Hacker Cinema
Last Action Hero
1993 · Film · 131 min
Directed by John McTiernan
After his father's death, a young boy finds solace in action movies featuring an indestructible cop. Given a magic ticket by a theater manager, he is transported into the film and teams up with the cop to stop a villain who escapes into the real world.
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15 comments on Hacker News
Leaving outside the ethical part of it - which is huge, this kills innovation.
The problem I see is that when everything is iterative, and you kill sustainable incentives for new views, innovation disappears.
Is like the movies. We will get all budget towards remakes and reboots, and little new would show up.
Being an 80s guy, I remember many new movies coming out every year, and when they stretched beyond 2 or 3 films, people frowned.
Back to the future, Indy (the good years), Rambo (first 3), lethal weapon. Cool gems came up too (Last action hero?Terminator) even in loaded fields like simple action movies…. Star Wars, 3 films. Matrix. bond was the exception.
Now? mission impossible (8 films at over 2h), fast and mediocre franchise (20 movies), Marvel and DC movies (3 movies shot 30 different times), and everything else is a reboot. Almost impossible for new ideas to get through.
We are killing culture, innovation and human spark for some companies to make a billion more. We are feeding like factory pigs from generic slop, and as the factories grow they kill fertile ground for those who wanted to eat something cleaner.
The fact that is happening does not mean it’s right. It’s just we are accepting mediocrity as our guiding principle at 0.01 USD a pop…
>How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read?
How many do you read from 10 years ago? Newspapers aren’t really meant to be “timeless”. They are specifically to inform people of what is going on at that moment. I’ve read books from the 1700s. I’ve looked at paintings and sculptures, watched plays written, and read about the lives of important people of the 1700s.
I do agree that most of our culture will be irrelevant to people of the future as entertainment, but will be invaluable as history. If you want to tell a story that is relevant to modern people, tell that story. Movies are remade/rebooted/gender swapped/set in new countries/etc. all the time. You don’t have to replace the original with a “fixed” version so that almost no one can experience anything but the update. We have dozens of retellings of Romeo and Juliet but the original(ish) play is still readily available. Just because new generations will have their own entertainment doesn’t mean we should overwrite ours and present it as if history doesn’t exist and everything revolves around and reflects the current culture and always has.
Speaking of Last Action Hero, those movies won’t ever be box office hits again but the action movies and political thrillers do tell us a lot about America’s anxiety and uncertainty about our place in world affairs in the post-Cold War world. They are interesting to revisit in the same way Casablanca is interesting to revisit and think about the context for a movie made about WWII when we didn’t know what the outcome of WWII would be.
I’ve read Marcus Aurelius‘s meditations, a few Greek plays and studied kung-fu movies and Japanese cinema critically. People still endure reading Madame Bovary.
Time stands still for no man, but we’re a curious people, and folks will search for meaning in the past through our art. As a parody of the traditional action movie, I’m sure people will be watching Last Action Hero for decades to come.
I think as time goes on the emotional hooks of media outside of universal themes fade away. My son will never know the time where “It’s a Wonderful Life” impacted my parents, or how the endless repeating of of “A Christmas Story” was a part of my siblings holiday. But the stories that are important to us or capture a moment of time will endure.
> I defy you to watch something like a Harold Lloyd movie involving a clock and not have sweaty palms or at least a mildly elevated ... emotional response of some sort.
Be that as it may, there's probably a day coming where only a handful of people on the planet even know who that is. Or who have even seen those films. And it'll be like that for most of our now-popular cultural artifacts.
How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read? The culture of those people died with them, and so too will it be with us.
Nobody is going to grow up to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers anymore. Nobody is going to watch The Andy Griffith Show or see Last Action Hero. Even if it happens on a rare occasion, those numbers will pale in comparison to the number of Fortnite players. Or whatever's popular in the coming decades.
