So I just saw Live Free or Die Hard and I wasn't impressed. I think the cinematic direction of the whole film is wrong, I would have loved to see John McTiernan direct this Die Hard, he did such a great job with the 1 & 3, and I say if it ain't broke don't fix it. Wiseman made the film cold and too impersonal, Die Hard is not Underworld.

Any films you guys have seen that you think needed different direction?...

Im sure someone will mention Star Wars.

Dangit, I was JUST thinking about a film that fit this...

I like what Wiseman did with the action, but the rest of the movie was pretty much worthless. As for the topic on hand, anything Michael Bay has directed. I really doubt watching Transformers tonight will change my mind.

elliott (otiose)...

Actually, I think Michael Bay was the perfect match for Transformers. I mean, it's a movie about GM cars and action figures. Bay did what he does best - lots of explosions and product placement. What more could you expect from the film (which I actually found quite entertaining).

Could this also cover sequel that should have been taken away from the director? Or films that should have just been taken away, period, to prevent the creation of bad sequels?

Naw, actually, I guess that would open up too big a can of worms.

I don't really think I've ever seen a bad film.

quote:

Originally posted by Cinematical:
Could this also cover sequel that should have been taken away from the director? Or films that should have just been taken away, period, to prevent the creation of bad sequels?

Naw, actually, I guess that would open up too big a can of worms.

yes it does, what franchises did you have in mind?

Personally, I think the Pitch Black (or Chronicles of Riddick) franchise should have been taken from David Twohy. I loved Pitch Black. It's able to create an entirely origiinal Sci-Fi universe while only depicting a very small set of events. It uses small references to really make the world, characters, and events believable. And the character of Riddick is not only cool but also very complex - he's undoubtable evil, driven by survival, and yet is confused by his evil and his capacity for good. Everytime I watch the film I catch some new little bit of his persona, or some new facet of the universe created in the story.

And then Twohy created The Chronicles of Riddick. To be fair, I enjoyed the film when I saw it in theaters. I even bought the DVD. But as I've come to like Pitch Black more and more, I've come to dislike its sequel. I remember Twohy saying of the Chronicles of Riddick that fans of Pitch Black would feel perfectly at home in the expanded world created. This is absolutely not so. The big problem with Chronicles is that it completely alters everything about the world and characters of Pitch Black. Suddenly, technology is far more advanced; in Pitch Black, the characters are using guns that shoot bullets, and in Chronicles you have enemies with lasers and gravity-guns. The first film makes many specific references to Earth, as if the planet still exists and is still very much the center of human life; the second film makes absolutely no reference, and indeed makes the human civilizations seem far more independent (in a Star Wars-like fashion - that earth isn't necessarily where humans came from). In Chronicles, there are different human-like races (Furions, Elementals); there is a massive, death worshipping cult (which I wouldn't be opposed to if it wasn't so fantasy-ish). In essence, the universe created for The Chronicles of Riddick is nothing like that created for Pitch Black. Indeed, Pitch Black manages to assemble a far more cohesive and even detailed picture of culture and life in colonized space than Chronicles, just by hinting at it.

This change is a very common mistake among directors - upping the fantasy/sci-fi element in sequels. We saw it this year in the third Spiderman and Pirates movies, and look what they were. Then again, who am I to question the direction Twohy took with his sci-fi universe; I may have just been very bad at interpereting Pitch Black and missed how it fit perfectly in the Chronicles arc.

Still, I think Chronicles could still have more than survived all the changes to the world if Twohy had done one thing: kept Riddick's character the same. I would have welcomed, even been thrilled, at seeing the character I find so interesting in a new world. I probably would have completely let go of my complaints listed above and even given them as strengths - if only Riddick were still Riddick. But he isn't. He's tame. In Pitch Black, Riddick is a murderer that may or may not have a streak of good. He can't even be called an anti-hero. In Chronicles, he's past an anti-hero; he's a full blown hero (bold added for effect), if a slighly reluctant one. Some might say that the events of Pitch Black changed Riddick, mad him more sypmathetic to others. This may be slightly true; but the events at the end of the original film, which are left purposefully uncertain, establish quite clearly that Riddick is still not a hero. His un-heroness makes the seemingly heroic things he does in Pitch Black that much more compelling. In The Chronicles of Riddick any good that he does is rendered meaningless because he is defined quite clearly as a hero.

Twohy may actually have accidentally put his character in this position through Chronicles' marketing. They decided to make the film PG-13, versus Pitch Black's R. The R rating allowed Riddick to be vulgar, violent, and fit to outbursts of anger - like a convict or a man who has lived life as a criminal. The PG-13 rating (done for money-grubbing purposes, no doubt) took away the filmmakers' ability to portray Riddick the way he is supposed to be portrayed; instead they show him as in control and collected - a definately cool character, but definately not Riddick.

There's also the major change done to another returning character from Pitch Black, one that is so mind-bogglingly out of place that I wont even attempt to discuss it. But even this would have been acceptable if Riddick had remained Riddick.

Huh, this post turned out to be slightly longer than I had anticipated.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Cinematical,

I think the sequel effect (detailed above) comes mainly from the increased funds directors usually have for sequels. With originals, the lack of money forces them to be more creative with what they have. When they have money, they tend to put their wildest, wierdest conceptions up on screen, which inherently makes them lazy. That, I believe, is one of the strengths of low-budget filmmaking: being poor makes you work harder to create a better film (usually).

I can think of one franchise where the films improved because they took away the films from a director and they improved, the Harry Potter franchise. While I admit to not being a fan of the books (refuse to read them) I wanted to see the fourth film in IMAX so I swallowed my pride and watched all three of them over the course of a few days. The first two were substandard typical filmmaking with nothing to write home about. Within the first minutes of the third film I felt that a surge of energy had been put in the franchise (mainly because of Alfonso Cuaron).

I'm not saying that the franchise is much more than a fantasy blockbuster but it definitely benefited from having some new blood in the last two films.

I agree with laudy32. Cuaron really did something great with the third film. The others weren't too good.