I’ve made no illusions to the fact that I am not a fan of Roland Emmerich’s work as a director.  Is everything he has made been terrible? No, but the vast majority of the films he’s made have been some of the worst things I have ever seen on the big screen, and his track record as of late has been especially rough to witness.  What is especially frustrating is the fact that he’s a filmmaker that has shown no growth as an artist over the course of his career.  Some directors like to re-invent themselves as they enter their later years, or they try a variety of different styles and genres and then apply their own unique voice to them.  Emmerich only does one thing; he makes big loud action movies with a lot of apocalyptic, environmental destruction thrown across the screen.  He’s a director that has chosen to make simplistically plotted crowd pleasers that often don’t even hit that mark.  But, why is he still allowed to make movies even though they are often seen in retrospect to be terrible.  One could say that he knows his audience and has managed to laser focus hit that target on a regular basis.  That, or he’s been coasting very much on the goodwill that he had built during his first few years in the business.  Working with his creative partner, producer/writer Dean Devlin, Roland Emmerich started off as a science fiction director.  Emmerich and Devlin managed to secure a modest hit with the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Universal Soldier (1992) and then they won raves for their ground-breaking follow-up, Stargate (1994).  But it was their third film that really put them on the map; the mega-blockbuster Independence Day (1996).  If anything, Independence Day is the sole reason Emmerich really still has a career at all, because that record breaking film is the movie that propelled him to the attention of all the studios in Hollywood.  But, with that meteoric rise, it’s only inevitable that something would bring a filmmaker like Roland Emmerich back down to Earth.  But, what kind of disaster would be the first crack in the armor for Roland.

Following up right after the historic success of Independence Day (1996), which was the most popular film of that year by a long shot and at the time was in the top grossing movies of all time camp alongside the likes of Star Wars (1977), E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) and Jurassic Park (1993), Emmerich and Devlin were seeking their next project.  Instead of crafting a film off of their own fresh idea, they decided to next work on an already established IP that Hollywood was seeking to re-boot.  Columbia Pictures had for many years been trying to get an American adaptation of the classic Japanese monster movie Godzilla (1954).  They had been trying to coax some of the biggest directors in Hollywood, including Steven Spielberg, who was very much against the idea, stating the nothing could replace the original.  Eventually, they got cinematographer turned director Jan de Bont to sign on, fresh off his success on the Keanu Reeves thriller Speed (1995).  However, de Bont eventually realized that he couldn’t pull off the vision necessary for the film, and Columbia was once again left to shop the project around.  The timing proved fortunate as Emmerich and Devlin were just leaving their contract with 20th Century Fox and were open to signing with a new studio.  Emmerich initially wasn’t that interested in directing an adaptation of Godzilla (1998), but he later agreed to take the job after Columbia granted him creative license.  With Emmerich and Devlin in place, the multi-million dollar Godzilla remake was underway.  But, as the studio would soon learn, the creative license granted to a director that was initially indifferent to the prospect of directing a Godzilla feature would prove in the end to be a recipe for disaster.  Unfortunately for the studio, failure on the part of the team of Emmerich and Devlin had yet to materialize and they had no insight into what was to come next.

The original Godzilla is a renowned classic the world over.  Despite it’s primitive effects at the time, basically a guy in a dragon suit stepping on a bunch of model buildings, it nevertheless managed to successfully convey a sense of terror for audiences upon it’s release. The movie played upon Cold War anxieties about nuclear war and annihilation, which especially rang true in it’s native Japan, the only country in the world to this day that suffered an atomic bomb attack.  The gigantic terror that is the King of Monsters, Godzilla is very much a metaphor for the uncontrollable chaos brought on by a nuclear attack.  That’s why the original movie resonates so much still, because of the earnestness of it’s message, and how much the movie maintains that tone of terror.  Because it was a hit both in Japan and abroad, there were demands for further tales of Godzilla on the big screen.  So, Toho Productions, the creators of the character, put him in many more films in the years that followed, not just terrorizing humanity, but also fighting a whole variety of monsters, which in time became known by their Japanese moniker; kaiju.  Joining Godzilla were foes like Rodan and King Ghidorah, as well as allies like Mothra and Gamera, who themselves would spin-off into their own series of films.  During that time, Godzilla even evolved from a malicious terrorizer of humanity to an eventual protector of humanity.  And though the movies themselves were popular in the states, despite the often awkward voice dubs and the weird shoe-horned clips of Raymond Burr, they still remained a uniquely Japanese import on American cinemas.  But, with visual effects improving greatly in the 80’s and 90’s, Hollywood believed that the time was right to finally take their shot at Godzilla movie.  Though Toho was reticent to the idea of a Hollywood studio using their iconic character in one of their movies, they did eventually grant Columbia Pictures the chance to make their own film version.  Of course, once the film finally did get made, they probably should have trusted their initial cautious instincts from the outset.

On paper, the movie has promise.  Godzilla let loose in the middle of the concrete jungle that is Manhattan Island; seems right up the alley for the director that had an alien ship blow up the White House in Independence Day.  But there is one thing that was key to the success of Independence Day that becomes very apparent when watching Godzilla (1998); the lack of a compelling story.  Though Independence Day lacked subtlety and was full of cliches, it still had a well constructed through-line built around it’s very high concept premise that made the shortcomings feel inconsequential by the end.  But, in Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla, you get very little in the way of a compelling plot.  Basically Godzilla finds his way to New York, wrecks havoc for two hours, the “characters” do their best to survive and then roll credits.  While Independence Day knew that you had to hang the interest of the audience on the sense of peril, the same never applies in Godzilla.  Honestly, the threat of Godzilla the Monster feels small compared to the city sized space ships that destroy everything in their path.  There are shots that Emmerich tries to convey the sense of scale that feels comparable to Independence Day, like seeing a Godzilla sized hole in the middle of the MetLife Building.  But, that’s the unfortunate thing about how Godzilla ends up being used in this movie.  The only sense of awe that we get is when we see the aftermath of what he has done.  The more we actually see of the monster in the movie, the less scary he becomes.  And there is a reason for that.  The design of Godzilla, let’s just say, is not very good in this movie.  The iconic design of the original creature, with his small snake like head on top of a bulking body with massive spikes running down his spine, is very much missed in this movie.  The new Godzilla looks like an escapee from Jurassic Park.  The head of the new Godzilla is unique, but you can’t tell me that the rest of his body was not stolen from a model of Tyrannosaurus Rex.  In fact, the DNA of Spielberg’s blockbuster can be felt all throughout this movie, and not in a good way.

There is no doubt that part of the reason this movie was greenlit in the first place was because of the monumental success of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park.  And in particular, it was the groundbreaking visual effects that spurred a revolution across the industry.  Jurassic Park not only had stellar practical effects, but it also showed the world for the first time what computer animation could really do.  Even 30 years later the computer animation in that film remarkably still holds up, even though it was done large with primitive software compared to what’s available today.  The same cannot be said about Godzilla, even though it’s basically using the same level of effects.  One big difference is how the director utilizes the visual effects.  Spielberg is a master of set-ups, and he manages to move his camera around in a way that compliments the computer animation and makes it feel natural.  The sweeping introduction of the brachiosaurus, the first full shot of a dinosaur that we get in the movie, is a perfect example of this.  But in Godzilla, Roland Emmerich moves his camera around a lot, never really allowing us the time to soak in the visual effects.  Not to mention that most of the movie is cast in nighttime darkness with an extra layer of rain, which no doubt was there to cover up the seams of the less than spectacular computer animation.  Even the practical stuff looks cheap.  The miniature models used for the buildings of New York City all look flat and texture-less, which really breaks the illusion.  Not only that, but the marquee attraction of the film, Godzilla himself, is seen as briefly as possible in this movie.  Instead, most of the film’s climax is spent with the human characters being chased by baby Godzillas, which are essentially velociraptor rip-offs.  All together, it makes this movie feel smaller than it should be.  It’s no wonder that when future Godzilla movies were made at other studios, they returned to that traditional bulky Godzilla look that resembles a man in a dragon suit.  That, strangely enough, feels more true to the character than this oversized hybrid of a Tyrannosaurus and an iguana.

But, lackluster visual effects can be forgiven to a degree if there is a compelling story and likable characters that drive the rest of the film.  Godzilla sadly did not have any of those things.  The story is pretty much just a cat and mouse chase through New York, as the main characters try to coax the monster out of hiding and bring him into the open, hopefully to exterminate him.  And the characters themselves are sadly the typical Roland Emmerich mix of archetypes and stereotypes.  He resorts to his favorite trope once again in this movie, with the awkward nerd managing to save the day with science, which we saw previously with James Spader in Stargate and Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day.  Like some sliding scale, we go from those actors to Matthew Broderick, playing yet another awkward nerd who seems to know all the right things necessary to take on a 200 ft. tall giant lizard.  And if his character wasn’t portrayed weird enough, Emmerich and Devlin gave him the needlessly complicated name of Dr. Niko Tatopolous.  Unique name does not equal unique personality.  On top of Matthew Broderick in the lead, the rest of the movie’s cast is just, shall we say, weird.  The movie features not one, or two, but three different actors who are part of the voice cast of The Simpsons: Hank Azaria, Harry Shearer, and Nancy Cartwright.  Of those three, only Hank Azaria has substantial screen time, but seeing all three here does take one out of the movie.  One even more distracting bit of casting in the movie are character actors Michael Lerner and Lorry Goldman playing Mayor Ebert and his aide Gene respectively, in a clear and obvious parody of film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel.  Why Emmerich and Devlin would throw this kind of satirical characterization into a movie about Godzilla makes absolutely no sense, and it almost feels like a petty move on the filmmaker’s part, either taking revenge on bad reviews of the past or perhaps doing it as a bit of pandering.  Suffice to say the real Siskel and Ebert were not amused and they predictably gave the film two thumbs down.  The one bit of casting that is borderline acceptable in the movie is Jean Reno as a military man lending his expertise in stopping the rampaging monster.  The renowned French actor isn’t particularly well-used here, but out of all the actors in the movie, he’s the one that comes closest to maintaining his dignity by the end, mainly due to a suitably subtle performance.  Overall, when most of your sympathy is with the giant monster, and barely even that, you know that you’ve centered your movie around some pretty bad characters.

Besides the production and story problems themselves, this movie also put a strain on the creative relationship between Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich.  This was the last screenplay that they collaborated on, and after their next film, the Revolutionary War epic The Patriot (2000), they stopped producing movies together.  Though Godzilla is not explicitly the movie that caused the filmmaking duo to pursue different paths, but you can definitely see how it started forming the cracks.  Roland Emmerich’s free reign on the project created more than enough headaches for the executives at Columbia.  Strangely enough, the problem with this movie was not constraints made by budget cuts, but rather the opposite.  The budget expanded significantly during production, which Dean Devlin later stated that it caused him to be overwhelmed as a producer, and caused him to neglect fixing the script during production.  For Roland Emmerich, he was working with a large canvas on a subject that he honestly didn’t have that much interest for in the first place.  As a result, we get all of the different Roland Emmerich elements (massive destruction, hollow archetypal characters, and sophomoric humor) all thrown into a Godzilla shaped blender, where it all feels like the creation of it’s director, but not anything like what a Godzilla movie should be.  Columbia/Tri-Star executive Robert N. Fried even stated that, “the team that took over Godzilla was one of the worst cases of of executive incompetence I have observed in my 20 year career.”  It’s been told that studio heads didn’t even see footage of the movie until it was months away from release, realizing too late that they had a mess on their hands, making this a rare case where a movie might have benefitted from studio interference.  But alas, the movie released in theaters in the summer of 1998, and quickly faded.  What was especially unfortunate for Roland Emmerich is that his poor performance with Godzilla came in the same summer season where Michael Bay released his new hit, Armageddon (1998), thereby taking the crown away from Emmerich as the King of Disaster Movies.  That, probably more than anything is what spurred on the career path that Emmerich carved for himself in the years after.  Spending the next 20 years making one disaster movie after another, including The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2009) and most recently Moonfall (2022), Emmerich has been trying to take that crown back.

For a time, Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla effectively killed off the giant monster movie for many years.  In the decade that followed, only Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005) remake was able to be made, and that struggled to break even on it’s own, even with Jackson riding the wave of clout after The Lord of the Rings.  There was a bit of a revival when Guillermo Del Toro made his critically acclaimed action thriller Pacific Rim (2013), with giant robots fighting giant monsters.  But for Godzilla himself, the rights to the character landed with Legendary Pictures, who began to devise a series of films featuring the King of Monsters as well as all the many other different kaiju creatures made famous from the original Toho run of movies.  They enjoyed modest success with the first Godzilla (2014), which took a far more serious tone with the character than what Roland Emmerich brought to his film.  Though the movie’s plot was still a bit undercooked, there was a lot of praise thrown the movie’s way with regards to Godzilla himself.  For old and new fans alike, these new Godzilla movies felt truer to the character.  For one thing, this Godzilla could actually breath fire, or more accurately atomic breath.  The human characters in these movies are still hollow archetypes, but they are far more likable than the ones that Emmerich put in his film.   Ultimately, Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla is a perfect case study in how not to reboot a legendary character.  It’s especially a good lesson to note that when you hire a director for a movie reboot, make sure that he actually has enthusiasm for the idea of bringing new life to an old character.  Otherwise, he’s just going to do whatever he feels like with the character and in the end, your Godzilla doesn’t look or act at all the way he should.  This was clearly an example of a studio wanting to capitalize on a growing trend in filmmaking, which was monsters brought to life through computer animation, and having a director more interested in his own quirks failing to deliver on that fundamental action.  Today, Godzilla ’98 is more of an unintentional comedy of errors given how almost none of it’s elements work together.  But, the fact that the movie doesn’t even take itself seriously to begin with makes the enjoyment factor of it’s failure feel disappointing as well.  Godzilla deserved much better than this, and thankfully with his more recent string of movies, the King of Monsters has managed to have the last laugh in the end, or more appropriately, ROAR.

Let’s journey back to the early 2000’s.  As the world was welcoming in the new millennium and all the highs and lows that would come, cinema was likewise going through it’s own period of transition.  The digital age was blooming to a point where there was limitless potential to what could be made real on the big screen.  And in the the early 2000’s, we saw the newest advances in visual effects help revive what had long been a dormant genre in cinema: Fantasy.  Though fantasy films were popular through the blockbuster 80’s, they more or less dissipated going into the 1990’s, which seemed to favor action films and epic dramas.  That was until 2001, when two film franchises made their debuts and brought the fantasy genre roaring back to life.  They were the Harry Potter franchise and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Both premiere films, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) were smash hits, and all but secured the continuation of their narratives in subsequent follow-ups.  But even more importantly, it reawakened Hollywood to the fact that there was indeed big business in the Fantasy genre that they had too long ignored.  Even more than their box office performance, Potter and Rings proved to be highly marketable franchises as well, boosting book sales of their respective source material, as well as creating a whole market for tie-in merchandise the likes that Hollywood hadn’t seen since Star Wars twenty years prior.  With all this huge business driven by these two valuable properties, other Hollywood studios became very interested in finding their own fantasy property that they could mine for all it’s worth.  Thus began a decade that saw a frenzy over bringing beloved fantasy literature to the big screen, all with the hope that it would bring the same kind of riches that Potter and Rings had found.  But, as many Hollywood studios would find out, it was gold rush that ultimately reaped very few rewards, and in turn, it created this shockingly high number of incomplete movie franchises that ended long before they could even begin.

