Last Movie You Watched

If you don't mind me asking, why do you think it's unnecessary?
Personally, I found the backstory and flashbacks to be some of the best parts of the movie.
They set up how terrible a person Wenwu is, how much he changed and gave up for his wife, which in turn shows how much he loved her. That love is the driving force of his actions in the present, and it wouldn't have been as effective if not there. Every aspect of the movie IMO is driven by those flashbacks and the theme of love, either by direct statement or implication. Not showing who Wenwu was, what Shang's training as a kid was like (first showing the training and then showing the motivation was a great way to recontextualize said training), Xialing's own feelings towards her brother's abandonment, or the fun family moments when the mother lived would have increased the number of things told and not shown in the movie. Instead, the movie shows us and tells us, and then recontextualizes both by showing us something else.

Yeah, I can't fight that. At least several modern movies both show and tell rather than one or the other. (Humorously, Fast & Furious 9 just shows the backstory and uses its flashbacks to address the present story in a pretty well-done way.)
Still, Shang-Chi was light on this IMO. The expository dialogue used to set up character, themes, and arcs. The world didn't get much set up or explanation outside of when it was truly necessary, and very little of it was backstory.

But then again, expository dialogue isn't inherently a bad thing. It can be used to tell the audience what they may not have picked up on, or it can be used to clue the audience into a lie that they should see. It can be used to tell us about characters or the world, or any number of relationship depending on how it's used. For example, a butler can explain how the lady of the manner passed away, and depending on how he does so, it could tell us about his relationship with her or his own priorities. Did he love her? Does he care more for the house? Is this just history? Expository dialogue about backstory can do all of that.

 

There's three topics here:
1) Exposition as a narrative device
2) Flashbacks as a narrative device
3) Flashback Expository Backstory as a required device

First, Exposition.
I don't hate exposition. You wouldn't get very far in a heist movie without exposition, and Star Wars is very nearly only expository dialogue.

The difference is whether the current movie hits pause on its narrative to give that exposition or whether its exposition delivers as part of the forward momentum within the narrative.

For example, Jones and Belloq's bar scene in Ark is expository. However, the movie doesn't hit pause on its narrative in the delivery. Instead, the exposition is woven into a tense conversation between two rivals about their philosophical differences as Belloq tries to convince Jones to agree with him.
This is good exposition.

In ANH, Ben drops practically full frontally naked exposition to Luke at his home upon their meeting in the movie. However, the movie doesn't his pause on its narrative here either. It would be hitting pause if it hadn't been framed the way that it was. The reason that the narrative is still moving forward is because Luke is set up to want to know this information and Luke is the main emotionally invested character for the audience. Additionally, Luke got to Ben under natural narrative conditions that were set up. That is, we were repeatedly set up to want this moment as we were told about this crazy old wizard and emotional contention was wrapped up around him already - to include letting us know that he knows information that Luke wants to know.

Since Luke wants to know, and tension has been established in a tease ahead of time, we want to know.
And because Luke wants to know, then we can watch Luke - the main character we care about - react to that information.
We learn about Luke as a person while getting the exposition based on how he's reacting to the expository information.

The same was true with Jones in Ark. We are learning about the character of Jones when exposition happens, not simply by the information being delivered, but also by how he reacts to those delivering the expository information. Further, the expository information in Jones is even higher quality than that of Star Wars because it's always embedded into a tense conversation rather than two characters plopping a seat so that one character can tell the other everything like an interview before they hit the road again.

With Shang-Chi, very little of the exposition is for Shang-Chi. It's for us. He doesn't need the information. Secondary characters want it, but this isn't their movie. It's Shang-Chi's movie, so watching how secondary characters react to Shang-Chi tell them about his past doesn't show us anything about his character of personality in the current moment of the exposition. Instead, it relies entirely on the information itself to be the augmentation of our understanding of him.

