Terrell: I apologize for my judgmental comments. It was wrong of me, and I couldn't tell if you were a Star Wars/LOTR fan or not and I apparently misconstrued your message.

I will say that my bash on CGI armies charging at each other is not bashing the technology, but rather the overuse of it in movies. The CGI in LOTR was good, but I thought it was rather lackluster in both Troy and AOTC. Alexander may still be shoddy, but I will say it doesn't look like anything out of the ordinary.

Basically, what I am tiring of is someone making a scene of CGI armies charging and thinking that shot alone should make their film an epic. It looks as if someone decided what kind of battle scenes they wanted and wrote a movie around it.

well from what I've been hearing the movie is short on battle scenes and long on dialogues, though word is the writing is not that great.

Does anyone in Hollywood invest in scripts anymore?

One would think with all they have invested in this movie Stone would try to churn out some decent dialogue.

Well, Stone has spent nearly 10 years developing this project and script. Of course, time and money don't necessarily equal greatness. Of course, the only reviews I've read come off AiCN so we shall see.

I think this might be a good movie, but the trailers and tv spots I've seen don't make it look at all interesting.

I refuse to watch any trailers or t.v. spots just because of this. I can care less about 'em - most of the impressive trailers turn out to be really pathetic movies.

No worries Dr. DVD. We all sometimes overreact and get bent out of shape. Yes, I'm a huge Star Wars fans. Big as they come. I'm not a LOTR fan, but I was impressed by the technical aspects of those films. The story and characters just don't do it for me.

As for the CG, I think the CG work in the Star Wars, Matrix, and LOTR films is not only visually stunning, but technically brilliant. But rarely does it ever look real in any of these films. Close, but not real. The battle of the Pellenor Fields, attack on Zion, and the clone attack in Episode II are all technically and visually brilliant. But they don't look completely real. For one, they contain a lot of CG, and two, the technology just doesn't exist yet to create completely photoreal CG. Give it another 10 years.

No arguments. But in today's film world, it's a reality we have to deal with. Yes, Gladiator and Braveheart used real extras. But those battles had 3000 extras, at best. The battles in LOTR and Star Wars have tens of thousands of characters in them, and there is just no way to do that except with a lot of CG. You can't hire 10,000 extras, pay them, feed them, create costumes for them, and transport them back and forth to the shooting location. It would cost a fortune and would take more time and more man hours than any production could ever deal with.

I see your point. However, I cannot help but wonder how so many films made back in the 50s and 60s (the David Lean and Cecil B. Demille) managed to get so many real people yet that is not manageable today. In all honesty, the average moviegoer probably couldn't detect an overabundance of CGI and armies and wouldn't know to gripe. That's actually a luxury we movie geeks miss out on I fear. :( Of course you have to admit that some movies truly O.D. on on it.

I could just venture a guess, but I would say money first and foremost. It was a lot less expensive to do a film like that back then. Couple that with the fact that far more people went to the movies back then. Today with the advent of DVD, home theater, and the like, a fraction of the people go to theaters nowadays, and the risk of a flop is just too great.

I would also guess that far fewer films were made back then than there are today. So maybe a studio would be much more willing to make a small number of big budget films. Today, studios make tons of big budget films.

I'm sure it could be done nowadays, but I doubt any studio would put up the money. Probably only for a sure fire hit. For instance, Lucas could have done it with Episode I. I'm sure he could made TPM with perhaps as many as 7,000 extras. He could have shared the budget with Fox and they could have given the film a 300-400 million dollar budget. Though I don't think for a second either would want to spend that kind of money. Not to mention Lucas has become far too rich and comfortable as a filmmaker, sometimes to his own detriment. He doesn't have to work as hard, so he doesn't, though I'm not suggesting making a Star Wars film is easy.

I certainly agree that Jackson, the Wachowskis, and especially Lucas could have found ways to cut down on CG. Lucas uses CG for things he didn't really need to. I would probably have a bigger problem with it if the CG in Star Wars was just awful. But since it's cutting edge work, it doesn't bother me. I do think Lucas needs to reign himself in at times. It's become too easy for him to create anything he can think of with ILM, and he puts it in the film, even though at times he shouldn't. Lucas is one of these, a million saved is a million earned people. I also tend to think that Lucas is trying to push ILM to it's limits, to see what they can do and how good they can do it. A pushing CG technology to it's breaking point in order to make it better.

