Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines exists solely because someone wanted a paycheck—it’s purely about the money. Still, I find myself actually liking it... It’s got an older Arnold Schwarzenegger looking ready to hang it up, and honestly? A mountain of nonsense and plot holes that James Cameron would never let slide... but somehow, in its own weird way, it has heart. 🙂
Anyway, regarding this whole thread—it’s basically just people saying, "Ugh, back in my day, sequels were actual masterpieces, not like the junk they make now..." 😬
Looking at that list of "third entries" feralorca82 put together—honestly, in my opinion, those were actual sequels for reasons beyond just padding the bank account: Star Wars Episode VI, Rocky III, Die Hard with a Vengeance, Alien 3, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade... Their whole point—aside from, obviously, making a buck😁—was to actually dig deeper into the story and the characters, you know? A genuine desire to say something new... or something like that. Nowadays, when studios churn out sequels to massive hits, it’s just the peak of corporate strategy—the goal is pure profit, and hey, they’re great at it. They’re products designed to make money that happen to be perfectly entertaining and satisfying. But today’s blockbusters are basically disposable goods, meant to be replaced by the next big thing. For comparison—take the 1978 "Superman" or "Jaws"—those aren't just mindless, disposable products. High-budget blockbusters don't have to be stupid, consumable junk. Why are today's hits such "movie killers"? Because everyone assumes a hit movie has to be a dumb, disposable one. Popular movies shape the audience and, eventually, the directors of the future.
There are a few documentaries out there—like stuff about climate change and *An Inconvenient Truth* featuring Al Gore, who actually snagged an Oscar for it.
As for movies centered on ecology—you’ve got *Medicine Man* directed by John McTiernan starring Sean Connery, and then there's *On Deadly Ground* with Steven Seagal.
Arthur is just a solid flick. It’s basically about a group of veterans who are pretty much done with serving—just one last job left on the docket—and then, in the end, they still find themselves fighting "for the common man"... Classic stuff, and honestly, it works perfectly. Accurate historical facts? Well, there's plenty of history to play with for a movie like this. Besides, Arthur wasn't even a real person. My only real gripe would be Keira Knightley in the fight scenes. Keira just doesn't have that warrior vibe, especially when she's swinging an axe.
I would have actually enjoyed The Thin Red Line if it weren't for that voiceover—it felt like listening to some high schooler reciting an essay about how "war to be bad" and "let the whole world live in peace." Those essays in the movie really suffocated me. It’s as if you can't grasp the entire point without being spoon-fed that kind of stuff.
So, you're saying all those guys are unpredictable? Fine—I'm going to go dive into those movies right now to see if they’re actually worth my time... maybe they'll actually catch me off guard for once. 😁
Look, the movie is trash—but not the miserable, bottom-of-the-barrel kind of trash like that «The Wicker Man» remake. It’s actually pretty watchable and fun garbage. Honestly, I enjoyed it quite a bit, so I decided to sit down and write out basically every major spoiler in the film. (But whatever, I’ve marked where the spoilers start. 🙂 ) So... The cinematography is gorgeous, the directing is solid, the actors are great, and the runtime flies by. There are some creepy, sudden jolts, too. And there's this one scene where a priest calls out, "I gotta call... someone!" The call... TADAM... comes from the other side via a high-ranking official who supposedly knows everything and has all the answers! By the end, there’s this "ideological" twist that feels a bit different from your typical flick in this genre. But I'll save that for the end—major spoiler alert. The Plot: We follow a young, attractive scientist, Anne Hathaway, who works at a university and specializes in providing scientific explanations for miracles—you know, those things like when a statue of Mother Mary starts weeping. Our lovely, brilliant Anne Hathaway is an atheist, while her partner is a Black man and a believer. They make a fantastic duo; they have great chemistry, almost like Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, which is a shame because we won't be getting any more movies with them. Basically, in a sleepy little town called Heaven in the American South, the river and the nearby swamp have turned blood red. The locals are all deeply religious and suspect this is a repetition of the ancient plagues from Egypt. And seriously, those plagues from SZ start happening one after another, and these superstitious townsfolk think God is punishing them for something. The scientist, though, is looking for a rational explanation. First, the river turns to blood, then frogs start falling from the sky... and as the movie progresses... The rest of the Egyptian plagues follow, and SPOILERS...