Our world is ephemeral and dies with us. We should enjoy our media while it is relevant to us, because that's what it's good for. Telling stories in a framework that speaks to us. In the future, it'll be a relic. An artifact of a time long ago, whose people are all dead, and whose lessons may need to come with a history book.
Apart from students of anthropology, the vast majority of future people will probably find our cultural works to be boring, irrelevant, and unworthy of their attention.
No need for AI, simply clean it up and cut and paste him into a movie like they did when they spliced in some B&W footage of Humphrey Bogart in the movie Last Action Hero. The line was something like the Desk Sargent telling someone to take the “black and white”, and there was Bogey.
For the most part, modern movies have just been dreadful. Previous great screenwriters like Shane Black would make action significant (with people actually reacting in fear to guns), make comedy light and airy but non-constant etc. (he has some nice lists of advice and processes he would use going through scripts) but then these weird light Marvel movies started coming out, amounting to little more than Abbott and Costello vs. the Wolfman or whatever. And somehow that took over all of Hollywood, so Shane Black goes and directs an Iron Man...
Thankfully old movies exist, so I've started digging further and further back, really enjoying the quality writing and acting in things like 1942's To be or not to be or 1932's Grand Hotel. The 80s are also a great treasure trove - recently I saw Shane Black's Last Action Hero, which is way before its time. Or Mystery Men - satirizing these same superhero movies before they became ever present.
Baudrillard saw it all in the late 1970s, in his book On Seduction that extrapolates the importance of video games from Pong and his later Simulacra and Simulation which outlines 13 parables for the information age, each of which could be the basis for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. (e.g, Terminator as a study of the post human, Total Recall for the reality bending power of technology, Last Action Hero is in the liminal space between reality and fantasy)
I always thought that "Strange Days" was one of the prime examples of "underrated movies", so it often gets mentioned that it gets rarely mentioned ;)
(Another movie I'd put in this group, Arnold Braunschweiger's "Last Action Hero" incidentally also has some mini disc usage)
The movie "Last Action Hero" (1993) has a joke about this [1], so maybe this mistake is quite common.
[1]: https://youtu.be/g751-jjKXC0
It's a Hollywood story cliche. There are so many continuity problems in that movie, but if I recall, they were designed to be that way. Here's a decent write up about the whole preposterous nature of the movie: https://film.avclub.com/why-last-action-hero-failed-and-why-it-deserves-to-be-r-1798241845
The author lost me when he said that “Last Action Hero” is not a great movie, so I wouldn’t take anything he writes about movies as serious. John McTiernan is a genius.
I want this.
Maybe use it as product placement in the movie 'Last Action Hero 2'?
>> "Total Recall" and "Last Action Hero" are two of the greatest films made in the last 30-40 years.
Last Action Hero is still one of my favorites.
I still recite a lot of the one liners from that movie. Arnold was so funny in that movie, and it was really well done. I was impressed his his ability to lampoon his own typecasting as an "action movie star" and all the cliches that go with it without being overdone like many of the parody movies you see these days.
> Sure the films in which he played didn't help
"Total Recall" and "Last Action Hero" are two of the greatest films made in the last 30-40 years, and I'm not saying that just because I'm a huge Paul Verhoeven and John McTiernan fan. The final action scene from "Predator" is one of the best from all time when it comes to action-movies.
> But the "action hero" died a while ago.
As a 30-something guy the main issue I had with Avengers 2 (just to pick the latest mainstream action movie example) was the blatant product placement which had no logic (like driving an Audi convertible in the midst of a gunfight scene). Plus, there was too much talking, I almost felt asleep mid-way through the movie. I'm not a comic-books aficionado, so I didn't particularly care about any of the characters, I just wanted some good action.
Compare that with "Predator" or the "Rocky" or "Rambo" series. Lots of good action, lots of "this is damn cool!" feeling without much thinking or non-sense talking. And "Last Action Hero", the movie, was indeed genius, like its director, John McTiernan.