It's kind of fun to watch the hack* director in action.
Their career path is interesting, if not all that surprising… after all, one watches a good director's films and hopes—perhaps expects—that each one will get progressively better, meanwhile following the bad director's career with the fear that each film will be worse than the next.
So it's probably not too surprising to find that, with each film, the hack director just becomes a bigger hack, latching onto those aspects of their previous works that they feel were the best parts (often mistakenly), blowing them up into bigger and bigger moments all at the service of producing a bigger, glossier and, ultimately, more meaningless (and usually worse) movie than their previous works.
And we've got two glorious examples of the hack in action so far this summer.
First off, of course, is Van Helsing… a turgid mess that I've already bashed here. But it's a prime example of what I'm talking about. Stephen Sommers made a big splash a few years ago with The Mummy, a fun little popcorn movie with all the depth of a wading pool, but some cool effects and fun characters. The sequel to that one, The Mummy Returns, simply upped the ante for effects (and ran EVERY effects scene for much longer than they ever should have lasted), downplayed the previously fun characters and introduced the (apparent) curse of action/adventure franchises… the annoying child actor as lead character. (Let's face it, it didn't work for Indiana Jones, it certainly didn't work here.)
(Interestingly, The Scorpion King kind of sidesteps many of Sommers' hack tendencies and is a fairly entertaining movie, but I think that's mainly because it was a more straightforward adventure story and had less room for the over-the-top effects of The Mummy films.)
But then he's right back in his groove for Van Helsing, where he parlays those same effects that were so overdone in Mummy Returns and makes them the whole reason for the film, sticking us with characters that had the potential to be interesting, but that we ultimately couldn't care less about because they're stuck in this lousy excuse for a movie.
But this is all prelude to my REAL reason for posting… The Day After Tomorrow. God, talk about a hack job! Roland Emmerich managed to take everything bad from his past few movies and put them all into one big, fat mess of a movie. We've got the horrible science of Independence Day, the bad storytelling of Godzilla and the heavy-handedness of The Patriot all working to make this one, if not unwatchable, at least laughable.
In a way, it kind of reminded me of all the cautionary, gloom & doom, end of the world SF I read in Junior High & High School. Everything I read at the time seemed to be some post-apocalyptic thing where we'd either poisoned ourselves with pollutants or blown ourselves to bits with nuclear bombs. They were heavy-handed, over done and all too much the same after a while. (Meanwhile, having said that, I have to say that I'm pretty sure it was books like this that helped form my attitudes towards war, nuclear aggression and our mishandling of the environment. But that's another topic altogether.) I also understand that, while I was never a big fan of the disaster pics of the 70's, this one follows that formula pretty closely.
You can see the films agenda right from the start and it's kind of amusing to see the obvious Cheney character blustering lines like "our economy is every bit as fragile as your precious environment" and equally fun to watch Quaid hit him with a line about "not listening when you had a chance to do something" even though we've just learned that there's nothing anyone could do about what's about to happen. It's absurd, but it's kind of fun. (Just an aside, but a sure sign that you're dealing with Emerich's fantasy is the heartfelt turnaround the VP has by the end of the film—yeah, like the real Dick Cheney would be capable of heartfelt anything.)
But for me, it was really a movie of moments… jaw-dropping, I-can't-really-believe-I-heard-that, mind-numbingly dumb movie moments. My personal favorite… Quaid and company are racing to New York to rescue his son. Somewhere in Philadelphia, they wreck their truck. Quaid turns to his two buddies and says "well, guess we walk from here"! We're over 100 miles from our destination and the storm we're walking into will freeze you to death in a heartbeat, but damnit, I'm gonna save my son! I honestly felt my jaw drop open when I heard that line!
As for Dani, the one that drove her nuts (and was a brilliant example of the kind of bad science littering this movie) was when they're in the library and they have to keep warm, so they start burning the books. Here they are, in a library full of wooden chairs, tables, benches… but we're going to burn the books! Why? Well, because it's the fall of Western Civilization and we want to make damn sure you know it!
There's more, of course… the scene of Quaid outrunning the freeze while dragging his injured friend, Jake Gyllenhaal outrunning some of the most blatantly awful CGI wolves ever, followed by HIS outrunning the same freeze his dad's outrunning… it just goes on and on.
Suffice it to say that this wreck's just not worth it. Independence Day was fun, in a roller coaster kind of way—strap yourself in, check your brain at the door and go along for the ride. But this one just doesn't have the same sense of fun… maybe because it's trying so hard to make it's point. Or maybe just because, as is the tendency with hacks, it's just a worse movie than the earlier one.
(hack* 3 a : a person who works solely for mercenary reasons : HIRELING b : a writer who works on order; also : a writer who aims solely for commercial success.)
