Alien vs Alien

My wife is out of town for the week. So that means that I'm bored. Instead of watching the shows stacking up on my DVR (all of which my wife wants to see), I am hitting up the Red Box and catching up on some movies that I have not been able to see yet. To make this even more fun, I will be blogging my reviews and thoughts about the films. Today's Final Installment: Super 8.

What is wrong with aliens today?  This is something that I noticed in some recent movies that has started to bother me.  When I was growing up, we had some really iconic aliens.  Think back.  There was the plethora of cool extraterrestrials in Star Wars and Star Trek.  You had THE alien in Alien and Aliens.  Then there was the predator in Predator.  I would even include E.T. as one of these guys.  They were recognizable and memorable.  If they were scary, they inspired fear.  But they also were just plain cool.  I remember when I saw Alien.  That thing was terrifying.  It looked horrible.  And it was a complete nightmare.  It had armored skin, even side of it was lethal, and it even had acidic blood - so if you did shoot it, it could kill you with its wound!  That is just vicious.  BUT, the alien was so ... stinking ... cool.  I felt the same way about the predator.  They were terrifying with their hunting helmets on.  And when they took them off, man, even worse.

I don't know filmmakers that came after those epic monsters were worried that they couldn't live up to the standard of awesomeness.  Maybe they were afraid that people accuse them of just making a cheap knock off.  Or it could be that they needed to follow the current mindset of "bigger, gaudier, blockbustier" when it came to their creations.  Whatever the reason, aliens in movies are just not doing it for me.

I noticed the trend back in Independence Day, actually.  I remember that they never showed the aliens in the previews.  My friends and I intentionally didn't read anything or watch anything that might show the invaders - just so they would be ready to be stunned at the big revealing scene.  Then they showed the things.  Whaaaa?  What the heck is that?  Their ships were cool, their attacks were awesome.  They were just stupid.  I mean, look at that thing.  As memorable as the movie is (and trust me, it has a huge following), the alien in it is just about the least memorable thing.  You don't see people with little figurines of that or hear anyone clamoring for more of the shovel headed freak.

This has continued with other movies.  I really have rarely been that impressed with the aliens.  It seems the reliance has been on their technology or their ships instead.  Many times we never even see the alien.  There is a menacing craft doing unspeakable damage.  But the thing piloting is is irrelevant.  Think about The Avengers this summer.  Now, I loved the movie.  Absolutely loved it.  But was anyone talking about the aliens in it?  Nope.  They were just cannon fodder.  They had nothing unique or awesome about them.  They actually were one of the weakest elements of the whole movie.

I watched Cowboys and Aliens the other day.  This is a movie that is based on the terror of these invaders.  Again, they never showed the aliens in the previews - just their ships flashing around and the mayhem they cause.  I was looking forward to see what they aliens looked like in their big reveal.  Again, I have kindly included a shot of these things.  What in the heck is that supposed to be?  Is that a fish?  A rock man?  They were ridiculous.  Their chest would also open up and these weird hands would come out.  It actually made no biological sense at all.  Was there a symbiotic relationship?  Were there two creatures inhabiting the same body?  What was the purpose of the second internal hands?  And do they have internal organs?  Plus there was no consistency in how to dispatch the aliens.  They seemed like they could take arrow or bullet hits, but if you hit their head (which seemed extra reinforced) they could die.  The whole thing was very bizarre.  I'm sure it didn't help the movie that the aliens - part of the title of the movie - were lame.

This all brings me to Super 8.  On the whole, this was a very good movie.  I loved it.  Well, I loved the first three-quarters of it.  Then it seemed to derail.  (Hmmmm.  Kind of sounds like another JJ Abrams project involving suspense and thrills.  cough LOST cough cough)  I thought the opening minute of the movie demonstrated Abrams' absolute brilliance at story telling.  The opening scene has the haunting score, penned by the always incredible Michael Giacchino.  There is a factory with a sign showing how many hundreds of days it has had without an accident.  A worker climbs a ladder and starts taking the numbers down, replacing them with just a 1.  Then it cuts to a boy sitting on a swing in the snow.  In just a moment, we already know this boy lost his parent.  Brilliant.  I loved it.