He's not reacting to that expository information very often at all. His best buddy is. But, again, this isn't "Shang-Chi's Best Buddy".

Now, Flashbacks.
I have a very low tolerance for Flashbacks, personally, because the overwhelming majority of the time they are employed very crudely.
They're just chucked in. I don't care how interesting the story inside of the Flashback is, if it's just chucked in, it's sloppy.
The Flashback is a very precious cinematic device that requires very careful hands to employ well.

For it to work really well and flow seamlessly as part of the current narrative's cinematic expressive visual language, the Flashback has to be an exploration into a character's theory of mind, and its delivery needs to merge with the artistic language of the current narrative's cinematic language.

To explain what I mean, I'll use two movies as examples (if you haven't seen them, you'll probably want to check them out to fully get what I'm going at here): The Pawnbroker, and Kung-Fu Hustle.

In The Pawnbroker, Flashbacks are brilliant. Genius. So genius Rosenblum (the editor) effectively created the modern language of Flashbacks in it.
Prior to it, every Flashback hit pause on the current movie while you did a close up on the main character, then softened the sharpness of the image and dissolved to the past. Then you reversed that to come back.
It was extremely clunky and graceless.

Shang-Chi very nearly does the same thing, just without the softening of the lens and slow dissolve. But it almost always starts with a close up on the actor in very similar framing to CSI Miami's notorious bad pun while putting on sunglasses delivery framing. That is, we're very directly being told by the lens that, as Monty Python's Holy Grail put it, "He's going to tell!".

In the Pawnbroker, this declaration of the Flashback coming doesn't exist. It just cuts in very invasively. And it does that because it's invasive to the main character.
We're not simply watching a Flashback. We're watching his stream of consciousness. We're seeing his memories with him as they invasively cut into his mind.
And the delivery is violent (and genius). This matches the artistic language of the movie by pairing against the mundane of his regular life - the one he tries to have. So the Flashbacks are an antagonist themselves and the two art forms of the cinematic language of the present day and the past fight each other. As a unison they merge into one artistic language of the current narrative's cinematic language - the language of trying to live with severely repressed PTSD.

Now, with Kung-Fu Hustle we have a very different form of Flashback. Here, there's no invasive cut into their mind. Instead, it's always soft and seductive. An object is always our key in, and those objects catch us off guard. We don't expect them, but they're always there along the way. They are marks of innocence in a world far from innocent. Each triggers a Flashback which shows us the main character's innocent heart he has clearly long since left behind.
They transition elegantly into them and back to a crude present day reality unlike that of the favored and idealized past.

This is used in the same visual language as the rest of the movie in terms of object oriented focused framing and moves in and out of them in the same artistic manner as the movie moves in and out of important moments of note it wishes to highlight in its narrative's present time.
This is pretty much the opposite of The Pawnbroker. Instead of the two forms being opposed in tension, they are one in the same language. Where there is a moment to marvel over, the language of the lens and cut is the same regardless if the moment is in the present or the past.

In all cases, a seductive grace is conveyed through the camera and cut. Because of this, we understand that all of these marvelously impressive Kung-Fu moments are on equal footing of an innocently hearted child. In fact, that is the conveyed philosophy of the movie - that true Kung-Fu is a purity of soul.

Therefore it works tirelessly to ensure a visual comparison language between Kung-Fu fight language and Flashback language.

Shang-Chi did not include anything of this sort. They simply cut over. There's no artistic merger between the present and past film language.
It's simply standard cinematic language except for the fights where the fights go pretty on framing for the purpose of being prettily framed fight scenes in and of itself.

The framing of those fight scenes, while amazing looking, doesn't relate to any framing work used elsewhere in relation to the character. They are disjointed.
Which makes sense because the team that did the artistic decision making for those fights (who are all really talented people) were a different set of people entirely from the regular shooting crew. The stunt crew was almost exclusively in charge of the designing and shooting of those scenes.
That is very much not the case in Kung-Fu Hustle, and it's very clearly the same artistic set of minds involved in shooting both non-fight and fight scenes.