This is the other thing that defined much of the cinema of the 2000’s; the abandonment of failed franchises.  For a lot of the studios chasing after new IP, they ultimately found that audiences had little interest in obscure tales that often felt too much like the bigger franchises that they were more fond of.  There were several fanchises in those years that were either a Harry Potter clone; like The Seeker (2007) or a Lord of the Rings clone like Eragon (2005).  Mainly the studios were taking in the wrong lessons from those popular franchises, believing that anything that followed the same plot points would lead to the same success.  What really set Potter and Rings apart was the fact that they had richly developed worlds, and were also in many ways uncharacteristic of Hollywood formula.  Reading The Lord of the Rings, you would almost think that it’s an un-filmable story.  Or that Harry Potter’s tonal shifts might be too much for younger audiences to take.  But, it took passionate filmmakers on both franchises to bring out the best of those books and make them work on the big screen.  Most of the failed franchises of the 2000’s lacked that passion.  They were made more out of a mandate than out of love for the source material.  There were some unexpected hits during this time, like Disney’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005), but even there you could feel the heavy influence of a studio mandate behind it.  Unlike Potter and Rings, many of these franchises, most of which were based on multi volume book series, ended up throwing in the towel after one failed film, which became even more awkward if that movie concluded on a cliffhanger.  And surprisingly, one of the worst offenders of this failed attempt at a new fantasy franchise was the same studio that brought The Lord of the Rings to the silver screen: New Line Cinema, with their catastrophically failed adaptation of The Golden Compass (2007)

The Golden Compass is the first in a three volume series of novels called His Dark Materials, written by English author Phillip Pullman.  Pullman published his trilogy over five years between 1995 and 2000, and won wide acclaim from the literary community.  What really set the novels apart in the fantasy genre was it’s very strong and pointed allegory.  Pullman, an unapologetic and outspoken athiest, made religious hypocrisy a central theme of his series, with the clash between faith and science being a crucial element in the narrative.  The His Dark Materials books have often been dubbed by some as “Narnia for Athiests,” which makes it surprising that any movie studio would take on the material, knowing that religious groups would possibly protest the movie upon it’s release.  It’s interesting that Pullman himself views the books as less fantasy and more as “stark realism,” but there is certainly a lot within the books that helps to characterize them as either fantasy or science fiction.  Talking animals that are the living manifestation of a person’s soul, witches, a kingdom of polar bears, and interdimensional travel.  There was certainly a lot of potential to mine from Pullman’s books.  Unfortunately, by the time Hollywood took notice of His Dark Materials as a potential franchise, it was very much beyond the point where studios cared less about doing right by the material and more about how much money they could make from it.  Not only that, but the His Dark Materials books fell into the hands of New Line Cinema, who at this point were embroiled in a series of controversies related to how they were handling the success of The Lord of the Rings.  Pete Jackson, the Oscar-winning director of Rings, quite rightly took notice of how inadequately New Line was dispersing the profits of The Lord of the Rings, especially with the final film, The Return of the King (2003).  Jackson soon took New Line Cinema to court to get the fair compensation for his company in New Zealand, which derailed plans from both parties to continue working on a possible adaptation of The Hobbit.  And that led to the interest in the Dark Materials series, as New Line decided to end partnership with Peter Jackson and Co. altogether, believing that they could make a hit franchise on their own without them.

What happened after with The Golden Compass is a text book example of studio hubris in action.  New Line Cinema not only intended to fill that Middle Earth sized hole with this new franchise; they intended to make it even bolder and grander.  The budget was estimated to be in the realm of $200 million, which was double the expense of just one of the Lord of the Rings movies, and almost 2/3 of the entire trilogy.  It would also feature an all star cast that included actors as diverse as Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Sam Elliott, Eva Green, and even Lord of the Rings alum like Ian McKellan and Christopher Lee.  And of course, there were millions poured into the movie’s extensive visual effects.  But, there was one problem.  Who do you get to steer the ship of this franchise.  New Line Cinema would end up bringing in Chris Weitz to write and direct the film; the co-creator of the American Pie (1999) series of movies.  Suffice to say, all the problems that followed could be stemmed back to this decision.  Weitz, while being a decent writer and a serviceable director, clearly was just a filmmaker for hire on this movie.  That made a big difference because you can tell he was just on board to do a job. This was not a grand artistic statement.  When Peter Jackson made The Lord of the Rings, it was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, which you could tell from the years of planning that Jackson put into that project.  There is passion in every frame of The Lord of the Rings that is visibly absent in The Golden Compass.  Chris Weitz didn’t have years of connection with the material like Jackson had with Rings.  It’s clear that New Line Cinema just gave him the book to adapt with an enormous budget and he tried to deliver the best he could, but ultimately ended up being overwhelmed by the task.

First of all, what ultimately sinks the movie as a whole is that it rushes through it’s narrative in order to meet a theater friendly two hour runtime.  When adapting a dense, multi-layered world like the one in the Dark Materials books, it’s clearly not enough time establish what we need to know.  It becomes clear what you’re in for when the movie dumps a whole lot of exposition on you in just the first ten minutes.  You suddenly have to accept the knowledge that this world is an alternate reality Earth, where people have souls manifested into animal companions named daemons, many of whom are capable of speaking human language.  And the movie never lets the world-building rest and allow itself to immerse the audience.  It’s just a collection of beautiful but ultimately empty set pieces.  Besides the extra length to allow for better world-building, The Golden Compass also lacks the gateway for audiences to connect with the world that’s being portrayed on screen.  The best fantasy films all have that special element that helps the audience grow acquainted with the world it’s showing, and that’s usually giving them a grounded entryway that the rest of the movie can build upon.  Think of the early scenes in the Shire from The Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter’s pre-Hogwarts life living under the stairs in his Aunt and Uncle’s home, or Narnia’s WWII prologue.  Each of these moments helps us to relate to the world of those movies, before they begin to open up and show all the crazy wonders beyond those simple beginnings.  The Golden Compass doesn’t have that.  It just immediately drops us into an already alien world and hopes that we can catch on fast.  And with the rush to get from one plot point to another, it also excises some crucial things that would’ve help set the movie apart; in particular, it’s anti-theocratic allegory.  The removal of the novel’s harsher stance against organized religion is probably the clearest sign of this movie being driven by a studio and not a filmmaker, as New Line Cinema obviously did not want to push any buttons in fear it might alienate more religious movie goers.  But, in doing so, it also took the bite out of the source material, and left the movie without an identity other than just being another fantasy film.

The movie’s condensed run time also works as a disadvantage towards character development.  There are just far too many characters to get familiar with in such a short amount of time, that none of them end up endearing themselves to the audience.  The only character that comes close is the main heroine Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), and she barely resonates beyond any other child protagonist from a dozen other fantasy narratives.  We only get to see how her adventurous side plays into her desire to go on the journey, but she grows very little throughout the narrative and ultimately, you care little about what she has to do because she’s not a terribly interesting character as a result.  And this is the best the movie can muster.  What the movie really wastes are it’s big name stars.  Nicole Kidman is a bland antagonist, with her persona reduced down to icy cold stares.  Daniel Craig, who was heavily promoted in his first post-debut as James Bond role, is only in the movie for maybe a total of 10 minutes, if that.  Only Sam Elliott stands out in the movie, and that might be because he’s the one American in this mostly British ensemble.  What I also find strange about the movie’s characters is that there are large chunks of the film where a whole group of them will just disapper for an extended period of time.  Perhaps it’s close to how the novel’s plot progresses, but to have the film just forget a bunch of characters as it chases a whole different plot thread just feels awkward.  This is evident at the end of the second act in the film when we suddenly shift to this whole different sub plot involving the polar bears.  Suddenly, we ditch the main story and follow this one of a Polar Bear prince named Iorek Byrnison (voiced by Ian McKellan) who seeks to reclaim his birthright from a usurper king (voiced by Ian McShane).  Now, truth be told, it does lead to the best and most memorable moment of the whole movie, when Iorek smacks the jaw off his rivals face in a shockingly violent and gory moment for a PG-13 film, but even still, it’s connection to the rest of the story is meaningless in the long run.  It’s that lack of cohesion in the narrative and the little investment in the characters’ motivations and desires that ultimately sinks any investment that the audience has with the movie.

But, probably the most notorious mistake that the movie makes is it’s cliffhanger ending.  Here is where the hubris of New Line Cinema’s petty one-up-manship against Peter Jackson becomes especially embarrassing.  New Line seemed so sure that they had a winner on their hands, that they believed the best way to end the movie was to leave it open-ended and unresolved, believing that audiences would be excited for the next chapter.  Suffice to say, they weren’t.  More accurately, they were confused and upset by this movie not closing on a satisfying note.  And cliffhanger is a stretch of the term in this case.  The Golden Compass book actually ends differently, with a moment that clearly fits the definition of a cliffhanger much better.  In the book, Lyra sees one of her companions betrayed and killed while a portal to another dimension is opened up, which she passes through in the book’s final moment.  The movie just has our characters traveling to their next destination talking to each other about what to expect next.  It’s horribly anti-climatic, especially when you know how the story really ends in the book.  I don’t know why New Line Cinema went for the more ambiguous ending instead of the more exciting one.  Were they looking at the more open-ended conclusions of the Rings films and thinking that they should repeat that formula?  Whatever the case, it’s a choice that ended up blowing back in New Line’s face, because there never was a follow-up to The Golden Compass.  The movie made only a third back of it’s original budget at the box office.  The significant financial blow began a continued downward spiral for the studio that saw many more financial failures that was only exacerbated by the continued legal dispute with Peter Jackson.  After a few more box office flops, the once mighty mini-major ended up seeing it’s independence wane as parent company Warner Brothers assumed more control, leading to the exit of the executives who initially greenlighted The Golden Compass.  And wouldn’t you know it, Warner Brothers settled the dispute with Peter Jackson and put into action the long delayed Hobbit adaptation that New Line was certain they could live without.  In the end, Golden Compass’ awkward, unresolved ending is probably the clearest example of a studio believing too much into it’s own hype and setting itself up for embarrassment.  It’s just too bad for those involved in the production, for the filmmakers and cast, that their work is just left hanging there awkwardly for eternity because of a studio’s poor attempt to build a franchise and hitting the brakes after one film.

I distinctly remember being excited for this film when it was originally released.  I wanted another Lord of the Rings franchise out there, just out of my love for extensive and imaginative world-building, and The Golden Compass had all the makings of a fantasy film perfectly suited to fill that vacancy.  Unfortunately, because it lacked the heart of other great fantasy films, and was clearly just an attempt by a major studio to chase after a fad and show another filmmaker who’s the boss, it ultimately fell flat.  I think it’s just the pettiness behind it’s making, as a way of New Line to turn up it’s nose at Peter Jackson, that makes it such an unpleasant relic of that period in fantasy filmmaking.  And even more egregious, it wasted good source material as a result.  Thankfully, many years later, Warner Brothers saw the potential in Phillip Pullman’s novels and decided to take another chance on this story again.  Only this time, instead of limiting the narrative to a short theater friendly run time, they gave it a 10 episode series order.  The His Dark Materials series, made in collaboration with BBC Studios, has aired on HBO here in the states, and by all accounts does better justice to the novels, particularly when it comes to characterizations and plot.  It also succeeded in going past the original film’s end point and has been able to adapt the other two books in the trilogy as well, with a final third season premiering later this year.  That’s a whole lot better than having the story forever sit unfinished like the movie did.  In the end, of all the failed attempts to start-up new fantasy franchises in the 2000’s, The Golden Compass probably stands out the most as the biggest blunder of them all.  It’s substantial cost ended up burdening a studio that saw a meteoric rise and in the end cost them their autonomy as their parent company assumed more control.  And the fact that New Line Cinema banked so much of their certainty in the success of the film that they didn’t even bother to give the movie a proper ending just caused the film to become a punchline rather than a fantasy epic that helped to define a genre.  It’s movies like this that ultimately tanked the resurgence of fantasy films, which ended up slipping back into dormancy as comic book movies would dominate the following decade.  If The Golden Compass offers up anything, it’s a cautionary tale of the folly of petty one-up-manship in Hollywood, and trying to chase after success without heart and devotion put into the work.  New Line Cinema tried to count all the chickens before they hatched and The Golden Compass became the rotten egg that defined it’s reputation for many years after.

I remember hearing a quote somewhere about the extent that a healthy amount of religion and patriotism should be injected into our own personal lives, and the one who said the quote commented that both are great things to have in one’s life as long as they are done in good faith and with a sense of humor.  Essentially, it is not a negative thing in life to be religious and patriotic, just as long as you remain humble and respectful about it.  Unfortunately, in our culture, we do not live such subtle lives, and in many cases, people either show too much or too little of either, which are both corrosive to society at large.  Too much patriotism, for example, can lead to jingoistic and exclusionary nationalism, which has led to some dark periods in world history.  A severe lack of pride in one’s home and society can also achieve the opposite effect and lead an individual down a nihilistic route towards anarchy.  Both are dangerous, and it’s a fine line that our culture constantly has to balance in order to function for it’s citizens.  As is often the case, cinema has been an effective tool for pushing forward national agendas, with the intent of promoting exactly what the country expects of it’s citizenry.  Propaganda films have been a part of cinematic history ever since the invention of the medium itself, and has been used throughout the 20th and 21st century to drive national efforts that otherwise would have been hard to manage without the broad reach that movies can provide.  In many cases, propaganda has propelled some terrible political movements in the past, but not all of it’s applications have been negative.  During World War II for example, the combination of wartime propaganda and the talents of Hollywood actually helped the nation come together behind the war effort that eventually saw victory for the Allied forces; something that might have seen a different outcome if our nation had been more divided on the war.  There are good uses of propaganda, but there are also bad uses as well, particularly as the quote says above, when someone uses it in bad faith.

When we look back on the experience of World War II, as we lose more and more people who experienced it first hand every progressive year, what we understand becomes more and more reliant on the artifacts that are left behind.  The personal accounts, as harrowing as they may, from the soldiers who lived it begin to not be as captivating as the propaganda that has endued beyond the war.  A soldier’s story presents the ugly side of war; the sleepless nights, the panic in the thick of battle, the wounds both external and internal, and the many, many defeats that made victory seem unreachable at times.  Propaganda presents the glory of victory, and for many people, including the soldiers who eventually came home, that’s the thing that they wanted to promote in a post-War world.  Unfortunately, it also had the effect of making the culture at large falsely believe that it was invincible, and that led to an unhealthy amount of patriotic fervor in the decades that followed.  It’s the kind of thinking that led to a proliferation in the armed forces despite being in peacetime, which then President Eisenhower decried as a “military industrial complex.”  This also led to a period called the Red Scare where people tried to use patriotic fervor to silence those whose ideologies didn’t line up their own agenda, and it prematurely ended the careers of many people, especially in Hollywood with the infamous Blacklist.  Over time, as attitudes shifted back the other way due to the quagmire of the Vietnam War, the wartime film began to fall out of favor because they were viewed as propaganda tools of a dangerous militaristic view of the past.  However, as the years past, and more soldiers who served in World War II were reaching their twilight years, many people wanted to find some way to respectfully honor the service they gave while not appearing to promote the necessity for armed conflict.  In 1998, Steven Spielberg released Saving Private Ryan, a movie that managed to bridge that gap, portraying an accurate picture of the atrocities of war while at the same time honoring the sacrifice of those who fought in it.  And with Private Ryan, Hollywood found that special movie that balanced patriotism and realism, revitalizing the war film with a modern sensibility.  But, as we know about Hollywood, once one movie succeeds at something, it’s only inevitable that someone else is going to try to replicate it.  And unfortunately, this is where the good faith patriotism of something like Saving Private Ryan gives way to the bad faith exploitation of a Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor’s production came about in a confluence of different factors at the turn of the millennium.  Like I previously mentioned, Saving Private Ryan was a major influence on getting the movie greenlit, but it had less so to do with the message behind the movie and more so to do with it’s substantial $217 million gross at the box office, as well as the 5 Oscars it picked up (including Best Director for Spielberg).  The movie was greenlit at Touchstone Pictures, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, with uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer behind it.  Bruckheimer had brought his action movie centric sensibilities to Touchstone and produced two back to back hits for them with a rising star director named Michael Bay, which were The Rock (1996) and Armageddon (1998).  What Bruckheimer, and especially the executives at Disney, liked about Bay the most was that he could deliver big, expensive movies on time and on budget, which was valuable to bottom line conscious investors who wanted to get the most for their money.  Both The Rock and Armageddon, despite mixed to negative reviews, managed to make a healthy profit for the studio, and that gave the Bruckheimer/Bay team more sway over future projects.  When the success of Saving Private Ryan proved that their was an audience for gritty, R-rated war movies out there, it convinced Disney CEO Michael Eisner to jump on the bandwagon and approve development for a big wartime epic of their own.  Pearl Harbor was coming on the heels of a decade that saw a brief revival in the historical epic genre.  With movies like Private Ryan, as well as The English Patient (1996), Braveheart (1995) and the biggest of them all, Titanic (1997), Hollywood was suddenly finding that people were happily consuming big, large scale films that ran 3 hours long or more.  Up to this point, Disney was one of the few studios that had yet to have their own historical epic, and they were now poised to jump into the fray in a big way.  Unfortunately for them, the gamble would not pan out like they had hoped and instead, Pearl Harbor was one of the movies that effectively killed off the historical epic as a viable genre in Hollywood.

