Thursday, April 01, 2010

Nooooooo! I want originality!

If you click on the NOOOOO above you'll follow a link to an article... that talks about a CG version of Captain Harlock's adventure.
Okay, it might be cool to see a 3d Arcadia take off but... looking at the model they created for Harlock I cannot help but thinking: he looks rather plain compared to the 2D one.

Sorry about this blabber but I grew up watching Harlock's cartoons and, being fond of pirates, he is one of the figures that impressed me the most when I was a kid... somehow I did wish to be like him when I grew up - somehow I did!

Now, honestly, in my head I've always imagined him to have a rounder face, a stronger jaw and not a split chin (which was the thing I hated the most about some actors... like Robert Mitchum - he had a dimple actually).... I imagined to see his hair wavy, not clean and shiny... maybe the hair was damp but it never looked dry to me.

Now this image they are giving to me... first of all it looks like my neighbor's kid with a wig on.
Take the whole hair and cool attire away from this dude and he looks overall plain... if not ugly.
I personally always believed Harlock's nose to be straight or retrousse... this guy has aquline nose and looks old too.

A week ago, when I saw that somebody was trying to do a remake of a Harryhausen's work, like Clash of the Titans... I thought: really they are wasting time and money.
But this? Oooh, I felt bad... like: I don't need this, what's the need for it? Do we really need this? I don't want it! It will not be better than the original just because it has technology in it!

I was thinking just the other day that 15 years ago I would go to the movies each and every sunday and I would get to watch a different movie with cool plot and great characters... and maybe the Special Effects were made with animatronics and foam but the stories were so cool and compelling nobody would care about the looks. Stuff like: Goonies, Gremlins, Innerspace, War Games, Back to the Future, Navigator.....
I would not trade a single Joe Dante movie with the whole of James Cameron's filmography... because movies, nowadays, look great but are not original and they are pretty boring too!
The are remakes, sequels, based on... not so very much based on... completely made up from an original idea that could not go wrong but you messed it up anyways... and so on!
Let's take Avatar, for example... now Cameron states that he spent 15 years writing the script. Cool, yeah, it doesn't really show except it places in time the beginning of a bad trend of "running out of original ideas": 15 years ago it was 1995, Pocahontas was out in the theaters... that roughly tells me you just painted a Disney movie in blue and spent the rest of the time thinking how cool it would be to have technology cover up your lack of ideas!
Now that's brilliant, let's all do that!

The sad thing is... kids won't know cuz they weren't even born 15 years before or were too young to remember... so culture erases and degenerates itself pretty easily in cycles!
In 15 years they'll complain like I do! Sheesh!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm a '90s kid, but I love movie's from the '80s like The Labyrinth, Gremmlins, Goonies, etc and I'm constantly showing them to people I know who haven't seen them because they're such great movies despite the bad effects, the effects don't even matter anyway.

dedasaur said...

Yes, Labyrinth and Dark Crystal too were so awesome!
I was a lucky kid, back then... being able to go every sunday at the movies and really find something good and written for kids.
Nowadays the stories look all alike. So disappointing!