Totally agree. I still need to see that whole series. Really liked the shows I saw. I got most of the first few season under my belt.
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It was very clear it was not going to be a true Shadowrun movie. It would have been called Shadowrun if that was the case. (And why haven’t we still had any Shadowrun movies? That world seems perfect for movies.) For one, it was going to take place today, rather than in a cyberpunk future. It had too many obvious modern day references, and it’s a buddy cop movie, just with fantasy races.
I did not expect Shadowrun, but was hoping for something interesting. And it was interesting enough for me.
That was kind of the point. The police was clearly racist towards Orcs, and Will Smith cared more about fitting in with his co-workers than about his new partner or social justice for Orcs. His arc is about learning to see Orcs as people too. Not the most original arc perhaps, but still from a perspective we haven’t seen yet.
I agree some characters were very flat and/or caricatures, but they worked well enough for a movie like this. I agree about the one character with the most humane motivation, but I disagree that he was the only real character; everybody had something they wanted.
There was very clearly a plot. 5 different groups were after the same thing, all for their own reasons. The protagonists accidentally got their hands on it, and had no idea what to do with it, except that they were pretty sure giving it to gangsters, a creepy cult, or corrupt cops would be a bad idea. They were in over their head, while trying to figure out how to do the right thing.
I don’t understand how you can miss everybody else’s motivation. Maybe they were less interesting, but they were absolutely there.
The renegade elf cult wanted their wand back; it was theirs, and a big part of their power. What exactly they planned to do with it doesn’t matter (presumably bring back that Dark Lord somehow), but it was theirs and they want it back.
The magic FBI wants to stop the renegade elf cult. That’s their entire job. If they lost their wand, that’s a perfect opportunity for them, and they certainly want to stop the elves from recovering their wand. And they are obviously the best safe keepers for that wand.
The corrupt cops expect to be able to use it for money, power, or fulfilling their dreams somehow. They clearly don’t exactly know how and are in over their head, but they recognise this as their one shot at moving up in the world.
One gang leader wants to be able to walk. I’m not sure how he expects to use the wand for it, but he clearly has a wish he wants fulfilled.
The Orc gang is mostly interested because everybody else is interested. They consider it somewhat their turf because one of theirs (even if he is an outcast) is involved. They feel Jakoby owes them loyalty, and therefore the wand.
And of course our two cops. They just want to get out of this alive without having to give that wand to the bad guys.
It’s not a Shadowrun movie, but it’s a scenario that could work very well in a Shadowrun game.
I don’t know who the target audience is, but I liked it, and clearly a lot of people liked it. If you don’t, that’s fine. I totally get that not everybody likes it, but this movie clearly has an audience that enjoys it.
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I downloaded a laserdisc rip way back when. I thought it had been pretty much abandoned since all my research suggested there was no DVD or Blu-Ray. I was pleasantly surprised to see it on the HBO app, and didn’t even know it was on iTunes.
The sequel was okay. Better and better-known actors than the original, better production value, but a weaker story. Lost its gritty charm. But overall, not bad.
Let’s not ignore the fact that actors are cheaper than CGI, which is cheaper than puppetry. The bumpy forehead is actually a mid-tier alien. The really cheap shows use purple hair dye or blue body paint and call it a day.
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I watched a couple of clips with these characters. While they are above the usual lightly masqueraded Star Trek variety, which usually could be classified at hominid, both are clearly humanoid. Their laugh, their facial expressions, even their voice are indistinguishable from that of humans. So I’d put them quite squarely into the class of aliens Michael wanted to get rid of.
I watched it, and I loved the visual depiction of the wand. And apparently I will watch any kind of stupid shit with Will Smith in it (see: Wild Wild West)
My problem with it is that it kept on throwing race and discrimination prominently into the foreground, but then the movie didn’t really seem to have anything deeper to say about those issues than “hey, what if we make a movie where people are racist against orcs?”
And I’m not sure how “the Dark Lord” works with the rest of this. Any kind of inhuman absolute evil kind of confuses the issue of how normal complicated deeply human people can still be shitty and racist. Like the movie kind of uncritically accepts that orcs are getting discriminated against because they backed the Dark Lord 2000 years ago. first of all, really? So, what’s been happening in the 2000 intervening years then? Second, if orcs are the stand in for black people and apparently orcs are discriminated against because of some kind of ancestral sin, then wtf kind of parallel are we drawing here?
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What bothered me most about it was, there was no reason most of the time when it came to needing new aliens. Usually the new alien species introduced had some cultural quirk or issue that had to be dealt with. But one could have used one of the established species and just make them a colony that had there own, different, unique culture. It is a little absurd that so many of the Trek cultures were so monotone. I sort of get it that the Vulcans, Kingons, and Romulans were all a bit authoritarian in their culture and design. But at the same time, there SHOULD be like hippy Klingons, or sex crazed Vulcans, or what ever.