Though I have talked mostly about the influence that Saving Private Ryan had on Pearl Harbor’s development, I should also point out that it has a fair amount of influence it owes to the movie Titanic as well.  And in particular, the piggybacking of Titanic is where the movie really becomes an embarrassing misfire.  At the center of the film is a love triangle, between two hot shot pilots (played by Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett) and the army nurse that they both have affection for (played by Kate Beckinsale).  To show just how uneven the movie is as a whole, the love story takes up the first 70 minutes of the 3 hour runtime before the attack on Pearl Harbor actually happens.  It’s roughly the same amount of time devoted to the build up to iceberg strike in Titanic, but there’s a huge difference between how the two movies use that time.  In Titanic, director James Cameron does devote the first half of the movie to bringing his two ill fated lovers together and endearing them to us as an audience.  But, their whirlwind romance also takes the audience on a tour of all parts of the ship itself, which itself is on an ill-fated collision course.  So, while the love story is central, it also functions to build the atmosphere, with scenes like the juxtaposition between the banquet on the upper decks and the party in the lower decks putting us on that ship with the characters themselves.  No such care is given with Pearl Harbor.  It is an achingly shallow love story that feels unconnected with anything of real importance with the actual event.  The characters of Rafe (Affleck) and Danny (Hartnett) do not go on a self-discovery journey like Kate Winslet’s Rose does in Titanic.  They are already pre-set archetypes just fighting over a girl, who herself is barely distinguishable as a character.  What makes this love story so insulting is that it takes precedence over the actual build up to the attack itself.  The movie keeps cutting to intelligence officers learning about advancements of the Japanese navy, with Dan Ackroyd (for some reason) cast in the role.  We also see brief glimpses of the Japanese themselves preparing for battle, in a half-hearted attempt to appear even-handed on their portrayal, which doesn’t work because again, they are merely archetypes.  But all this just seems like Michael Bay spinning plates for an hour so he can get to what he really wants to do; blowing shit up.

Truth be told, when the movie does get to the actual attack itself, it does finally start to come alive.  Michael Bay, for all his faults, is an expert craftsman, and he manages to depict the attack on Pearl Harbor with an impressive sense of scale.  But even here, the movie doesn’t work as well as it thinks it does.  While there are some really impressive moments captured on screen, including actual pyrotechnic explosions ignited on real battleships, it at times feels more exploitative of what happened than actually presenting a genuine portrayal of the day’s events.  In particular, the movie features one too many indulgent Bay moments, where the director just ends up showing off.  One of the most famous of these is the famous falling bomb shot that was featured heavily in the movie’s trailer.  Using heavy amounts of CGI, this shot in particular starts off from the sky showing one of the Japanese war planes releasing it’s payload.  Instead of cutting away, the camera then follows behind the bomb as it drops down to it’s target below, either the USS Arizona or the USS Oklahoma, one of the many that sank that day.  It’s a big epic shot that director’s like Michael Bay believes as a shining example of their talents as a filmmaker.  But the problem is, that shot shows an actual moment that happened in real life, and it just comes across as exploiting real tragedy for the sake of artistic indulgence.  Going back to Titanic, James Cameron makes you feel for the hundreds of unknown faces aboard the ship as it sinks, because we see the terror in their eyes, helping us to see the reality of their situation.  No such care is given to showing all the soldiers, pilots, and sailors coming under fire from the hailstorm of bullet fire in Pearl Harbor.  They are just pawns in greater scheme of things within the movie.

Though I don’t think it was the intention of Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer, but their lack of attention to the actual bravery of those who were there at Pearl Harbor in many ways is as disrespectful to the memory of the people who died that day than anything else.  In the movie, we get big swooping shots of the mayhem, but the people caught underneath the action are just faceless extras, that the movie almost seems to delight in slaughtering throughout.  Again, this is not what Bay intended and I’m sure he wanted to go in respectful of those who died.  But the fact is, his strengths as a director is ill-suited for this kind of movie.  He is best suited for escapist entertainment, where stakes are nowhere near as high.  But, when he applies his indulgences to a real tragedy, it belittles the true history in a way that just feels wrong.  It’s compounded by the fact that the movie really has no direction in it’s story.  The aforementioned love story really just hits pause so the attack scene can play out, and then the movie awkwardly tries to restart it again thereafter.  It also doesn’t help that the characters are so thinly drawn that you end up not caring who lives and who dies by the end.  And this includes a cast with a lot of actors who would go on to better things, like Michael Shannon in an early role and the future Mrs. Affleck, Jennifer Garner, in a blink and you’ll miss it supporting role.  Perhaps the most egregious example of wasted casting is in the inclusion of a real life hero named Dorie Miller, a low ranking African-American naval cook who broke ranks and commandeered artillery aboard his under siege battleship and managed to successfully shoot down a couple Japanese planes, saving countless of his fellow officers.  He was awarded the Navy Cross for his act of bravery, the first African-American to receive the honor.   Private Miller’s story is worthy of a movie on it’s own, and Pearl Harbor did cast the part well with Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding Jr.  Unfortunately, his presence in the movie is miniscule, and it almost feels like Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer put it in there merely as window-dressing.  Pvt. Miller and many other soldiers like him deserved better than to have their true life heroism and sacrifice take a back seat to fictional love triangle that we care nothing about.

It goes back to the question of why exactly did this movie need to be made.  It doesn’t honor the people involved in the actual “day of infamy.”  It’s love story is shallow and unimaginative.  And it offers no real message about the nature of war itself and America’s role in fighting in it.  It’s not even good as a piece of propaganda.  Michael Bay, for one thing, sure is trying hard to connect his movie with some patriotic fervor.  I can’t tell you how many shots there are in this movie where the Stars and Stripes are clearly visible, but it’s a lot.  Granted, it takes place at a time when such a thing would have been normal, as patriotism was strongly connected with the war effort, with the Uncle Sam “I Want You” posters plastered seemingly on every wall.  But, Bay also throws in a lot of glory shots of the flags and the soldiers and the weapons of war throughout the movie, almost to the point of parody.  As the film goes along, these glory shots feel hollow, with a significant tendency towards pandering.  The reason why it doesn’t work as well as Michael Bay seems to think it does is because it’s just spotlighting the artifice of what the movie actually represents.  Even when the movie first came out 20 years ago, audiences immediately sniffed out what it was trying to be.  It was a major studio trying to capitalize on a trend and not understanding that it’s a formula you can’t replicate.  Titanic worked because it didn’t try to show off it’s artifice  to the audience and instead focused on bringing everything to life in stunning detail.  Saving Private Ryan worked because it put us in the life of a soldier without trying to sanitize a thing, and showed us the real graphic cost of war.  Touchstone, and by extension Disney, only saw the potential for profit with Pearl Harbor, and didn’t even consider how it would reflect on the legacy of the actual event.  Strangely enough, Pearl Harbor came at a time when such a brazen cash grab wouldn’t be viewed as something problematic.  It came out on Memorial Day weekend in 2001 to mild box office success and mostly poor reviews.  A couple of months later, the 9/11 attacks occurred, with carnage and horrific imagery eerily reminiscent of the Pearl Harbor attack.  Suddenly, America was reminded of what such an event feels like, and it ended up refocusing Hollywood on what the right approach is to depicting a horrific national tragedy on the big screen.  In particular, Pearl Harbor stood out in this new atmosphere as an example of how not to portray a tragedy on screen.

Overall, the biggest failure of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor is that it teaches no lessons about the events of that day, and instead just stands as another mindless action spectacle.  Like the case of Pvt. Dorie Miller, there are so many fascinating stories that could have been told about the events of Pearl Harbor, and instead, the movie just panders an easy to swallow story and message to it’s audience.  One thing that I am happy about in the long run is that Pearl Harbor is such a universally reviled movie that nobody is going out of their way to turn it into a propaganda tool for their own agenda.  I’m especially glad that the movie came out before the events of 9/11, because if it came out after, you might have had a lot of bad faith propagandists latch onto it and proclaim it falsely as a bright example of American patriotism, thereby using it as a tool in the ever increasingly vapid “culture wars.”  Imagine right wing pundits suddenly saying if we don’t like the movie (which most people don’t, left and right) than you hate America, like so many of them have done over the years to a variety of cultural hot buttons.  I often hear the claim that movies like Pearl Harbor recall back to a time when America had pride in itself, like the movies made during the war.  I’m not saying propaganda movies of the war era are not valid works of art (Casablanca for example).  It’s just that many reflected the times they were in and culture is not set in stone.  Pearl Harbor‘s jingoistic patriotism works as a detriment and not a positive, and it’s a clear example of how improperly patriotism can be used in the culture at large.  I think that it is interesting that in the same year that Pearl Harbor made it to the big screen that Jerry Bruckheimer made another war film starring Josh Hartnett that was more true to the wartime experience; that movie being Black Hawk Down (2001).  In that film, the movie focuses solely on the experience of soldiers caught in the middle of a losing battle (a little remembered skirmish in Somalia in 1993), and more accurately depicted the terror or war while at the same time honoring the fighters who were in it.  It probably helped that legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott was behind the camera on that one.  But like Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down doesn’t revel in it’s cinematic indulgences, and instead presents what happened unvarnished.  Pearl Harbor failed because it was trying to please everyone with an easy to digest, PG-13 presentation, and in the end just ended up dishonoring the memory of those who lived through it.  Cinema is a powerful propaganda tool, but it’s only used at it’s best when it is built upon honesty and done in good faith.  Pearl Harbor was just a dud of a bomb that neither improved the world nor set it on fire.

My whole life I have been pretty devoted to the long, diverse legacy of The Walt Disney Company.  Since childhood, Disney was the gateway to all cinema, helping me to form a strong sense of the artform and business from an early age.  And it was a good time to grow up as a Disney fan.  My formative years fell within the height of the Disney Renaissance, from The Little Mermaid (1989) to The Lion King (1994).  I would obsessively pour over all the new information I could get about what Disney was working on next, and discovering more and more of the deeper titles within the decades long Disney library.  Even before I had entered high school, I could boast that I had seen nearly every Disney animated film that had been made up to that point; The Black Cauldron (1985) being the notable holdout because of it’s lack of availability at the time.  To this day, even though my interest in cinema has expanded far beyond walls of a single studio, I still hold a special place in my heart for most things Disney, so you can still say that I am a fan.  At the same time, I would also say that I am not a member of any Disney cult either.  Like any other big corporation, the House of Mouse does it’s own share of questionable activities in order to keep their profits going strong, and if it does cross the line, I will call them out on it.  Their labor disputes with workers in their vast company over the years have reflected badly on them, even in Walt Disney’s time.  More recently, their cozy arrangements with the Chinese Government has raised some eyebrows, especially with claims of forced labor behind things like product supply lines and the production of the recent Mulan remake.  Those are serious questions for a different time, but I also point out that there are creative failures from the company as well that have left me questioning the judgment of those working at Disney.  And that’s something that I find right at the heart of what may be my least favorite Disney film of all time; 2005’s Chicken Little.

Chicken Little came out in theaters at a very turbulent time for the Walt Disney company.  The later part of the Disney Renaissance post-The Lion King did not see the same kind of success that the earlier films had.  Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), and Hercules (1997) all underperformed and received mixed reception, while Mulan (1998) and Tarzan (1999) saw only modest success.  At the same time, Pixar began to rise in prominence, with the Toy Story movies leading the way to even bigger hits like Monsters Inc. (2001) and Finding Nemo (2003).  This diminishing of returns for hand drawn animation coinciding with the rise of computer animation began to seriously challenge the notion within the industry about what kind of future the traditional form had left.  Then came two pivotal moments.  One was the release of the movie Shrek (2001) from newly formed rival studio Dreamworks, which saw record box office and critical praise, earning the first ever Oscar for Best Animated Feature.  A year later, Disney’s Treasure Planet (2002) became the biggest money loser in the company’s history.  The writing was on the wall; hand drawn was out and computer animation was in.  Now, Disney already had their partnership with Pixar to guide them into this next era, but it was a limited contract, and Pixar was itching to go solo.  Disney CEO at the time, Michael Eisner, was not happy with what Pixar was demanding as a part of the renewal offer, so he set out to shift Disney’s fledgling animation department to be a Pixar competitor, focused entirely on CGI animation.  However, by the time the first of these new CGI Disney films were about to enter production, Eisner’s tenure was ended in a shareholder revolt, and soon after Bob Iger was left in charge of the company.  Iger not only soothed over tensions with Pixar, he negotiated a full purchase of the studio altogether, making them officially a part of the Disney company.  Though the duel with Pixar was ended before it even started, Eisner’s final push to bring computer animation to the legendary animation department still continued on.

Though a number of projects received a green-light at the same time, it was Chicken Little that was fast-tracked to be the first of this new breed of Disney movie.  Put in charge of the project were Director Mark Dindal and Producer Randy Fullmer, fresh off their surprise success with the sleeper hit The Emperor’s New Groove (2000).  Many of the animation team were also Disney vets from the Renaissance period that had to quickly re-train themselves in order to work in this new field of computer animation.  Also notable was the fact that the movie was going to deviate from the traditional Disney formula; it would not be a musical, aside from licensed songs and new pop tunes scattered throughout the score, it would be taking the classic nursery rhyme story and giving it a “modern” twist, and it would be banking on irreverent humor as a base for it’s entertainment.  The movie came out the year after the last of Disney’s hand drawn animated films, Home on the Range (2004) and ironically only a few short months after Eisner’s ouster and Iger’s purchase of Pixar, casting something of a shadow over the movie upon it’s release.  While there was anticipation over what Disney might deliver with their first CGI feature, there was also worry.  Chicken Little did perform modestly well at the box office, banking $150 million domestic for Disney, but critically it was a different story.  The movie was seen as too generic and lacking an identity.  And that really is the thing that characterizes the failure of Chicken Little the most as an entry in the Disney canon; the fact that it doesn’t feel like a true Disney film.  More than anything, it feels like Disney was trying to answer the competition of Dreamworks and Pixar with more of the same formula, and it backfired.  For the first time in it’s storied history, it looked like Disney were the ones playing catch-up.

The story of Disney’s Chicken Little, for lack of a better word, is weak. Pretty much every underdog cliché you can think of is thrown at you with regards to Little’s character development.  He’s ostracized for having been responsible for mayhem due to his assertion that the sky was falling and has to build his reputation back up, which is only compounded by the fact that he is a small statured little chicken.  They also throw in a cliched parental issues with his father, Buck Cluck (voiced by the late Garry Marshall), which of course is something that has been done to death in countless other Disney films.  Even with these tired tropes at it’s heart, the movie can’t even focus on this the whole way through, as later on, the movie turns into an alien invasion plot which comes straight out of nowhere, and makes the second half feel like a whole other film.  There is no heart or drive to the movie.  It just hits the points when it needs to and then moves onto the next point.  Pretty good case in point is when the town that the characters live in begins to be completely invaded by aliens, Chicken Little (voiced by Zach Braff) and his father are holed up in a theater for safety, and as the tension of the moment begins to rise, Little just stops the scene to finally speak his mind to his emotionally distant father.  Had the movie been able to build up a more contentious relationship with Little and his dad, this moment might have landed better, but here, it just stops the movie cold so that script can scratch one more thing off it’s list.  That’s emblematic of the movie as a whole, it just forces it’s moments through without letting it flow naturally.  It’s yet another sign of the filmmakers looking at other movies, like those from Dreamworks and Pixar, and just cutting and pasting what they saw.  For a storied studio like Disney to resort to this, it shows a shocking bit of desperation.

I should also point out that none of the characters are likeable at all.  Maybe with the possible exception of Buck Cluck, based on the charm of Garry Marshall’s vocal performance alone, all the characters are either too flashy and “hip” to be believable, too obnoxious, or too generic to leave an impression.  Chicken Little is easily the most underwhelming protagonist of any Disney movie, and that’s mainly because he changes little (no pun intended) throughout the film.  It was clear that Disney wanted actor Zach Braff’s vocal performance to drive the personality of the character, but he’s left with nothing but his own persona to guide him through that process.  Like many of Zach Braff’s other characters throughout the years, Chicken Little is nerdy, neurotic, and put down by society, and by the end of the movie he is still nerdy, neurotic but only less put down by society.  It’s not Chicken Little who changes, but all those around him that dealt him a bad hand.  It’s just not the hero’s journey that you expect from a Disney protagonist, who in some way or fashion have to struggle with some of their own shortcomings in order to become the hero.  It doesn’t help that the sidekick characters that follow him along are also devoid of interesting personalities.  There’s the ugly duckling, Abby Mallard, who like Braff’s Chicken Little is more defined by who voices her (Joan Cusack) than anything else as a character.  There’s voiceless Fish Out of Water, who is just there to deliver visual gags.  And then there’s Runt of the Litter (voiced by Steve Zahn) who may be the most insufferable comedic character ever put into any animated movie.  He’s just there to be the butt of fat jokes and to break into pop music tunes, because Disney’s trying way too hard to be culture savvy.  Coming off of the glory days of the Disney Renaissance, which gave us classic original characters like Sebastian the Crab, Mrs. Potts, the Genie, Pumbaa, and many more, this bland cast of characters really feel out of place, because there clearly was no care in making them stand out in the way that the other had.

