn't enough depth of character to fill up the final hours.
Remember also that Steven S. was the overseer of all the other directors. The individual episodes had seperate directors and I could feel the difference from show to show.
In the end, it's all just entertainment....and most people here posting watched it...enjoy it, it was free and you also got to see those halfway funny IBM ads.
Oh, something else I forgot to mention. It's arguable whether at the end of the uber-mechas destroyed him, or whether he simply committed suicide by going to "sleep". The latter might be more likely since he appeared to voluntarily close his eyes. Of course, the uber-mechas may have known that by fulfilling his quest, that would cause him to turn off.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
ok if they were mecha, why were they excavating the ice?
"This machine was trapped under the wreckage before the freezing. Therefore these robots are originals. They knew living people."
Same reason we excavate: to learn about the past. Records, even when they exist, can be incomplete. Mecha knowledge of the old cities was sketchy even in David's time-- remember Gigolo Joe's comment about "Man-hattan?"-- and would certainly not have been filled in any during the intervening years.
I write in my journal
Interesting how on Slashdot most people feel compelled to parrot what they perceive as the "common wisdom", without investing a second of their time in forming their own (supposedly intelligent) opinion.
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also interesting is how people feel compelled to call someone a parrot for agreeing with the majority
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If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Oh, get a grip. ... hell, pick a mass media. By insisting that all anime is incredibly good, you're basically showing that you have absolutely no ability to critically evaluate it. A hint: Any art form or mass media in which a single fight scene can take twenty half-hour episodes to get through, not including the digressions away from said fight scene to show other, minor characters fighting, is not automatically captivating. Nor, I would like to point out, is it automatically wonderful. So, I reiterate: Get a grip.
Anime can be tentacle rape. And there's nothing that says it has to be 'captivating, wonderful film.' It's not new - it's been around as long as animation has been made in Japan - and it's just as much of an art form as any other mass media. It's a mass media. There's good anime. There's bad anime. There's tentacle rape anime. There's magical girl anime. There's five-people-in-giant-robots-saving-the-world anime. Some of it is pretty good. Some of it stinks to high heaven. Saying that all anime is 'captivating, wonderful' is like saying that all novels are 'captivating, wonderful,' or all comic books are 'captivating, wonderful,' or
You make a statement like that but don't post your conclusions after 'picking it apart'?
This article sounds more like a troll posting on a bbs somewhere.
If the answer is that they can't because they are not powerful enough, then that's really convenient. The futuristic mecha are just powerful enough to support your interpretation - not enough to build a satisfying mother from the kids mind, but enough to build one to fool him for one day alone, no DNA involved.
What bothered *me* most wasn't the ending, but the idea itself that you can make things that are "programmed to love" or programmed to X where X is some intentionality. If something is "programmed" to love, how can that feeling they have be called love or even be called a feeling or a mental state? Since love is a mental state, it can only exist in minds, and an important feature of minds is fluidity, and even a certain degree of control over it. Maybe you can't choose who you love but you certainly can choose how you will react to that feeling and that reaction will in turn affect the feeling. In my opinion the notion that you can make minds that can love but cannot have a real reaction to their own love, is nonsensical; like saying, let's draw a square, but without sides. Like I said, it was what bothered *me* about it, it's actually quite common in SF to do this.
On the other hand, assuming you can actually build minds that are "doomed to love", then clearly making such minds would be immoral; it would be like creating a flawed mind deliberately, like consciously creating someone with a mental disease. Since the movie was (supposedly) about A.I. I expected that issue to be dealt in it, but it's not. Instead, we get a tale about a boy and his love, or, as you insightfully put it, about the human condition and its capacity for cruelty... All of which I actually enjoyed. Yes, I liked the movie, heck, I even liked the ending in its plain, rosy interpretation... but to me the movie is not really very good Sci Fi, just a very good story. Not that there's anything wrong with that
I also enjoyed your interpretation but honestly, I think it's one of those retrofitting interpratations we often engage in when we have to 'justify'... Nothing in the final scenes suggests that they are going to kill the kid. The interpretation is indeed possible, i.e. not terribly contradictory to anything in the movie but it would be a stretch to say that it actually stems from it (IMHO). OTOH I've been known to try to rationalize the mystical elements in the matrix, myself :)