Crothian said:
No, I haven't seen it. From the previews it didn't look that good.
Ah, I see. I don't put much weight in previews, other than to get a handle on how well the effects might be handled. They can be misleading so often that I gave up on trying to gage a movie by them a long time ago.
What strikes me more is how little I've heard about it. There was a recent article on how text messaging is ruining the longevity of movies that aren't that good. To whit, folks are warning their friends off of movies they don't like even as they are sitting in the theatre during the first showing. The drop off from week one to week two for a lot of films has been incredible lately.
It seems that people who make bad films have been trying to counter this by either not giving much advance notice on movies or advertising the hell out of them just before they hit the screen so they can make their money in week one. This is the opposite effect that anyone would have hoped, to whit, just forcing people to make better movies in general.
Dimwhit said:
...and I really liked 13th warrior. Never actually read a Crichton book, though.
I read
Eaters of the Dead (1977) which was an early Crichton effort and could have been much longer. It is one that he has, or his publicists had, suspiciously dropped from his standard bio in most of his books, though it appears on his website and I think the success of the related film has made him less skiddish about its quality.
According to Crichton he wrote it on a dare from someone who suggested the epic genre wasn't well handled, in general (see other thread on Sci-Fi vs, Fantasy, I suppose
), and that he couldn't make and entertaining story out of Beowulf. It combines elements of epics like Beowulf with a scientific "what if" regarding the neandethals still existing through that age which to my mind makes it a period/epic/fantasy film. I thought the movie was very well made and an excellent example of how to make a fantasy/epic film (there's some debate over what genre it fits best).