I should also note that the movie is visually uninspired as well.  Now, to be fair, none of the computer animated movies of that era particularly look great over fifteen years later.  Computer animation was fairly new and still experimenting with a lot of techniques with each successive film.  But, most people don’t pay attention to the dated look of early CGI when the story and the characters are engaging enough to carry the rest of the movie.  That is why Toy Story has endured a quarter of a century after it’s original release.  With a story and characters that are less than engaging, people are bound to take notice of the shortcomings of early computer animation even more, and it is painfully obvious how lackluster Chicken Little looks.  The movie just has this obvious low texture look to it, like all the characters and the environments are made from plastic.  The village that the movie takes place, called Oakey Oaks (*eyeroll*) also has this strange visual style to it, where it’s supposed to look cartoony, but the blockiness of early CGI doesn’t completely smooth out the edges, so it becomes this weird mish-mash of painfully simplistic environmental design.  The only interesting visual idea in the whole movie is the way that the sky is made up of hexagonal plates that sit on the bottom of the space ships that are stealthily hovering over the town, and when the ships pull apart, it maintains that pattern.  The false sky element leads to some of the only visual gags that work as well, but sadly it doesn’t get nearly enough time on screen.  I almost think that a large part of what drove the visual look of this movie was probably coming from Disney’s consumer product line, who were possibly pushing the filmmakers to create character and structural designs that would appeal better as potential toys to sell in conjunction with the movie’s release.  It wouldn’t have been the first movie at Disney to have given consideration to the marketability, but with so little else that stands out in the film, it just further illustrates how this movie was made as more of a product and less as a work of art.

It’s interesting that Disney would attempt to devote a feature film to the story of Chicken Little at all and do so without giving any importance to the ultimate message behind the story.  The story of Chicken Little, which goes back to early European Folklore, is a cautionary tale about hysteria, and the dangers of giving into one’s fears.  Disney in fact had tackled the story before in the 1940’s in a short cartoon.  The short is noteworthy by the fact that it ends on a decidedly dark ending, with Chicken Little being tricked by the evil Foxy Loxy into convincing the other chickens on the farm to believe his belief that the sky is falling.  They all follow Chicken Little into a cave where they think they will all be safe, but to their tragic mistake, Foxy Loxy is there waiting.  The last we see is rows of chicken bones laid out like tombstones on the cave floor.  Pretty dark right.  It was originally supposed to be even darker, because Disney started out making the short as a wartime propaganda piece, explicitly connecting the hysteria spread by Chicken Little as the seeds of dangerous ideologies like Fascism and Communism.  Though cut out of the original short, Foxy Loxy was shown getting his ideas from reading passages out of Mein Kamph, Hitler’s notorious manifesto that became the backbone of Nazism.  Disney later changed it to a “psychology” text book, though some of the passages are still from the same source.  Though 2005’s Chicken Little didn’t need to be that explicit in it’s message, it nevertheless missed a prime opportunity to have a meaningful lesson at it’s core that stems from the original story.  Instead, the movie plays it safe.  It reminds me of how starkly it contrasts with another film about animals who live in a human like society that is way, way better in it’s execution; Zootopia (2016).  Not only was Zootopia far better looking and had more interesting characters, but it was also not afraid to lean more into a sharp social critique that you otherwise wouldn’t have expected.  The fundamental success of Zootopia just illustrates even more how squandered the entire Chicken Little experiment was, and what it could have been had it been brave enough to have an identity.

There are worse animated movies out there, but for a studio like Disney that has raised the bar so high for the artform, Chicken Little is definitely the bottom of the rung of the ladder.  It looks cheap, it’s derivative of too many other features, and it lacks an identity.  And the most sad thing of all, it just reeks of desperation.  It’s scary to think that this is what Michael Eisner was ready to herald as the touchstone for a new era in Disney animation.  Thankfully, once he was on the way out and the Pixar deal was reached, the weight of what Chicken Little was supposed to carry was somewhat lightened.  Thankfully, Disney animation only improved from there, and has remarkably not fallen under the shadow of Pixar but has instead thrived alongside of it.  A new regime now was in charge of the Burbank based animation studio, with former Pixar chief John Lasseter taking the reins.  The follow-up to Chicken Little was 2007’s Meet the Robinsons.  While not an all time classic, Robinsons was nevertheless an improvement as it had more likable characters and an emotional core at it’s heart.  Disney even briefly tried to reboot their hand drawn animation division with The Princess and the Frog (2009) though limited success led to a renewed focus on CGI, and that eventually led to mega successes like Tangled (2010), Wreck-It Ralph (2012), Frozen (2013), Zootopia and Moana (2016).  That’s the best thing I can say about Chicken Little is that it’s embarrassment didn’t reflect badly on Disney in the long run.  It’s a good thing too, because had it become a bigger success, I think it would’ve creatively bankrupted the studio for a long time.  Disney has long been an industry leader, being the gold standard by which all other studios strive to reach harder towards in order to match or even surpass them.  With the Dreamworks wannabe that was Chicken Little, it would have been the point where Disney ceded the crown to another studio, and let them be the drivers of the artform.  Thankfully, Disney chose a different direction, and reclaimed their dominance in the following decade, making some of the greatest animated films ever in the process.  Chicken Little only remains as a reminder of the dark path that they could’ve taken, and a sits alone as sad relic of the point where Disney was just ready to give up and choose commerce over art.

Living through a global crisis is not unfamiliar, but still thankfully rare.  Whether it’s world wars, or a geologically caused catastrophe, or an economic collapse, or as is the case right now a pandemic, the planet at one point or another tests the strength of it’s people and despite a lot of hardship in the process, we emerge out of it.  Though it’s a distressing time when living through it, Hollywood will often look at crises in hindsight and find it to be great fodder for movies.  The disaster movie in particular has been a favorite among epic movie makers, because of the larger than life aspects of the ordeals that the characters go through.  Often these movies are showcases for visual effects, with massive budgets and a cast of hundreds.  For the most part, there is an understanding between the audience and the filmmaker that it’s all about the entertainment value of the experience, and that is why so many disaster movies are not afraid to be a little cheesy sometimes.  The movies of Irwin Allen in the 1970’s are a great example, like The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974) which were star-studded extravaganzas that took place within structural disasters.  For the longest time, apart from the all-star casts, the biggest draw of these movies would often be the grand scale destruction, especially if it involved an iconic structure.  And for the most part, these movies would retain it’s sense that it’s all just a movie, and that none of it’s supposed to be taken seriously.  Unfortunately, the world works very differently, and silly old disaster movies suddenly don’t feel so harmless once an actual real life disaster happens.  That’s why you sometimes see periods of retreat for these kinds of films, so that it won’t appear that Hollywood is exploiting a tragic moment in any way.  Eventually the periods of reverence recede, and it becomes okay to treat disasters as popcorn fare again.  It may take decades like getting our romantic Titanic movies when nobody is left alive to complain, but it always happens.  The only time when it doesn’t feel right is when a filmmaker who works solely within this type of genre continually exploits disaster sized imagery to make his own half-cooked points about the here and now.

Enter Roland Emmerich, best known as the “king of disaster movies” among film critics.  German born Emmerich has made a career out of making movies that seemingly are made solely to see landmarks destroyed.  This was certainly the case with his breakthrough sci-fi epic Independence Day (1996), which won an Academy Award for it’s ground-breaking effects, depicting an alien invasion that destroys many of the world’s largest cities.  The kind of grand-scale destruction that was found in Independence Day captured the imagination of it’s audiences, especially when seeing the Empire State Building and the White House being vaporized in a colossal fireball.  But, Emmerich was able to make that work  in sci-fi, because it fell within the understanding that Hollywood and audiences have always had; it’s all just a movie.  He continued the same principal to lesser effect in his Godzilla remake in 1998. And then two things happened after that.  In 2000, Emmerich broke away from his sci-fi pedigree and made for the first time a period set war film called The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson and Heath Ledger.  Garnering some of the best reviews of his career, Emmerich took this as a sign that it was time to become a more serious filmmaker, while at the same time working within the genre that he knew best.  From this, he set out to start writing a script centered around the theme of global warming, and it’s disastrous effects on the world, complete with the catastrophic destruction he had previously imagined in his sci-fi pictures.  And then came the second pivotal moment, which was the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  The kind of destruction that seemed so trivial and popcorn fodder in Emmerich’s previous films was now so very tragically real and traumatizing for most of America, and to return to that mode of film-making no longer seemed sensible anymore in Hollywood.  For Emmerich, he too would refrain from delving back in to his old ways, but that lasted little over a year, as the king of disasters went right back to his old ways by starting production on The Day After Tomorrow.

Pretty much every thing you can hate about Roland Emmerich’s style can be found in The Day After Tomorrow, and it marks the point in his career when his film-making sensibilities really began to devolve into self-indulgence.  One thing that can account for this is that The Day After Tomorrow was his first movie working solo after breaking from his partnership with co-writer and producer Dean Devlin.  Devlin, who himself has a penchant for loud, disaster filled action movies, for the most part was a grounding influence for Emmerich, helping to give his movies a more tongue-in-cheek self-awareness.  Mainly, Devlin helped to shape the tones of Emmerich’s scripts, giving them more of a sense of what they could be rather than what Roland wanted them to be.  This includes shaping the characters and the world to better service the plot and visuals, which were always Emmerich’s bigger strength.  But, without Devlin there to reign him in, Roland was more or less left to fill his movie with all sorts of his haphazard ideas, without any sense of how to make them work into a cohesive story.  At the same time, Emmerich was also developing a more politically conscience mind during this time, which also was a bit half-baked to say the least.  Like many surface level thinkers, Emmerich has opinions, but not the knowledge to translate those opinions into a workable story.  And the result ends up being a movie that tackles a serious subject and unfortunately trivializes it, causing the opposite effect that it was intended to have.  In this case, the issue is global warming, something that was indeed a hot button issue at the time when Emmerich was drafting his script during the 2000 presidential election.  Though the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing wars that followed took the focus away from the issue, it nevertheless remained a part of the discussion even up to the premiere of The Day After Tomorrow in 2004.  Around  that same time, presidential candidate Al Gore appeared in the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth (2006) which drew more attention to global issue.  And the reason why a documentary like that raised such an alarm is because of the catastrophic way that movies like The Day After Tomorrow failed to do the same.

Emmerich’s films often share one characteristic, and it’s the allure of the conspiracy.  He is an avid conspiracy theory enthusiast, and has often used it as fodder for many of his movies; often exploring them with complete disregard to the actual truth.  Some of it is harmless enough, like theorizing what went on at Roswell (Independence Day) or who built the ancient pyramids (Stargate) or were the Mayans right about doomsday (2012, and no they weren’t).  Then there are some conspiracy theories that he indulges that are more insidious and irrational like the false one about the authorship of William Shakespeare’s plays (Anonymous) because some of it’s arguments stem from imperial nationalistic hate groups.  Not that Emmerich prescribes to some of these more extreme conspiratorial beliefs, but the fact that he indulges many of them is something that is very irresponsible as a story-teller with immense sway within the industry.  What’s especially problematic with The Day After Tomorrow is the fact that Emmerich’s conspiracy thinking mixes in with actual science, and takes a very real problem like climate change and turns it into something as convoluted as one of his zany theories.  What was especially fool-hearty about his attempts to legitimize his vision was  that he called in actual experts from the field of climate science to observe his movie and give it their thumbs up.  The plan did not go as he expected, as scientists from NASA were especially critical of the “made-up” science of the movie and the agency even barred them from even speaking their mind about the movie any further, critical or otherwise.  Many other scientists called the movie “silly” which probably did not please the director, who wanted to be taken more seriously at this point.  In the end, Emmerich went ahead with his vision of a world overcome with sudden climate change, and the end result is no where close to real science nor towards a comprehensive narrative.

First of all, it’s clear that the science was never going to matter to Emmerich.  He just wanted to show cities being destroyed again, and doing so with a grand scale event like a natural disaster made sense to him in a post-9/11 age.  One thing that climate scientists will tell you is that global warming and climate change are two different things, with one resulting from the other.  They will also tell you that it is a gradual process that just doesn’t manifest overnight.  But, in Roland Emmerich’s eye, global warming means extreme weather happening without warning in places that it shouldn’t exist.  It’s clear from watching the scenes of destruction that Emmerich just wants to destroy landmarks, as they seem to be suspiciously prone to attracting natural disasters in this movie.  We see the Hollywood Sign and the Capitol Records building being blown away by tornadoes.  Why those specifically?  Because people who aren’t from Los Angeles will recognize them right away.  Also the Hollywood Sign being blown apart by a tornado is scientifically absurd to begin with, because tornadoes can’t climb mountains; they only manifest on flat terrain.  There is also the storm surge that floods the city of New York, which supposedly happens because of a week’s worth of constant rain.  Again, the science here is so nonsensical, because storm surges are cause by a rush of water brought in by a hurricane or tsunami, and not a long-running rain storm.  The flooding of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 is the most recent example, and it didn’t nearly flood the city up to the armpits of the Statue of Liberty like it does in this movie.  Emmerich clearly saw the time tables of the effects of climate change and felt they were too slow and too minimal for what he imagined.  The problem is, when you put that kind of rushed thinking into your movie, you give the audience the wrong impression of what actual climate change is going to be like, and that makes the job harder for climate scientists to give their own informed and researched warnings.

What’s also a problem with the movie is that the story itself is also fairly flimsy.  Emmerich’s movies typically center themselves around a nerdy loser who somehow stumbles across the key to saving the world.  You see this with Jeff Goldblum’s character in Independence Day, Matthew Broaderick’s in Godzilla, John Cusack in 2012, and of course Dennis Quaid in The Day After Tomorrow.  There’s not much we learn about with Quaid’s character, other than he knows that an imminent natural event caused by global warming is about to destroy most of the Northern Hemisphere.  The only other aspect that we learn about him is his estranged relationship with his son, played by Jake Gyllenhaal.  Gyllenhaal’s character was originally written to be 12 years old, but was changed when the rising actor expressed interest in the movie, and became a teenager instead (Gyllenhaal was 24 at the time by the way).  As a result, this becomes the focal point of the movie, which otherwise would have been a aimless globe-trotting series of different disasters hitting the planet with unrelated characters all witnessing the destruction.  In some ways, you could have gotten away with this arrangement of characters had they been quirky enough, or charming, like those found in the ensemble of Independence Day.  But the characters, even the ones played by Quaid and Gyllenhaal, are so generic that we can’t connect with them on any level.  So, when the movie calls for them to be witness to a cataclysmic event, all we see in the audience is exactly what is on the screen; disinterested actors staring at a special effect.  It makes it all the more ridiculous when the movie can’t even hold it’s own logic together.  Supposedly, the massive storm at the end of the movie, which causes the city of New York to go into an immediate deep freeze, can destroy infrastructure and envelope interiors killing everything in sight.  And yet, our main characters can survive in a solitary room with a working fireplace?  This ludicrous logic exists solely to give us one of the most justifiably mocked moments in the movie, where “climate change” is literally chasing the characters down a hallway, like a monster.  Suffice to say, this movie is dumb.

What it also reveals is a hubris on the part of Roland Emmerich that is also the hubris of many others in Hollywood.  What The Day After Tomorrow and most other Emmerich movies reveals is the worst kind of Neo-liberalism that ends up trivializing so many important issues that should be given a more serious examination.  Roland Emmerich believes that he is a liberal thinker, that his movies are doing a lot to help left-wing causes that mean a great deal to him.  But, as is the problem with a neo-liberal mindset, he is only interested in the surface level aspects of such causes.  His movies are all about tackling the soft targets, like politicians and industrialists, but never actually takes addresses the larger societal problems that also contribute to the rise of global warming, such as consumerism and increased human activity.  He never wants to point a finger at the audience themselves to make them consider what they could be doing differently to help slow down the rate of climate change.  No, instead he presents an easily identifiable antagonist that we can all project our disgust on, putting the responsibility on the individual and not on the masses.  This is shown through the portrayal of the vice president character, played by Kenneth Walsh, who repeatedly ignores the warnings of Quaid’s character.  Walsh was clearly cast because of his resemblance to the then VP Dick Cheney, and it’s Emmerich’s lame attempt to win some political points by picking on his straw man representation of the divisive politician.  The problem is, Emmerich is no where near clever enough to make this political parody work so it comes off as petty.  This kind of neo-liberalism is often referred to as “limousine liberalism,” meaning it’s a political mindset that claims to be progressive but is formed within a bubble of comfort that has no connection from the actual plights of the world, and as a result minimizes the arguments that the subject is trying to make.  This unfortunately leads to right wing forces in opposition to progressive causes having more fodder and reason to dismiss the arguments of the other side.  Emmerich probably doesn’t know how counter-productive his half-baked arguments are to actually solving the problem that it intends to address, and that is probably The Day After Tomorrow’s biggest crime of all.  It, probably more than any other film, set back the progress this country has made in fighting climate change because it gave the other side of the argument the perfect example of the kind of overblown exaggeration that they always claim is coming from the environmental side.