Abrams has a knack for opening a story - it is one of his hallmarks.  Consider the opening scene of Star Trek.  It was absolute mayhem.  And it was incredible.  I remember watching it with my friend, Greg, and he leaned over to me when the scene ended and the title screen came up.  "JJ Abrams is a freaking genius."  I agreed.  The pilot of Lost was as good as any television episode ever.  The same could be say about the pilot of Heroes, the pilot of Alcatraz, the opening of Mission Impossible III.  Abrams grabs your attention on a consistent basis.  The challenge is carrying that all the way through.

Super 8 started off great.  I was very interested in the story.  It was a great tale.  The train wreck that really catapulted the movie was intense and incredible.  I really liked the kids that were the center of the movie.  It was a very good movie and it was very enjoyable.  But...

Throughout the film, there is this monster hiding.  It escaped from the train and it now lurking in the city.  We see glimpses of things happening.  The monster is obviously formidable.  It can crush a car.  Somehow it affects the electricity in its area.  People scream a lot when it shows up.  It is supposedly terrifying.  They are building to the moment when we finally see it.  I am actually excited and nervous to see the thing.  I'm sure that Abrams and executive producer Steven Spielberg will come up with something worthy of the hype.

Ummmmm.  What exactly is that?  It has six legs, I think.  The first time we saw it on the kids' video it looked like a spider.  I thought maybe it was a giant spider.  A giant spider is what they are going with?  After Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, we are supposed to be freaked out by a giant spider?!?  Then I realized it wasn't a spider. It had that weird face too.  What is that?  It looks like a dozen other creatures we have seen.  Actually, his face reminds me of Megatron from Transformers.

There are tweaks and such, but I wasn't that impressed.  It was ugly.  And then we are supposed to actually have some sympathy for it.  It just wants to go home!  Of course, it has killed dozens of people already and caused tons of damage.  One character has already said that it has no remorse or pity for anything.  And we are supposed to be like, "Poor spider looking transformer thing.  It misses its home."  Sorry.  Not working for me.

The other problem is that the scenes where we actually see the alien up close are so dark that I could barely make out details.  There is no big scene where the thing emerges so we can see it in its full glory.  It is always in shadows or silhouettes.  That's really annoying.  So we either have to deal with scenes too dark to actually be scared of the non-spider or we have to deal with Abrams love affair with lens flares.  [Side Note - there is an entire online community devoted to ripping Abrams for his love of lens flare effects.  For those of you who don't know, lens flares are this trick where light hits the camera just right and you get a little starburst of light in a scene.  Awww.  However, they also can be added through any video or picture editing software.  I know how to do them in Photoshop.  They are actually one of the first "tricks" people learn.  Star Trek was infested with them.  Light bounced off all the chrome everywhere and there were flares galore.  I actually laughed at one scene in Super 8.  It was a gas station at night (of course).  I counted six lens flares in one shot.  In a gas station.  At night.  But I quibble.]

I know that this whole alien thing may seem like a small thing to focus on in a rather enjoyable movie - especially for a guy who gave Cowboys and Aliens a VERY generous evaluation.  But, I think it should be an understandable rule in Hollywood.  If you are going to make a movie or show that focuses on the presence of a terrifying alien, then the alien needs to live up to the hype.  If not, then the movie kind of crumbles.  I mean, that is the crux of the conflict, right?  Was the alien in Super 8 scary?  Well, sure, if I was a kid standing there in a cave and that sucker came up to me, I would soil myself.  Heck, if I was the sheriff and that thing came jumping out of the dark at me, I would soil myself.  But I'm not. I'm a grizzled moviegoer who is used to aliens from decades of invasion movies.  I need to see something memorable.   I don't even know what I was hoping for.  I just know that wasn't it, especially with the big names that were associated with the film.

