This looks amazing.
I don't need big budgets, I don't need CGI, I need story, I need plot, I need mythology. "Its like saying you are just an ape" is a fantastic pity piece of dialog.
share100% agree. Hope the movie delivers!
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MovieChat Forums > Autómata (2014) Discussion > This looks amazing.
I may have to dip into my savings to see this bad boy!
"SIN CITY 2 will open at #1 at the box office this week-end" -- Batman_Vinni99
I want the CGI, but not overdone, super fast, crazy explosions CGI.
I loved the CGI in District 9 and Elysium. I looked very different to beefed up wet plastic-y CGI is most films. District 9, felt like Half Life source engine, only much more advanced.
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It's frustrating because I want to just blabber about what I think the film is trying to tell us but that would spoil everything. Just rest assured it tells a great story. Visually stunning, great performances from the actors, even the non human ones :)
Anyone who is starved for great sci-fi will find it here.
Dude, it was terrible. Everyone except Banderas is terrible. Especially Griffiths, she sounded as if she was reading off cuecards every time she said her awful lines. Clumsy beat-you-over-the-head with "clever" social commentary. Wannabe Blade Runner/Kubricks visual language, over the top music cues. Disney-esque ways of forcing the viewer to feel sympathy for the robots.
A for effort, c-for execution. Felt like a filmschoolstudents end of year project if they had access to a big budget and a few name actors.
I'm genuinely sorry you feel that way. I did expect an overally bad reaction to the movie because of what it was trying to do. Namely, be more than a brain dead action flick with robots trying to take over the world because hey, that's what robots do right?
There's probably not much point in discussing it with you as you seem to really set in your ways but I'll throw a few things out there just for the hell of it. Feel free to chew them up. I didn't see the social commentary that you saw, for me the idea that mankind was becoming extinct for whatever reason was a clever way to deflect the idea that robots = mankind killers if they ever get smart. It's now become a cringe inducing joke that you see along side anything robot related. A new vacuum cleaning robot comes out? the comments will be full of people joking about how it spells the end of life as we know it. The film avoids that by allowing mankind to pretty much snuff itself out, no help from robots needed. This leaves it open to tell a story that's not about that and I think it did that beautifully. The disney sympathy trope, if that's even a thing doesn't really work because they always use characters with big eyes as we're hard wired as humans to care for things with big eyes. You know because our eyes never grow so when babies are born they appear to have huge eyes, when in fact they just have a small head that hasn't grown out yet. So none of the obvious ways hollywood uses to manipulate the audience into liking something seemed to be used, no comedy cute voice, no wacky actions. Anyway, I felt the decision to go with very industrial robots that have tiny little red eyes was actually very smart. You didn't initially care about them at all, in fact for a lot of the movie you're very unsure about them and their motives. So guess I'm lost where you're going with the disney crap. It's my understanding that the budget wasn't so great for this movie and yet it needed a lot of space to work. So I can't help but praise how well it did look. It's probably impossible at this point to avoid echoing something from Blade Runner in a sci-fi movie. It's sunk so far into popular culture now it's just unavoidable. They didn't go for the big shiny neon cities and instead I think captured a pretty unique look with the desert moving in.
Still you hated it and I'm not going to change your mind. I just think your reasoning is flawed.
I have to agree that the visuals were stunning, and I like the idea that robots weren't what destroyed mankind, but I was utterly bored by this movie.. :/
I managed to watch 50 mins or so, and nothing of interest had happened to suck me into the story.. It's not like I have a problem with slow paced movies or so, two of the best movies I've seen lately are Stoker and Disconnect, neither of them very fast paced, but they both have excellent storytelling! And it's very rare that I don't finish a movie. But this one.. I tried, but got nothing in return.. :(
Just watched it. I'm a huge sci-fi fan and i need compelling story telling too. This is the best science fiction i've seen in a long, long time. Banderas was an interesting choice but it worked 100%.
