I expect it's either a flashback/memory or interim SFX, since the movie is still six months from release.
Spielberg's "Disclosure Day" pre-release Speculation
- Thread starter Giddierone
- Start date
RTM
Senior Member.
Rendezvous with Rama is supposed to be one of the future projects of Denis Villeneuve (director of Dune), Morgan Freeman has tried to get it made in the past and is also attached. As much as I enjoy the book, I don't see it as a crowd pleaser block buster. I hope it doesn't fall through with all the nonsense happening with Netflix and Warner Brothers, and the pressure it may put on studios.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
I can't see "Rama" making a good movie. At east, not without rewriting it to the extent that it is not itself any more, in which case why not just make a totally new story for your movie?
(It's not like there is a MASSIVE "Rendezvous with Rama" fan base out there clamoring for content! There are certainly some of us who liked the book, but we aren't a "Star Wars" sized fan base by a few orders of magnitude!)
(It's not like there is a MASSIVE "Rendezvous with Rama" fan base out there clamoring for content! There are certainly some of us who liked the book, but we aren't a "Star Wars" sized fan base by a few orders of magnitude!)
The problem with adapting a lot of older science fiction stories is that they're set in worlds that aren't drenched in decades of pop-culture science fiction. You can't just reskin War of the Worlds for the present day without people immediately worrying about alien invaders (without retitling it Independence Day) or have a big interstellar object enter the system without everyone immediately thinking it's a giant alien spaceship (ciao, 3I/Atlas).
One of the striking oddities of the modern Godzilla/King Kong movies is they take place in a world that never had kaiju movies, and the 20th and 20th century Earths visited in Star Trek never seemed to have had a Star Trek equivalent. (Though oddly TNG's Enterprise's history includes the real shuttle named Enterprise which was named for the fictional starship.)
Circling back to Disclosure Day and pop culture... the 32-year gap between the 1993 debut of X-Files and today is twice as long as the 16-year gap between the 1977 release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the debut of X-Files.
Todd Feinman
Active Member
I hope for the best. I think a very good story could be based on accounts from the past, laced together in an interesting way. I collected many old experiences in an archive: hereThat's a shame, but I understand what you are saying. You are right, the genre has become cooky-cutter stale and often the plot is just rehashed crash-bang villain vs hero nonsense with a sci-fi layer.
As for the Spielberg movie, I think the premise is really interesting and regardless of execution the marketing is brilliant! It is generating so much buzz and I really want to see it NOW!
I will guard my expectations though. Even if it is totally over hyped, I hope there is a some little nugget of originality there.
They are endlessly fascinating, and some are very old. I found all kinds of stuff, after I searched many historical newspaper databases, looking for historic accounts after my personal experiences.
There is an account of objects seen on the '33 Everest ascent, travelers in the outback at the beginning of the 20th century, being surrounded by a beam of light from an object in the night sky, accounts of the "Hitchhiker Effect", UFOs coming out of the ocean by Australia, watched by pig farmers and seen by others later flying in formation over land, casting locomotive-size shadows on the ground.. Wild stuff, but some of it very relatable. Many of them would make great material for movies.
Maybe something involving the activities of Roscoe Hillenkoeter, or General Craigie, Chief Engineer at Wright Patterson in '47, iirc. I knew an elderly woman, since passed who knew him as a teen; he told her UFOs were real. I used to have her on video. More recent Chief Engineer at Wright Patterson was Mr. McCasland, appearing in the leaked Podesta emails discussing UFOs.
Great stuff for conspiracy theories….
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Ann K
Senior Member.
The book is half a century old now, so I'd imagine some updating would be required. Come to think of it, the original (and still best) Star Wars movie is no spring chicken itself...
John J.
Senior Member.
Maybe we should work on a screenplay.
I nominate Rendezvous with Oumuamua.
A mysterious object enters the solar system, a team of astronauts led by the dashing but controversial Abi Vole is sent to investigate.
Tension builds until Vole's startled exclamation,
"My God, it's full of rocks! ...Oh, it is a big rock."
I nominate Rendezvous with Oumuamua.
A mysterious object enters the solar system, a team of astronauts led by the dashing but controversial Abi Vole is sent to investigate.
Tension builds until Vole's startled exclamation,
"My God, it's full of rocks! ...Oh, it is a big rock."
JMartJr
Senior Member.
Not bad, but I can see it needing fleshing out bit to get to feature film running time...