**** LEVEL THREE SPOILERS **** ... Somewhere along the line, we find out the scientist used to be a devout believer herself. She walked away from God during a humanitarian mission in Sudan—all because of what happened to her family during an incident involving some aggressive locals. Specifically, one large, imposing Black man who, with blood streaming from his eyes instead of tears and a machete in hand, keeps popping up in flashbacks. BOOO! It turns out the movie isn't about a scientist debunking religious delusions or finding science behind weird phenomena... it’s actually a pure, unadulterated... ...satanic supernatural thriller!
**** LEVEL TWO SPOILERS **** A satanic thriller centered around... a Satanic child born right there in the town of Heaven, who is destined to trigger the APOCALYPSE!!! As it turns out, the Demonic Child is just a tiny, sweet little girl with big blue eyes (the child actress is adorable—honestly, she's cuter than Hermione in the first Harry Potter movie; she'll be a star in a few years!) The girl comes from a weird redneck family, outcasts from polite society, living in a shack on the edge of the swamp... The culprits? Satanic cultists, who were spotted performing rituals in that family's shack. (There were a ton of motorcycles parked outside the cabin, according to the film.) Our scientist discovers that she is the only one capable of killing this Satanic child before all ten of the Egyptian plagues manifest in this unfortunate town... because she was once consecrated, you see, and the fact that she renounced God doesn't matter. She steps up to play the role of the angel-savior... BUT... there's a TWIST at the end!
**** LEVEL ONE SPOILERS (THE BIG ONES) **** The finale goes down in the ruins of an old Gothic cathedral deep in the Southern American swampland. The scientist is brandishing a knife at the Satanic girl when she suddenly realizes she's making a massive mistake! She can't kill the girl, because the child isn't actually a demon—she's an angel sent by Almighty God to use the repetition of the ten Egyptian plagues to wipe out the EVIL in the town of Heaven. The "evil" is actually that Satanic cult everyone was talking about, which is really only *planning* to create a child to start the Apocalypse. The cult members are actually... 😈😈 😈
I I mean, literally every single resident of this tiny town! 😲
By the end, you've got Anne Hathaway wrapped up with that little girl amidst the ruins of some Gothic cathedral—only to be surrounded by the entire townspeople, all making the wrong sign of the cross and muttering something in Latin...
Anyway, let’s pivot to what I’d call the "ideologically" interesting part of this Satanic thriller. See, in your standard Satanic flick, Satan is always the one behind the supernatural mess. He’s the culprit for all the creepy deaths, the insanity, the pea vomiting, the head spinning, the random earthquakes, lightning strikes, or those Dobermans lunging out of the shadows... In those movies, you never see any divine help from God—the only weapon the fighters against the Devil have is some dry faith they have to dig up deep inside themselves... In this movie, though, it’s flipped on its head. Everything supernatural is actually the work of God, leaving the followers of Satan totally stranded with nothing but their little charms and sacrificial goats. And in the end, all that evil—all those residents of Heaven who are charging at our heroine and the girl—gets struck down from above by a good God who saves our lead from a hopeless situation. Because, ultimately, we face the ultimate evil—that Egyptian-style death of the firstborn. And it turns out EVERY resident of this town is a firstborn child!!!! Their demise comes in the form of MASSIVE FIREBALLS FALLING FROM THE SKY!!! There's this HUGE EXPLOSION and a SEA OF FIRE that floods the old church ruins... and once the smoke clears, the only ones left standing in a field full of flaming craters are our heroine—who isn't exactly a scientist anymore, more like a fanatic believer—and the little girl, who is basically an angel. There's one last tiny, half-baked twist at the very end that doesn't matter at all to the plot, but anyway, bye. Fun stuff... 👍
Slashers were definitely a thing back in the 70s, but once we hit the 80s, the whole genre just became a massive loop of the exact same tired clichés. By the 90s, you saw them trying to pivot—first by making fun of those tropes through parody, like >, and then they just started ripping off the 80s style again, but this time they were intentionally leaning into the stuff people used to find boring back in the day. (Yeah, I see what you did there...)