This is the general issue that causes the movie to be clunky with its devices.
It's not that the ideas are bad ideas. They're good story concepts. The execution of the merger between Flashback, Fights, and Mundanity are very crude. In every case, it's essentially a harsh cut into a different modality of film.
For every fight, you could basically say, "Ready, FIGHT!" like a video game because of the jarring frame shift tell before the fights kick off.

Finally, Flashback Expository Backstory as a required device
Now, did Shang-Chi need all of that backstory to work?
As it is, yes. But not as it could be.

It didn't have to have this tangent.

Let me put that another way around. The original Star Wars trilogy isn't weak because it doesn't give you the full flashback expository backstory of the Prequels before it finishes.
The Father and Son relationship, which is the main narrative focus, is not weak by the absence of it.

Now, I'm not saying it couldn't be made stronger. I'm saying it's hard to argue that the story is weak because it lacks giving us all of the Prequel information backstory before we get to our emotional pay off between the Father and Son.

It all depends on how you set up your story. If you don't set it up well, don't frame it well, then you'll have no other option than to pause the current narrative and cut over to a B story to tell the audience why they should care more than you've earned so far as a storyteller about someone or something.

Consider that you could tell the Shang-Chi story in a few different ways.
In one, you could tell the story like ANH. You could just not bother with all of the expository flashback backstory and get on with the current day material and rely on tension based conversation like Indiana Jones to allude and inform us of that past conflict which fuels character motives today, and you can have that expository information be newer information to the main character so that it's informative to his character by the way in which he receives the expository information during those conflicting tense moments.

So that's one way.
Another is that you could keep all of that story in, but put the cart behind the horse where it properly belongs - you could put the backstory at the beginning of the movie as prologue to the current story rather than jamming the current story to a stall and hitting play on the B movie, then hitting pause on it, and hitting play on our A movie again.

Another is to not bother at all and leave it to follow up movies to tell that prologue story - like Star Wars did with the Prequels.
That is, the audience didn't have to sympathize with Wenwu in this movie. That was an artistic choice to shove everything into one movie so they could get Shang-Chi's character up and moving for use in an ensemble movie that wouldn't allow for time to do subsequent follow up movies focused on just Shang-Chi for a while.

But it could have been written differently in the set up and delivery than it was.
It's not a terrible movie - it's pretty good. I'd say it's a pretty good couple of movies shoved into one. I'd just prefer to watch both movies separately rather than having them so crudely mashed together.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Ah gotcha, thanks for sharing.

I still fundamentally disagree in some ways however:

I slightly disagree here. Each flashback is placed where it is for a reason.
The opening flashback is a nested egg - it's framed as a mother telling a child to her story, and then outside of that it's a memory dreamt of. Outside of that narrative structure, it also tells the audience who Shang-Chi is, from a legacy standpoint.

You say disjointed, I say varied. The fights are varied in location, style, and tone within themselves, and that's not a bad thing. But each fight has a sense of escalation. This is easiest seen in the bus fight, but it's also seen in the tower fight and the final fight. These fights all start pretty simply - Shaun is put in a situation that isn't ideal where he needs to fight, and he uses surroundings to do so - and evolve from there. (The bus brakes are cut, Katy's in danger, Shang can't measure up to his father.) Each fight is given a final boss related to something about Shang's past, and he must overcome it or fail and move onto the next part of the movie. (The necklace is taken so now Shaun must find his sister; Shaun must defeat his own master and reveals his inner nature of anger and vengeance, ironically stopped by the person who instilled it; Shang must remember his mother's words and training and use it to balance out his father.) The only fight that doesn't follow this is the fight with Xialing, as she's the creator of the situation, the twist, and the final boss.
As for them being done by different stunt crews and teams, I definitely can see that. (And knew about that due to the Director's Commentary.) But it's not something that's inherently bad. Each fight or set of fights is more about evoking a certain genre or feeling than just the fight itself, which is what some of the best fights do IMO. Wenwu's fights evoke the Wuxia roots of the movie. The bus and scaffold fights evoke Jackie Chan movies. The last fights are epics and bring in that MCU flavor. I recognized these things the first time I saw the movie, and I don't think saying "oh, that fight reminds me of/feels like XYZ thing" is necessarily a bad thing, particularly when it's well done. It's not a bad thing for a director to say "I want fights in these three styles," and get three sets of crews to make it work, particularly f you believe the character (and/or actor) can actually pull all three off.