shareI couldn't agree with you more Duncan, huge sci-fi fan here too. I'm pretty much at the point now where I get most of my sci-fi fix from books. At least there you can still get some really hard science fiction that really entertains while sort of extrapolating out what we have in our world now to what we might have in whatever time period the story is set. It's a tough call to expect writers to pull that off but they keep doing and I love it when they do. This movie nails that IMO. The Machine was another smart movie that I loved recently but it managed to work by setting itself inside a really small space. So despite the low budget, it still felt solid enough to me. This movie is anything but that, it's got huge wide open spaces it needs to fill and I was floored by what they managed without a Prometheus like budget.
shareSpeaking of sic-fi books, can you recommend a couple that you really liked and found interesting? I'm also a sci-fi fan and although I haven't really gotten the opportunity to read any books, I would very much like to start doing so. I do agree that books can be more enjoyable than most of the movies on the matter out there.
I did however like Automata mostly because of Banderas but also because of the different take on the robots than what we are usually used to. And I need to check out The Machine as well because I haven't watched and I heard some decent reviews about it.
What can I say? I'm in a kind of sic-fi state of mind.
"Which would be worse - to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?" [giveup]
Book recommendations incoming faceless-man. All of these sort of fall into a similar category of having great story and characters and really high quality writing but also absolutely no *beep* when it comes to the science. No timey wimey doctor who shenanigans.
There's so much you can recommend from the past, like Arthur C Clarke and Asimov but I'll stick to the more up to date stuff. Alastair Reynolds is a great first start, as well as being a sci-fi writer he's also got a PHD in physics so you know that when he describes stuff in his books, it's absolutely spot on.
He's got an epic in Revelation Space but you can drop into self contained one offs like Pushing Ice and Blue Remembered Earth which aren't part of the Revelation series.
Iain Banks is another fantastic writer with a similar grand epic you can munch on or some single self contained books. The epic is the Culture series. Book 1 is Consider Phlebas, then the Player of games, Use of weapons and book 4 is Excession. some of his one off's are Surface detail and the hydrogen sonata.
Not very up to date but still a great trilogy is Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars trilogy, i think red mars is the first one. Really simple idea of humans going to and colonising Mars but its so realistic you'll feel like its a documentary of what really happened.
Again not so new but still must mentions are Neal Stephensons Snowcrash and Reamde. Snowcrash is problematic because it deals with what we thought virtual reality was going to become. A real place like chatrooms and forums are today but it never happened so it feels oddly wrong and dated because of that. Still a great read and Reamde is bang up to date.
If you happen to remember the slightly dodgy tv show called flash forward, that was from the book of the same name by robert j sawyer. I wasn't impressed personally but he has a fantastic AI tale called WWW1 Wake ,WWW2 Watch and WWW3 Wonder. Not as hard science wise but I had no problems believing it as it went along and it's not often you get to read really in depth into an AI character being believable.
All the above are authors where I've read either all of or a lot of their work. These ones below are just one off titles that I liked a lot but not really familiar with the author perhaps.
andy weir - the martian <-- has been getting great reviews
Charlie Huston - Sleepless
Daniel H Wilson - Robopocalypse <-- think walking dead with robots instead of zombies
Daniel Suarez - Influx
A nice light hearted one is ernest clines Ready Player One
And if you like that slightly tongue in cheek sci-fi, Rob reids year zero is a classic.
Hugh Howeys Dust has such a fantastic opening you won't be able to put it down.
Justin Cronins The Passage is one I can't believe hasn't been turned into a movie yet.
Marcus Sakeys Brilliance
and a controversial one as a lot of people hated it but Paolo Bacigalupis The Windup Girl is a kind of cousin to Automata is some ways. I loved it.
Probably more than you wanted to hear about but hopefully something tickles your brain in the list :)
Thanks man, thanks for getting the time to reply to me. I will try to check them all out as soon as possible because they sound interesting and some of the names already caught my eye.
Which would be worse - to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?
This movie sucked two fat hairy guerrilla balls!
"Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha (chaching) Whoops!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XphDXWPBQqE