I did read Lucas say that even though he always wanted to tell Vader's backstory, that the main reason he went through with making the prequels is so he could make enough money to do the projects he really wants to make, ie films more in line with THX-1138 and American Graffiti. Though I have no idea why he would need to make the money, since he already has a reported net worth of 3-4 billion dollars.

back in the old days even with inflation actors didn't make today's equivelant of $25 million a movie. With the salaries of some of today's big stars and their luxuries on the set, there isn't a lot left for SFX.

Now, today we're not seeing films on the size of Cleopatra and ten Commandments or Ben Hur, but did those films really look so much more real? Sure some wide shots looked great, but then we cut to lots of shots of horrible blue screen and mediocre special effects. It's a trade off, and I'd say the CG today far outweighs any problems we have compared to movies of the older days.

Again, if someone makes a good movie with massive CG battles, then I'm all for it. How they do it doesn't matter to me. Too much CG in Star Wars? Where, I'm still curious which shots look so awful simply because they're CG, and also could've been done another way. Again, what ever happened to suspension of disbelief? There isn't a single shot in Star Wars that looks worse than the bad blue screen, faked night tint of many older classics, yet those things seem to get a pass. Quite frankly, many of the complaints we have basically say things look fake, but in truth we're talking about images that really could not be made save for exhorbitant cost or really couldn't be made at all.

And to think it's stars salaries that prevent movies from having massive sets is silly...that just depends on the movie. Did you guys not see the sets for Troy? They were freaking enormous, they built a damn city. or what about Titanic, they built a 90% scale boat! or Waterworld, they built a freaking floating city.

I would agree. There have always been problems with all the different visual effects techniques. Nothing has changed. There were problems with those older films.

Well, I don't think any shot in Star Wars looks even close to awful. In fact, it's as good as it gets from a technical standpoint and the shots are visually stunning. Considering the stress and huge workload ILM is always under with these films, I'm still amazed at the work they did for these films. But I think some people would like them to look like the original films and use less CG. I respect that thought, but it just doesn't bother me.

Fake would be too harsh a word. So many of the things in these films are so far out of this world that it would be hard to define real or fake. I would say CG-ish. Some people would say hollow. It's different for every person. But it's not the fault of ILM, or Weta, or any other FX company. The same can be said of the Matrix and LOTR films, if we're going to be honest about it. Again, I would say technically brilliant and visually stunning work.

I have my problems with TPM and AOTC, even though I think they're pretty good films with so many positive aspects. But the effects isn't one of them. Different strokes for different folks.

This I completely agree with. The prequels are hardly perfect films, but the techinical credits on these films is beyond reproach. I can think of a few shots where Lucas' compositions seem a little cluttered (which I would imagine might be what people mean by too much CG) but, I agree with his sentiment I'd rather see strange looking worlds done in CG than another scene in some northern california forest.

In general though, I rally against the CG complaints because I really do enjoy the work these people put forth, and I find many of the complaints are just people who have issues with design or in general, with the movie themselves and lay the blame on special effects. I can tell you this, Troy wasn't lacking because of CG armies. It's what the director did that was lacking (imo), but quite frankly the technical work is great and I give the film credit where credit is due, since at least on that level I enjoyed the film. Of course, that same thing goes for Alexander. CG armies mean nothing, it's whether Stone uses those CG armies in an effective way to tell his story.

In all honesty, I don't mind good CG effects, and FWIW, Peter Jackson did a very good job of restraining from using CGI. A lot of the sets in LOTR were actually built and/or models, which surprised me.
I am just a proponent of CG being used to enhance what is already there and be a part of the film, not them BEING the film. Troy had a lot of good shots in it, but Terrell is right. Wolfgang Peterson is not a director of actors, and the script stunk to high heaven. I really hope that with Stone at the helm, we can get another epic movie with a decent script and acting, and given Stone's track record, he is more of a character study person than anything else.
This is why I think Alexander will flop in the U.S., it won't have an enough action. Sad how today's movie audiences seem to require their action in a non-stop manner for the most part (LOTR being the exception) and not wanting much character development.

I honestly don't care how CG is used, as long as those elements are used well. If someone wants to create the entire background with CG along with a fully CG character, fine by me, as long as the movie is good.