In addition, to have the movie end the way it did just seemed weird.  It almost felt like I had wrongly identified the main story arc.  The whole time we are sitting there worried about how to defeat this alien.  At the same time, we are supposed to be suspicious of the military guys, knowing they are up to no good.  The alien is actually going out of its way to hunt people.  He isn't just offing the clowns who cross his path.  He is out and causing trouble.  He takes out sympathetic characters, too.  So there is no reason to feel bad for this guy.  I am wondering the whole time how the kids and their parents are going  to fight off the military AND defeat the spider thing.  Then we get a twist that this guy just wants to go home.  And then he goes home.  Aaaaaand scene.  What?  That doesn't make any sense.  Everyone just stares up as his cobbled together ship takes off.  Now, mind you, only a couple people know that he just wants to go home.  But what's left of the town is just going to stare up approvingly at the killer leaving, as their buildings are burning all around them.  Nonsense.

In short, the movie was three-quarters very good and one-quarter confusing as heck.  The alien was disappointing on many levels.  And the ending was bizarre.  But there were some very cool elements and moments.  Which brings me to the end of my week of movie reviews.  I hope all two of you enjoyed it.  Actually, it is funny to see friends of mine out of nowhere putting status updates like "I finally am watching Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" or "Let's see if Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is any good."  I would like to think I made a difference.  Whether or not that difference was worth making is a different story.

Where's the Mystery

I threatened numerous people that my next post after the award winning Reunion Files would be a list of my favorite superheroes.  BUT, I lied.  Sure, this probably will reference superheroes, but the actual list will have to wait for another day.  Instead, I am wanted to address something that has been bugging me for a while now.  It started as a Facebook status update.  But, when I realized that it was going to take a paragraph to explain, I knew it had to go somewhere else.

TO THE BLOG!!!

[Side Note: Facebook friends, if you feel it necessary to write a full column for your status update, can I suggest you perhaps turn that into a note?  Then I will at least know what I am getting into.  I don't mind a short paragraph.  Everyone knows that I have written my share of long statii.  If the status ventures into needing its own ISBN number, go the Note route.]

I have reached the end of my tolerance of movie and tv spoilers.  There was a time, not too long ago, where I enjoyed the random spoiler.  I liked to know some information about where a show was heading, or what treats may pop up in a movie.  When Lost was on air, I would visit many sites to figure out what just happened, what it meant, what was coming.  I like to know the random detail about a television series.  We watch Burn Notice every summer and winter.  It left us last year with some big cliffhangers last season, so I was naturally curious about what was going to happen.  I did at some point go onto ew.com and see how long a character would remain in jail.  But that is a big difference from the spoiler madness out there.

The reason I even thought about this was that one of my regular entertainment sites - not even a normal spoiler site - had a post up about who Joseph Gordon Levitt was playing in The Dark Knight Rises.  This is the thing.  Christopher Nolan is notoriously secretive about his movies.  And he is even more paranoid than he usually would be because of the way people now desperately want to ruin films.  I love Nolan's films.  I like the intrigue and surprise of them.  If you allow yourself to, you will be kept off guard the entire time.  This has been his hallmark from the early films on through the Batman movies.  Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige, Inception.  All of those are complex stories that require the viewer to remain in the dark.  I loved those films BECAUSE I didn't know what was going on.  The experience would have been ruined if I had known spoilers.  Nolan's ability to make intriguing movie trailers without giving away plot points is almost as breathtaking as his ability to make the movies themselves.  I remember seeing the Inception trailer and thinking it was incredible.  I started to wonder what was going on in certain scenes.  And then when I saw the movie, I was completely wrong about everything I had guessed.