Suffice to say, there is much to dislike about the movie, from it’s mediocre script, to it’s bland characters, to it’s self-indulgent direction.  But the fact that it bungles it’s important message so fiercely that it may have set back the environmental movement at a time when we need them the most is probably it’s greatest crime.  Emmerich is clearly out of his league as a social commentator, and his attempts to make a statement on the politics of this issue and point fingers at certain people doesn’t do anything to help what actually needs to be done.  Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did so much more to address the actual problem and what needs to be done to solve it than Roland’s movie ever did, and that was because it didn’t let it’s audience off the hook.  It’s not a simple good vs. evil story-line; it is man vs. nature and about bringing balance back into the world, which calls upon us to change a lot of our own behavior.  The Day After Tomorrow just whittles the issue of climate change down to a simple series of experts vs. skeptics arguments and some big budget mayhem that seemed to be his main goal in the end.  Emmerich’s main problem is that as much as he wants to be a serious filmmaker, he never will able to be, because it’s not his strength.  He’s a loud, bombastic filmmaker who excels at portraying destruction on screen.  And as often the case, his attempts at making a profound statement often get drowned out by the sophomoric indulges he puts in whenever he fears he’s losing the audiences attention.  He has to understand, he is not a serious filmmaker.  It is okay being genre man, and indeed, he can find moments of truth even within something as outlandish as Independence Day.  But with The Day After Tomorrrow, he is only further poisoning the discourse, which should always be focused on delivering the cold hard facts about the realities of climate change.  It may not be Emmerich’s worst made movie, but it is certainly his most irresponsible, and should stand as a reminder of what it looks like when a filmmaker’s own self-interest ends up doing a disservice to the very issue it is trying to solve.  It seems appropriate that a movie like The Day After Tomorrow would in itself prove to be a destructive disaster.

It may be hard for a millennial film goer to know what the late 90’s were like for cinema.  For one thing, there was a lot less super hero movies released every summer.  Before Marvel and DC began flexing their muscles, the 90’s were a time when blockbusters were centered around movie stars, who at that time were starting to command paychecks reaching $20 million dollars a movie or more.  In this same time, you saw a lot more variety in the kinds of movies being made, because as long as a bankable star was attached, people would flock to the theater to see it.  It was a particularly strong time for things like the historical epic, the sci-fi adventure, and the romantic comedy; movies that you typically don’t see get the green-light for blockbuster treatment nowadays.  And in this time, we saw the meteoric rise of many a movie star.  If there was one whose ascent defined the 90’s in a nutshell, it would be Will Smith.  The former Fresh Prince had just wrapped up a successful run on television and felt it was time to branch out into television.  Starting with the modestly successful Bad Boys (1994), a buddy cop film from Michael Bay co-starring comedian Martin Lawrence, Will would later play a starring role in two of the 90’s biggest box office hits back to back; Independence Day (1996) and Men in Black (1997).  Each movie built on the one before and in a short span of time, Will Smith went from a cinematic neophyte to the King of Hollywood.  Couple this with a resurgence in his rap music career, leading the entire nation to start “getting jiggy with it,” and it appeared that nothing could stand in his way.  But, as we would soon find out, it could also take one disaster of a movie to grind that train to a halt.

The downside to the much of the celebrity obsessed culture of the 90’s is that Hollywood put perhaps too much trust in the actor’s ability to bring in an audience.  This often led to a lot of movies either turning out mediocre, because quality mattered less than star power, or they let productions run amok solely hoping for the name recognition to help bail them out in the end.  That’s why the 90’s ended up being a mixed bag for a lot of movie stars, who would be responsible for a lot of the good and bad through much of the decade.  For every Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) there was a Father’s Day (1997); for every My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) there was a Runaway Bride (1999); for every Ace Ventura (1993) there was a Cable Guy (1997); all movies that pale in comparison to their predecessors.  But a lot of these movies could still benefit their selective stars (Robin Williams, Julia Roberts and Jim Carrey) respectively, since it kept them largely in the spotlight.  It had to take something tanking extra hard to change all this emphasis on movie star appeal leading the market, and that movie unfortunately had to involve Will Smith, who was a the peak of his powers in 1999.  Coming immediately off of the success of Men in Black, Will and director Barry Sonnenfeld were looking to collaborate on something again, given their great experience working on their last film.  Not wanting to go right into a sequel, Sonnenfeld latched onto a project that he felt would be an ideal follow-up; a big screen adaptation of a cult tv series from the 60’s called The Wild, Wild West.  The original series, starring Robert Conrad, was a quirky spin of Western tropes with a little bit of science fiction thrown in.  Having just succeeded making a comical science fiction action flick with Men in Black, Sonnenfeld hoped to do the same in the Western as well, and sadly, he would realize too late how wrong his approach would end up being.

The Wild Wild West series, was a product of it’s time; campy, and low budget; typical of other likewise shows of the time like Batman and The Green Hornet.  And that low budget sensibility is what helped it find it’s footing, because the show relied much more on it’s creative story-telling and quirky personalities.  Which leads to the very first problem you will find apparent with Barry Sonnenfeld’s mega-budget adaptation; it’s unnecessary excess.  The movie, Wild Wild West (1999) cost a then staggering $175 million to make (eclipsed only by Titanic’s $200 million at the time).  That’s an acceptable amount of money to spend on a historical epic, but not on an adaptation of a tv series, and one that was budget-minded to boot.  Understandably, a lot of people saw that the movie missed the point of the show, which was a point stressed at the time by the show’s original star Robert Conrad, who refused to cameo in the movie and has in the years since publicly mocked this film relentlessly.  But, exactly where did all the money go?  Well, upon viewing the movie, you will notice quite a bit of the film devoted to showcasing the many gadgets of the character Artemus Gordon (played by Kevin Kline), an eccentric inventor and government agent assigned to work with Jim West (played by Will Smith).  A lot of the gadgetry feels out of place, like holdovers from Men in Black, only in a post-Reconstruction America setting, and it shows just how devoid of creativity the filmmakers had in making this movie.  They weren’t interested in adapting the TV series; they just wanted to do Men in Black again, only as a Western this time.  From Artemus’ needlessly complex train, to the neck magnet death machine of villain Dr. Arliss Loveless (played by a very hammy Kenneth Branagh), to the infamous giant spider (more about that later); the film clearly wants to show off and it does it in the poorest possible way, showing very clearly that a little bit too much hope was vested in the ability of it’s movie star to carry this clunky mess.

Which brings us to the involvement of Will Smith.  Will could not have been more beloved around the world than he was near the turn of the century.  His movies were beloved, his albums were #1 hits; he was on top of the world.  But, that overconfidence probably clouded his judgement leading up to the making of Wild Wild West.  It’s been said that Will Smith took on the role of Jim West because he was a fan of the original series, and also having the role be written for him in a bit of color blind casting must have been appealing as well.  That said, this misguided career move also took Will away from other roles that may have taken his career in a different direction.  For one thing, he apparently turned down the role of Neo in The Matrix (1999) in order to appear in Wild Wild West.  Can you imagine how different cinema and his film career would have been had he taken the red pill instead?  All that aside, Will doesn’t look too bad in the role.  The costuming department clearly set out to make Will appear stylish in an all black cowboy suit.  The same effort can not be said about his performance, however, as it becomes very clear early on how out of place Will is in this kind of movie.  Not that portraying Jim West as a black man is out of place; the concept is actually well executed.  No, instead, Will just resorts to the same tricks that he used in other movies, which makes him feel too modern for this Western setting.  He’s a man out of his time, and that becomes distracting after a while.  Kevin Kline fares a bit better fitting into the Western setting, but he’s not a good match for Will Smith as the co-star.  There’s a rhythm that you need to have in order to work as a pair with another actor, and Kline’s delivery is a tad too mcuh on the quirky side for most of the movie; perhaps more to do with the terrible screenplay than anything.  You can clearly see that Will’s performance is missing the stoicism of Tommy Lee Jones from Men in Black to work off of, and he more or less is acting opposite another actor who is acting in the same quirky tone, emphasizing the mismatch.  Needless to say, Will Smith has stated that turning down The Matrix is the biggest regret of his career, and it’s clear to see why.

The humor of the movie is also something that is painfully awful about this movie.  For one thing, none of it ever works the way it way it was intended.  A lot of that has to do with the over abundance of CGI to bring a lot of the gadgets to life.  This came out at the point in the late 90’s when the wonder of CGI was starting to wear off on audiences.  Having started the decade off with something as mind-blowing as the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (1993), we were now being treated to computer rendered machines that stood in as a phallic sight gag.  Essentially, audiences stopped being impressed.  You also have Will Smith and Kevin Kline bickering throughout most of the movie in a way that I guess was intended to be charmingly funny, but we never get a chance to grow to like these characters, so it just feels forced.  These characters are not Riggs and Murtaugh; they’re just archetypes built for the actors who are portraying them, who are mismatched to begin with.  And some of the scenes that are meant to be the show-stoppers in terms of hilarity just end up stopping the show; grinding the movie to a halt and going on for what seems like forever.  A scene where Will Smith dresses in drag in order to distract the villain is especially painful to watch, because it’s both pointless and a shameful desperate ploy to get a laugh from the audience.  Yes it establishes early on that dressing in drag is a go to technique for Atremus Gordon for going undercover, but when the movie has Jim West doing the same thing, the plot just essentially breaks down and you feel embarrassed for the movie at this point, because it’s exploitative.  It makes it even worse that West’s drag persona is named Ebonia.  Yikes!!

Will Smith may have had the charisma to live through some sophomoric comedy bits, but the movie goes even more off the edge when they interject some very misguided racial undertones to the mix.  The absolute worst part of the movie lies in the absolute piss poor way that it deals with the issue of slavery in America, and the resulting racism that still persisted post-Civil War in the Old West.  The film tries to add some pathos in Jim West’s backstory, telling how he lost most of his family from a Confederate Army raid that destroyed a settlement of black refugees who escaped on the Underground Railroad.  Had the movie given more depth to West’s character, this backstory would’ve carried more resonance, but instead it’s just dropped on us as exposition, giving it absolutely zero power.  The racism prevalent in the Old West is nothing to take lightly, and it can even be dealt with seriously through humor, as Mel Brooks proved with Blazing Saddles (1974).  But, Wild Wild West is no where near as clever, so the fact that it tries to shoehorn in a tragic backstory like that just feels exploitative in the end.  But that’s nothing compared to a downright cringey scene where Jim West tries to smooth talk his way out of a lynching.  You heard that right.  Will Smith resorts to his “slick Willy” charm shtick in a scene where there is literally a noose around his neck, surrounded by a crowd of torch wielding white settlers.  For all of those who complained about Will Smith in blue skin from Disney’s Aladdin remake, you need to relax because Will can and has done much worse on film, and this scene is proof of that.  This lynching scene from Wild Wild West is without a doubt rock bottom for Will Smith as an actor, and may very well be one of the most offensive scenes that any mainstream film has ever put on screen.  There’s a lot about Wild Wild West to be embarrassed about, but this is the moment for me in particular where it just flat out became un-redeemable.

A lot of blame can be put on director Barry Sonnenfeld for taking the absolute wrong approach to the material, or on Will Smith for allowing his ego to cloud his own judgement, but as with many other runaway movie productions, you have to put much of the blame on the one responsible for the money itself.  That just so happens to be the infamously eccentric producer Jon Peters.  The hair-dresser turned producer had gained a steady stream of hits throughout the 1980’s, culminating with the mega success of Tim Burton’s Batman (1989).  Into the 90’s, his track record began to wane, and he split from his producing partner Peter Gruber to venture out and make movies more suited to his own tastes.  He tried for many years to get Wild Wild West off the ground, including having Mel Gibson and director Richard Donner attached at one point, but it never came together.  Some of the problems arose from a few of Peters’ sometimes bizarre demands of the story.  One in particular arose out of another project he had been working on, which was a reboot of Superman called Superman Lives, directed by Tim Burton and starring Nicolas Cage.  For that film, Peters commissioned fresh new director Kevin Smith to write the screenplay.  Among the many puzzling demands that Peters wanted Smith to put into the script one stood out; Superman had to fight a giant spider.  Kevin Smith left the project before it fell apart and always remembered that weird addition he put into script, which became an anecdote that he would retell for years after.  But what makes that anecdote so funny is that many years later, we would get a giant spider in a Jon Peters movie, and it was in Wild Wild West, where it felt even more out of place; appearing as the colossal steam-punk monstrosity built by Dr. Loveless in order to conquer the United States.  It’s the thing that Wild Wild West is probably most infamous for, and also the thing that it gets the most mockery from.  When the best your movie is good for is to be the punchline of a Kevin Smith anecdote, that’s when you know your movie is an absolute failure.  It’s not even bad enough to be a joke;  it’s a punchline.

Since it’s premiere, Wild Wild West has become the poster child for misguided, runaway studio productions built around the hubris and ego of it’s creative team.  In many ways, it spelled the end of the era of movie stars being the driving force of the industry, because if Will Smith, at the height of his celebrity, couldn’t lift this mess to a less embarrassing box office run, then it meant that name recognition wasn’t the magic key Hollywood after all.  Studios became a lot more cautious in the years since, and as a result movie stars took a back seat when compared to the appeal of the brand in Hollywood, with stars taking rolls in smaller films in order to keep their names in the spotlight.  Will Smith, likewise, retreated from making big budget movies for a while, at least on the same level.  It’s only recently that he’s gotten back to the box office numbers that he had been pulling from the 90’s with his two most recent blockbuster hits Suicide Squad (2016) and Aladdin (2019).  Even still, you can see how negatively Wild Wild West left a mark on his film career for a while.  It effectively screeched the momentum of his career to a halt, and completely forced him to reassess what he was doing when picking his film roles.  He’s fared okay since then, with modest successes and a couple Oscar nominations, but those early years still stand out as the ones that people most fondly remember.  Wild Wild West is more of a cautionary tale than anything.  It shows us what happens when a movie production becomes too over-confident and too reckless with it’s own indulgences.  It also proves that It seems foolish to try to invest so much money into the  Western genre; a lesson that foolishly was forgotten in the wake of Heaven’s Gate (1980) and was overlooked once again with the equally disastrous The Lone Ranger (2013).  Some of these may have fumbled good intentions, but Wild Wild West was just doomed from the beginning, with it’s lazy approach towards the material, it’s reliance on self-indulgent excess (a giant, freaking Spider!!!) and just flat out offensive use of serious, real world injustices.  I could go on and on, but the flat out point is that Wild Wild West is a travesty of a movie that unfortunately ruined the solid reputation of the people involved, and now is just best referred to as the punchline that it is.

With the past year at a close, the next few weeks present to us the season in which the last year was all leading up to; awards season.  One thing that is commonplace pretty much every year is the scramble to get in last minute consideration before the deadline of the year’s end cuts off prevents any more inclusion.   In these final weeks of December, the goal is very clear from all contenders; get the most attention that you can.  As accolades begin to pile up from various year end awards, this is when the attention from the Film Academy is at it’s highest, and the potential of making their shortlist of nominees becomes even higher.  Some movies have better chances than others because they appeal to the general tastes of the Academy’s voting body, which can be frustratingly predictable at times.  These movies are what we generally know as “Oscar Bait,” which are films that are specifically manufactured to appeal solely to the people within the industry who vote for the Academy Awards.  And given the insular, sometimes out of touch voting body of the Academy, these movies tend to always end up being small dramas that tackle some social issue or features a performance where the actor goes through some body transformation that makes them(how to put this lightly) less glamorous.  Essentially, they are movies that are pandering to a specific group of elitists, and typically because of that, the movies have limited appeal and even smaller box office grosses.  And you wonder why the Academy Awards has a problem with popularity.  Oscar Bait movies are not all bad; some are even great and deserving of their honors.  But, when they are bad, they become infuriatingly so, because their very pandering nature exposes the cynicism behind their creation and the greedy intentions of their producers.  And, depending on the type of story and issue that the movie is tackling, it can become downright offensive.