Giddierone
Senior Member.
or,
Nicholas Cage, plays a maverick scientist with ONE BILLION DOLLARS of taxpayer money and only 30 days to spend it. Hell-bent on bucking scientific orthodoxy, and determined to inherit the once thought mythical Galilean codpiece, he's one man in a sea of doubters determined to prove that cosmic spherules deposited on the ocean floor are of an intelligently designed extraterrestrial origin. That's Avi's Lobes (PG-13)...
NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
And I'll note, as a mostly retired contractor, 16" on center is the standard layout for wall studs. So, there's that.
Guillermo del Toro has supposedly been sitting on Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness for several years, while Bradly Cooper has the rights to Dan Simmons' Hyperion novels. I could see Hyperion as a Game of Thrones type thing, there's lots of characters and sub-plots to work with. As for the Mountains, reports I read had del Toro so rewriting the original Lovecraft story for modern audiences that it no longer resembled the original. While I'd love to see del Toro's take on Lovecraft, the reality is anything like the original would end up looking like John Carpenter's remake of The Thing. A bunch of dudes trapped in a cold place encountering alien threats.
From what I recall about del Toro and Mountains, del Toro's project got stepped on by Ridley Scott's Prometheus, which is basically an updating of Lovecraft's story with the Alien lore grafted on, swapping the inhospitable Antarctic for the inhospitable valley on LV-223: Explorers find the ruins of an ancient civilization and learn that humanity was a the incidental and unimportant creation of bygone gods; their investigations rouse monstrous creatures who slaughter most of the expedition; a greater monster is roused from the deep; only one person survives with their sanity intact to recount the tale.
A film version of At the Mountains of Madness, keeping to the original setting and time period would be a great movie.
Would lose a lot set in modern times, or in the future on a planet far, far away, it's interesting because of the immediate connection with the here and now.
Ann K
Senior Member.
You can fill a lot of space with meaningful looks of consternation, set to spooky music. No dialogue required.
JJB
Active Member
I was thinking the same. Complaining about CGI in a Spielberg trailer always feels a bit premature. This is Steven Spielberg working with Industrial Light and Magic, not some rushed streaming production cutting corners.
If something looks uncanny or artificial, there is a very good chance it is intentional. A dream sequence, a subjective point of view, or even an AI constructed reality would absolutely justify a slightly off or stylized look, including things that feel wrong at a glance. Spielberg has spent decades showing that he understands visual language and audience perception better than almost anyone.
Assuming he somehow forgot what good CGI looks like is far less plausible than assuming there is a narrative reason for it.
Z.W. Wolf
Senior Member.
But let's ask how much Spielberg is involved or even capable of being involved. Modern movies seem to be a product of a neo-studio system.
The classic studio system had leaders who were in control. The new system only has an invisible hand. No single person is really in control, and there's no plan, just a system. Ancient big name directors are legacy figureheads who keep cranking things out... for some reason... even they are unsure of. They're nominally in control but they just seem to be, themselves, a part of the system going along with the group-think.
It's kind of amazing that the made for theater movie has lasted this long. The only thing movie theaters are good for is a family outing with the little kids, and teenaged kids roaming in packs, because that's what teenaged kids do. And one last thing... spectacle. Explosions and general sound and fury still have an impact on the big screen with giant speakers.
They've even made a horrible, soulless, soul-crushing AI version of the Wizard of Oz for an "immersive experience" here in Las Vegas.
Yeah the blockbusters are losing money, but so are the small films. Nothing is making money this year
I'm afraid it's a dying and unsustainable artform.
The classic studio system had leaders who were in control. The new system only has an invisible hand. No single person is really in control, and there's no plan, just a system. Ancient big name directors are legacy figureheads who keep cranking things out... for some reason... even they are unsure of. They're nominally in control but they just seem to be, themselves, a part of the system going along with the group-think.
It's kind of amazing that the made for theater movie has lasted this long. The only thing movie theaters are good for is a family outing with the little kids, and teenaged kids roaming in packs, because that's what teenaged kids do. And one last thing... spectacle. Explosions and general sound and fury still have an impact on the big screen with giant speakers.
They've even made a horrible, soulless, soul-crushing AI version of the Wizard of Oz for an "immersive experience" here in Las Vegas.
Yeah the blockbusters are losing money, but so are the small films. Nothing is making money this year
I'm afraid it's a dying and unsustainable artform.
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FatPhil
Senior Member.
Would "Abe Lovi" have been too unsubtle an anagram? Avi's real name is Abraham, and Loeb is one of the "lion" surnames, as is Lovi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loewe_(surname)> and which incidenally happens to be the name of an asteroid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5943_Lovi .