Of course, some movies just have good, varied fights, like the John Wick movies and The Raid movies, but that doesn't mean having fights for other reasons is bad.

I'm not sure I can agree with this. The merger is the fight itself, at least to me. The flashback fights involving Wenwu are all about aggressive martial arts. It's his style, his M.O., and his personality. He punches, kicks, directs, and conquers. His wife, from her first introduction, is different. She redirects, defuses, and avoids. There's duality. That duality comes into play with Shang-Chi himself, as he's out of balance. It's only when he can master his mother's martial arts and ultimately combines it with his father's power that we see our hero at his best.
But for that to happen and to be as rousing as I personally find it, we need to see both his father's style and his mother's style. Now, both were shown in the present, but neither to the extent and association that would have made the impact as...well, impactful. The mother's martial arts' style would have been framed as the style of her people as opposed to a connection with her, and Wenwu's style is more just what he uses, no longer a visual representation of his personality. But we see them fight, we see them fall in love despite their fighting and former philosophies, and we see Wenwu give up that personality - give up that fighting style, give up the Rings - in order to be with his wife. The tragedy is that he turned back to it in the end.

The score itself highlights this. IIRC, the mother's theme only plays when she's present, which is almost exclusively in flashbacks. This helps set the tone of most of the flashbacks, as when she's there, things are lighter and softer. When she's gone, the music references or outright uses Wenwu's theme. And at the end, Shang-Chi's own personal theme (aptly titled "Xu Shang-Chi") is a personalized mix of his parents' themes. And just as well, it only plays once he's accepted and gained the powers of both.

There's also a third thing, but I forgot it.

I don't think something isn't set up well just because it chooses to tell a flashback. Flashbacks aren't always crutches, they're narrative choices that can enhance the context of the movie directly rather than depending exclusively on the audience's visual narrative fluency or being told rather than shown or told and shown.

My favorite example of this comes in the form of a show - I know, I know, shows are a different medium with different objectives, limitations, and narrative languages in a way. But the point still stands. In one episode of a CW show called Arrow (I loved it, but I think you'd hate it seven ways to Sunday and beyond) there's an episode in the fifth season where the titular character is training a group of new vigilante recruits. The training in the present was mirrored by a flashback showing our hero going through that exact same training in the past. In the middle of the episode, our hero talks about what that training taught him, and what he's trying to (and failing to) instill in his recruits. The episode ends with him choosing another path, while the flashbacks swerve go in the exact opposite way, symbolizing a break in how our hero was trained and how he's going to train his protégés.
The episode could have been strong without the flashback, but the flashback provides a way to show a parallel path and recontextualize the present actions while also exploring the same theme in a different way.

Shang-Chi is similar. As you say, the movie absolutely could have foregone the flashbacks and been made a movie focusing on Shaun's return to his Shang-Chi self and his battle with his father, who is ultimately redeemed by love. But I come out on the side thinking that without the flashbacks, this would have been a weaker movie for this character and his background. Just because it worked for Luke and Vader doesn't mean it would have worked for Shang-Chi and Wenwu.

