That being said, it'll be nice to see that retro-future production design again, if they don't chicken out and update all of it. Like, I almost wish they'd lose the Aliens and just make a different genre set in that universe.

Give me space Die Hard with the Alien/Blade-Runner design-work.

I hate that Top Gun is the go-to movie when people think about Tony Scott, and that he gets written off based on it. That was a gun-for-hire movie he did to break into hollywood, and Jerry Bruckheimer is far more responsible for the content than Scott is. And for what it's worth, Scott directed the hell out of it, it looks amazing.

But the stuff that's really representative of his work is his 90s output, which married ultra stylish, flashy visuals, with good scripts and performances. Look at the casts he worked with, giving great early roles to James Gandolfini and Viggo Mortenson, making Denzel a star. And he wasn't complacent either, when people like Michael Bay started ripping him off (without any of the art, or moral center, or restraint), he kept pushing his style further and further to see how experimental he could get. This makes his filmography post Spy Game fascinating, because nobody else would take 100 million dollar R-rated summer movies and do the kinds of crazy experimentation he did with editing, double-exposures, hand-crank (and doing it all on film, not digitally in post). He finally went too far on Domino, but you have to admire that he was pushing to see how far you could take that stuff.

Basically, you don't have to like his movies, but it's extremely reductive to say he was just a lazy gun-for-hire, I'd kill for more Tony Scotts right about now to inject a little style into our blockbuster landscape.

In-before anyone else, here's the ultimate version of the blade runner soundtrack, wonderfully mixed into an awesome 2 hour piece of ambient 80s retrofuturism:

Great commentary guys, very good analysis and perspectives from all. Glad you came around on it Teague.

That being said, I will not stand for this flippant dismissal of Tony Scott, one of the best populist directors we ever had. For my money, Tony is the more consistent of the 2 brothers, and has made more overall enjoyable movies (that always look amazing). Ya, he never swung for the fences and made an Alien or a Blade Runner, but True Romance, Crimson Tide, Last Boyscout, Spy Game, Man on Fire, Deja Vu, and Unstoppable are all awesome movies and that's not a filmography to sneeze at. Even his weaker stuff like Enemy of the State, Top Gun, and Domino is better and has more personality than anything big-budget coming out today.

Rendezvous with Rama is dead in the water by all accounts. They were trying to make it with Fincher for years and couldn't get it off the ground. Maybe post-Interstellar doing well and if Foundations is a hit on HBO it could happen one day.

A lot of these are more likely to end up as premium cable adaptations, I really think that's going to be the next big wave we see. Game of Thrones has shown epic budget fantasy can be done on TV, Westworld is coming this year and has a great chance of being amazing, Foundations will be next. If those work, it wouldn't shock me to see HBO doing a massive-scale adaptation of Dune in a couple years.

Interesting write-up on what went wrong and how this even got green-lit in the first place:
http://deadline.com/2015/02/jupiter-asc … 201369053/

Like I've said before, I can't knock these two for their ambition, but I don't give them a pass for it either. If you're gonna spend 200 million on your original wacky ass sci-fi movie and are given final-cut (?!!!), you'd better damn-well make sure you get it right. They have terrible taste in performances and dialogue (honestly the warning signs are even there in the 1st matrix in a couple scenes), and no amount of sincerity changes that. The end result of all this is going to be a dozen original sci-fi movies by young filmmakers getting rejected/cancelled.

You have to just burn through XCOM. It will consume your life for 100 hours, and then suddenly when you're done, you'll never have the urge to play it again.

Everyone talks about how Snipes was a nightmare to Goyer on set, but I can't blame him. Every decision Goyer was bringing to the table was a terrible idea that shit on the previous movies, no wonder he was pissed off and just got high all day to get through it.

Aliens was my favorite movie of all time for the longest time. That's changed over the years, but man is it an awesome piece of work, absolutely insane given the budget. I will say, on last viewing, it suddenly wasn't clicking for me the way I remembered, and all the marine banter started to feel uncomfortably close to some of the bad writing in Avatar. I'd like to give the Theatrical version a shot (I've basically always watched the extended), because as much as I like the sentry gun sequence, I do think a shorter run-time helps the movie, and that 1st hour in the extended cut starts to drag.

It does shock me how 30 years later, pretty much no-one has come close to matching the level of intensity of the final hour in Aliens. Video-games have imitated it to hell and back, but I can't think of any movies that have been able to match that relentless "everything is fucked we need to run" level of pacing and pull it off. T2 arguably, parts of The Descent, The Matrix maybe? Nothing feels like it matches up. That's crazy to think about for a movie that cost $16 million

To be fair the rest of the police academy movies get progressively more kid friendly, and I can attest to growing up with 3-6 on in regular rotation

Watched a 1969 Alain Delon flick I'd never heard of before called The Sicilian Clan. Interest peaked as the late 60s early 70s are basically the golden era of French crime films, with this sandwiched neatly between Le Samourai and Le Circle Rouge, and I was right. It's terrific, looks gorgeous (the blu-ray transfer is great), has an all star cast, a wonderful Ennio Morricone score, and very elegant 70s film-making.

If there's a knock against it, it's that this feels like a bit of a big budget cash in on a genre and actors who were becoming extremely popular internationally. So you have 3 big name leads, and a pretty predictable heist story that goes from Paris to Rome to New York in a way that feels sort of similar to what we see now with movies suddenly going to China in the 3rd act to rake in the foreign dollars. 

That being said, while it's not as raw and restrained as Le Circle Rouge or Le Samourai, for a big budget version of that kind of movie, it's still really awesome and retains that cool genre vibe.

For Interstellar, I would also say, if you didn't see it in 70mm Imax, you can't judge the effects work. That may seem harsh, but having seen it both ways, there's just no comparison. The experience of Interstellar with the full vertical framing was way superior to anything in Gravity for me, even if Gravity was doing much more technically sophisticated things. Yes, the blackhole/workhole sequences are CG, but they've also got model and full-scale practical ships and robots, not to mention actually throwing massive clouds of dust around, filming in Iceland, etc. That stuff goes a long way. Ultimately, whatever the mix of practical and cg was on Interstellar, the end result is breathtaking and I don't see it losing the oscar. Remember, it's not just purely about tech, it's how it's applied to convey an experience.

Edit: Also, no way in hell Hobbit will win anything. Those movies are incredibly ugly, and still despite all the tech look like fake video-game cut-scenes half the time

The Guest - The all around best action movie of the year, with great performances, music (an amazing synth soundtrack), comedy, pacing. Imagine a more fun, less self-serious version of Drive, and you get the picture. A total throwback to classic John Carpenter and Terminator-era James Cameron. It hits blu-ray in January, and you are seriously missing out if you don't give this one a watch.

The Raid 2 - in case you missed it, at a minimum it's a must-watch to see a master-class in action film-making, there are sequences that are better than anything I've ever seen done in the genre, and will ruin all other action movies for you. As an actual movie, it doesn't hold together unfortunately, but the highs are so damn good.

Interstellar - Seriously, it's still playing in IMAX, go see it the way it's meant to be seen. I'm baffled at some people's indifference to this movie. It's beautiful, it's ambitious, it's pro-science. Don't wait for video.