Z.W. Wolf
Senior Member.
I'll point out for the billionth time on this sad floating world, that a blockbuster is a hugely destructive bomb.
Going with that theme - in a confused, mixed up way - what led to the firebombing of Dresden? Very few German cities and towns hadn't been firebombed. A huge system had been built up to do such things. It also became normalized. No one person made it happen. Some figureheads at the top sort of gave their go-ahead, but they were just a part of the system going along with the group-think. It just sort of happened.
Is that a coherent metaphor for the modern movie industry? No. But it makes sense in an Alice in Wonderland kind of way... I guess.
Going with that theme - in a confused, mixed up way - what led to the firebombing of Dresden? Very few German cities and towns hadn't been firebombed. A huge system had been built up to do such things. It also became normalized. No one person made it happen. Some figureheads at the top sort of gave their go-ahead, but they were just a part of the system going along with the group-think. It just sort of happened.
Is that a coherent metaphor for the modern movie industry? No. But it makes sense in an Alice in Wonderland kind of way... I guess.
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JMartJr
Senior Member.
Some large and small films were profitable this year. Minecraft Movie (oh dear) pulled in almost a billion vs. a 150 million budget*. "Dog Man" pulled in 140 million vs. 40 million, "The Monkey" made 63 million vs. 11 million, "Sinners" did 367 million vs. 90 million, the "live action" "Lilo and Stitch" remake broke one billion on a 100 million budget. The latest Jurassic film did well, as did the latest Superman flick, both of which surprised me, I expected them both to crash and burn. Even the third or fourth (does the Corman version count?) Fantastic Four re-boot wound up in the black.
There were some others, but that's sort of the gist of it. There are still movies that are making money in theaters (not counting whatever value they have as "content" for streaming.
Sadly, I don't see much correlation between quality and profitability -- though I recognize that things like "Five Nights at Freddy's 2" (200 mil on 50 mil budget) were not made for me, and may be quite good for what they are...
Sometimes it takes a long time to write history. Got to wait for the people who will be offended by what you write are dead.
A lot of WW2 history has become clearer in recent decades, if not totally revealed.
Bombing of Dresden had multiple motives.
One was to disrupt German transportation lines through Dresden prior to the Russians capturing it, to slow their westward advance. (not the sort of thing you could admit at the time ((Sorry Allies, but you are advancing too fast...)))
Another was to satisfy RAF Air Marshall Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris's obsession with destroying as much of Germany as he could before the end of the war. By Feb 1945 area bombing was disrupting Allied advances as much as it was hurting the German war effort.
Read a book by one of Harris's subordinates who implies that by 1945 Harris was obsessed with killing as many German civilians and destroying as much German real estate as he could before the end of the war would force him to stop. He kept bombing right up to the last day.
I believe I read somewhere that General Eisenhower wanted Harris to be removed from command because Harris would not stop, but was rebuffed by Churchill.
Totally off topic, sorry
Z.W. Wolf
Senior Member.
You've caught me in over-reach. I'll redeem myself with a Motte and Bailey argument. Later...
John J.
Senior Member.
All characters are fictitious, and do not depict real persons, living or dead. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
Wait till you get to the bit about Chevalier Broad from Oxbridge University, expert in Hayesian theory and part of the shadowy group known as the Better Monks.
Montauk
Active Member
I don't think he intends it to be a crowd-pleaser à la his Dune trilogy. He's been a long time fan of Kubrick and 2001. He said in an interview that he's always wanted to make a sci-fi art film in this vein, and that with Rama he intends to do so. If it fails at the box office (A prior film of his, the excellent Blade Runner 2049 suffered this fate), so be it, but it'll be far more interesting and compelling than a lot of the mainstream sci-fi movies coming out now.
Montauk
Active Member
It may not make for a "good" mainstream space shoot-em-up movie like Star Wars or Sunshine, but I think it'd make a pretty good cerebral artistic film à la 2001, Danny Boyle's Sunshine, or Villeneuve's pre-Dune sci-fi endeavors (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049)
As for the question of adaptation, well, I've tried reading Herbert's Dune a dozen or so times and I just couldn't get into it. Now, I love dense fantasy and hard sci-fi novels as much as the next guy, but Herbert's prose, among other thing, just made the work unbearable and frankly annoying. The guy was a fine world-builder and idea-man, but to me his weakness was in his execution and presentation of such ideas. The unfortunate mangling by the producers of David Lynch's attempt at a film of it tampered any chance a good one could be made.