It feels like there used to be a huge market for those old-school Italian B-movie horrors, but they’ve basically vanished now. Instead, everyone is obsessed with Eastern horror lately—something that definitely wasn't on anyone's radar during the 80s...
I just wanted to talk a little bit about Star Wars.😁
Picture this: someone who’s been stuck in a fallout shelter since the 60s and finally emerges to watch the original Star Wars trilogy—but they have absolutely zero context for what Star Wars even is. For us, we already knew the vibe. We didn't necessarily know every tiny detail, but we understood the core essence. We don't see any plot holes—if there even are any—because the narrative feels complete, almost as if everything was pre-ordained beyond the screen itself... How would someone experience a new Star Wars trilogy if they weren't already spoiled on the plot, the characters, or how it all ends? Would a person like that actually see Palpatine coming? Just imagine the sheer shock at the end of that trilogy! It would be totally unpredictable! 😉
Star Wars episodes 1-3... a completely unpredictable trilogy. First off—each of these three movies is unpredictable on its own merit, mostly because throughout their run, we’re essentially dropped in as witnesses to a series of events that seem to lack any internal logic or connection to one another. We try to connect the dots, but after a while, you realize that—well, actually—the events in the film don't have much logic or cohesion at all. Things just happen chaotically, but I guess that’s fine; isn't that how life works? Things around us don't always have a clear cause. The events in the movie are unpredictable, much like life itself. And yet, we realize—or at least we think we do, since the film tricks us into thinking we've grasped something—that all three films, as a whole, are actually a single story about a young man and a girl trying to build a traditional marriage in an unpredictable world full of crises. We follow this guy's career in government service; he's basically a sort of undercover federal agent. His job is incredibly high-stress. You have periods of peace followed by war and various national emergencies, so he's constantly out on assignment. His colleagues are hardened veterans, and his best friend is clearly a dysfunctional type dealing with PTSD. (At no point in the trilogy do we ever see him hanging out with his wife outside of work.) The guy tries to establish a normal relationship and a conservative marriage, even though his job makes it nearly impossible, and by the end of the film, he actually pulls it off! He achieves a stable union. His superiors release him from duty despite the state of war. It looks like a happy ending... And then comes the most unbelievable plot twist in cinematic history! When I saw it, I couldn't believe my eyes!
By the end of the film, the guy starts swinging wildly at everything! He even strangles his pregnant wife! Some mild, pleasant little guy—a minor character, a Senator—completely flips his character; suddenly he turns into a psychopath, a monster, even in his physical appearance! The young man and this gentleman establish this strange master-servant dynamic. Throughout the film, this little guy wasn't dominant at all, nor did the young man show any inclination toward being submissive to anyone, let alone a middle-aged gentleman. This shift happens abruptly, without warning, in less than a minute! The film concludes by showing all the characters dead, that the Senator staged a coup d'état out of nowhere, and that the entire once-monolithic government structure collapsed into chaos overnight... It's totally unbelievable because we know things like that don't just happen in a stable, organized nation, and the film showed us that this was a very orderly, advanced state. Is the ending just a vision—a nightmare in the mind of the young man, broken by everything he experienced during his service? That would be a good explanation, except the films never gave us any hint that the guy was on the edge of madness. But no, throughout the films, he was quite composed—deadpan expressions, almost (as if he weren't even acting)—and he seemed to have no inner life at all. So, an ending like this is completely unexpected. This film trilogy ends so... surrealistically. It's a totally unpredictable and confusing narrative for its duration; just when you think you've finally figured out some kind of structure and that it's ultimately just a love story with a happy ending—albeit an atypical one—it all veers into surrealism.
velvetotter10: 👍 Regarding Pinbacker... I never really looked at him as some major character—more like... what? In the Film, he’s presented as this almost non-material threat; you never actually see him clearly, and even when you do, the camera intentionally distorts his image... What was the goal there? ...