(Not to mention, the two times the film actually uses what could be considered "action time" to give a flashback are during Xialing's flashback, and Shawn's montage when he tries to kill his former trainer. Both are moments of choice due to actions in the past. I will say that Shaun's montage could have been taken out, but I disagree with the rest. The rest happen when something else is going on - Shaun is dreaming, he and Katy are on a flight, everyone is at a dinner table. It's the "down time" in the film when our characters do things they'd normally do in real life, used to give us information.)

Sorry, fundamental disagreement here.
I don't think flashbacks MUST be at the beginning of a movie exclusively. I think they can be scattered throughout the movie, if put in place well and integrated within the overall theme of both the movie and the objective of the scene itself. Inception is a great example of this, as it has flashbacks all throughout the movie, from the very first scenes to the scenes right before the climax.

(F9 is a weird but also successful example IMO. The first scene and final flashback (which is the second-to-last scene) are paired, showing the two major events in Dom's life. But since we've been told about them already and someone new is being introduced, showing us allows the new character to enter in this known context and recontextualize it. (...have I said recontextualize enough?) The other two major flashbacks allow for the movie to check off a franchise staple and justify the character's absence while also providing the key to finishing the arc and reconciliation.)

Shang-Chi achieved this as well IMO. Every flashback was placed where it was for a reason, and it played into who the main character was (a man of two worlds, a man torn between the light of his mother and darkness of his father), what the overarching emotion/theme is (love - a love of a man for his wife, a son towards his father, and ultimately a father towards his son (and daughter I guess)), and what is happening at the time. (Shang-Chi's childhood flashback happens right after Katy finds out her friend's life is a lie, and so he's telling her the story; Xialing's flashback happens when she's confronting her brother for the first time in over a decade, and she's deciding whether or not to forgive him in that moment; Wenwu's family flashback happens over a family table, when he's trying to reunite a family and explain his own motivation.)

There is a third way, the way that Rurouni Kenshin did. In the fourth and second-to-last movie (but the last chronologically), they had a separate scene exclusively for the flashback with little-to-no-voiceover. It showed the key scenes, played some nice leitmotifs, and told its story through visual language. This is also an option. HOWEVER, they got away with this because:
1. The flashback story had been told in visual medium before and Rurouni Kenshin is a very popular story. Both mean that the film expects the audience to be familiar with it.
2. They had a fifth movie (chronologically the first) planned and filmed, and they were releasing the two mere months apart. This flashback was ultimately just a teaser, which means they could show it without consequence. ...which makes it more like Star Wars, but the difference between the two - and what makes this example a better version than Star Wars in practice, quite frankly - is that they were filmed at the same time.

That's a separate issue to me, but at least it worked. Various other characters like Loki and Kylo Ren are supposed to garner sympathy, but they fail because we don't see their pasts, and what we know of them isn't as sympathy-inducing, at least not to me. (Contrast this with Killmonger, whose past is shown both in a flashback at the beginning, recontextualized in a different flashback in the second act, and then explored more in a sort of vision quest at the beginning of the third act. We care about Killmonger not just because of what we know of his situation, but what we see of it.)

Sympathetic villains are something of the norm right now, and I think they're more of a reflection of the time we're in as well as the age of the target demographic than anything else. We live in an age that isn't as black and white or simple as it was even ten years ago. Heroes aren't always heroic, values can feel old-fashioned and straight up wrong in some cases nowadays, and even children are more mature and knowledgeable than ever because they have to be. Our fiction in many cases reflects that - Grimdark fantasy became all the rage about 5-10 years ago to reflect this trend. In media, it shows as our villains now having explorable motive and reasons for what they do. The Joker is no longer Mark Hamill laughing and poisoning people with a flower or holding a kangaroo court in Arkham - he's a terrorist now, or a serial killer with an understandable but not never agreeable view. (Or a popular psychopath that some people in real life relate to despite the movie showing how he's NOT the good guy.) To me, Wenwu is an extension of that, as was Thanos and Killmonger and Baron Zemo before him. Superhero movies are far from the only movies enacting these changes - James Bond, Mission Impossible, and even the nature of "protect the president" movies like White House Down all show evidence of this - they're simply the best places to see it nowadays.

