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Doom Movie Might Not Be Terrible
Like many upcoming nerdly pieces of media, the Doom movie had a showing at this year's Comic-Con. Gamecloud reports on the related panel and footage shown, and posits that against all odds the Doom movie might not suck. From the article: "Everyone on the panel said that every effort was being made to make the movie faithful to the game and that it will be a R rated film. While there will be some CGI, the Doom monsters like the Baron, the Imp and the Pinky Demon will mostly be real monsters created by the Stan Winston Studios (who created the creatures in all the Terminator movies, Aliens, Predator and many more)."
What shocked me was that unlike most rumors "The Rock" is NOT the main character.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I'm not wrong about The Thing though, am I? I'm not asking him to look like the new Thing or the old Thing, just not like a guy in a suit. If I see one more three-fingered character who obviously has two fingers in the middle finger of the glove, it really will be clobberin' time. At least The Thing is _supposed_ to have thick fingers.
;) With the other movie, I can't bring myself to give a crap about the one-dimensional Gary Busey and Danny Glover characters.
Like you I haven't seen F4, and probably will skip it in the theaters (tangent: the more a movie is promoted, the less I want to see it, I guess; the commercial that somehow ties in the movie, Burger King, and Amazon.com is just ridiculous; and don't get me started on Darth Vader in an M&Ms commercial, gack!) so I can't comment how The Thing looks in all his projected glory, but from what I've seen in the ubiquitous ads and whatnot, I think you're right -- he doesn't look that great, especially as compared to the CGI-enhanced Johnny.
I love Aliens, don't get me wrong, but most of what made the fight scenes acceptable was clever camera work and the _implication_ of scariness. I'm all for using your audience's imagination against itself and showing less instead of more, but it's a little sad when I know the film-makers HAVE to do that, because their creatures won't pass muster close up and in full daylight. "Queen Alien!" you say? Even a forgiving viewer can see flaws in her movement, good though she is.
Heh, yeah the Queen does pose a problem. Although I don't remember it being so bad in the theater. Maybe after seeing it repeatedly and losing some of that initial shock and rush, the awkwardness become glaring. And that probably goes for the rest as well. As modern audiences have become more sophisticated, after decades of increasingly more lifelike effects, it gets harder and harder to pass off crappy ones.
Of course, probably the bigger difference for me between Aliens and Terminator on the one hand and, say, Predator 2 on the other hand, is that I truly care about the awesome characters of Ripley and Sarah Connor -- and not just because they're Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton
I like to compare the viewing experiences of Spider Man and Toy Story -- I found myself more immersed in the "world" of Toy Story -- the characters seemed more real to me than did Spider Man in full flight through the urban canyons. Part of that is probably the uncanny valley at work, but a lot of it is the story and characterization.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Well, it's hard to say "better" since you can't compare it to a version of the same movie in which Spielberg _didn't_ do that, but I agree that the hidden antagonist is a big part of the appeal of that movie. Same with ALIEN. However, it's almost always necessary to show the bad-guy at some point. I merely contend that good CGI will (or will someday soon) get you closer to believeability than the best physical effect.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
I couldn't believe how much the author had bent over backwards to make the novel faithful to the game. And that made it suck far more than you could possibly imagine.
On the Daily Show, the Rock said that in the movie, BFG stood for Bio Force Gun. It's gonna suck.