movie night, or "screwing with the storyline again" · 8:49pm Mar 18th, 2014
Welcome to Midnight's Spoilery Movie Night.
If you don't want to read about atlantic rim (not pacific -- yes, really, the BAD one), enders game and the new robocop, then move along.
Number one was "atlantic rim" by our friends at the asylum. Jesus fuck christ wept, you have to see this movie if only to see how utterly terrible it is. It's basically a fanfiction of pacific rim done by somebody with no budget and even less story telling ability. There's sergeant angry eyepatch guy, there's big chief running bull, there's flyboy mcjockstrap, captain watermellon and commander tampax and they're all utterly fucking useless. People suddenly randomly turn up having died, their bodies are left in the street for the people who found them to almost literally say "yup, time for that party" and... dear god.
People, you should see this movie and then understand why bad stories shouldn't be given the spotlight.
And then you should understand why we weep at the drivel that makes the favourites box here on fimfic.
Anyway, quite apart from that I saw two other movies that bear talking about, because they have been changed from their original source in important ways.
First I'll go for "Ender's Game". Now the book was written by a nazi apologist, features bloggers saving the world, a smug, self-satisfied gary stu anti-hero and a psychopath-laden army corp which is both stunningly obliviously the hitlerjungen and also entirely believable.
And the movie whitewashes all of that: Ender "accidentally" kills bonzo and is wracked with guilt over it, rather than have him coldly and clinically murder the boy and stuffing his body where it won't be found. Boohoo I didn't mean to lose control like my brother who is never mentioned again in the movie.
Give me a fucking break.
They whitewash the fact that Ender is a coldly calculating, psychopathic murderous little bastard, and then they refuse to acknowledge the "ra ra god bless the military" spiel that they've been force-feeding their viewers for the first half of the movie. It's quite frankly sickening when they decide to turn Ender into a sympathetic character by giving him some mysterious mental link with the alien queen after he's genocided their entire race. I guess that's what hitler apologist Card did, sure, but he at least took his time about it by shitting out another few bookturds.
tl;dr version is that the movie does an about face on the morals and ethics presented in the first half of the movie (might makes right, the end justifies the means, glory be to the army) and pretends that lovey-dovey was "the right answer" all along, even though it a) patently wasn't and b) is classic whitewashing of history by the victors. The still-burning corpse of a shattered world is still burning on screen and already the film-makers are fellating the revised version of their imaginary history's dick. It makes me angry, because that's what happens, but it's also going against the grain of the movie for an ending which hollywood would find acceptable (because people are stupid and cry if they don't get a happy/sympathetic ending) which is completely at odds with the actual morals and ethics presented in the books and in the first half of the movie.
But I guess nobody really wants to watch 2 hours of hitler apology dressed up as scifi, huh?
And the last movie is the revised "robocop". If you want to know what makes the new robocop both surprising, interesting AND disappointing, then let me sum it up in a few key points:
1) the robots work perfectly.
In the original movie (which is superior, you should go see it if you have not, and only see this new one to compare -- the original is gorier, punchier, funnier and more direct) ED-209 hilariously malfunctions the first time we see it, and it guns the absolute bejesus out of one hapless board member. Very memorable. So memorable that it is still a part of the zeitgeist even today.
Now the startling thing with the new movie is that the new robots work absolutely perfectly. At one point, Robocop's got himself in some trouble and is being gunned down by OCP robots... and one of his buddies runs in front of them. In the original, we all know what would have happened. In the new one... the robots stop firing because they would be hitting an innocent.
They work. Flawlessly.
Are you getting this? The story of the original was that the man was superior to machine. The new one turns that on its head, and I'm left wondering just WHY the fuck OCP isn't allowed to use its robots on the streets when they are quite obviously superior to humans. Including robocop.
2) didn't I mention that? Robocop is flawed. Robocop in the new movie is shit when it's Murphy doing the piloting, so they override his consciousness with the machine, and then trick his brain into thinking that his brain is doing the job when it's not. Not at all. It's the robot. And it does it, again, perfectly.
In fact, the crux of the movie is that the OCP CEO is a shyster, as usual, and robocop overrides the machine and shoots the guy anyway even when he shouldn't have. So in effect, the flesh and blood copper breaks the law where the robot won't. And I'm sorry, but even though the CEO deserved to be iced, that's not actually how it's supposed to go down. Batman would be ashamed.
The movie is also devoid of blood and guts, as usual with the neo-puritan bullshit being shat out by hollywood lately. You can murder all the people you want, just as long as you don't show titties or blood.
So, thoughts?
The new Robocop movie was written to be a parable about the dangers of drones in modern military/police use... by someone who apparently never watched the original, nor understood its themes. Hell, I bed they'd blink at you blankly if you so much as said the word 'cyberpunk'.
Wow.... that stuff on Robocop... that's pretty awful. Why would they even make a cyborg cop if the robots worked? That was the whole reason they went for the cyborg route in the original
[edit]
omg, they fixed the [page_break] tag on the feed! It works now
Wait, so they flip-flopped on the message of Ender's Game, and turned Robocop's entire premise completely inside-out? Yay, two movies I don't need to watch.