I remember one episode where the alien culture had a mandatory age at which people were put down. The premise was it prevented them from being a drag on society, as well as allowing them to die before getting frail or sick. But the person scheduled to die was a scientist on the cusp of a new discovery that probably wouldn’t see fruition with out him. See that could have been any one of the other species, where that rule just applied to that colony. Like the Amish or something.
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I wonder i it was ”mine“. Because I had been looking on the net for years before I commissioned the digitalization.
Edge of Tomorrow or whatever they’re calling that one where he Groundhog-Days the alien invaders. In that one he poked fun at his action-hero persona and it really worked.
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It’s a long list of actors. I almost wonder if one can reach a certain level of fame without that being the case. What’s funny is to see non-famous actors who are like that, clearly hoping to reach that level of stardom.
They did good remaking the story for a western audience but I didn’t like the happy ending version over the way the resolved things in the book.
That was actually addressed in the first 15 minutes of the first episode. Although I can’t find a clip of it on youtube, the general scenario shows Crichton ending up on Moya which is getting attacked by the Peacekeepers. Once he makes it to the bridge he encounters Rygel, Zhaan, and D’Argo all speaking a different language. Obviously confused but yet fascinated he introduces himself which doesn’t go over well. Pilot figures out he can’t understand the others and directs one of the DRDs to inject him with translator microbes. After a few minutes he is able to understand everyone.
I realize its a simple explanation, but I’ve always liked it better than the universal translator concept in Star Trek. The individual languages come up in various context throughout the show, it wasn’t something completely glossed over by the writers. At the same time I don’t think a show of mostly subtitles is going to last long no matter how good it is.
There was an episode of Sliders that had a similar setup.
I think one aspect of Star Trek not using the core groups has a lot to do with preconceived ideas. If they are dealing with a realitivly new culture they have to start at a baseline and work up. It would be more jarring to have a coloy of humans where no one was over 40, because the crew already sees fallacy in that. The same thing applies in the real world, I have a harder time accepting cultural variations the closer a group is to my own. That doesn’t mean I won’t respect their ideas, but it is harder for me to reconcile the questionof why.
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That’s a good point. I guess a famous actor may want to keep close to his brand. Yet offhand I say that Marlon Brando, Alan Rickman, and David Bowie, while easily recognizable as them (most of the time, anyway), without always playing the same character with some minor variations. I’d include Anthony Hopkins and George Takei in that list, too. Also Tricia Helfer, unfortunately the only woman whose name I remember right now. Two others lurk in the back of my mind, but I’m horrible with faces and names.
I fail to see how this is any different from an universal translator. Apart from being one-way, while Star Trek universal translator did both directions.
But does it also change perception? Humans smile, but many species do not like that at all, do the microbes make them see something else when a human smiles? And vice versa?
How I think of it is that there are actors who are international commodities who demand huge salaries because they drive ticket sales by playing a consistent role (Cruise, Smith, Schwarzenegger, etc.), and then there are actors who are famous in that their name may be widely recognized (sometimes because of a single role), but are getting paid orders of magnitude less money. Rickman was a character actor who became internationally known for Die Hard, and his few subsequent (relatively) large roles (e.g. that Robin Hood movie) were due to his falling in line with typecasting (or, in the case of the Harry Potter movies, subverting it); his filmography is mostly fairly small movies. Takei is famous for Star Trek - I’m actually not even aware of anything else he’s done. Hopkins went from character actor to internationally recognized character actor thanks to Silence of the Lambs, and Helfer is a tv actress with a higher profiles and some serious geek recognition thanks to Battlestar Galactica. Bowie is famous for being a rock star who also did some acting (and is in similar company with some other rock star thespians who actually had an interest in acting rather than just being more famous).
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To be fair, they did some of that in Enterprise - mostly with the Vulcans with the various cults the High Command keeps trying to crack down on but with the Klingons a bit, too. There is an episode when Archer gets arrested and the lawyer he’s assigned basically says something about how other classes in Klingon society had gotten somewhat overtaken by the warrior class.
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teddy shapiro is a goddamned magician
My take on the ‘Dark Lord’ thing was to provide a thin excuse for some people to feel justified in their racism against the Orcs. There are pretty clear parallels in our societies to this. Blaming someone for the decision a far distant ancestor made? No, no one would ever do that…
I don’t think saying the Orcs were a stand in for black people, I think the situation is meant more to be a religious kind of issue. The ‘2000 years ago’ part was just too much of a tell.