But we both know the above stuff is partially nonsense. Or rather, it's more nuanced than that. It's easier to think of villains of days gone as being simple and evil. That's true in a sense. Movies like Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians, The Magnificent Seven, and even Star Wars have irredeemable, card-carrying villains. But older movies like Seven Days In May, Three Outlaw Samurai (or Sword of the Beast which I prefer more) and Bridge on the River Kwai all have nuanced and understandable villains. It's just a switch in preference that's always been there. It's like videogames. There was a time when single-player games reigned supreme. Then multiplayer games overtook them, with Lan Parties and tournaments and so many other things. Right before COVID, single-player games made a comeback with games like God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Jedi: Fallen Order, and JRPGs like Persona 5 and Fire Emblem. Then during COVID, collaborative games like Among Us and Fall Guys took over. Maybe next year we'll see single player games come back. (Still, this year has been phenomenal for single-player games as well.) Nuanced villains and card-carrying villains are the same.

Shang-Chi does this too. The entire second act is full of expository information that our characters receive and must deal with. The entire part about Ta-Lao and it's location, about Wenwu believing his wife is alive and him wanting to reunite the family because of that, and nearly everything that happens in Ta-Lao is portrayed this way. The flashbacks that do occur are here to accentuate the information given outside of them, to give depth the emotions that fuel the motivations.
As I said above, who gives the expository information and how can tell us just as much about them as what they're saying does about the world. Shaun leaves out key details about his childhood on his first telling, which upon rewatch tells us that he's worried about how Katy sees him, and that he's still running from his past and who he was. During the second set of flashbacks involving his childhood, he no longer has that barrier because he's trying to use what he was to come to terms with what he must do. We see him hesitate with the information, lie when it's convenient, and at the end cry when it's all too much. I don't think this was bad delivery of exposition, and it was orders of magnitude above the "as you know," dialogue.


Anyways, there's definitely more to say, but I think at the end of the day we're just going to fundamentally disagree on flashbacks in movies and this one in particular. Regardless, it's been a blast discussing things with you once again!

 

I noticed your points are not about the method of transition from one mode to the other.

This was the major point of address for flashbacks as a physically visual device, as I highlighted in the two examples.

As a narrative device my main issue with Flashback is their visual relationship to the movie as a trasitioned item.

If a movie just cuts over, especially in "down times", if you're watching a movie with me, you'll see me actively disengage from the movie.

It pushes me out of the movie and feels tactless.

The rest is about exposition, and that is a preference.
It's usually the easiest solution one could come up with to simply go to the past and/or explain it.
I also find it, very commonly, the most uninteresting of approaches to problem solving and almost always it takes me out of the movie because it is so distinct and separated with the only real link being some cognitive ideas.

I could cut all of the flashback exposition out in Shang-Chi and it wouldn't matter to me. None of it helped me engage the movie better anyway - quite the opposite.

But the main point that jars me above all else is the pure mechanical reason: how you transition, and how you use the visual frame as a visual conversation between the two modes.

If you just cut, and you just block and frame, I'm out.

Cheers,
Jayson

--- Double Post Merged, Aug 7, 2022, Original Post Date: Aug 7, 2022 ---

@Use the Falchion
Let me expand a bit on that (sorry, was writing the previous quickly on my phone).

I know it seems incredibly trite to point to the transition of a Flashback as the element that yanks me out of the movie, and I fully accept for that the wealth of the population, no such event happens in their mind experientially.

Not as a defense, but as explanation of this possibly seeming oddity, I'll note that Rosenblum (he who effectively invented the modern Flashback) gives a considerable length of his section on The Pawnbroker to simply the transition to the Flashbacks. In fact, it was the transition which was terrorizing him and the director time and time again. And that director is Sidney Lumet, no less. No light weight class of artist himself.