1936219
Yeah! I just... there weren't any dangers about using the OCP drones! They fucking worked! Perfectly! In combat and in civilian settings! They were faster, more accurate, more dependable and therefore safer than humans!
What were we supposed to be afraid of again?
1936228
Yeah, it totally turns the original on its head. And then it makes the unforgivable sin of abandoning the promising side-stories about consciousness and cyborgization that it presents within the first half.
1936251
Correctamundo. Both movies are a waste of time. Read Ender's Game if you want - but be aware it's basically hitler apologism dressed up as scifi,and even at it's best it's smugly ayn randian and so far up its own head that it postulates bloggers could save the world - but you're not really missing anything if you don't.
And watch the original robocop rather than the new one (I and II - though II isn't as good. And III is a complete waste of oxygen). It really is far superior in every respect. Even the effects are passable, which is pretty good for a nearly 30 year old movie.
1936274
Oh, I've read Ender's Game (both the short story and the novel), and IMO the main plot-line is a good enough story. I'm not a follower of the "Hitler Wiggin" school of thought, but I don't think he's a good role model either. I suspect that most of the things people object to (aside from the asinine blogging B-plot) are due to the short story being stretched and watered down to fill a novel. The message of the short story was clearly something else entirely. You can find it here if you're interested.
As for Robocop, I've seen them, and I agree completely.
You must be reading a different book than the one I have in my hands: Bonzo (age 13), corners Ender (age 10) 7-on-1 in a shower room, then dismisses his bookends to guard the door and advances on Ender. Ender tries to stall, then pleads with Bonzo. Bonzo attacks, Ender repels him, and while Bonzo continues to be disoriented, Ender reflects whether he wants to have to repeat this fight again and again, or whether he wishes Bonzo to leave him alone. Ender decides that he wants to have some peace, then Falcon-kicks Bonzo's gonads in what, somehow, turns out to be a deadly hit. He then marches out of the shower room, through the bookends, and starts crying.
A) He marched through the other six who had participated on the ambush.
B) By this point, it was pretty well established that the entire Battle School was riddled with security cameras. Therefore, your argument is doubly invalid.
I don't think you really understand the meaning of those words. If anything, Ender works like a typical child soldier, with the only sociopathic problem of having some morals.
1936411
Come to think of it, you're right. It was actually the head-butt that unintentionally killed Bonzo; he was dead on his feet when Ender kicked him. Ender never specifically tried to kill Bonzo, just put him down hard enough to not have to do it again, and he didn't even decide to do that until after the fatal blow. Ender just left the body there and walked out when he heard the teachers coming, assuming that they would take him to the infirmary.
The short story clearly stated that the whole plan was to craft a living weapon, and that Ender was simply the product of that plan. Everything that happened to him was specifically engineered to produce just such a personality. Ender isn't a hero, he's just a tool that did its job exactly as intended.
I am so glad I am having zero to do with any of that. Plus the original Robocop is a classic and nobody should remake it because that is sacrilege against policemachine-robojesus.
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1936795
I didn't care to watch the new Robocop movie (simply watching the poster of a black-patina Robocop with an exposed hand and a red line for a visor told me that somebody just didn't get the character). On the other hand, I could recommend the mini-series "Robocop: Prime Directives": it picks up from the first and second movies and projects some ten or fifteen years into the future, and employs its 8 hours to try to do in-depth character studies, and brings the franchise to a close.
1936354
Thanks for the link to the short story. I just read it.
You are right in that the novel and the short story are significantly different: Novel-Ender is a child with a family (his sister) and a firm moral basis that not even Battle School can delete from him. Short-Ender, on the other hand, is the commander version of Master Chief from the HALO franchise: he could not even attempt to function in a healthy society, and didn't really understand his actions beyond knowing that he had achieved his assigned objectives.
1936411
I might actually be misremembering, or remembering a different book in the series and a different event. Hmm. Still, the movie at least flubs the "he must never have any support" angle multiple times, and Ender really isn't a likeable, sympathetic creature, and the tacked on feel-better-about-ourselves ending did miss the original point.
1937923
I think you are. Ender was actually fairly sympathetic simply because he didn't give a shit. He was a kid who'd been pushed beyond his limits, and isolated at every turn to break down his humanity. He killed the Formic homeworld because he thought the whole thing was some sort of twisted 'test' his teachers were punishing him with, so he decided to act like a completely murderous bastard just to get them to wash him out of the program.
Little did he know he was winning the war.
I hate defending Card, because the guy's a bigoted asshole, but part of the genius of Ender's Game is that Ender is only able to do what he does because the IF has spent years isolating a faily empathetic young boy and making him into a sociopath for their own ends.
1938650
Maybe I'm remembering Bean from Ender's Shadow?
1938685
Could be. Bean (gene-tweaked genius who grew up on the streets) did explicitly plan the deaths of several other children before he could even walk properly, and didn't stop there. He learned to be a manipulative, power-grabbing little shit from day one, because it was the only way to survive. He's an interesting character, but he's a damn sight less sympathetic than Ender.