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Posted by Guy on 04-05-2008 at 07:42:
Doctor Strange
I FINALLY GOT IT!
The US got it on 14/8/07 and it was supposed to come out on the 30/4/08 over here, but it just didn't show up on shelves anywhere until TODAY.
Now I'm scared to watch it because I'm worried it's going to suck and will ruin one of my favorite marvel heroes (my most favorite being Man-Thing, and we all know how much THAT movie sucked -.-) I've been avoiding reviews and everything about it because I didn't want to see any accidental spoilers (like I'm avoiding the Gatchaman movie now, and I'll probably not want to watch that either, damn I hated the comic, it was so much better looking at the covers and thinking 'oh it's going to be so cool!').
But I'm going to watch it. I've only been waiting for it FOREVER.
Guh, why can't everything just be awesome and be done with it? Then I won't ever have to be worried about being dissappointed... though I guess that possibility is what makes it all the more worthwhile in the end if it is awesome.
And now I'm just distracting myself. I'm going to do it, I'll watch it now!
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Posted by Guy on 04-05-2008 at 12:08:
My assessment; 5.4/10
Enjoyable trash. Not true to the original story, not true to the original characters, not a brilliant new work using the title as leverage.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Animation; Low quality, jerky. Most of the time when a character speaks the mouth doesn't appear to be doing anything remotely like what a real person's mouth would do... and the animation of the swarm of flying monster piranha was disgustingly lazy.
Art; Completely different from any of the styles used in the comics - not too bad, but not exactly wonderful. Expressions are sometimes hard to understand, and there's a focus on the eyes which is rather undue - they all looked exactly the same except where colour is concerned, and they lack emotion. The art is also of inconsistant quality and has minimal detail and shading. It's lazy art for underpaid animators.
Character design; Well, they changed some of the characters around a whole lot. Wong wasn't supposed to be some awesomely powerful guy, he was just a butler. The butler to the sorcerer supreme, but still a butler, and when did he become some big guy you could mistake easily for a european? Baron Mordo just didn't seem like Baron Mordo anymore - too much of an evil conan the barbarian look to him.
The monsters all looked like dinosaurs or animals to me, nothing really spectacular there. The added characters were pretty generic. Distinctive, but nothing special. They all DIE, so that's probably why there wasn't any effort put into them, but whatever.
Sound; The music wasn't exactly epic, but certainly not jarring in any way. It suited the film and was used appropriately. I liked it.
Sound effects weren't bad. There were a few times when I thought something should have been louder, or could have been done in a different way. Just average.
Voice acting was surprisingly good, with a nice choice of actor for everyone except Doremmamu. How could an ultimate evil being made entirely dark magical power have a normal, boring human sounding voice? It should have been deep and monstrous with all kinds of crazy filters and stuff. Oh, and Wong and the aincient one could have done with more of an accent.
Story; BUTCHERED TO HELL. They did another X-Men 3 with this - Baron Mordo, the Aincient One, Dread Doremmamu, the entire cast of newly added sorcerers DEAD. They made this story to fill in the origin of Doctor Strange - I have it around here someplace - believe me it was a damn short story. Basically 'oopsie, we forgot to tell you where he came from so uh... he was a surgeon! An asshole! Then he broke his hands and went nuts and tried everything to get his hands back and wound up in tibet, learned his lesson, became a sorcerer the end.' So they had a LOT of creative freedom to flesh it out within the existing Dr. Strange universe - and for the most part they did it well. Until they got to the part where he gets to tibet. Thats where the story starts to really go wrong.
I didn't like anything they did with Mordo, the sorc. team could have been done so much better if they had to have it but it didn't really need to exist. The whole sanctum sanctorum holding that vortex (and not being Dr. Strange's house) and Doremmamu wanting to take it was all kinds of wrong... Why the hell did they strip Doremmamu's character so much? Where was his honour? Why didn't we see anything about his kingdom? Hell, where was his character at all? They tried to make him into an even more evil bad guy than he was originally by taking away anything that made him into an actual character... goddamn it failed.
Additional niggles; Where was the cloak of levitation? What happened to the wards and spells and all the crazy chants? Where were all the awesomely powerful arcane artifacts? Why weren't the Vishanti mentioned even once? What about all the other super powerful entities that existed? How come characters can die, but nobody bleeds even when their legs are cut off? HOW THE HELL DID DR STRANGE ABSORB DOREMMAMU? Didn't he try that in the comic and fail because he was a mere human and incapable of holding so much power?
I mean sure, the comic was full of weird plot holes and unfinished story arcs, it was produced as a filler for Strange Tales, but it became an awesome and epic story that didn't deserve the butchering it received in this obviously low budget movie. In the special features they keep saying 'it's for the fans', but they should have known that fans wouldn't be pleased with anything but the original story - I liked what they did fleshing out the origins of Dr. Strange, it was really good... but the rest of it was just dreadful. Where were the characters I loved? Why were they all so changed?
Oh, and I always thought Stephen was pronounced like Stephanie (with an F), not 'Steven'. Ph is supposed to represent the sound of an F not a V.
Anyway, it was dissappointing, but if I didn't know anything about Dr. Strange I'd think it was average but okay.
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Posted by lborgia88 on 04-05-2008 at 14:30:
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I'm sorry you were disappointed, Guy. Sometimes my pessimistic side has a feeling we'll be thinking similar things about the CGI Gatchaman movie in 2010.
