a review of 异星战场

FLOPUARY #11: First time rewatching this one since it flopped at the box office, and I've gotta say it holds up as a well-made 21st-century adaptation of utterly ridiculous turn of the century pulp literature. Although Disney clearly fumbled the marketing on this one, I couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if it had been a hit instead of a flop. First of all, we probably wouldn't have seen Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm later that same year, and almost definitely would not have seen the arrival of five more STAR WARS films (and multiple TV shows), as well as the latest INDIANA JONES. Disney was trying for a big SF/fantasy franchise to challenge AVATAR, HARRY POTTER, and LOTR, and JC's failure meant they had to go buy one. Secondly, I wonder if this -- combined with Disney's early success with THE AVENGERS -- would have cracked open an appetite for more pulp adventure films, with Shane Black's DOC SAVAGE starring Dwayne Johnson escaping development hell at last, or maybe another crack at CONAN. Since Disney already had access to the Burroughs library, why not a JOHN CARTER/TARZAN team-up movie? In any case, it was nice to see a big epic adventure yarn like this where it wasn't just setting us up for the next movie, or directly tied into something else. Not to mention shooting in real locations on real sets, with the CGI budget used on the things that truly needed it like the Tharks and giant monsters and ships and such, instead of pasting the star's face onto a computer-generated double in a costume. The fact that the effects in this movie actually look *better* than those in pretty much every Marvel film since AVENGERS: ENDGAME makes it clear to me that the idea of one studio trying to release three or four of these things a year was always a pure folly, and that maybe the key to making memorable genre action epics is to space 'em out a little and stop overloading the effects houses with things that can be achieved with practical techniques.