Blumhose has been doing fine with these made-to-order movies but I suspect they may be approaching the end of the road. Yes, it's true that great American movies from earlier decades did introduce to the world of cinema some kind of mathematical joy with the screenplays. Yes, Back To The Future is among the greatest of such franchises ever. But no, not even that one relied so heavily of tying hundreds os knots while leaving the essence totally empty and superficial.
To put it more simply: You can never make a cool movie if you diminish truly cool movies to their shells.
I did watch this one till the end, but with a rapidly declining level of interest. I guess it was mostly my affection with the 80s that kept me warm even when the jigsaw puzzle nature of the script got really boring and predictable. There was quite a long footage from RoboCop, after all. Throw in cool stuff from the 80s into whatever you are doing nowadays, and you'll upgrade it a notch.
Having seen all three Back To The Future movies on some Italian TV lately, I gotta say I admire the passion and the desire to pay homage to it. Blending teen slasher genre with time travel is, meh, at best plausible to some degree. But the real problem is coming up with a weak result while relying heavily on what you could have learned from in the first place.
They had replaced Eric Stoltz with Michael J. Fox even after having shot all the Marty McFly scenes in the first movie. Why? Because they thought the actor did not match with the spirit they aimed for with the movie. It was never just a mechanical story about some teen who'd have to avoid doing his mother's young self. That was the shell. What we enjoyed was the authentic relationship between Doc and Marty. That weird bond which later gave birth to Rick and Morty. There were too many layers to BTTF franchise.
When you try to imitate its mathematics by avoiding to provide enough screen time to even the main character, a girl who definitely NEEDS whatever Marty had found in Doc, you end up with a dry movie which will never be remembered by anybody.
Now, was this a BAD movie? Nope. As I said, I did finish it after all. Even though I stopped caring about the whodunnit factor and the emotional aspects midway, I kept looking at the screen in a semi-interested fashion. Some preferences looked quite puzzling to me, though: Like, Kieran Whatshername being cast as some she-Marty... I mean, come on... Okay, she can act as has a weirdly nice face, but... More often than twice, I found myself asking why they put a girl who looks like a mid-aged horse thief as the lead. The other one who played her mother was a hottie, maybe even too hot to have he title role, okay, but the casting didn't really make sense overall.
Why'd they need so many characters to make this story work? How do they expect the audience to get to know the lead character well enough to actually CARE about to plot, when they have dozens of other characters ineracting with each other, stealing valuable screen time from the crux of the matter?
I don't get it. I just don't. Those folks at Blumhouse seem to know how to make really cool movies and there are a few proofs to that fact. But they also do unnecessarily inflated stuff like this and I just can't wrap my head around it.
To put it more simply: You can never make a cool movie if you diminish truly cool movies to their shells.
I did watch this one till the end, but with a rapidly declining level of interest. I guess it was mostly my affection with the 80s that kept me warm even when the jigsaw puzzle nature of the script got really boring and predictable. There was quite a long footage from RoboCop, after all. Throw in cool stuff from the 80s into whatever you are doing nowadays, and you'll upgrade it a notch.
Having seen all three Back To The Future movies on some Italian TV lately, I gotta say I admire the passion and the desire to pay homage to it. Blending teen slasher genre with time travel is, meh, at best plausible to some degree. But the real problem is coming up with a weak result while relying heavily on what you could have learned from in the first place.
They had replaced Eric Stoltz with Michael J. Fox even after having shot all the Marty McFly scenes in the first movie. Why? Because they thought the actor did not match with the spirit they aimed for with the movie. It was never just a mechanical story about some teen who'd have to avoid doing his mother's young self. That was the shell. What we enjoyed was the authentic relationship between Doc and Marty. That weird bond which later gave birth to Rick and Morty. There were too many layers to BTTF franchise.
When you try to imitate its mathematics by avoiding to provide enough screen time to even the main character, a girl who definitely NEEDS whatever Marty had found in Doc, you end up with a dry movie which will never be remembered by anybody.
Now, was this a BAD movie? Nope. As I said, I did finish it after all. Even though I stopped caring about the whodunnit factor and the emotional aspects midway, I kept looking at the screen in a semi-interested fashion. Some preferences looked quite puzzling to me, though: Like, Kieran Whatshername being cast as some she-Marty... I mean, come on... Okay, she can act as has a weirdly nice face, but... More often than twice, I found myself asking why they put a girl who looks like a mid-aged horse thief as the lead. The other one who played her mother was a hottie, maybe even too hot to have he title role, okay, but the casting didn't really make sense overall.
Why'd they need so many characters to make this story work? How do they expect the audience to get to know the lead character well enough to actually CARE about to plot, when they have dozens of other characters ineracting with each other, stealing valuable screen time from the crux of the matter?
I don't get it. I just don't. Those folks at Blumhouse seem to know how to make really cool movies and there are a few proofs to that fact. But they also do unnecessarily inflated stuff like this and I just can't wrap my head around it.