What If Uwe Boll Had $200 Million?

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While watching Transformers: Age of Extinction, I remembered a part of one of the many rants of infamous director Uwe Boll saying something to the effect if he made a movie with the budget of Michael Bay his would be better.  That seems like a very low mark to aim for, and to Bay’s credit I think he is very smart and knows exactly what he is doing, but it made me ask the question, “What would a $200 Million Uwe Boll movie look like?”  I mean what cinematic horrors would he unleash?  I am going to give my best guess as to what this movie would look like.

First off, Uwe would need a video game to base his movie off of.  It couldn’t be something small, with this budget he would get one of the top franchises.  Halo and Call of Duty are too controlled by their publishers, and Boll has too much of a reputation for them to take the risk on him, but one publisher would relish the theatric destruction Boll would bring.  That would be Take-Two/Rockstar.  That’s right, I am betting Boll would make a Grand Theft Auto game.

Now part of the fun with Grand Theft Auto is it knows it is over the top, and everything is very tongue and cheek.  Uwe Boll would miss all that and play it straight.  His movie would follow a man as he murdered and slaughtered his way to the top.  He would think he was making a new version of Scarface, but in reality it would just be stupidly violent.  Now with $200 Million he could pay a script writer to write something decent, and he probably would pay someone to do it, but then he would say it was garbage and then write his own worse version.  It would all be part of the process.

Since this is Uwe Boll we are talking about I am guessing he would try and ‘sex’ it up a bit.  He would do that the only way he knows how: adding naked women.  They would be everywhere.  He would put them in like a home decorator adds in lamps.  He would get an actual actress do strip down too.  He was very proud of himself for saving money in BloodRayne by hiring prostitutes, but with this budget he would get real SAG actresses.  I am guessing he would set a record for the amount of skin on screen in an ‘R’ rate movie.

Now all that money would finally get him the special effects budget that he has always wanted, so I am pretty sure that to prove he is better than Michael Bay he would try to beat him at his own game.  This movie would be nothing but slow motion pans and explosions.  He would level Detroit, or some other cheap-to-film-in US city.  Everyone would be shooting at any given moment just because he could afford it.

So what I am saying is the movie would be gloriously bad.  It would be a violent, incoherent mess with a bunch of naked ladies.  So pretty much a Michael Bay movie, but without any of the marketability.  I think Uwe Boll would fall very short of Michael Bay, and give us one of the worst movies ever made.  Something that would be talked about for ages.  Rockstar Games would love it.

Why Did I Watch Transformers: Age of Extinction?

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When scrolling through Netflix Mrs. Shmee saw Transformers: Age of Extinction, and said, “Hey let’s watch that!”, and I inexplicably agreed.  I shouldn’t have, but I did.  I will say this: Michael Bay knows how to make his type of movie.  His finger prints are all over it: The slow motion camera rotations, actors group posing in front of amazing backdrops, creepy floor height shots of every woman on set, and about a million American flags.  To his credit, his movies sell, but they sure aren’t good.

I was going to try and give you the plot, but I am not sure that I have figured it out yet.  I can at least give you the setup.  Transformers: Age of Extinction takes place after the destruction of Chicago in the last movie, so the Autobots are no longer working with the US Government, and worse for Transformer kind that means they now are being actively hunted and killed by the Government with the help of a new alien robot.  You know because the Government can’t trust alien robots…

Quite a switch I know, but the real reason for this is so we can get new Transformers, and you would think with the voice acting talents of John Goodman and Ken Watanabe that would be okay, it isn’t.  The new Transformers are all terrible.  Not that it is Goodman or Watanabe’s fault, they just look ridiculous, and are given just completely rubbish dialog.  They don’t have conversations, they just say things.  Odd things, mostly about wanting to kill humans.  Which I guess given that we are hunting them down it makes sense, but they are supposed to be the good guys.

The rest of the actors don’t fair much better, so they just do their best to chew through screen time.  I mean it is like Mark Wahlberg just decided to play the SNL talking to animals version of himself.  I half expected him to tell Optimus Prime, “Say hello to your mother for me!”  Stanly Tucci similarly seems to just throw his hands up and act as crazy as he can.  The rest of the cast just gets to stand around and react to things.  I would love to see a copy of the script for Age of Extinction just to see if there is dialog on it, or just vague direction like, “act surprised”, or “say something about murdering humans!”  It was all so bafflingly poor.

Now all of this would be somewhat forgivable if the robot action was at least good, but Transformers: Age of Extinction is the worst of the bunch.  Yes, I know what you are thinking.  Yes, there are robot dinosaurs, but they are at very end when the movie moves to China for some reason.  They can’t save it, the action just isn’t very good.  Plus there are long (very long) stretches of time were nothing with a robot happens.  We are just left watching confused humans attempting to try and make this movie watchable, but for a movie with a two hour and forty-five minute running time, they were never going to succeed.

Now all my ranting about Transformers: Age of Extinction is for nothing, Transformers 5 comes out next year, and it is probably going to be worse given the downward trajectory of this already low quality franchise, but it will still make hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, so we will get Transformers 6.  Mind blowing.  Don’t watch this movie (unless it is the RiffTrax version).  It isn’t good, and it is just encouraging Michael Bay.  In the words of Mark Wahlberg, “Get me my alien gun!”

San Diego Comic-Con 2015 Wrap-Up!

Another Comic-Con is gone, and all it gave us was a ton of awesome trailers.  The Nerve!  Oh, wait that is totally rad!  I mean in the new Batman v Superman trailer (watch it here) we got to see Wonder Woman blow some stuff up.  If you were quick enough to watch the trailers before they got pulled you got to see Deadpool murder people and make jokes in a very Deadpool way and the Joker get creepy.  Both looked great.

Honestly Warner Bros. and Fox should know better and just release the trailers to the public.  They can’t want their movies’ first intro to the public to be crappy blurry cam shots can they?  We are all going to see it anyway, why fight us.  Embrace the 21st century and let us watch our superhero footage!  It is all we really want.  We just want to watch guys and gals in capes punch each other!  Is that too much to ask?  I don’t think so.

Instead of a new trailer Disney released a behind the scenes reel (shown above), and it all looked very exciting.  Especially Simon Pegg in an alien suit, so we will see where he turns up.  The practical effects look amazing; I just want to go roll around on their set.  I don’t care if I hate the heat (fat nerd syndrome) – I will make it work.

There is a lot, and I mean a lot of genre TV coming out, so if there was ever a doubt that geeky stuff is now mainstream, there isn’t now.  But the coolest news for me was that we learned that The Flash is going full on multi-dimensional by introducing Jay Garrick the Golden Age/Earth 2 Flash, so now instead of just time travel we have multiple earths.  Heck, I am in!

But the very best news of all, the news that I am happiest about:  Pacific Rim 2 starts filming at the end of this year.  So excited!  I loves me some giant robot, that isn’t the abomination that is the Bayformers, action.  My top news was almost that they are making a Green Lantern Corps movie, but since that isn’t until 2020 it is hard to get too excited about it (though I am pretty excited).

That is my wrap-up, what did you guys like from this year’s show?