The prologue could have been cut...

by Hollowshape 1 day ago (Thu Oct 28 2010 13:52:31) Ignore this User | Report Abuse
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And it wouldn't have hurt the film at all. In fact, I think it would have improved upon the structure and pacing of the film. Here's why: normally the audience gets to solve a mystery along with a movie detective, but many aspects of this case are puzzling only to him, since the audience knows many of the secrets from watching the prologue. As a result, we spend a lot of time waiting for him to catch up. Remove the prologue, and I think the film would be much more intriguing and less tedious.





Good point. However, I think using that footage needed to stay and perhaps be used as a flashback as one of the characters brings the detective up to speed on what was really going on. Think how cleverly the original "The Mummy" used extensive flashbacks to explain the Boris Karloff (I don't recall the name) character 's origin before being resurrected. "Lord of Illusions" suffers from bad editing decisions.









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Believe it or not the prologue was my favorite part of the film. I do agree the film could have used flashbacks, it would have been interesting to see how Dorothea and Philip's marriage sorta fell apart over the years. I do think though that showing them when they were younger and how they first faced Nix was very well done. A truly haunting opening.

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I completely agree, this movie is a mess. It's a shame because it could have been awesome. The prologue should have been told in flashback or a series of flashbacks later in the movie as other posters have already suggested. To be honest though, I think the entire thing could have done with a massive rewrite. I think Barker wanted to give us a reason to fear Nix from the start so we knew what was at stake if he were to resurrect, but you can't lay your cards out in the opening scene and then conduct your movie as like a detective story.

I haven't read The Last Illusion, but it seems staggeringly similar to The Great and Secret Show, a book which coincidentally (or not) has the same problem as this movie but magnified; It rambles along through a one-hundred page prologue before starting again with a bunch of characters who don't know what the hell is going down and we have to rediscover it with them. I thought clearly the perfect place to begin was Howie's arrival in Palamo Grove, with perhaps a short prologue detailing what happened the night of the storm that brought the Jaff and the Fletcher there years earlier, but from the point of view of the townsfolk, detailing the back story through revelatory flashbacks and even devoting whole chapters to it later in the book. Okay, this digression is more involved than I had intended so I'll just show some self control and bow out... now.

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