Their career path is interesting, if not all that surprising… after all, one watches a good director's films and hopes—perhaps expects—that each one will get progressively better, meanwhile following the bad director's career with the fear that each film will be worse than the next.
So it's probably not too surprising to find that, with each film, the hack director just becomes a bigger hack, latching onto those aspects of their previous works that they feel were the best parts (often mistakenly), blowing them up into bigger and bigger moments all at the service of producing a bigger, glossier and, ultimately, more meaningless (and usually worse) movie than their previous works.
And we've got two glorious examples of the hack in action so far this summer.
First off, of course, is Van Helsing… a turgid mess that I've already bashed here. But it's a prime example of what I'm talking about. Stephen Sommers made a big splash a few years ago with The Mummy, a fun little popcorn movie with all the depth of a wading pool, but some cool effects and fun characters. The sequel to that one, The Mummy Returns, simply upped the ante for effects (and ran EVERY effects scene for much longer than they ever should have lasted), downplayed the previously fun characters and introduced the (apparent) curse of action/adventure franchises… the annoying child actor as lead character. (Let's face it, it didn't work for Indiana Jones, it certainly didn't work here.)
(Interestingly, The Scorpion King kind of sidesteps many of Sommers' hack tendencies and is a fairly entertaining movie, but I think that's mainly because it was a more straightforward adventure story and had less room for the over-the-top effects of The Mummy films.)
But then he's right back in his groove for Van Helsing, where he parlays those same effects that were so overdone in Mummy Returns and makes them the whole reason for the film, sticking us with characters that had the potential to be interesting, but that we ultimately couldn't care less about because they're stuck in this lousy excuse for a movie.
But this is all prelude to my REAL reason for posting… The Day After Tomorrow. God, talk about a hack job! Roland Emmerich managed to take everything bad from his past few movies and put them all into one big, fat mess of a movie. We've got the horrible science of Independence Day, the bad storytelling of Godzilla and the heavy-handedness of The Patriot all working to make this one, if not unwatchable, at least laughable.
In a way, it kind of reminded me of all the cautionary, gloom & doom, end of the world SF I read in Junior High & High School. Everything I read at the time seemed to be some post-apocalyptic thing where we'd either poisoned ourselves with pollutants or blown ourselves to bits with nuclear bombs. They were heavy-handed, over done and all too much the same after a while. (Meanwhile, having said that, I have to say that I'm pretty sure it was books like this that helped form my attitudes towards war, nuclear aggression and our mishandling of the environment. But that's another topic altogether.) I also understand that, while I was never a big fan of the disaster pics of the 70's, this one follows that formula pretty closely.
You can see the films agenda right from the start and it's kind of amusing to see the obvious Cheney character blustering lines like "our economy is every bit as fragile as your precious environment" and equally fun to watch Quaid hit him with a line about "not listening when you had a chance to do something" even though we've just learned that there's nothing anyone could do about what's about to happen. It's absurd, but it's kind of fun. (Just an aside, but a sure sign that you're dealing with Emerich's fantasy is the heartfelt turnaround the VP has by the end of the film—yeah, like the real Dick Cheney would be capable of heartfelt anything.)
But for me, it was really a movie of moments… jaw-dropping, I-can't-really-believe-I-heard-that, mind-numbingly dumb movie moments. My personal favorite… Quaid and company are racing to New York to rescue his son. Somewhere in Philadelphia, they wreck their truck. Quaid turns to his two buddies and says "well, guess we walk from here"! We're over 100 miles from our destination and the storm we're walking into will freeze you to death in a heartbeat, but damnit, I'm gonna save my son! I honestly felt my jaw drop open when I heard that line!
As for Dani, the one that drove her nuts (and was a brilliant example of the kind of bad science littering this movie) was when they're in the library and they have to keep warm, so they start burning the books. Here they are, in a library full of wooden chairs, tables, benches… but we're going to burn the books! Why? Well, because it's the fall of Western Civilization and we want to make damn sure you know it!
There's more, of course… the scene of Quaid outrunning the freeze while dragging his injured friend, Jake Gyllenhaal outrunning some of the most blatantly awful CGI wolves ever, followed by HIS outrunning the same freeze his dad's outrunning… it just goes on and on.
Suffice it to say that this wreck's just not worth it. Independence Day was fun, in a roller coaster kind of way—strap yourself in, check your brain at the door and go along for the ride. But this one just doesn't have the same sense of fun… maybe because it's trying so hard to make it's point. Or maybe just because, as is the tendency with hacks, it's just a worse movie than the earlier one.
(hack* 3 a : a person who works solely for mercenary reasons : HIRELING
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