And then I saw Villeneuve's take and I finally got it. Now, they're not flawless and personally I wouldn't rank them super high on my list of his work, but they're undeniably enjoyable movies. He and his collaborators knew how take that book and eruditely rearrange and change some things for clarity and logic, but still retain the best parts of the original story and worlds. When I learned he'd been a life-long hardcore fan of the book and series, it made perfect sense. I have no doubt he can do something similar (if not more freely and artfully as this will hopefully be more auteur than Dune) with Rama. He seems to be an ardent fan of it and Clarke in general so I'm not too worried.
Mauro
Senior Member.
I beg to disagree, but of course tastes are tastes
I have read the Dune book much before any film came out, and I have re-read it at least twenty times since that (both translated and in English). It's a great book. But I agree it's not easy to fully understand and appreciate at first read, it takes time.
I was rather disappointed at first by David Lynch's film but, after all, it was not that bad. The Villeneuve's take is imho the worst, notwithstanding the stunning visuals. I expecially hated the mangled final where Chani leaves Paul, totally un-Dunish. I think the best take on Dune is actually the TV mini-series, but no film rendition compares to the beauty of the book (same goes for LOTR, ofc
)
Todd Feinman
Active Member
I very much enjoyed the books, and I also liked Lynch's film. Some excellent actors, and I enjoyed Kenneth McMillan's Baron Harkonnen. Many of the sets were very good too, and as I envisioned them, but some of the special effects look dated now, of course. I was also able to tolerate years of Dr. Who, fwiw...
Ann K
Senior Member.
I got half way and quit. I never saw the need to come back for more.
Having read all of the Dune books up to number 24 (Sandworms of Dune) I can say there is plenty of material for decades of videos.
However, I will never read any of them past the third again, too too much filler.
If you must know how the story ends just read Sandworms of Dune, that is the END. Books being published after that one are just fillers in the timeline.
Mauro
Senior Member.
My advice is to just read the first book and possibly read it twice. The story does end there, the sequels are a long beating of a dead horse.
When you look that deeply into Dune's future, you see Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson there, laughing at your impotence.
elvenwear
Senior Member.
Oh no. I like Emily Blunt. This will be like when Kate Mara did Captive. I can't watch Captive without cringing.
elvenwear
Senior Member.
You may be right. What I have also suspected for some time, is that the studio takes money from dozens of investors (ie the committee) and then 'spends' hundreds of millions on special effects (ie funnels hundreds of millions into their effects studio). If the film makes more than the effects cost, the investors get a return. If not, only the studio makes money.
Ann K
Senior Member.
That's essentially the plot of The Producers, with their "Springtime for Hitler" play within a play.
RTM
Senior Member.
There have been a few cases of this; The Road Runner and Bat Girl films were filmed and not released for "tax purposes ".
There's obviously an incentive to do so, as you'd think after spending tens of millions, getting something back would be better than nothing.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/10/23955432/warner-bros-discovery-coyote-acme-shelved-john-cena
JMartJr
Senior Member.
My understanding was that "Bat Girl" was not released more sue to a conflict with the vision of a new regime in the studio front office, and the general unfixable problems making a coherent film out of the footage that had been shot. But I suppose you wouldn't admit to a tax-dodge openly!
Another reason for making an unreleased fim is to hold onto rights to a story or characters that came with a requirement that they be used by a certain date or the rights would revert. Roger Corman's unreleased version of "Fantastic 4" allegedly falls into that category --
Another reason for making an unreleased fim is to hold onto rights to a story or characters that came with a requirement that they be used by a certain date or the rights would revert. Roger Corman's unreleased version of "Fantastic 4" allegedly falls into that category --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fantastic_Four_(unreleased_film)External Quote:
Montauk
Active Member
Glad to see someone else that was able to see through the hype. I see the defenders here are as zealous as I've seen on other forums. /s
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Montauk
Active Member
I think there are good aspects about it some of which you already pointed out (I quite like Sting, Patrick Stewart, McMillan in it, and I'll watch anything with Kyle MacLachlan), but the final cut's biggest flaw for me is that it's poorly paced (specifically quite rushed). Lynch himself has admitted this. This was because Lynch's intended cut ran about 3 or so hours, and the producers wanted to get as many screenings as possible, so they made him cut it down to 2 hours, which they only realized the consequences of when it bombed. I did watch a fan edit that gets close to Lynch's intention as possible and it was much better. I think it's called the Spicediver cut.
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JMartJr
Senior Member.
Sometimes people just like things that you don't like. It's OK when that happens.
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