It drove them nuts because simply cutting over didn't work, crossfades didn't work, nothing worked. Every approach caused a disconnected sensation between the two parts rather than a solid merger. Rosenblum went on to discuss how no single element has so been a nightmare as working out the transition of the Flashbacks.

He goes on about all of the problems with Flashbacks from an editing perspective, and the challenge to the cut and flow of the cut they inherently bring.

The point I'm making here isn't that they are the kings of Flashbacks, or that theirs was a one-off oddity, but instead that it highlights how something as tiny and seemingly trite as the transition from one to the next can be that damaging to the visual smoothness of a movie's editorial flow.

And I am extremely sensitive to the editorial flow. Flashbacks aren't the only thing that do it to me, it's more that the chances are very high that the Flashback will be conventionally cut in with no greater cut than a change of location, yet the entire narrative arc in almost all Flashbacks completely shifts between the two from an editorial flow point of view.

This is why I found a method of employment that @NinjaRen developed regarding them to be so profoundly novel - because he developed a method for flashing over the top of current action in a manner akin to the reverse shot in dialogue scenes - that is, he found a way to cut back and forth that wasn't simply conventional cutting over, but instead unique to the flow as a momentary amplifier without requiring whole arc deliveries. Sort of similar to that found in Fight Club.

That is, for me, it can't just exist. If it simply cuts to inform, rather than to visually experience the cut, then I am hard yanked out of the movie.
It's why I'm fine with the (effectively) Flashback in TFA, but the one in TLJ just feels like a giant scarring wound - for me when that flashback happened someone might as well have walked up to the screen and stabbed it with a knife and ran it down the entire screen.

It's a visceral experience for me - a very unpleasant one.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Last night I watched:



Blimey, that might just be one of the very best (if not THE best) Predator movie of all.
I had a great time!

--- Double Post Merged, Aug 7, 2022, Original Post Date: Aug 7, 2022 ---

My only gripe was: though I chose for English subtitles (because I heard there would be parts spoken in Comanche and French), the "foreign" parts were subtiteld in their respective languages!!! So I still don't know what they said!!!

 

I just watched:



...and I'm still buzzin'!

 

I think that's good. So you have to guess or interpret what is said- which isn't difficult IMO.

@RockyRoadHux and I also watched 'Prey' this weekend. It was fun. I really liked the tone and kinda old school approach of this movie. The movie also looked quite beautiful, especially those clouds in the background. I've never seen such prominent clouds in a movie before. That's a nice idea.

 

That's fine when that's your thing and you could do without subtitles. (I've seen plenty of foreign movies (French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, japanese, etc.) without subtitles and yes, most of the time you get the general idea.

But with a movie like this, I think there should at least be an option where just the foreign parts are translated to English.
(Also IMHO, when you choose "English subtitles", those subtitles should be none else than English!)

Yeah, the visuals were excellent! (those clouds WERE beautiful.. ) Great acting from everybody as well.
I also liked the hint at a possible sequel, at the end of the end-credit animation!

 

I really wish this film had a theatrical release... I took French in school while everyone else took Spanish so I understood what they were saying but I think every language should be translated its stupid and lazy IMHOP.

--- Double Post Merged, Aug 9, 2022, Original Post Date: Aug 9, 2022 ---

do you have to watch toy story to appreciate this film?

 

I purposefully watch Asian and India cinema movies without captions on because if I had it my way, the bulk of movies I watch would have dialogue like Minions.

If I could get the sound effects and score without the dialogue track to most movies, I would.
Most movies, for me, become remarkably more magical without their dialogue.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I had one year of basic French in school and that was over 30 years go... so that was no help for me here.

Ikr? It's like they wanted to be extra interesting or something.
I just want to know exactly what they're saying!

No, not necessarily! It doesn't hurt either...
There ARE a few references in the film (personality-wise, certain moves and features on his suit) that are recognizable if you've seen Toy Story... but this film stands perfectly on it's own two feet!

