Completely agree, I love alternate history stories, if they're done well. I just have absolutely no confidence this will be anywhere close to done well.

In Titanic, you're willing to buy that these two fictional people have a fictional story because Cameron obviously paid attention to the nonfictional details. If they do that here, it will be brilliant and I will love it. They won't do that here.

Yeah, I know.

My favorite part about this is how badly it HAS to mangle history, which I can safely say knowing nothing about it except the synopsis.

You see, Apollo 18 was a planned but cancelled mission. NASA had already assigned a crew for it, including the commander, Dick Gordon. Gordon was the Command Module Pilot (Michael Collins' and Jack Swigart's job) for Apollo 12. This movie presupposes that the crew of Apollo 18 actually went and died.

Except Gordon is still very much alive. I've met him. Twice. Very nice man.

Odds that this movie will bother to explain the discontinuity between our and its history? Or explain that if Apollo 18 wasn't cancelled, then why Jack Schmidt (the only professional scientist to walk on the moon) was switched from 18 to 17 at the last minute because of pressure from the scientific community?

Yeah, I'm not counting on it. If, by some miracle they actually do, Kranz as my witness, I will give this movie a pass on absolutely any other magic bean related matter.

Pffft. Blade's a vampire movie. Everyone knows that.

Duh.

Listen, I just want this to be over. So how about I just agree to a nice big round of tax cuts for everyone!*

But seriously, that shit is just unreasonably bananas. Way more bananas than usual. That's all I'm saying.

*And by everyone, I mean just the rich.

Oh please. Everybody feels that way about everything (generally).

I'm no worse a person for voicing the opinion.

People are not entitled to be wrong.

[serious face!]

Yeah, I think we're on the same page, I'm just asserting my opinion to make sure everyone knows how big my dick is.

8===============>

Where 1 "=" = your penis

And that's the simple unresolvable difference between us. You believe it, I don't. I don't generally consider myself to be the kind of person so married to my own point of view that I can't even conceive of someone else's, but in this case, I'm afraid I really just can't fucking imagine how anybody could believe a single, solitary moment of this godforsaken piece of shit.

That's a false distinction I think. If your characters are properly crafted, they will create the plot that you want. "Plot driven" is just a nice way of saying what happens in the movie happens because the filmmaker wants it to happen, as opposed to crafting the characters that would create those events organically.

Eh, ultimately, it's just an exercise in labeling. We have to remember that whenever we humans create categories and assign things to them, it's just an artificial construction that we invented. The lines in the sand that we draw are more arbitrary than not.

It applies to film genres just as much to the question of whether or not Pluto is a "planet." Draw your lines in the sand all you like, but the stuff at the edges is always going to be fuzzy.

Much like the question, "What's the single greatest film of all time?" is meaningless and using the "perfect movie" criteria is a superior measurement, the better measurement is to simply ask whether a movie succeeds at being believable or not. And for me at least, Lord of the Rings does while Spiderman 2 does not.

Yup, yup, and yup.

The director's ultimate responsibility is to the story. And Inception's story is more convoluted mess than layered profound genius.

Fantasy my ass. They're running around midtown. If it's in Metropolis, you have more leeway, but the fact that the Nolanverse's Gotham is more realistic than Raimi's New York City doesn't help Spiderman's cause.

And yes, sure, the decision to set Marvel in real world settings was made decades before Raimi ever touched Spiderman, but that's the state of affairs, like it or not.