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Interesting.

This would somewhat balance out the fact that people who may be more inclined to like or love a film tend to watch it closer to release. Depending on the factors one considers I could see this being a wrong approach aswell, the type of weighting as pointed out probably only depends on what the individual thinks looks good as it is re-weighted, factoring in their biases and previous reference points.

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I'm 50-50 on alot of things about it.

It's incredible at times, and cringey at times.
All set pieces are superb, and Zimmers score enhance them so well. Some things rival Gravity in sheer awe and impact in the theater seat.

All the talk about love being the only thing able to transcend time and space, I just can't overlook the fact that it's complete mumbo-jumbo. Hate is just as valid a feeling as love, and logically would have just the same characteristics and suggested properties (being able to both hate and love someone across time and space). The bit about love was, I guess, supposed to ring emotionally true and not necessarily supposed to be taken literally, it was more about driving forces and what makes us do what we do, but it's so obviously such an over-simplified view and doesn't make sense even superficially.

Liked the hinted idea of the original timeline being that MM gets sucked into the black hole and dies, and Anne Hathaway populates the new planet alone, presumably creating a new set of humans that, long into the future, perhaps because of love, decide to honor their ancestors by reaching back through time and saving MM and allowing him to communicate a solution to the survival of humanity in that alternate timeline.

Though I don't know if I really feel it was necessary to spend all this time leading humanity to saturn, a wormhole, a black hole, only for MM to transmit some data back to his daughters bedroom. It just seems like such a waste of resources to end up right at the beginning. I guess technically the higher-dimensional future-humans couldn't interact themselves and needed MM to get to a wormhole to work as the mechanism for transmitting it, it just didn't ring logistically true for me. Maybe i'll have a different opinion of it.

What was Matt Damons motivation? I assume he wanted off the planet since it was dead. Why not just tell the guys who came for him, "yeah so this place is dead, let's move on to the other candidate planets". He wanted to leave and that would allow him to leave in the company of the new crew. Instead he leads them on with incorrect info, tries to kill MM, and then still leaves, which he could have anyways if he's just told them straight up when they found him.
Does anyone else understand his character actions better?

The end has MM and us realize Anne Hathaway is alone colonizing a planet on her own. Which was a bit clunkily delivered as his daughter finally saw her father again after so long, she was way too quick to just say "Hey, how's it going... So you should go". The entire film was about their connection and his promise to return, and I as an audience member got serious blueballs from that brushed-over interaction. There was barely time for a single tear to roll down their cheeks before it was over.

And then we're lead to assume MM borrows a very small, fragile looking space plane to go to Anne Hathaway. I guess the space station they were on was close to Saturn, but it felt like MM was just going to pop over to Wallmart to buy some groceries. Did he even pack lunch? Or was his pod capable of hibernation? Did he go to Anne Hathaway to bring her back to the space station, or to join her on the planet? Shouldn't MM atleast tell someone else he was going, just in case? Or was Brandts presence and isolation in the other galaxy common knowledge and other people around Saturn were already on the way there anyways with other expeditions to start life on that planet instead of earth. Surely it would be safer for MM to wait for a bigger ship or cruise to travel there, rather than taking a small plane himself? If he went there now himself, are the others humans coming along right behind him, or are they like 50 years away from mounting their exodus from our solar system to the new planet, and MM and Hathaway are going to die alone (which they may think is worth it, but it hardly seems in line with the more poetic, hopeful tone of the ending). Just one line about an expedition already being staged and everyone joining her shortly, and MM deciding to go slightly ahead of everyone else, perhaps subtly yet explicitly driven by love, would have given some well-needed exposition to make a more satisfying ending with a distinct emotional point, in this case hope of humans very soon reuniting again.


