Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Audiophilander (A) on January 23, 2004 at 11:37:12

In Reply to: Can I play? posted by Troy on January 23, 2004 at 10:07:06:

While mostly a matter of personal preferences there are some places where we are more closely in agreement: movies like Blade Runner, Alien, Brazil and perhaps The Shape of Things to Come (i.e., except for the latter's overly pompous dialogue and speeches, which is stiffling in it's sincerity). There are others where I definitely see more THERE there (i.e., Metropolis, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Thing and Starship Troopers), but in some cases you have to understand the source material and the Director's intentions to fully appreciate the material. This is especially true of both The Thing and Starship Troopers.

In The Thing, based on John W. Campbell's short story, Director John Carpenter was trying to envision the most ALIEN alien being conceivable while playing off of the paranoid distrust of isolated researchers; in so doing this version manages to remain truer to Campbell's original concept than the film noirish "carrot man" more in keeping with it's cold-war allegory.

In respect to Starship Troopers, this much maligned "bug" movie deserves every bit as much credit for Director Paul Verhooven's successful capturing of the original story's subtext of a "future-perfect" fascist society as it does criticism for his straying from Heinlein's more cerebral vision.

While I will agree that John Carpenter's low budget Escape from New York and big budget Starman are good films that sequentially bracket The Thing, the former (Escape from New York) suffers from the comic book simplicity of it's two dimensional anti-hero Snake Pliskin and the latter (Starman) from it's forced sentimentality. BTW, I do tend to think of John Carpenter's Starman as a better film than Stephen Spielberg's more popular E.T., if only because Starman takes a more thoughtful adult approach to an almost identical theme. Of these three sequential Carpenter films (i.e., Escape from New York, The Thing & Starman), I'm of the opinion that The Thing is far and away the best.

AuPh