Great Film, honestly blew me away. It’s been ages since I sat down for a serious space flick—it really hit the spot. This is easily the best sci-fi space movie out there lately... actually, looking back, I can't even think of any other hard sci-fi set in Space from recent years. (Haven't seen Tarkovsky's Solaris.) Even that final stretch (SPOILER) involving Captain Freddy Krueger—which some people seem to think was a bit clunky or forced—I thought worked perfectly fine within the flow. Giving this Film top marks.
That last scene felt totally unnecessary. Honestly, it would have been much stronger if the whole plot about saving Earth wasn't even there.
If you’re a writer who also happens to be a journalist—someone who’s actually managed to get on TV once or twice—it definitely smooths the path when you're trying to pitch a screenplay. Otherwise, I honestly feel like it’s nearly impossible around here. You have these competitions and whatnot... But still, it seems like some totally regular guy actually won one of those screenwriting contests recently... Just an average Joe... He works over at Congress... No, he’s not a politician or anything, just a staffer at Congress.
So, let’s talk about remakes. There’s this almost metaphysical take from Zvonimir Berković regarding why he thinks remakes, by their very nature, just don't work as movies. A few weeks back, Berković sat down with The New York Times to explain his reasoning—specifically why he thinks a remake of an old classic like "H-8" is a total wash, and why remakes in general tend to miss the mark.
His whole argument boils down to this: you can always sense the era in which a film was captured. It’s in the hairstyles, the tiny details, the way the actors carry themselves—it all screams the time period, even if the movie itself isn't set in that era. (Take "New Hope," for instance; despite all the modern touch-ups and CGI, it practically shouts "the 70s!" at you.)
And according to Berković, that specific era acts as a sort of silent collaborator with the story. The time period is like a hidden actor in the cast. When you remake a film and transplant it into a different decade, he argues that this "hidden actor" stops performing. You end up with this nagging feeling that something is off—something just doesn't sit right—even if you can't quite put your finger on what it is.
Richard Wilson4 said:Has anyone actually sat down and watched this movie yet? If so, what's the verdict? Did you dig it?
I absolutely loved it—honestly, it blows "Kingdom of Heaven" out of the water. Anthony Mann was one of those rare directors who actually knew how to handle a serious historical epic, rather than just churning out those over-the-top period melodramas that seem to pass for historical epics these days...
redowl90 said:First off, the movie title is GHOST RIDER, not Ghoast Rider...
Secondly, there’s already a thread about this topic...
Thirdly, it isn't exactly "great trash"—it’s just a bad movie. If we're talking about great trash, you'd look at something like Evil Dead or the second season of Lost...
So, I caught Ghost Rider yesterday—and man, it’s been a minute since I actually had a decent time at the movies. This flick is just plain stupid. The plot? Total trash, feels cheap as hell. Nicolas Cage is completely washed up—stuttering through lines and sporting this absolutely hideous haircut. As for the female lead, she didn't really do anything for me. The jokes are mindless, there isn't nearly enough action, and those CGI effects feel like stuff we've all seen a thousand times before—just low-budget and tired. Most of the acting is pretty rough, too. Honestly, the whole thing feels like some bargain-bin 80s flick you'd find playing in a tiny theater in middle-of-nowhere Nebraska. It's bad. But, somehow, I actually liked it and had a blast.
"Bullitt" is basically the godfather of the modern car chase Then you've got "To Live and Die in L.A." (1985)—that was William Friedkin trying to outdo his own work on "The French Connection" And of course, there's "Mad Max" 1 and 2 Or take "Terminator 2"—you’ve got that kid on the motorcycle, being hunted down by Edward Patrick in a truck, all while Arnold Schwarzenegger is hot on their heels...
If you ask me, a chase only counts if they're using actual cars and real stunt performers—once you start throwing in CGI, the whole thing just loses its soul.