Hacker Cinema
The Wolverine
2013 · Film · 126 min
Part of The Wolverine Collection
Directed by James Mangold
ActionScience FictionAdventure
Wolverine faces his ultimate nemesis - and tests of his physical, emotional, and mortal limits - in a life-changing voyage to modern-day Japan.
2 negative7 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
I was watching a terrible movie, Wolverine, and the titular character is driving through Canada, we're told, and I found myself thinking that "huh, that bit of Canada looks a lot like New Zealand, interesting."
Then he drives across a one-way bridge, and tracking shot above the car captures the big arrow New Zealand paints on the exit lane indicating you should drive in the *left* lane (started doing this after few too many tired tourists from RHD countries reverted to habit upon leaving a one-way bridge causing a head-on collision further down the road). They could've edited the arrow out, surely.
TL;DR thought Canada in a movie looked like New Zealand, it was New Zealand.
I remember years ago seeing a prerelease version of one of the wolverine movies. As the CGI models were still grayscale, it was cool to see at what points the fights were actors and what points it was CGI.
D&D had written a lot of movies (25th hour, troy, kite runner, wolverine, brothers) and there were some “known actors” (Lena heady, Peter Dinklage, aiden gillan, Charles dance, Sean bean).
And I think the biggest problem with game of thrones is that the show runners crapped out after GRRM ran out of material. So I would want a better runner for Tolkien.
The building also appears in the movie The Wolverine, and may have been referenced as William Gibson's titular New Rose Hotel.
It's a familiar sight, and a familiar idea, around the world, much like "The Gherkin" in London or the Sydney Opera House. Its architectural oddness makes it stand out, and media presence gives it wide exposure.
Most comments here just seem to generally crap on all video game movies to date (correct) and surmise that it's a losing concept (wrong).
Movies afraid to deviate away from source material I don't think applies to the problem. I've probably seen most video game movies (even the cringe-worthy Uwe Boll ones) and I'd say the overwhelming problem is no one on set even bothering to look at the source material, or understanding what they're trying to do.
Someone mentioned Edge of Tomorrow, which never was a game. It was based on a very light-sci-fi japanese novel, in turn inspired by a player's forum account of restarting a game over and over in order to incrementally learn enough to finish it.
But it doesn't really matter whether Edge of Tomorrow was or was not based on a video game. The fact that it works as a movie and you can think about it in terms of a video game proves that there's no issue with making a video game movie.
The problem with Hollywood sometimes or often putting out crap is a Hollywood problem, not a medium or genre problem.
Think of a movie you thought had all potential to be good, but turned out bad, and then google the backstory on its production. I'll put $10 on saying that it most likely suffered from "too many chefs"/creation by committee, and focus-grouping it to death, instead of trusting the vision of the creator(s), whether that be screenwriter, director or other.
This is obviously subjective, but why is the best Marvel movies Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, Deadpool and Logan?
For example, James Mangold did both The Wolverine and Logan, what changed between them?
I'd bet there's not a single star athlete in any sport that hasn't used performance enhancing drugs in some way. Test doesn't just make your muscles grow; it allows you to train harder and recover faster. The benefits are obvious. Stars have been caught in nearly every single sport you can think of -- football, baseball, track, cycling, distance running, sprinting, swimming, weightlifting, bodybuilding (well, they mostly don't bother testing), etc. Even movie stars are doing them (see eg Hugh Jackman jumping 20 lbs lean muscle mass in 6 months in his 40s to play Wolverine.)
Where stars aren't getting caught testing is lax or the drugs have outrun the testing regimes (basketball, crossfit, tennis).
In the year 2016, believing that the best athletes aren't using the same drugs as everyone else requires willful suspension of disbelief. After all, look at what they did for eg Barry Bonds -- they turned a clear hall of fame player into probably the best to ever play baseball. Every star athlete, and they tend to be ultra competitive, wants the same thing.
a leak of the entire film could be a disaster. Lions Gate's Expendables 3 bombed in theaters when it was released in July after a high-definition version of the movie was posted on sites that traffic in pirated films
Expendables 3 was also awful -- X-Men Wolverine was leaked very early on, and went on to do extremely well. How a leak affects ticket sales is pure speculation, I wish 'journalists' would stop talking about the harm piracy does without any substantiation.
(SPOILER ALERT)
To me, the beauty of the story is that, while we as viewers do not know what has transpired in the universe between 1973 and present, neither does Wolverine. Further, since he stills ends up at the School with his friends alive in the present day, we know that a lot of character development has necessarily happened, because we saw analogous stories in the earlier movies from the now lost timeline. So while the events of the previous movies are now no longer canonical history, they are as real to Logan as they were to us, and their emotional impact still affected Logan's life in a very real way. Meanwhile, going forward the script writers are no longer slaves to continuity, which, after the third film blew up everything, greatly restricted what they could do with the main cast of characters in the present day setting.
In my opinion, so many "time reset" plots (think Star Trek Voyager's Year of Hell) leave the viewer empty because they truly have no lasting consequence on the character's we love. SF Debris (http://blip.tv/sf-debris-opinionated-reviews/voy-year-of-hell-review-part-1-6469092) made the incredible suggestion that, in that Star Trek story, imagine what if, due to some kind of quantum chronometric mumbo jumbo, one of the crew members (say, Harry Kim!) had survived the big reset with their memories and experiences of the year intact. But instead, apart from some shallow insights into the characters in a "what if" scenario, it was as though it never happened.
I wonder if the constant shifting of VFX houses to new countries and employees coming and going from the field is why we are seeing uneven results in movies? Most special effects-laden movies have a few CGI shots that just look awful. And you would think that VFX would be steadily improving in quality, but while we often see more impressive results in terms of what can be done the accuracy of them isn't always holding up and the realism and reliability isn't improving at the same rate that technology and new techniques are.
This could end up with Hollywood shooting themselves in the foot. Movies are getting more and more CGI, but CGI that breaks the suspension of disbelief can really ruin a movie.
A lot of people complained about the VFX in Wolverine, for instance, but shouldn't the VFX in that have been better than the X-men triology? Well, when you have seventeen different companies doing VFX shots for a movie, you're going to get uneven results. There was some really good VFX in Wolverine, but there was some really bad stuff too, and I'd have to believe the studio going cheap is what led to it.