Now, I know that massive movies like Dark Knight Rises do not allow for complete secrecy.  You can't hide filming a giant vehicle racing through downtown Chicago or a bomb exploding on a football field.  So there is going to be paparazzi shots of those things online.  But if the filmmaker is going out of his way to keep SOMETHING secret, let him do that.  There is probably a good reason.

J.J. Abrams is another director that gets labelled "notoriously secretive."  But he has to his credit some really twisty surprising stuff that would not have worked if everything was out in the open.  When a director fights the intrusive nature of modern media, it is almost they get a target on their back.  Now it becomes an accomplishment to get set photos, script peeks, or character bios.  This is happening to Abrams now on Star Trek 2.  He went so far as to rent giant cargo carriers to surround the shooting area because he got tired of seeing every little thing plastered on the web.

I guess I don't see the point of all of this.  I suppose for the photographers there is some kind of thrill in breaching security.  Maybe it is the modern equivalent of a photo safari in Africa.  But for the moviegoing fan, does this actually help the moviegoing experience?  Do you enjoy a film more because you know everything about it?  I know that I don't.  I want to be surprised.  It may not ruin the entire movie, but it isn't as good as it could be.  Heather and I were watching the series premiere of a show the other day on television.  There was a big twist at the end where a character dies - someone you never would have imagined was going to bite it.  The only problem was that I already knew that.  I wasn't looking for information on the series.  I was just reading an entertainment story about the premier (which we were watching on DVR the next day).  There wasn't any warning or anything.  And this wasn't like I flipped out because someone told me the secret in Psycho fifty years after it came out.  This was the next day.  So what did I think about the whole episode?  "So when does this dude die?  How does that happen?"

The thirst for secret information combines with some of the worst journalism since newspapers were called newsrocks and the fact that you can get information anywhere, any time.  This is a perfect recipe for disaster.  The writers are so desperate for scoop to drive traffic to their site that they don't care if their information is damaging to anyone.  Here are some recent examples that I will put SPOILER WARNING in front of, just in case you have missed stuff.

• After The Avengers, entertainment sites were flooded with people discussing the details of the monster film.  Ordinarily, I would have been right there opening weekend and been in the discussion.  But I couldn't make it until the second weekend.  I actually had to completely avoid any story with Avengers in the title because so many of them had spoilers in them.  One of the most grievous was on blastr.com (a major offender).  They ran a photo gallery of the most shocking deaths in Joss Whedon's film career.  The picture to promote the gallery was of the character who shockingly died in The Avengers.  
• The massive response to Avengers led to people searching for information on the next Marvel film - Iron Man 3.  Sure enough, out comes a picture of a red, white, and blue Iron Man suit.  It gets plastered all over the place: blastr, yahoo, ew.  Who is this?  Is it Iron Patriot (from the Dark Avengers storyline)? Is it War Machine?  The very fact that this discussion was happening may have ruined a major story arc in the movie!  
• Ridley Scott is one of the original secretive directors.  With Prometheus, he tried to keep as much information under wraps (until it was time to super-promote the film by apparently telling everything that happened).  The movie had barely hit theaters before multiple sites were talking about what was said in a conversation at the end of the movie.  Of course, the conversation gives away massive information.  

It used to be that you had to hunt for information about a movie or a show.  Now you have to actively and intentionally avoid it.  And it is getting worse and worse.  If you don't see a movie opening night, be prepared to have all the secrets ruined the next day.  I have gotten into the habit of just avoiding sites altogether until I can see a movie.  More than that, though, I go into total media blackout.  I remember back when Independence Day came out, I didn't want to know anything more than I had to.  I wouldn't even look at the toys until I saw the movie because I didn't want to accidentally see the aliens.  Back then it was a different story.  To not get information, you didn't go to the toy section and didn't read insider magazines.  There was no Internet.  