When MM finds the NASA place they immediately recommend him as a pilot. MM asks why when they didn't even know about him an hour earlier. They explain they had pilots, but none as good. Obviously MM is an asset for them now.
But they also know who MM is when he arrives at NASA, they know his name and his record if I recall correctly. MM also drive max a day to get to them. Wouldn't NASA at some point contact him and ask him to pilot the craft? They need a pilot, they have one a days drive away. What gives? This is about the future of mankind, are they so secretive they cannot even contact a potentially very valuable asset and see what he thinks of the idea? It feels like "Well, now that you're here, you're perfect for this job. We just couldn't be bothered to drive a day ourselves and contact you, since we obviously know who you are and that you exist". Also they don't even seem to screen him for mental or physical health, they offer him the job on the spot pretty much. It feels like he leaves a week later at most. Matt Damon was supposedly a prime candidate and look how stable he turned out to be in space. NASA simultaneously has too little confidence in MMs necessity (they never specifically sought him out for the job), and too much confidence, offering him the job at a moments notice. Either seems the opposite of what would be expected from the people who are planning the continuation of the human race.

Stream of consciousness above, but I definitely need to see this a second time.

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I felt really bad when I saw the news, so I can only imagine how those close to him feel. Most things I can think of saying are just platitudes, so I'll just honestly say that my thoughts are with you guys, and Mr Scott.

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This series is probably, by now, one of the biggest missed opportunities ever.

The 3rd one, which I just saw, really cemented it for me. I spent entire sequences, minutes at a time, completely apathetic as I watched the screen. It's been a long time since something so completely failed to grab my attention.

The visual language, editing and shooting style is so utterly disjointed, it's often hard to see how 2 consecutive shots even fit together. Everything seems to be shot in inserts, and you rarely get any master or overview shots to show relationships between different parts of the scene.
The CGI for the most part is terrible and stands out like a sore thumb. In EX3 they even completely CG a helicopter explosion. The helicopter in question is on the ground, completely stationary. They didn't even bother getting a helicopter shell and packing it with real explosives.

It also doesn't help that they keep packing even more people in front of the camera. The core group of actors in the first one were already plenty, but you could atleast fit them all comfortably in one frame, and if they were all involved in an action scene, you could comfortably divide them in such a way that you had 2 or 3 groups that could be intercut with each other, and the viewer could retain the information and track them all.

EX3 has a final battle which goes on, and on, and on, and on. Never do you really know what's going on, because they are literally trying to track and cut between 10+ people all doing different things, and barely doing anything as a group to make them easier to keep track of cognitively.
Because all people also need their screentime and moment to shine, there is absolutely no pacing to the editing or action. The music reflects this aswell, it's just 10 minutes straight of climax music. The editing pace never seems to depart from a disorienting 1 second per cut average, and after just a minute or so of the action scene, you are already so bombarded with images and sound that it's impossible to think ahead, to try and anticipate where the movie is going or what the actors are going into/are in peril of. All you can do is passively react to flashes of images and one-liners. Every time they cut between these 10+ people all doing their thing, it's like I'm seeing them for the first time. "OK, what is this person doing again?".

EX3 was to me worse, way worse, than any Transformers movie in this respect. Bay would atleast sometimes use gratuituous slowmotion which gives your brain a second to breathe, and he actually seemed to have access to wide-angle lenses. EX3 uses neither.

The action is also mindnumbingly staged, again no effort is put into building any tension whatsoever, bad guys just come around corners or through windows and are disposed of. "There's a bad g- ...And there he goes...".


Normally I wouldn't care, but when they've got this kind of pedigree in front of the camera, it just blows my mind that this is what they come up with. Even a 90 minute movie filled with nothing but homages to, or entire lifted scenes, from the actors previous movies would be preferable, since the movies that came before (the Rambo series, Rocky series, Jet Lis martial arts movies, Arnolds films, hell even Dolphs films) all had, at the very least, an older, more mature sense of style in their execution.

Just had to vent a bit, feel free to give some feedback if you've got any.

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Herc, that's quite similar. Amadeus and a Wes Anderson movie (Tenenbaums in my case) seems to be some recurring recipe... smile

I now remember I watched the prison film "Papillon" in school aswell. I should become an elementary school teacher and show the kids "2001" to take it to the logical conclusion...


..."Mulholland Dr." in a post-natal ward. That is surely endgame.

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