A couple years back, I made a top ten list of failed Oscar Bait movies, and what ended up topping my list was Micahel Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980).  My criteria for the list called for the top movie to be the one that crashed hardest in it’s attempts to win an Oscar, and Heaven’s Gate is notorious for being an Oscar Bait movie that bankrupted it’s studio (United Artists) and destroyed it’s director’s reputation.  But, here’s the thing, Heaven’s Gate is not a terrible movie.  In fact, it’s gone through a critical reevalution in the last few years thanks to a stellar restoration and a Criterion Collection release, helping to soften it’s notorious reputation.  If you want to look at the worst ever Oscar Bait movie, you only need to look at my #2 on that same list; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  The Stephen Daldry directed feature is pretty much the textbook example of a bad Oscar Bait movie.  It’s pandering, it’s obnoxiously self-indulgent, it’s enormously shallow and insincere, and worst of all, exploitative.  And yet, somehow, it managed to do what Heaven’s Gate could not; get a Best Picture nomination.  I guess that doesn’t make it a failed Oscar Bait movie, because it at least got itself a place at the table, but really, at what cost?  Extremely Loud is personally my most hated of Oscar baiting movies, which are the ones that use it’s very important subject matter to do nothing other than gain the attention of Oscar voters.  And here’s the more insidious thing about it; it doesn’t just stick to one grim subject matter either.  We get the entire buffet in one movie.  We get the Holocaust, mental disorders, racism, and the Twin Tower attacks of 9/11 all in this mess of a movie.  Had they thrown a person dying from AIDS the movie would have hit an Oscar BINGO (thankfully the movie never went that far).  But what we did get presented us with probably the most grossly transparent attempt at baiting the Academy for an Oscar, and sadly the industry took a nibble before rightfully throwing this one out.

To understand why a movie like this came to be in the first place, you have to consider the period in which it was made.  The movie came to theaters just after the ten year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack; a point in time after the tragedy when the industry felt it was appropriate to begin dramatizing the event on film.  Before this, only two other films had tackled the tragedy; Paul Greengrass’ United 93 and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, both from 2006.  Both tackled the event head on, with true life stories and managed to gain varying degrees of success among critics.  But, Extremely Loud took a different approach to the event; using it as a backdrop to their own fictional story.  Many films do that of course, but there is a purpose most of the time to those that choose to set their story that way.  Titanic (1997) of course used a Romeo and Juliet style love story to place a dramatic connection for the audience in the midst of all the true events of the tragedy.  9/11 is a trickier event to tackle because of the widespread ramifications that the event had on the world at large; including becoming a hot button political issue, even today.  Extremely Loud makes the aftermath of the terror attack part of it’s own narrative, primarily with regards to the trauma that the city of New York went through.  Some movies could tackle that kind of narrative effectively, without ever having to resort to recreating the event itself.  Spike Lee managed to to that effectively in his film 25th Hour (2002), which was made a mere year after the attack, and told the story of the people still feeling the pain of loss.  The way that worked is because the movie was about the longer lasting effects of trauma on people, and how that creates problems down the road itself.  Extremely Loud on the other hand not only wants to use the 9/11 terror attacks as a factor in it’s movie, but it even seems to expose old wounds that many had hoped would be healed with time.

Here’s where we get to the most controversial aspect of the movie, and a prime example of where movies that pander to an a certain kind of audience ends up crossing the line.  In various parts of the movie, the 9/11 attacks are dramatized; not particularly outrageous in itself, except the filmmakers decided to do so with a misguided artistic flair.   The character played by Tom Hanks in the movie, Thomas Schell, is a victim of the terror attack, with the movie focused on the coping with grief that his remaining family goes through afterwards.  At several points, Thomas’ son Oskar (which is in no way another pandering move, I say in a sarcastic tone) has nightmarish flashes of imagination where he sees his father falling from the building like one of the horrifying videos of jumpers captured on that day.  These moments take this tragic aspect of the tragedy and dramatizes it in a way that feels extremely exploitative.  The scenes don’t just recreate the falling, they stylize it.  The opening credits in fact play over a cringe-inducing slow motion shot of Tom Hanks falling in mid air.  This is not the kind of thing that you use visual poetry on.  To make matters worse, there is no need in the narrative whatsoever for these moments to happen.  It just comes at you as a slap to the face reminding you of what a tragedy 9/11 was.  It’s the same kind of exploitative tactic that you see when a documentary or narrative film suddenly splices in footage of the towers collapsing, knowing the power that those terrifying images still have.  The images of 9/11 are profound in their scale of cataclysm, but to take those and offer up an artistic spin like the one in this movie almost feels like it’s intentionally wanting people to feel the pain of the events again.  It’s like the movie doesn’t care what feeling it’s audience has toward the event; it just knows that there is power in the images that we saw from that day, and it wants to use it to elevate it’s own sense of importance.

That’s where the movie especially rubs people the wrong way, with it’s emphasis on it’s own importance.  The movie wants you to follow these characters around and learn about their struggles, but here’s the problem; the struggles carry more importance that the characters themselves.  Every character is a pastiche of your typical tragic backstory individual that usually populates movies that carry some importance.  Most of the time, we accept a character or two that has a personal tragedy that motivates their existence within a narrative; but not when the entire movie is populated with them.  The book on which this movie is based, written by Jonathan Safran Foer, probably addresses each individual problem with all the characters with more nuance, since novels allow more time and introspection to establish each character’s purpose in the story (I can’t judge for certain because I haven’t read it).  The movie adaptation, done by the usually reliable Eric Roth, dispenses with subtlety and just goes for the essential hardship that defines each character; whether it’s loosing a husband on 9/11 like Oskar’s mother (played by Sandra Bullock), or having survived the Holocaust like his grandparents.  All we get out of their character development is how each personal tragedy shaped them, and this carries little resonance as there is nothing else remotely interesting about each character.  To the movie, the personal tragedies are all that matter and that makes the movie feel especially exploitative.  It’s as if the movie doesn’t want anyone to know anything more about the movie other than it touches on these important issues, because it certainly doesn’t have worthwhile characters.  If you look at other movies that tackled serious issues, they always managed to find a way to ground their narrative with a deeply relatable story.  But, when everyone has baggage, then the narrative comes across as false and unrelatable.  Not everyone in New York has a deep connection to the many plights that has befallen society; and yet Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close seems to believe that all of these people are so easily accessible in one neighborhood.

Compare the way the movie deals with something like the Holocaust.  The worst tragedy of the 20th century is merely represented here through the presence of Oskar’s grandparents, who seem so disconnected from their past experience.  The Holocaust is merely just an extra bit of character detail here; never fully explored and yet always reinforced on us the audience.  If the movie really wanted to give more importance to how the Holocaust could fit in their narrative, they could have included a moment when one of the grandparents sits down with Oskar and helps him learn how to move beyond the pain of loss endured through such an ordeal and find positivity again.  But, no, we only get the information that both grandparents are Holocaust survivors and that this is enough to give the movie the extra weight of importance.  It doesn’t help that one of the grandparents is a mute, which is never really given a full explanation as to why.  You would assume the tragedy of the Holocaust would’ve done that, but the movie seems less interested in connecting the dots.  To be fair, Max von Sydow’s performance as Oskar’s mute grandfather is the one redeeming aspect of the movie.  The film doesn’t do a good job of explaining the real truth behind the character, but Sydow is able to communicate so much through his simple gestures and expressions, which helps to give some element of authenticity to this film that severely lacks it.  He received the movie’s only other Oscar nomination, and lost out to fellow octogenarian acting legend Christopher Plummer that year.  But, Max von Sydow’s long and storied career gave him the ability to find the humanity in this character and make him more than just a archetype, which is sadly not the case with everyone else in the movie.   If there was ever an event where the personal story mattered with regards to the characters, it would be the Holocaust where the outpouring of personal accounts in the wake of Schindler’s List (1993) made such an impact in defining that period of time in human history.  Here in this film, it’s just there to get attention, and that makes it feel very wrong and misused.

But, the movie’s biggest problem is with the little, walking talking plot device that is Oskar.  He is where the movie focuses all the Oscar Bait formula into and creates perhaps one of the most insufferable characters to have appeared in a movie perhaps ever.  Oskar, a twelve year old boy with mental abnormalities, must learn to let go of the pain he has felt since the loss of his father on 9/11, and in the meantime, reconnect with the estranged Holocaust-surviving grandfather that he barely knows.  The movie deposits a treasure hunt for him to complete, that his father had set up before his death, and the movie uses this narrative structure to take us through the aforementioned greatest hits of every Oscar baiting subject known to man.  It doesn’t help the fact that Oskar himself is not only not very interesting, but he is also incredibly annoying.  I don’t want to blame this on the young actor, Thomas Horn, who plays Oskar, because it’s not his fault the character is terribly written and poorly conceived.  But the film rests so much on him to carry the film, and it does so by making him talk a whole lot.  The movie also fails in portraying his mental state in any meaningful way, because it never really commits to it either.  The movie heavily implies that he has Aspergers Syndrome, but it never commits to it, and in some instances, portrays his disability as a quirky aspect of his character.  Never once does the movie address the daily hardships that most people with the disorder must overcome to live a normal life, and again like everything else, just merely uses it as another element in the story to inflate it’s own sense of importance.  This is the most often exploited Oscar bait tactic for many movies, and you can fill a whole library with all the movies that failed hard in an attempt to dramatize a persons disorder.  It feels even more egregious here because it’s the mental disorder that fuels the character of Oskar, and makes him feel less genuine as a person.  You never want to tell someone like this to shut up in real life, but this movie really grinds your nerves and it pushes Oskar so heavily to the forefront.  And in doing so, it takes this movie from forgettable Oscar Bait garbage, to irredeemable and notorious Oscar Bait garbage.

I cannot stress enough how infuriating this movie is to sit through.  It’s always clear what the movie’s intentions are, and it’s cynical ploy to grab the Academy Awards attention is frankly offensive when you see the things it’s exploiting to get there.  The movie is not content to take on one issue, it wants to do all of them; perhaps banking on the odds of quantity over quality.  We get our Holocaust backstory, and the mental illness angle, and this movie carries the notorious reputation of adding the tragedy of 9/11 to the checklist of things Hollywood can exploit for awards fare.  The fact that this movie uses them is not the problematic part; it’s the fact that it uses them without care.  The Holocaust and 9/11 are just tools for this movie, completely devoid of any really exploration and just there to remind the audience of how awful the world is.  When a movie addresses an important issue, it must come with a story that transcends it’s placement in that moment and helps to personalize it for all audiences to understand it’s importance.  Schindler’s List brought many harrowing stories to the forefront, but centered it around an interesting character study of a man who saved lives by exploiting a system to his advantage.  Rain Man (1988) brought a portrayal of living with a mental disorder to life, but framed it within a story of two estranged brothers reconnecting on a road trip.  The best way that these elements can work in a movie is if the film never intends to do anything else than shed light on these important issues.  That was clearly Spielberg’s intention with Schindler’s, and he’ll tell you that the proudest outcome of that movie was seeing the floodgates open with numerous survivor’s stories after the movie came out.  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close doesn’t care about any of it’s issues; it’s a fabricated gift bag to the Academy hoping to get attention in the most desperate of ways.  The fact that the Academy almost fell for it is a pretty sad statement, and it shows just how easily the body can be manipulated.  Everything you hate about Oscar Bait movies can be found in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and that’s what makes it one of the most insufferable and at times most offensive movies to ever get this close to Oscar glory.

When Hollywood finds a blockbuster that exceeds their wildest expectations, they often try to find ways to extend it’s popularity way beyond it’s intended life span.  This often involves sequelizing the movie, whether it lends itself to a sequel or not, and usually involves a great deal promotional exposure in order to make sure that it continues to stay in the public consciousness.  Sometimes Hollywood does stumble on something that not only lives beyond one film, but can remarkably sustain continued new installments towards a series that lasts for decades.  You look at how Star Wars has evolved from a single film, to a trilogy, to a collection of trilogies, to an entire cinematic universe to see just how well an experiment in franchising can work if the movie in question opens itself up to such a thing.  An even more remarkable example can be found with the Planet of the Apes films, which based off the original 1968 film you would never even think would have had legs strong enough to expand into the new millennium.  Yet, here we have a new set of Apes films in recent years that are not only critically acclaimed, but are also breaking new ground in terms of visual effects, not to mention sharing the original film’s sharp social and political allegories within it’s narrative.  But, the same cannot be true for all franchises, and sometimes it becomes disheartening when you see a beloved film be followed up with a sequel that squanders the potential that the first movie so perfectly laid out for it.  Recent examples of this include Kingsmen: The Golden Circle (2017) and Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), which were both pale imitations of their predecessors.  But, if you are looking for a movie that perfectly personifies the idea of wasting something good in the rush to capitalize on a sequel, then you can look no further than the sequel to Jurassic Park (1993): the horribly mismanaged The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997).  It’s not only a terrible sequel to a beloved classic, but in my own opinion, it’s also one of the worst movies ever made.

That may seem like harsh words for what is essentially a harmless sequel to a blockbuster movie, but for me personally, it was one of the worst cinematic experiences that I have ever had.  Personal influences certainly shape my perception of the movie, I will be honest, but they do point out an element of the movie that I really detest.  And that element is, that it is a movie without a soul.  Now, you’re probably wondering how can a movie have a soul?  It’s a product and not a being.  Of course, when I say something has a soul, what I really mean is that it has a sense of character and identity to it; that it reflects back a sense of life that makes the 2 hours we witness watching it unfold worth the time.  Most good films have this about them.  Even most bad movies have a soul, because there are many cases where bad films stand out because of all their faults.  But The Lost World has nothing.  It’s just pieces of a movie awkwardly stitched together to give the impression of a film, but where nothing feels authentic.  When a film lacks a soul, then it stops being a movie and just becomes a product; something that was made out of obligation and not through genuine love.  I guess you can say that about most bad sequels, but it stun a lot more because this was how Hollywood tried to answer something magical like Jurassic Park.  Even more disheartening was the fact that it involved many of the same people, including writer Michael Crichton and director Steven Spielberg; two enormously creative people who should’ve taken the opportunity to build upon their past achievements to make something even more amazing.  If they didn’t have their heart in it, then why should they have even bothered trying.

One has to understand the absolute importance that Jurassic Park has as a part of cinematic history.  While mostly a typical Hollywood action thriller, the movie was still ground-breaking in it’s use of CGI technology to bring dinosaurs to life on the big screen.  Those early computer models remarkably hold up 25 years later, but that’s not the thing that makes the movie as beloved as it still is today.  Jurassic Park is also a perfect example of a movie with a definitive soul to it.  We remember the characters, the moments, the sense of thrill that we had watching it for the first time.  We quote the movie constantly, from Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm delivering sly quips, to Wayne Knight’s Nedry’s sarcastic put downs.  It’s a movie where even minor characters stand out and are remembered with fondness, like Samuel L. Jackson’s briefly seen technician, Arnold.  But, what really defines the soul of the movie is the way that it pulls us in as a viewer.  For instance, how does Steven Spielberg encapsulate the sheer magnificence of viewing a living dinosaur on screen.  He plays it off of the reactions of his actors first, then does a sweeping upward shot to capture the scale of the dinosaur that the characters are looking at.  Then, with an assist from John Williams’ brilliant musical score, we have a perfect introduction of the core concept of the film; dinosaurs live among us.  That is how a movie finds it’s soul; with cinematic language driving the glory of the moment, without words or character motives driving the scene.  From that moment on, the audience is on board for every plot point from then on, and are even intrigued by the philosophical discussions that this moment inspires thereafter. Jurassic Park plays by the Hollywood rules of plot and character for typical blockbusters, but Spielberg knew that all of this had to mean something as well, so he made his best effort to not only make the movie look good, but to have it resonate as well.  And thus, with his keen sense of cinematic story-telling, we get a blockbuster that is more than just a product; it also has a beating heart.