Today, it is a real challenge to not see a movie spoiled.  Take Dark Knight Rises.  I am so excited for this film.  First of all, I am a major Batman fan.  Second, I love Christopher Nolan.  Third, I have thoroughly enjoyed Nolan's Batman series.  Fourth, it looks like it may be harkening to the Knighfall comics arc, which was one of my favorite.  It is an excitement on par with Avengers.  The original trailer came out and didn't show much - just enough to excite fans everywhere.  Then a second trailer came out and gave more information.  Then multiple viral campaigns got started.  Then there were the onslaught of television commercials.  At this point I already have seen more than I wanted because I know there are two different Batmobiles and there is a Batplane.  I have tried to avoid a lot of the spoilers out there, but there have been intense online discussions about what the Selina Kyle character is all about, if Joseph Gordon Levitt is playing a good guy or bad guy, if Talia Al Ghul makes an appearance.  Not just that, but when you go to the toy store, there is a whole line of toys with characters and vehicles that I wouldn't know existed without watching the movie.  [Similar problem with The Avengers, when Lego brought out sets that showed the aliens that Whedon had worked so hard to never show.]  It becomes tons of work to NOT see anything that will spoil the movie.

I really miss the older days when you knew a movie was coming out, you saw the trailer, there may be a magazine article and that was it.  Now we are so saturated with a film and its coverage and its tie-ins that the film itself almost becomes a second thought.  It makes me wonder if the marketers behind all of this thinks it is successful.  Was The Avengers successful because it was marketed to high heaven and had relentless coverage?  Or was it because it was a very good movie that tied together several other really good movies?  Is Dark Knight Rises going to break records because it has been promoted non-stop for the last month?  Or is it because it probably is going to be beyond amazing?  The thing is, even with all of this promotion and marketing and coverage and "leaked info" and snoop pictures, the moviegoing audience can still identify junk and avoid it.  John Carter, Battleship, Dark Shadows were all promoted to a ridiculous level.  They all had the same level of pubic recognition.  And they all bombed because they were awful.  

The is a fine line between spoilery information that will attract and info that will ruin.  I want to know what JJ Abrams' show Revolution is about.  I think it looks very cool and I plan on watching it.  I don't think that it hurts to know Elizabeth Mitchell has been cast as the main kids' estranged mom - even though I didn't know those kids had an estranged mom.  Knowing Mitchell is on board is another draw.  But if they start telling me a bunch of information about everything, that is going to turn me off.  Of course, marketers would probably label me an "educated viewer."  That doesn't mean schooling, it means that I know a lot about entertainment and the like.  With a show like Revolution - like with Avengers and Dark Knight Rises - there are three groups of viewers.  There are people who are on board no matter what.  There are people that won't go no matter what.  And there are those who need swayed.  Just about all of these efforts I've talked about are aimed at that last group.  With the new Batman movie, the first group was won over when the movie was announced.  But the blockbuster status of the film will be determined by just how many of the last group can be swayed.  The problem is when the powers that be, the media, those who are obsessed with information actually damage the interest of the fans to gain fringe viewers.  [You could actually argue that Apple has been walking this line for a while, and failing from time to time.  Their desperation to pull in new users with things like the new MacBook Pro and Final Cut Pro updates actually alienated long-time Apple devotees.]  That may make business sense, but it stinks for those people who really support projects.   

I know this isn't going to change any time soon.  It actually will get worse.  Everyone has a phone with a camera.  It is so easy to post news.  Real journalism is being run out of town by entertainment media and gossip sites.  And movie and television studios have to have MEGA-hits to justify their costs.  Everything has to be big now.  I have never seen so many $100 million and $200 million grossing movies labeled bombs as I have this year.  We have seen shows that consistently pulled in over ten million viewers weekly cancelled for poor performance (Alcatraz, Terra Nova, Rob!).  It is going to become harder and harder to control how much information we get about entertainment.  I'll guess I will just have to expand my media blackouts even more.  I can only imagine how bad it will be by next year's Man of Steel.  But if you happen to know anything in advance, just keep it to yourself.