Stupidity. That’s what’s wrong with giant monster movies. Most of them are exceedingly idiotic and arbitrary.
Well, sure, but they still have big followings. I mean, Transformers is basically a terrible giant monster movie franchise and look at its box office.
Well, I think that to many people Akira and Ghost in the Shell are history. I mean, they are products of their time and over the years they’ve become cemented in most people’s minds as uniquely Japanese. Whitewashing the characters just feels weird to many people because once you remove that 1980’s noir neo Tokyo feel, you may as well tell a different story entirely.
I’m much more worried (read, hopeless) that they won’t make a smart, cerebral, political cyber-spy thriller with some philosophical musings and a great attention to details and procedures and instead will make a scifi action flick with some token AI-are-beings too! subplot.
and Gits isn’t in Neo-Tokyo but in Newport City :P.
The uniqueness isn’t in being Japanese, but in being 80s cyberpunk, with the social struggle as backdrop, which doesn’t feel “modern”.
Oh, and given that she is a full-body cyborg and her true name isn’t “Motoko Kusanagi”, she could be canonically be from other nation. :D
Well, if you’re going to change everything from the characters to the country to the politics to Section 9, might as well call it “Generic Future Cyberpunk Movie #1”.
World War Z, the movie, only used the book as a jumping off point. I suspect this movie will do the same. Now I know WWZ book fans, and many zombie fans in general, look down on the movie but it IS the highest grossing zombie movie of all time, OF ALL TIME!
This movie could be the highest grossing live action anime of all time, and if it is no one will care what fans of the anime version think. So that’s what I’m hoping for, ScarJo in the biggest female lead sci-fi action movie of all time.
I don’t think “highest grossing live action anime of all time” is much of a distinction. What’s the competition, Speed Racer?
Rurouni Kenshin? I loved that trilogy.
Also, I want a good Ghost in the Shell, not a high grossing one. A WWZ scenario is exactly what I don’t want.
I was just thinking about this - what did they keep from WWZ aside from the name?
I keep thinking WWZ the book was slow zombies whereas WWZ the movie was fast zombies, even.
I was just thinking about this - what did they keep from WWZ aside from the name?
Almost nothing of import. A handful of background details, like the Israeli response, are drawn partly from the book. That’s about it.
Hah - How do you think Asimov fans felt about I, Robot which had absolutely NOTHING (Aside from 3 Laws) to do with the stories I, Robot? I understand your frustation. Especially when one then sees the Isaac Asimov book I, Robot in a bookstore a few years later, with Will Smith on the cover…sigh…
edit- Found it!
I can’t say I was frustrated in either case, so much as baffled as to why they bothered to license the books in the first place if they were going to drop everything interesting and distinctive about them. I suppose I was a bit frustrated that the WWZ movie forestalled a proper miniseries, but I think that story in particular works better in written/audio form.
Because it’s a license. It’s the name. Marketing. Zombies. Duh. You don’t really need anything else.
— Alan
Well, sure, and we’ve had this discussion in the WWZ thread so there’s no point in rehashing it at length, but the only people who care about the WWZ licence are people who have read and liked the Brooks book and didn’t particularly want it changed. It’s not like it has much of a brand outside that context*, unlike, say, Batman. They could just have made the movie they wanted to and called it something else and it wouldn’t have made any difference to the revenues. I get that it started as something closer to the book and evolved into the action movie that was released (both pre- and during production), but it still seems silly given the end result. I, Robot even more so, as they never had any intention of putting the book on screen.
It’s less to do with marketing and more to do with the producers being able to cover their asses by saying they based it on an existing popular-ish property so it’s not their fault it didn’t make enough money.
Those fucking Asimov fans didn’t come out, Chahlie! It ain’t my fault that half his original readership died before we could get the pickcha to the screen!"
It’s kind of perennial. The original “I, Robot” collection came out, what, 30 years before you were born? It was 15 years prior to my birth, and Asimov’s robot stories were a big part of my teenage years. Though I wonder if it’s too dated for today’s teenagers.
This by the way is the cover I remember, from the 1970 edition:
My copy has gone missing. I do still have my 1972 Fawcett paperback copy of The Caves of Steel.
No doubt, I’m sure. My favorite Asimov books growing up was actually the Norby series he wrote with his wife, Jane, around the time of my birth, though I didn’t read them till I was 10 or so. Asimov is definitely an author who just sort of lingers throughout the scifi cultural consciousness, in a manner very similar to Tolkien in fantasy.
That’s a fair analogy. Heinlein’s the only other Golden Age SF author I can think of with the same sort of lasting popularity. Dick’s themes will always be with us - paranoia will always be relevant - but he’s never been as popular overall, even if we’ve had more Dick movies than Asimov movies.
