Wednesday, December 23
The Iron Giant
Directed by Brad Bird
42 Days of Summer #4
Written by Tim McCanlies and Brad Bird from a story by Ted Hughes
Voices of Eli Marienthal, Jennifer Aniston, Harry Connick Jr., Christopher McDonald, and featuring Vin Diesel as a big inarticulate monster
1999, 86 minutes
In a small town in Maine in 1959, people are mysteriously dying of cancer. Like, all of them. A young boy points the blame US government nuclear "tests" and sets out to... No, wait, that's Iron Giant II.
...
In a small town in Maine in 1958, a young boy gets the Christmas present he always wanted: A genuine Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Mk VII self-assembling killbot. Things go awry when the usual Sirius Cybernetics QA problems arise and the killbot switches operational modes without password confirmation.
I know some people love this film, but I'm just not feeling it. It's neither good enough for me to rave about it, nor bad enough to elicit an entertaining rant, nor is it a flawed work whose faults can elicit an interesting discussion. It's just there. Perfectly fine.
I do like the fact that when the adults see the giant killbot, they say, oh, right, giant killbot. It's the late 50s, we have giant killbots now. I'd like to compare that with the original story, because this film was made in the 90s, but the story was written in 1968, and a typical 50s or 60s film with similar subject matter would feature a great deal more running about and shrieking.
I don't like the laziness of the characterisation of the government official, whose actions would in reality have caused the agonising deaths of everyone in the film. Happy ending my arse; this film has a MESSAGE, and the message is DUMB.
Oh, maybe I can rant about its flaws after all.
Two and a half autonomous repair systems out of four.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:24 PM
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Interestingly, the Washington Post hated this film for much the same reasons it disappointed me. I doubt they'd publish such a review today.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 23 2015 03:34 PM (PiXy!)
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