Posted by Guy on 04-05-2008 at 23:19:
That's what I'm worried about too - I can see it now - by the end of the movie, Sosai and all his minions, the entire gatch team except the eagle, nambu and everyone else dead, and utoland terraformed into some pile of craters.
It's one of several reasons I avoid the hype about movies I really want to see - if you aren't hyped up you won't be dissappointed so badly. 'Cos you know with the teaser trailers all they are going to do is show you the most awesome clips they can from the film and make you think 'omg the whole thing must be that cool!'
Like that Godzilla 2000 movie or whatever it was - the ads for that showed this scene where some guy in a museum is telling some school kids 'this is a T-Rex, it's the biggest ever land predator...' and then godzilla's foot comes through the ceiling and crushes the skeleton.
As a kid that was THE one most awesome thing I had ever seen in my life. And when I watched the movie, patiently waiting to see that scene in context, it turned out that it wasn't even in the damn movie. They cut it. WTF? And the movie sucked - the ads were better than the movie. They could have shown a continuous loop of that one scene for 1.5 hours and it would have been better than that crappy movie.
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Posted by Metaliant on 05-05-2008 at 08:52:
Everytime they make a movie about a hero from the DC, Marvel or a Manga worlds, I am always worried that it would look horrible.
I love the 2 Batman movies that Tim Burton and Micheal Keaton did, wasn't keen on the next 2 which in my opioion were far better than the Dark Knight movies for several reasons.
I am debating whether or not and go see the Ironman film but I am just worried that it won't be any good.
Maybe the Gatchaman film will be good or not but like everybody else, I am worried.
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Posted by kimiko on 05-05-2008 at 10:54:
Well Met apparently Iron Man was #1 @ the box office here this past weekend, though I haven't heard any reviews good or bad.
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Posted by Guy on 05-05-2008 at 23:30:
I guess the main problem with the movies is that they are made for the purposes of getting cash out of your pockets and into their hands.
Unless the production team actually cares they're not going to do a good job on anything but making the movie look nice.
It seems to me that the people working of Dr. Strange were extremely dismissive of the whole thing - in the special features Stan Lee was basically saying 'oh, me and some guy we thought it up in 2 seconds, and it was really a clone of some other wizard we had done earlier, Dr. someone else, but that failed, and for some reason this one took off.'
Of the crew who worked on it, one guy couldn't remember any of the other crewmembers names and didn't seem to care about anyone but himself and the people he could remember (obviously not a lot of teamwork happening) and one guy, maybe the same guy, was non stop shitting on about how it was for the fans and how they had put all kinds of things in there that fans would pick up and notice (ie; we bastardised the story completely and threw in some original story to make the fans happy) and then they started going on about how THEY created the rules in the world of Dr. Strange - most of them wouldn't have been out of nappies when all that stuff was created - they obviously just took the vague idea, and rewrote the entire thing because they couldn't be bothered researching it by reading the original comics.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, they didn't care about what they were doing so it failed hard. Probably weren't being paid enough to care either. That Stan Lee guy was being a total dick, and seeing as he was more than likely the guy who said 'well let's make a movie off this' he was probably the guy who decided on the budget.
I just hope that the people working on Gatchaman care. I hope they were fans as kids, and are excited about working on the film, not for the money, but for the chance to be a part of the Gatchaman universe. I hope they want to stick with the original feeling, and just modernise it, not bastardise it. There's a pretty fine line between the two, but that's what I'm hoping for.
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Posted by kimiko on 06-05-2008 at 11:49:
I hope so too Guy.
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Posted by Cep on 06-05-2008 at 12:01:
This is why I am sooooooo glad Mr. Jackson did the LoTR films.
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Posted by Metaliant on 06-05-2008 at 17:53:
I was really worried about the LOTR films as the cartoon film which was Fellowship Of The Ring and Two Towers was interestingly made but the company went bust.
But as I saw and read a bit more about the film, I was started to wonder that it will be okay, even though trying to do those three books in three movies was going to be difficult, but thank god it wasn't as badd as I thought......in fact quite the opposite. I waws sad that it ended, though I knew it would as I wanted to see more.
I loved the music as well which helps to make those 3 films even more brilliant than normal brilliant.
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Posted by Guy on 07-05-2008 at 23:05:
Have you heard that they're making two hobbit movies now? But apparently Jackson isn't going to direct them. I wonder how they're going to turn out?
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Posted by Metaliant on 07-05-2008 at 23:29:
2 Hobbit movies?
I have The Hobbit and can't really see how they can make it into 2 movies when the LOTR movies were 3 books in 3 films or is it 2 different Hobbit stories in 2 different movies?
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Posted by clouddancer on 07-05-2008 at 23:37:
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I thought she meant two different companies were making the same movie. Like we were hearing was happening with Gatchaman (or am I wrong about remembering that?)
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Posted by lborgia88 on 07-05-2008 at 23:56:
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I read somewhere, it might have been aintitcool.com, that the first movie will tell the story, The Hobbit, and the second one will be a bridge between the events in The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings -which means that somebody will be making stuff up, tenuously based on what little information is in Tolkien's LOTR appendices and maybe some of his his unpublished writings. I'm not too thrilled about this.
Granted, it could just be a rumour.
Posted by Metaliant on 08-05-2008 at 00:31:
Hopefully it's a rumour. If not then I have a terrible foreboding of it and yes CD, I also read in some thread (can't remember, old age you see) about 2 companies making Gatchaman, one CGI and one live action.
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