So, where did that all go when The Lost World came around?  Obviously not into the sequel.  When looking at what’s wrong with The Lost World, you have to take into consideration that Hollywood likes to break down each film it makes and tries to perform an autopsy on each to see what individually made it work or made it fail.  From this, they create what they essentially see as a blueprint on how to make a good movie.  If this particular moment worked so well in this movie, then we should do even more of it in this new movie, and so on.  So, essentially, you have a film that is assembled to mimic everything that was good about the original movie in order to repeat it’s success.  There’s only one problem; it almost never works out that way.  The Lost World feels so lifeless for one main reason; it’s too polished.  One has to remember, Jurassic Park is not a flawless movie.  It can be a tad cheesy at times, it falls prey to a lot of plot conveniences, and there are plot holes wide enough to drive a truck through (how exactly did the T-Rex get into the building without anybody noticing, or hearing?)  But, the movie almost embraces those things as a part of the whole experience, whether intentional or not, and it’s become part of the whole mystique of the movie itself years later.  By analyzing the flaws of the movie and trying to remove those imperfections, the filmmakers made something that was more refined, but lacked all character.  Maybe when Spielberg was developing this sequel, he thought that it was going to be easier now that he knew what he was doing this second time around, but as this movie shows, maybe it’s better when he doesn’t work with a strong sense of confidence.  One particular example I would point out is the way it uses familiar call backs to the first film.  Like the first Jurassic Park, there’s your epic introduction to the dinosaurs peacefully existing, as well as another scene involving a vehicle dangling off a ledge after an encounter with a Tyrannosaurus.  The Lost World seems to think that each moment needs to one up the original, so one scene involves a pack of Stegosauruses crossing a stream, while the other involves an even bigger truck attacked by not one but two T-Rex’s.  In each case, they both pale in comparison to the original, because they lack the intimacy and the novelty of what came before.  In other words, the less is more approach of Jurassic Park was more effective.

One of the most glaring things to note about what makes The Lost World so much worse as a movie sequel, is the fact that it completely tosses aside the logic that the original film established for itself.  Like any other science fiction, Jurassic Park is given some leeway to bend reality for the sake of narrative purposes.  But, for the most part, it is a scientifically grounded film, mainly due to the long history of writer Michael Crichton’s own work in the field of science.  Sure, science hasn’t been able to create dinosaurs out of genetic cloning yet, but the movie does a fine enough job laying out the real science behind the research in order to make it feel at least plausible.  And one thing that it does get right most of the time is how the dinosaurs would’ve actually behaved.  You have characters like Sam Neill’s Dr. Grant, Bob Peck’s Muldoon, and young Joseph Mazzello’s Tim to tell you all the real facts about dinosaurs you need along the way so that when we actually see it happen in the movie, it makes perfect logical sense.  The tidbit about how fast a Tyrannosaurus can run makes the scene where it chases down a Jeep at night all the more intense.  But, The Lost World seems more concerned about dramatic tension than giving us context, and changing the rules just to make a scene look better does not do the movie any favors.  For example, there is a point in the movie where a campsite is attacked suddenly by a T-Rex and the campers flee and somehow most of them make it out alive running on foot.  It’s like Spielberg completely forgot that this same creature was able to keep up with a Jeep driving at full speed, and now is barely able to catch up to the foot-speed of human beings.  If there was an explanation that the dinosaur was hobbled then maybe this discrepancy would have made sense, but there isn’t.  The movie just flips the logic for convenience.  And this is only one example.  The first film at least tried to make sense; this one just doesn’t care.  And that lack of care is what plagues the experience of watching it.

The distinct lack of personality this time around is also something baffling about the movie.  I know that it’s a bit unfair to use the original constantly as a reference point, but considering the fact that this movie is trying way to hard to copy it in every way makes it almost unavoidable.  And the one thing you’ll notice as a fault with the sequel is that every character doesn’t work at all in this story.  Like I said before, there original movie had top to bottom memorable characters.  They may not have been original or even always likable, but they stood out.  Here, everyone feels generic, even if they are returning from the first movie.  Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm is a prime example.  In the first movie, he was the wild card character who often was hilariously callous and a little nutty.  He was comic relief in an otherwise ensemble cast that also included dinosaurs as featured characters.  Here, he’s the primary protagonist, which is a role this type of character does not work well in.  And you’ll notice very quickly that the character is way out of his element and nowhere near as entertaining this time around.  The boredom on Goldblum’s face throughout the movie is noticeable.  In addition, the movie makes little effort to create new characters with any personality and instead just tries to fill each role with a generic archetype that’s a retread of what was there before.  Julianne Moore is wasted as Goldblum’s scientifically driven girlfriend, who basically serves that function and nothing more.  Vince Vaughn is your stereotypical hotshot soldier for hire.  And the movie gives Dr. Malcolm a mixed race daughter who is clearly just there to fill some diversity quota that the movie feels it needs to accomplish.  Diversity is admirable, but only when the character has a personality and a purpose in the story, which this character does not.  And she stops a Raptor attack in the most ridiculous way possible; through her training in gymnastics (What!?).  I imagine either Spielberg or some other producer had a child also going through gymnastics at the time and felt compelled to include it in the movie, even if it makes no sense.  Only the late Pete Postlewaithe’s character, the hard-edged dino hunter, feels anything close to original for this film.  The film’s lack of any character development, good or bad, only solidifies just how much it lacks in general.

But, there’s something else that makes me despise the movie more than most sequels and other bad movies.  It comes back to that lacking of a soul excuse that I mentioned earlier.  And it makes more sense when you consider how this movie stacks up against the other films that came after it.  Sure, it’s worse than the original, but how can it be worse than Jurassic Park III (2001), or Jurassic World (2015), or the recently released Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018).  It’s because some bad movies manage to stand out better than others by becoming so memorably bad.  That’s how some bad movies can have a soul too.  I see that especially after having seen the newest film Fallen Kingdom.  Believe me, sparing you a lengthy review, this new film is bad, and yet I still think The Lost World is worse.  And that’s because it’s so stupid at times that I almost found it’s stupidity entertaining.  Almost.  The two films are remarkably similar; they both involve extracting dinosaurs that remain in the island based parks and bringing them to the mainland, and two opposing ideals about what to do with them when they get there which inevitably leads to dinosaurs breaking loose and running a rampage in the open world.  In The Lost World it involved a Tyrannosaurus rampaging through San Diego; in Fallen Kingdom, it’s dinosaurs wrecking havoc in a mansion before inevitably branching out across the world.  But, Fallen Kingdom is significantly cheesier and aggressively more stupid, which kind of prevents it from being boring in the process.  The Lost World is bland the whole way through on top of being boring and stupid, and that is why it is so much harder to sit through.  The fault comes in the assumption on the filmmakers part that they were making something more profound with The Lost World, which a Jurassic Park movie should never be.  It can have profound moments, but it works best when it embraces a more cartoonish sensibility.  Fallen Kingdom, despite being so mind-numbingly stupid at times, at least remembers that.  The Lost World was made in between Schindler’s List (1993) and Amistad (1997), which probably didn’t put Spielberg in the right mindset to direct a movie like this, and it painfully clear in the movie’s severe lack of fun all around.  And that’s saying something for a movie that has a Raptor taken out with a gymnastic kick.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park is not the worst made sequel, nor is it the worst made movie in this franchise.  But it is the most insulting sequel that I’ve ever seen made in response to a classic movie.  For the longest time, this stood right up there with Space Jam (1996) as one of my least favorite movies ever, and it still is high up there even today as other bad movies have joined them.  And the reason for the scorn that I hold for this movie is because it’s the most blatant example of a movie that just doesn’t even try to be a movie.  It is a manufactured beast, devoid of any love put into it by people who are among the greatest artists of all time.  This is far and away the worst movie that Spielberg has made in my opinion, and that’s because it even lacks the things that made Spielberg’s other failures at least memorable; it doesn’t have the nonsensical absurdity of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), the dullness of Always (1989), nor the awkward tonal shifts of Hook (1991).  Art, even bad art, by the greatest of masters can illicit some emotional response from it’s audience.  The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a blank canvas of bland whiteness being passed off as artwork.  Every decision made with the movie is there to repeat something that worked before, and it accomplishes absolutely nothing.  Maybe it was a rushed job, and like I pointed out before, maybe Spielberg’s heart wasn’t in it because he had already moved on to more serious, worthwhile projects.  It’s just a shame that he had to burn through something as purely entertaining as Jurassic Park in order to get there.  The worst that a movie can be is to show the inner workings of it’s creation bare in front of us and reveal it to be nothing more than an empty vessel made solely to fill another’s place for one shallow reason; to make more money, and nothing else.  The Lost World is that kind of movie, and that’s why it hurt so much after seeing Jurassic Park.  You can’t make the same film twice, as this movie so painfully shows.  And Lost World holds a special plays of scorn for me, because it’s the movie that first opened my eyes to the fact that film-making could sometimes turn into a soulless venture, where greed can sometimes trump art.  It broke my once pure ideal of how Hollywood works, and showed that sometimes even the best of filmmakers can create something that lacks a soul.

Robin Williams was a rare talent in our lives.  A master comedian and a genius at improvisation, he also managed to carve out a niche as a well respected actor in both comedy and drama.  Though he could be completely bombastic and off-the-wall, he still had the ability to reign himself in and give a touching subtle performance once in a while; something that indeed helped him win an Oscar for his work in Good Will Hunting (1997).  But while he proved himself time and again to be a master at so many different things, it unfortunately made it difficult to find the right kinds of roles for him.  Oh sure, he had plenty of great films come his way, and many of those movies were no doubt improved by his presence.  But, when you become an extremely popular actor in the public’s eye, Hollywood might over time begin to believe they can harness that popularity and work to control it.  That’s why at certain parts of his career, Robin was finding himself acting in roles that didn’t use his talents effectively.  These were movies that more or less began to follow a formula; one’s that thought they knew what a Robin Williams’ picture was all about, but in actuality had no clue.  These kinds of pictures tended to play off both sides of his persona on screen, the affable clown who works a mile a minute, as well as the warm-hearted every man who stood up for the right things and gave hope to the helpless.  While Robin could excel at both, these two sides often would feel out of place next to each other, and it made some of his films feel particularly disjointed.  And oftentimes, you could see Robin really struggling to define himself as an actor, but sadly was being saddled with movies that Hollywood thought were right for him.  He became a performer restrained by his own successful identity, and that led to some rather disastrous films.

This particularly came to a head in the mid to late 90’s, when Robin’s film career was hitting a repetitive point.  In the earlier part of the decade, Williams had two monster hits with his work as the Genie in Aladdin (1992) and as a cross-dressing nanny in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), but soon after, his film output got a lot shakier.  It became clear over time that Hollywood saw Robin as a finely tuned machine that could bring the right kind of magic to any story, but that was not really the case at all.  Robin Williams, like any other actor, wanted to tackle something challenging, giving him the opportunity to surprise his audience, and if you’ve ever seen Robin perform in front of a crowd, you’ll definitely see that desire within him to be unpredictable.  Restraining him to a formula is not the greatest use of his talent, and that’s something that’s clear in his output from the 90’s.  Some movies of this period did turn out well (1995’s Jumanji and 1996’s The Birdcage), but there were plenty that didn’t (1996’s Jack, 1997’s Flubber, as well as Bicentennial Man and Jakob the Liar, both from 1999).  And when you look at the movies from this era that clearly didn’t work, you can see one thing that they all had in common; schmaltz.  It’s unfortunate to think that for a time that this was all that Hollywood thought that Robin Williams’ movies measured up to, this excessive sentimentality that’s only punctuated with his natural talent for improvisation.   Sure, some of his successes from year past had their sentimental moments, especially in his beloved turn in Dead Poets Society (1989), but that’s not what defined those movies in a nutshell either.  It’s a good thing that Good Will Hunting came along to break that cycle and leader to more serious and often darker roles later on for Robin, like One Hour Photo and Insomnia (both from 2002).  Unfortunately, before that would happen, Robin had to go through what is undoubtedly the worst movie of his entire career, and one that represented the worst of what Hollywood believed a Robin Williams movie could be; the travesty that’s known as Patch Adams (1998).

Patch Adams is the worst kind of schmaltzy movie that you could ever imagine, but that’s not the only thing that’s shameful about it.  It’s a movie that also uses it’s schmaltz in a manipulative way, believing that tugging at the heart strings will compensate for the narrative shortcomings.  But that’s not even the worst aspect of the feature.  No, what makes the movie so despising is the way that it was framed in order to be made more “marketable,” particularly towards favor during awards season.  Movies, particularly ones that are taken from real life stories, take liberties all the time in order to craft a film more towards appealing to the widest possible audience.  People are either excised or combined together and whole passages of a person’s life can also sometimes be completely ignored in order to focus on the most important parts of the narrative of the subject’s life.  But, sometimes, too many liberties are taken in order to broaden the drama of the story and that’s exactly what happened here.  The movie examines the story of Dr. Hunter Doherty “Patch” Adams, a groundbreaking American physician who founded the Gesundheit! Institute, which is a not-for-profit health care facility that specializes in Integrative Medicine.  A long time champion for free health care service not funded by insurance policies, Adams is also renowned for his colorful personality, often dressing up as a clown or wearing a red nose as a way of humorizing his patients as they go through their arduous treatments.  He’s a fascinating figure and continues to set a good example for the medical industry to this day.  Indeed, some of his techniques have since been adopted by hospitals across the world, and many new health care centers have improved the comfortable atmosphere of their facilities thanks to the example of his Institute.  When you look at his story, as a doctor who is also a clown, you can’t help but think of this as an ideal role for Robin Williams.  And yet, this was a match that was doomed to fail.

It wasn’t enough for Hollywood to just approach Dr. Adams story in a straightforward way; they had to make it their own.  First off, there is little of the real life of Patch Adams that makes it to the screen at all.  Robin Williams is nothing like the real Dr. Adams in any way, which can be overcome with a strong, well crafted performance.  But, nope, that’s not what the filmmakers wanted.  They just thought, hey here’s a doctor who cracks jokes all day to make his patients happy; all we need is Robin Williams to go wild and we’ve got our movie.  That seems to be the general result once you watch the movie.  Robin is just put in front of a camera and is told to improvise.  That’s why you see him cracking jokes with props on set like with medical supplies or a skeletal replica model.  Robin Williams can certainly improvise gold out of anything, but you know what you never see him actually do in the movie; actual medical healing.  The movie gives the false notion that all a doctor really needs is positive attitude and a sense of humor to be the best doctor in the world.  And the movie shamelessly injects this underdog aspect to the narrative, where it seems like Patch is breaking against tradition in attempting to empathize with his patients, thus breaking all the rules of his trade.  But, this was never the case at all, and it is merely a lazy attempt to find conflict in an otherwise straightforward story.  The biggest problem with the way that the movie portrays Patch is the fact that it just plays up the comedic aspects of his practice, and not the medical part.  No surprise, Dr. Adams was sharply critical of this movie, and in particular, with regards to the way that it minimized the work that he does.  He is a jokester and someone who believes in the healing power of laughter, but Dr. Adams also knows that humor and actual medicine need to go together, and that there’s a lot of hard work that goes into perfecting that balance; something that the movie definitely misses the mark on.  Robin Williams’ effortlessness with comedy is no substitute for conveying the actual hard work that Dr. Adam’s Institute goes through every single day.

In many ways, I feel that Robin Williams was more or less saddled with the burden of carrying a lazy production.  Not a single moment of this film goes by without it falling into one cliche or another.  You have the whimsical Marc Shaiman musical score, a cast of characters that are in no way realistic but are merely pawns meant to conform to the whims of the story, and it is entirely predictable in every beat of the plot.  Like I stated before, the movie is less informed by the actual work that Dr. Adams has done, and instead crafts a story all on it’s own.  And it’s one that we’ve all seen before a million times.  In particular, there was something about 90’s films that seemed to love the cliche of the court room finale.  Robin Williams was in quite a few of those if I remember, including some good ones like at the end of Mrs. Doubtfire.  The reason that you would see this cliche pop up so much was because it was an easy platform for the screenwriters to craft a monologue for their characters which basically gives them a chance to encapsulate the message of the movie in a nice, easily delivered package.  Because of it’s over-usage, this cliche just ended up turning into a clear sign of lazy writing, and sure enough that’s what you’ll find in Patch Adams.  The movie shows Patch defending his practices in front of a council that seeks to revoke his medical licence, and of course he delivers a long-winded defense of his practice, which just ends up falling into the realm of common sense that no real person would ever disagree with.  And yet, this movie thought it was profound enough to justify the conflict, which by the way is a complete Hollywood fabrication.  It didn’t help that the movie was made by two filmmakers well out of their element; director Tom Shadyac and writer Steve Oedekerk, who had risen up in the industry making Jim Carrey comedies like Ace Ventura (1994) and Liar, Liar (1997).  You can clearly see them trying way too hard to be profound, and it ultimately backfires.  The movie is too silly to be taken seriously, and too restrained to ever become hilarious.  It ends up becoming a failure on both measures as a result.