Anyway, I agree Alexander is probably goign to struggle. It's 3 hours, it's probably a lot racier than any of the other big epics (and I don't mean violence, which in general audiences dont' seem to mind, but sexually speaking there are things which might turn off a lot of audiences), and probably quite talky. But who knows...audiences are strange and might make this one a hit for all we know. They need it though...this ain't a cheap movie.

Even though I am sure the movie will wind up being another one of Stone's crazy a$$ works when all is said and done, I have to give him credit as a filmmaker. It seems like no matter the price tag or amount invested, Stone always seems to get his way as an artist. The down part is, the box-office of his movies (which more often than not ain't cheap) almost always wind up being a tank (not a flop, just a disappointment in relation to cost). Probably why it has taken him five years to get another movie to theaters.

Well, the below review seems to pretty much confirms my suspicions. This is from IMDB.

I saw Alexander tonight, at what was the first large public screening of the movie, and is it a stinker. It's virtually incoherent, Alex speaks with an Irish brogue, his mother (Angelina Jolie) speaks with a vague Russian accent, it's violent as all hell..but amazingly not exciting. The battle scenes are impossible to figure out, and the film goes on wayyyy too long. Several people walked out of the screening. The tone and amazingly stiff clichéd dialog go back to the Joe Levine sword and sandal epics of the 1950's and 60's, the ones that were dubbed from Italian. I can't believe Stone wrote and directed this dreck. I normally enjoy his movies; they're certainly never boring. But this one is a snooze-a-thon. I see huge losses and empty theaters once the word gets out on this bomb. Oliver, go back to what you know, provocative modern day stories.

ah he's just pissed that Stone left in the homoerotic tension.

The sad thing is, Stone's use of old "sword and sandal" type dialogue might be intentional and "true to his vision!"



Okay, this is a departure for me to say something like this, but I don't care who you are as a filmmaker, when you are given something of this size, you should feel obligated to make something that is at least viewable and coherent. I mean come on! He was given over $150 million from various investors, and I am sure they expect some sort of return, even if they are pretty much foreign.
While I like directors being given control of their movies, I do not like it when they seem to treat the movie and sets like their own private little student film or plaything. Artistry has its merit, but it's always nice to make some money for both yourself and the people you're working for.
I will make a prediction that after this, Stone is going to have a hell of a time getting any movie with a decent sized budget greenlit.

And one other thing, if there is a shot of Alexander having an acid dream and taboo relations with his mommie while some guy dressed as a Native American dances around in the background, I will leave the theater! ;)

Come on, that's just one review. I've read reviews on this one that were positive too, so this is hardly the only opinion out there. And quite frankly I have no problem with directors treating sets like their own private film...they are the auteur, and for the top talents, who wants execs butting in and giving bad ideas? Do you really think Kubrick was a collaborator?

Anyway, it's too early to judge off one review. I've seen them go both way, and knowing Stone's type of filmmaking I'm not surprised some people would be turned off. You're talking like this movie has been released and bombed already, it's too early to say whether their investment paid off (and quite frankly, that's the least of my concerns.)

I really want this movie to do well enough to merit more like it, but Stone's filmmaking always leaves me feeling, well, dizzy. With the exception of JFK and his first two films, it seems like everything he does is influenced by heavy drugs or have sequences that look as though they were made under the influence. Maybe it's just me.

I wouldn't worry too much about the genre. The historical epic has proven itself to be quite profitable. Just look at Troy (yes, it's based on a myth but I don't think Hollywood sees it very differently). It wasn't even that good and it still made craploads of money, pretty much ensuring that we'll continue to see these types of mvoies.

Now, with regard to Stone, I agree his fimmaking style is as of recent years very, well, drug induced it seems (word has it he was on acid a lot during the filming of NBK). But, on the other hand, this is the film he's wanted to make since film school, so I don't imagine it'll be quite the same as his other films.

Not to mention we've got a few more of these lined up, whether it be Ridley Scott's upcoming Kingdom of Heaven or Vin Diesel's Hannibal, the genre seems to be alive and well. I agree, I'd love to see more and Alexander hitting big will all but keep that train rolling. But I wouldn't be too concerned with it, unless this bombs big time, along with the upcoming ones too.

Same here but, I disliked Troy as well so...go figure.

Uh..Troy didn't even make back its budget, unless you're counting worldwide grosses.