The movie literally begins with the message that the Buzz Lightyear doll from Toy Story was based on the lead character from a movie... and this is THAT movie!

 

That's fair, my family is from Haiti, so I speak French in the household too, so yeah I should have mentioned that as well...

 

I disagree. The main characters don't understand the language, so why should we? In the case of Prey it's more thrilling to guess what's going on.

 

In the original release of The Guns of Navarone, none of the foreign languages, such as the long chunks of German dialogue, were subtitled so that American audiences felt the fear of being in the situations without knowing what's being said.

It works wonderfully well.

...unless you speak German.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Remind me, are the guerilla camp folks in Predator (1987) subtitled in English? The French speaking trappers in Prey function in much the same way as the Hispanic (?) speaking guerillas in the first one, being an "other" group who interacts with the heroes and the extra-terrestrial creature in ways that inform the movie and the heroes' experiences. In neither case do they really need to be understood by the (English speaking) audience as their function is not in what they say, but in what they do and represent to the heroes.

I'm as curious as the next person about what the trappers say in Prey, understanding only the bares of sentence structure and the odd word, but it is hardly important to the story and one could, as many here have, argue that not translating the trappers helps us non-French speakers associate with the Comanche characters' situation in the film.

IMHO, it is sort of like the various creatures in the OT films that speak real world languages that substitute for alien ones. Very few are subtitled (only Hutteese, right?), and there are people around the world who do understand what the Jawas or whatever say, which makes for a very comical experience for them.

 

I don't really remember them speaking to be honest. As they're checking out the camp before they attack it you might hear some Spanish chatter in the background but it's presumably nothing too important to the plot since the guerillas are a bit of a misdirection. Even the lady they take with them I don't think they subtitle but somebody usually translates (not always well) what she says for the others and the audience.

Maybe it's better they don't translate? I haven't seen Prey yet but I'm just being reminded of The Thing and how the untranslated Norwegian dialogue at the beginning of the film provided major spoilers for those that could speak it.

 

That Norwegian stuff in The Thing is precious to us Northfolk! It is a bit funny, 'cause the dude can't speak Norwegian, but MAN does he try! Very good attempt. He says something to the effect of: "Get the hell out of there! That's not a dog, it's some kind of thing! Get away, idiots!" Sort of gives it away on the first viewing, although the dude could be interpreted to be just paranoid and insane, of course.

 

I saw Prey last night. It's okay. 6.5/10. It stands up well for being a Predator movie which must be why it's getting so much praise. As a movie by itself? It's kind of predicable, the CGI is rough in 4K (a common problem at the moment). Amber Midthunder is getting a lot of praise, but she was even better in Legion. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I didn't see all the buzz about it? Lower expectations would have probably helped.

 

On a flight home yesterday I had a chance to rewatch one of my old favorites:

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

If you have not seen it before, I encourage you to check it out. This is the film that brought worldwide acclaim to filmmaker Ang Lee. One of the best female heroines (villains?) of all time and a haunting soundtrack. It was made in the 1990s but still holds up strong for a modern audience.

 

Caught two movies yesterday.

Elvis

It seems music biopics are back which I really don't like. Walk Hard pretty much covered this entire genre of film, but Baz had his own take on it and Elvis was interesting. 7/10

Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Finally got around to seeing this... kind of a weird movie. The original Ghostbusters was an adult comedy that's now fathered a nostalgia film for all ages some 30+ years later. Some of this is because of how long ago it came out, but also because that's how the IP was handled after the original film was released. I couldn't help but think of The Force Awakens when I watched this.... it's not nearly as good, but leans into nostalgia to almost a comical degree. The end is kind of silly and doesn't really work. Mckenna Grace is really good. Her brother in the film could have been cut entirely and it would have been shorter. That would have likely been an improvement. 7/10