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Ismailov (173)
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What if Office Space came out in 1989?
How plausible is the setting?
This film's reputation as a dark comedy
After Drax is defeated, I rapidly lose interest in the film
Minor plot point involving the "11" on Primo's shoulder
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It can be mildly entertaining if you just want to turn your brain off for an hour and a half, but I wouldn't call it a good movie. For one thing, Mikey apparently has the ability to teleport at will; there's multiple instances where he manages to vanish without a sound despite the context making no sense. Another dumb bit is an adult dying via a slingshot marble hitting their eye, which in a comedy would be fine but this is marketed as a horror and thriller.
Yep. I've seen "Experience of Love" described as an odd song for the end credits, but in hindsight it evokes a "this is a 90s film, this is nostalgic" feeling IMO.
As another comment said, it's not intended to be a reboot. It's intended to show James Bond can adapt to the world of the 1990s. Those behind the series had to deal with the end of the Cold War, the disappointing reception of License to Kill, and betting that audiences would like Brosnan as Bond.
I wonder if he was ever offered non-action parts. He obviously isn't an incredible actor, but his career could have benefited in the late 90s and 2000s if he could get supporting roles in comedies or crime dramas or something instead of insisting on being the untouchable badass star in everything.
The thing is that a widespread robot malfunction means humans in the park were overwhelmed and the protagonist had no one to turn to for help.
It isn't impossible to make an entertaining movie where the Gunslinger is the only malfunctioning robot, e.g. the protagonist could try to enlist the help of other humans and "good" robots to try to stop him. But the tone of such a movie would be a lot less bleak and probably not something Crichton would be interested in.
To be fair the touted "realism" of the park seems to play upon the guests' pop culture notions of how life must have been like back in the day. A knight fighting for the love of a queen by doing battle within castle walls against a diabolical "black knight" is more akin to a Walter Scott novel than actual medieval societies.
Romanworld is described as "a lusty treat for the senses in the setting of delightful, decadent Pompeii." Clearly the emphasis is less on an accurate rendition of Roman life and more on an idealized, eroticized portrayal of a very small segment of the Roman population.
I also notice that the park seems to discourage frequent interactions between guests (the protagonist and James Brolin's character, entering the park as friends, are exceptions that prove the rule.) Delos seems to have things planned so that guests experience their fantasies without being interrupted by other guests trying to experience their own fantasies.
So with all that said, it would make perfect sense for a woman guest to be able to fulfill a fantasy of acting as a gunslinger if that is what the guest wanted (and, as the movie notes, these guests pay good money to attend the park.)
Moviegoers are already expecting that a robot called "The Gunslinger" is going to end up turning on humans. Having him just kill the protagonist and the film ends would probably be hard to pull off in a satisfying manner, at least in the hands of Michael Crichton who clearly preferred scenarios where *everything* goes to hell, not just one freak accident that claims a single victim.
One problem with the notion that one can "quickly fix and reuse" robots is that these are presumably being shot and subjected to physical attacks (including bladed instruments) every day or so.
I find it quite unlikely that the costs of repairs wouldn't quickly add up, given the expensive machinery (presumably not mass-produced) that must be required to make the robots behave in so life-like a fashion.
There's no way actors are going to be more expensive than having to pay top of the line engineers and other staff with incredibly specialized skills. Of course, having a gun just go "bang" with no bullet and an actor pretend to fall over dead isn't as "cool" as shooting a real bullet through a human-like robot that rbleeds and ceases all signs of life, but it's certainly going to be more practical as a business.
If it were a "so bad it's good" movie that might have led to a cult following, but instead it's a mediocre big-budget Hollywood production where the script pretty much copy and pastes Will Smith's character from Men in Black into the 19th century and expects laughs based on that premise.
I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason is the plot. LW2 came out at a time when South Africa was heavily featured in international news, including plenty of protests. The villains are not only shown as bad because of their criminal acts on US soil, but because they are representatives of Apartheid, a system that ended a few years after this film came out.
Compare that to, say, Die Hard 2. An overthrown dictator from a fictional Latin American country is being extradited to the US. Audiences in 1990 could easily tell the dictator is meant to evoke Manuel Noriega, but otherwise the film focuses on mercenaries carrying out shenanigans at an airport to prevent the extradition. You could know nothing about Noriega and be none the wiser watching the film.
LW2's plot comes across as much more "of its time" than DH2.
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