But the movie’s most egregious aspects come in the way that it tries turn real history into something that you could say Hollywood views as more “marketable.”  Marketability is a tricky thing to figure out for a movie, because it is never really a clear cut thing.  Some executives in Hollywood believe they have a pulse on what can make a movie more marketable, but I highly doubt that someone with a high paying salary and a luxurious office and lifestyle in sunny Southern California really has the best insight into what the actual viewing public wants in every movie.  Oftentimes, you just have to take a chance and hope that an unconventional movie might hit the mark, which it sometimes does.  But, most of the time, you get these compromised films like Patch Adams which clearly shows a lack in faith from studio execs in the actual story of the real person, and they instead decided to inject their own ideas to make the film “better” in their eyes.  This might not be a problem if it at least is done tastefully.  Unfortunately, Patch Adams has one of the most tasteless alterations that’s ever been done to improve the marketability of a film.  In the movie, we are introduced to a fellow physician that helps Patch start up his free clinic in it’s early days named Carin (played by Monica Potter).  She not only becomes a reliable ally for Patch, but also a potential love interest.  You also learn of her history of sexual abuse as a child which haunts her into adulthood.  Halfway through the movie, she ends up being murdered by a deranged patient she is treating, breaking Patch’s heart in the process.  This may seem heartbreaking, until you realize that Carin never existed.  Dr. Adams did in fact have a best friend who was murdered in real life, but that person was in fact a man, who had no romantic relationship at all with Patch, and was never abused as a child.  Learning this fact just makes the fabrication of the character of Carin sickening, because it shows the complete disregard that the filmmakers had to honoring the life of it’s subject.  They wanted their movie to have a conventional love story attached to it, and so they swapped genders with a real life person, gave them an unnecessary and false history of abuse, and killed that person off purely for the dramatic effect.  This aspect, more than anything else, is what makes Patch Adams such a hateable movie.

The reason I wanted to spotlight the movie Patch Adams in this series, and in particular wanted to address this sickening alteration that they injected into the story to add more drama, is because it reveals a larger problem in Hollywood with the way they try too hard to make their films appealing to too wide an audience.  Now sure, movies are expensive and you need to reach as big of audience as you can.  But that should be the marketing team’s job, not the filmmakers.  The people in charge of making the movie should be working towards making the movie the best that it can be, and that should not include any worries about how can we make this scene play more successfully in the Heartland.  This is unfortunately something that you see too much these days as studios try to alter their movies in the middle of their productions, because they feel that the movies are not good enough to stand on their own merits.  So many movies nowadays are becoming susceptible to re-shoots and alterations in post, as a means of changing what was there before into something that is better equipped to reach all flavors of audiences.  You can definitely see this happening with the movies coming from DC Comics, as Suicide Squad (2016) and Justice League (2017) both felt like they suffered from very confused productions that had no idea which direction they were heading towards.  The changing of a movie to become more marketable can even happen as early as pre-production, where the studios make a filmmaker compromise their visions in order to meet the demands of the executives.  This played out recently with the upcoming movie All the Money in the World, directed by Ridley Scott.  In this telling of the kidnapping of billionaire J. Paul Getty’s grandson, Scott wanted his first choice of Christopher Plummer to play the crucial part of the stingy tycoon.  But, the studio forced him to cast Kevin Spacey instead because he was viewed as a bigger name, thus we saw him assume the role under some really bad old age makeup.  With the scandal that erupted around Spacey earlier this year, the studio made the unprecedented decision to erase their “ideal” actor from a near finished movie and Scott was able to do last minute re-shoots with the actor he wanted in the first place.  It goes to show that not every studio makes the right choices in how to make a movie more appealing, and that sometimes it’s better to trust something to stand on it’s own.  Patch Adams represents those bad choices to the very extreme.

The failure of Patch Adams as a movie basically distills down to the fact that you can’t force a movie into being based on thinking you know what the audience wants.  Robin Williams can make anything funny, but not when it’s in service of taking it’s subject seriously.  You can believe that a character’s tortured history makes for compelling drama, but not when it’s tagged onto a real tragedy that disrespects the memory of the actual person, making their existence not even matter.  To add further insult, the real Dr. Adams believed that the movie did nothing but just exploit his name and personal history, and did nothing to further his message of compassionate care-giving and alternative medicine.  Upon release of the film, Adams slammed the movie and Robin’s portrayal of him, saying very bluntly, “He made $21 million for four months pretending to be me, in a very simplistic version, and did not give $10 to my free hospital.”  Adams later clarified that he didn’t dislike Robin Williams at all, and did not fault him for the film; his anger was more directed at how the studio just exploited his story for their own gain and not to help further any cause.  He is right to be dissatisfied with the movie, because all it does is just use Dr. Adams as a premise rather than a person.  Robin Williams unfortunately was the right man at the time to portray a funny doctor, but the movie wrongly seems to believe that this is all that matters.  Adams’ career is defined by so many other things; his ingenuity, his activism, his personality, all of which the movie doesn’t seem to care about.  And what’s worse, it takes certain aspects of Adams’ life, like the death of his friend, and adds unnecessary dramatic touches to it, which in the end is highly disrespectful.  This movie only appeals to the easily manipulated, who eat up schmaltz like it’s candy.  Even Robin Williams grew tired of this stuff, and tried to branch out, but sadly never got to shrug off completely before his untimely death in 2014.  More than anything, Patch Adams is a horrible cinematic travesty because of all the things it wastes; the fascinating story of a trailblazer in the science of medicine, the unparalleled acting abilities of Robin Williams, and the fact that it could have used this movie to affect change for good, rather than fill the wallets of it’s greedy backers with near certain and safe box office returns.

For the longest time, one of the toughest shells to crack in the film industry was finding that breakthrough superhero movie that centered on a female heroine.  The struggle to make it work shouldn’t have been that hard, considering the wealth of fantastic female characters in all sorts of media, but Hollywood itself has unnecessarily been hedging their bets a little too much over the years.  The problem has been rooted in the fact that the industry still holds on to the out-dated notion that male and female audiences value different things when it comes to cinema.  Sure, there are films that only cater to audiences of certain genders and are made specifically with the purpose of hitting those demographics.  But there is a sizable audience in between that can appreciate one or the other.  There are a lot of men who like romantic, feminine centered dramas or comedies, and there more than enough women who enjoy a good action film.  Comic books find that the same is true.  I know plenty of women who love comic books just as much as men do, and the comic book industry has it’s fair share of female artists and writers who are making an impact on their own.  It’s not a boys only world as much as Hollywood seems to think it is.  So, why has it taken this long for Hollywood to actually invest in a superhero movie with a woman at it’s center?  It largely comes down to not having enough faith in the audience, political timidity, and a lack of understanding about the comic book medium in general.  But, most of all, it’s a perspective that’s driven by money, and the mistaken belief that female superheroes are not marketable the same way that their male counterparts are.

That’s all about to change with the long awaited release of DC’s Wonder Woman.  Not only is the movie expected to have a strong opening weekend, but the film is also earning rave reviews; which given DC’s track record up to now, is really unexpected and pleasantly reassuring.  Finally, we have a movie centered around a female superhero that actually lives up to the potential of the character, and doesn’t feel like a cynical ploy by the studio to appeal to a target audience.  It’s an earnest adaptation of a long established superhero, treated with the same care and respect as would be devoted to her male peers.  And it’s long overdue.  The reason why I think that this new Wonder Woman movie is succeeding, more than anything, is because of the lack of cynicism.  You can look at the movie and see that it was made with the best of intentions by it’s filmmakers, and not as an obligation nor as a grand statement.  She gets her own story told the way that suits her character the best, and because she’s on an equal footing with Batman and Superman, her story gets the same treatment.  That’s something that even the recent Superman and Batman reboots haven’t been able to achieve, so it’s a real testament to the character and her fan-base that such a success could be possible.  But, Wonder Woman‘s road to reality has been a shaky one, and there have been a lot of other failed attempts to bring a feminine presence to the superhero genre.  Of all of them, none managed to mismanage a female heroine worse than 2004’s Catwoman, a mind-boggling misfire that not only ruined an iconic character, but also completely dismantled any progress towards successful female driven action films for some time, and is a prime example of the very cynical approach by Hollywood that Wonder Woman sought to avoid.

To call Catwoman a superhero movie is doing a disservice to the genre.  It bears no redeeming value as either a comic book adaptation nor as an action movie in general.  Even it’s roots in the source comics is non existent.  There’s no way you can look at it and see it as anything other than a cynical attempt to reach an audience that the studio clearly didn’t understand.  But, why did this movie become ever come into existence in the first place.  It was a long, windy road called “development hell” that led to a monstrosity like this.  After Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992) brought a revised version of the character to the big screen, people began to show interest in her appeal as a cinematic icon once again.  Though Batman Returns received a mixed reaction from audiences and critics alike, Michelle Pfeiffer’s performance as the feline villainess was highly praised.  So much goodwill came Catwoman’s way that talk immediately started of a spinoff movie centered around her.  Unfortunately, even after receiving the green-light from Warner Brothers, the project languished for years, with both Burton and Pfeiffer dropping out of involvement and several rewrites and revisions being made to various script drafts over the years,  Eventually, the project dropped into the lap of a French visual effects producer named simply Pitof, who managed to land then recent Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry into the title role.  So, a long gestating film project finally got off the ground, but as we would soon learn, it was a project that probably should’ve been scrapped long ago.  It released into theaters in the summer of 2004 to almost universal derision.  People across the board hated it; critics, comic book fans, casual fans, and especially female fans.  For many, this wasn’t just a misfire, but a betrayal; to both a beloved character and to their hope of a successful movie that centered around a female super hero.

First of all, I would just like to point out how badly this film fails as a movie in general.  It is an ugly movie to look at, and represents many of the unnecessary excess that usually defined films of that era.  In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, we saw a lot of fresh new filmmakers experimenting with some of the new technology that was being made available.  That’s why you would see a lot of Hollywood films in this transition period of time using excessive amounts of CGI to make what they perceived as “cooler” and more exciting action scenes.  Unfortunately, not everything can be The Matrix (1999), and what we saw from this era was a lot of unappetizing eye candy.  Catwoman was a perfect example of that, with action scenes brought to incomprehensibility thanks to poor direction and obviously artificial visual effects used as a way to patch up the shoddiness of it all.  The film is notorious for how bad the CGI looks in several scenes, to the point where it’s clear that the Catwoman on screen is just a digital model and not the actress herself.  Other movie at the time did a far better job of switching between real people and digital stand ins when called for in a effects driven scene (the Lord of the Rings movies for example), but there’s nothing seamless here.  The movie even makes the mistake of getting up and close to the digital models, showing how not real they really are.  In addition, director Pitof uses a distracting soft focus throughout the movie, making everything feel texture-less.  It’s garish and unflattering, especially on the actors faces, and makes just sitting through the movie a chore.  And, like a lot of other pot-Matrix movies, the movie makes you all to aware of it’s film-making style.  Not a single scene in this movie is framed naturally, with dutch angles, slow-motion photography, and extreme lighting ruling much of the cinematography here.  Thank God Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005), with it’s more restrained style, was right around the corner, or else we would be getting more super hero movies that looked like this.

The cast itself doesn’t fare much better.  Halle Berry in particular just feels lost in the role.  Truth be told, it’s not really her fault, because the movie never allows her to be more than just model around in costume and act like a cat.  And believe me, this movie is relentless with it’s cat puns and innuendos.  The way I see it, Halle Berry might have taken the role thinking that it would be an empowering character and dignified hero, but only realized too late that the film was sadly fetishizing the character as a way of making her more appealing.  As a result, you get a rather uninterested performance from Ms. Berry, who clearly is just waiting out the clock so that she could collect that paycheck and put this sad experience behind her.  But, sadly for her, audiences didn’t forget.  Her performance as Catwoman has unfortunately cast a dark shadow on her career, one that I think she still hasn’t moved beyond.  She rarely headlines feature films anymore, and if she does, it’s usually made outside of the Hollywood machine.  It’s hard to believe that one bad role can set back a career that harshly, but that seems to be the case with Halle Berry and Catwoman.  And it’s something that shouldn’t just be laid upon her shoulders alone.  The remaining cast, including a very forgettable male lead played by Benjamin Bratt, and an embarrassingly over the top Sharon Stone as the villain, are even worse in the movie.  At least when called to do ridiculous things like running catnip across her face and eating cat food out of the can, Berry still goes for it.  I’d say the terrible direction crosses over into the depictions of the characters, and makes them innately unlikable, even despite modest efforts from the actors.

But, the movie’s biggest fault comes in the cynical nature of it’s creation.  To talk about the toxic nature of the film’s central theme, we have to address the sometimes touchy subject of feminism.  Now, I am a male writer who can in no way claim to be an expert on the subject of feminist issues.  All I want to do is to observe how Hollywood touches upon feminism and, in many cases, fall way out of line on the subject.  Feminism may not always be a topic at hand when it comes to adapting movies from comic books, but it certainly becomes one when Hollywood attempts to appeal to a female demographic that takes the genre very seriously.  There is definitely a disconnect between Hollywood and female audiences as to what constitutes a feminist identity in both narrative and production.  What Hollywood might see as empowering, feminists might see as condescending and offensive.  That’s something that very much defined the awkward portrayal of Catwoman.  When the filmmakers redesigned the character, for example, they sexualized the character to an uncomfortable degree, making her have more in common with a whip cracking dominatrix than a crime fighting do-gooder.  Now, to be fair, Catwoman has always been a character that has used her sexuality to her advantage, but here the subtlety in her portrayal is entirely dropped .  What the filmmakers saw as a strong, independent female in charge of her sexuality, feminists saw as a cynical ploy to use the character as a object of desire for male audiences.   By putting so little emphasis on her story and identity beyond that, you just spotlight the sexual nature of the character and it diminishes her to merely a tool for arousal.  That’s why the movie failed to appeal to a female audience, because they could see right through the cynicism, and rightly observed this as just another example of Hollywood not understanding their issues.

But to make matters worse, the movie has the gall to declare itself as an empowering, feminist movie.  There is a moment in the film where Berry’s Catwoman seeks answers from a mysticism expert, played by Frances Conroy.  She asks her why a history of female heroes who have been granted powers from felines over the centuries has been largely ignored, and the expert merely blames that on “male academia.”  That’s right; this movie’s feminist statement basically boils down to “women are great, because men are dumb.”  This is a clear minimalization of feminist ideals and is an insult to their cause.  It’s something that I found annoying in the recent all female Ghostbusters (2016) reboot as well.  Just like in Catwoman, Ghostbusters’ idea of declaring power for women is to knock down all the male characters around them and make them look weak and petty.  Now, like I said, I’m no expert on feminism, but I can safely say that this is not what the movement is all about.  Feminism is not about declaring superiority for one’s gender; it’s about demanding equal rights and respect in a society that doesn’t value women enough, and seeing that all women should have an equal footing with their male peers in all fields.  Taking cheap shots at men only diminishes what feminists are trying to accomplish, and as a result, it just motivates the men who have been a target of their ridicule to lash out back at them.  That’s the reckless and idiotic form of feminism that both Catwoman and Ghostbusters proudly claim for themselves.  It’s probably not a coincidence that both were directed by men who proclaim that they understand the plight of women.  Suffice to say, their help has not made things any better.

That’s why this new take on Wonder Woman is such a breath of fresh air.  It makes a concerted effort to appeal to all audiences, while at the same time taking the portrayal of her seriously, both as a icon of the comic book medium and of feminism.  And it thankfully pulls the concept of a female driven superhero film out of the dark shadow cast by the failure of Catwoman.  It’s safe to say that Catwoman is an example of the worst things that a superhero can be; whether it be female centered or not.  It’s cynical, garish, and just unappealing in every way.  And even worse, it represents just how little faith Hollywood can sometimes have for it’s audience and how little they value the issues that matter to them.  For years, female comic book fans have been clamoring for an honest portrayal of a heroine that could hold their own in this male-dominated genre.  Up until now, they’ve only been able to remain satisfied with their Princess Leias, and their Ripleys, and their Furiosas, all of whom are great heroines on their own, but who could never be seen sharing the screen with the likes of Batman and Superman.  Catwoman only compounded the problem, making Hollywood think that female driven super hero films were bad for business for a long while.  But, as we’ve seen, it’s not the heroines themselves that make the movies fail, it’s the lackluster executions of their stories.  A Catwoman movie could have worked if she was treated with a little more respect and dignity.  We’re thankfully heading in that direction now, finally.  Wonder Woman shows that female super heroes can succeed at the box office and hold their own, and hopefully it opens the door for other feminine heroes just like her.  Even Catwoman managed to find a better life outside her own movie, when Christopher Nolan included her in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), as portrayed by Anne Hathaway, showing that the character is still a valued one.  The only good to come from 2004’s Catwoman is that it now serves as a cautionary tale of how not to make a female super hero movie, and let’s hope, for the sake of other female super heroes waiting in the wings, that they don’t fall into the same, toxic trap.