Movies you “need” to “see”

Cover of A Princess of Mars

You need to see Avatar. You do. It’s a beautiful film. It’s exciting and fun to watch. But that’s all. The more classic sci-fi I read, the less original Avatar is. Now I’m reading A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Oh. My. God. Some of the critters in Avatar were pulled right out of this book. As was a good chunk of the story.

You need (I guess) to see Surrogates. Again, a visually good movie with some interesting ideas. Unfortunately, none of them are new ideas and the story is pretty much ripped right from Asimov. At one point I leaned over to Kerry and said “this is Caves of Steel.” It wasn’t, but what was going on in the movie at the time made me believe it was going to be. Ving Rhames: awesome. Bruce Willis: not bad. James Cromwell: always a pleasure, but he was better in part one: I, Robot. And that had a fully-developed story.

The Bone Collector. Totally unrelated, but a similarly good movie. Interesting story, but zero believability. A couple who live in Manhattan fall asleep in a taxi. A New York cop (a woman, no less) goes to check out a possible crime scene alone. A (supposedly) wrongfully-accused felon convicted of tampering with material evidence at multiple crime scenes is a licensed medical technician. I could be totally wrong, but those three things seem completely unbelievable to me. If I was a uniformed police officer in any major city, there’s no way I’d ever go anywhere alone on purpose. Also, I really like Denzel, but he was entirely the wrong actor for this movie. His performance, more than anything, made me not like this movie as well as I would have if it had been done properly. He wasn’t bad. He just wasn’t the right man for the part. Angelina Jolie: loved her. I think she was right for the part and she played it well. Out of the three movies in this post, this one is the best, but it still doesn’t get the honor of being on my DVD rack.