Prehistoric Low Camp. The archetypal Hero’s Journey, at its earliest starting point: the outcast of a mountain clan, who appear to wear bird droppings on their faces, wending his way past woolly mammoths, giant man-eating gobblers, a saber-toothed tiger, across the Sea of Sand to the Head of the Snake …
Roland Emmerich's widest view of disaster to date: the sky-high eruption of Yellowstone (Old Faithful gone Vesuvius), the toppling of the Washington Monument and St. Peter's Basilica (the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower would be so old-hat), the block-by-block collapse of Los Angeles (a rented limo outrunning the …
Never before has a “Shakespearean” movie been this lousy. Rafe Spall plays the bard as a bumpkin, virtually illiterate, but the dim actors think he created the great plays scripted in secret by the haughty snob Edward, 17th Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans, desperate to hold on to some dignity). …
Doomsday science fiction -- emphasis, as is only fit and proper, on fiction at the expense of science -- about how global warming brings on a new Ice Age in the northern hemisphere, and in consequence a southward migration that reverses the flow of illegals across the Mexican border. (That …
Well, she's big all right. As advertised. But not really as big as you might have expected. The otherworldly spacecraft in Independence Day, Roland Emmerich's hommage to the alien-invader fables of the 1950s, was sufficiently larger than any previous such vehicle as to carve out a special niche for itself …
A conscious and conscientious throwback to the invaders-from-space fables of the Eisenhower era: simply and straightforwardly War of the Worlds with updated hardware. But it won't do to be too blasé over the derivativeness. Film, as we've all been instructed but haven't all yet learned, is a visual medium, and …
Independent from original thinking. Director Roland Emmerich and his band of four co-screenwriters waited 20 years to crap out a sequel, and this is the best they can come up with? Even the updated CG effects effects aren’t an improvement. If Independence Day was, as my predecessor Duncan Shepherd observed, …
Independent from original thinking. Director Roland Emmerich and his band of four co-screenwriters waited 20 years to crap out a sequel, and this is the best they can come up with? Even the updated CG effects effects aren’t an improvement. If Independence Day was, as my predecessor Duncan Shepherd observed, …
HOW ON EARF ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DEFEAT THE ALIENS WITHOUT WILL SMITH? We better think of something, Jeff Goldblum, because they are coming back, and they are angry. Directed by Roland Emmerich.
Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg rejoin forces, nineteen years later, for a fourth archaeological adventure. Ford, with his big-cat purr of a voice, remains an amiable fellow; and if he’s a bit jowlier beneath that crumpled face (like a wadded-up piece of paper retrieved from the wastebasket and mostly smoothed …
What happens when producers do double duty as screenwriters? Midway through Midway, it hit me. First-timer Wes Tooke, guilty on both counts, makes it so the special effects are more interesting than the characters and events they were meant to update for contemporary audiences. The cast, on the other hand, …
All of the tropes are in order starting with a disgraced astronaut (Patrick Wilson) wrongfully blamed for a co-worker’s death who is unable to confront this dark moment from his past. Mother Earth is next placed on a collision course with another planet, in this case the moon hurtling out …
Revolutionary War epic, long-winded and simple-minded (an unhappy combination), as brutal in its sentimentality as in its violence. One exciting scene when the neutralist hero ("I'm a parent. I haven't got the luxury of principles") ambushes a squad of Redcoats bent on hanging his eldest son. The German-born director, Roland …