28 Years Later

Homsar said:

Danny Boyle is a pretty great Director, at the time Sunshine blu-ray was one of the best to test out the new TVs

I don't even know if he's made a bad movie, even Trance was pretty good regardless of lower reviews

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Kirun said:

Sunshine is one of the greatest failings ever. That movie could've been an all-timer, but once it turned into a "zombie" movie it all went to shit.

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Homsar said:

Its been 13+ years since I've seen it but didn't turn into kind of a mild Event Horizon?

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Kirun said:

Eh, not really. And even if it had, Event Horizon established very early on that it was likely a messed up situation/horror scenario they were walking into.

Sunshine turns into a completely different movie about half-way-2/3rds in. If it wanted to be Event Horizon, that's fine. But by the time it established that, it became a case of, "WTF am I watching? Did somebody record a different movie over the one I was watching 5 minutes ago?". It was way too fucking abrupt and out of left field.

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Arbitrary said:

It's the same affliction that Matt Damon suffered from in Interstellar - space madness. It's a common affliction in space.

Sunshine is still pretty good up until the final action sequence.

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Homsar said:

Even Horizon wasn't space madness I thought, they went to hell and didn't an actually entity possess them? I remember putting the movie on slowmo as a little kid and the recording of the lost crew killing each other was not pleasant for an 7 year old. Think I remember them having their arms down the mouth/throat pulling out their guts

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Onoes said:

I have only watched maybe 4 or 5 directors commentary on movies in my life. I loved 28 days later, so one day I was like "Fuck it, lets hear the directors talk about it." and it was shocking how bad this movie almost was. Basically, at one point in the movie they just pause it and start talking about how the whole last 20-30 minutes of the movie had to b changed. Then it goes into a story board of what was supposed to happen, which was the main character does a total blood transfusion on the girls dad, so that he becomes infected, and its a happy ending for the girl and her dad. They had filmed a bunch of it, and then one day, some random crew member went "Are people going to believe this? I mean, you guys already established a single drop of blood in one guys eye turns him into a bloodthirsty zombie in about 30 seconds. How is a blood transfusion not immediately infected?" and they looked at eacxh other and just went.. "uhhhh FUCK.". They had to call the studio and tell them they needed to shut down production and do rewrites. The studio gave them 48 hours to start filming again.

So they basically said they spent the whole first day pissing and moaning, looking for inspiration, trying to come up with an alternate ending. They said they basically stayed up all of night 2 in a fever just trying to make something that worked. They were super unhappy with the direction they were going until the actors started adlibbing and they were basically taking any suggestions from crew and cast for how each scene should go. They then talked about how well everything just happened to work out, and that they had filmed another ending where the main dude had died and it was just the girls living in the woods making the banner, basically the same ending but a little bleaker.

All in all, the only thing I got from the directors commentary was that these guys tried to make a shitty movie thinking it would be good, and instead fell face first into making a good film thanks to everyone around them. So when 28 weeks later was announced I expected it to be garbage, and it was. I don't know what these guys have done since, maybe they figured it all out, but man, I wouldn't bet #1 on anything these guys do based on that one directors commentary.

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DickTrickle said:

I went through a phase where I listened to a lot of commentaries and interviews by creative types and I think one of the most surprising takeaways for me is how some of the biggest successes in terms of storytelling are accidents, unintended, or something done on a whim instead of being so carefully crafted and belabored. I think it speaks somewhat to their latent ability or skill that something amazing sometimes comes out of something so chaotic and convoluted but it also explains why it can be so hard for many of them to recreate their successes.

Even shows that are universally praised like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, some of the things that seem like utter genius Vince Gilligan readily admits just kind of happened to work out. Entire characters or story arcs are born out of scheduling conflicts or things like that.

The creative process is pretty bizarre.

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Chukzombi said:

It's not all happy accidents. You won't get gold nugget surprises if your story is shit. You get fun surprise moments in BCS because it's a very high standard written program

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DickTrickle said:

some of the biggest successes in terms of storytelling are accidents, unintended, or something done on a whim instead of being so carefully crafted and belabored.

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