Alex Proyas
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Blade Runner (1982)
Directed by Ridley Scott
influenced I, Robot (2004), Dark City (1998), Knowing (2009), The Crow (1994)
Themes Visuals
The notion achieved perhaps its purest form in Alex Proyas' Dark City, a film which -- like Blade Runner -- took some time to find its audience.
Like "Blade Runner,'' it imagines a city of the future.
Before the film is half over he manages to evoke memories of "Blade Runner," the Gotham of Tim Burton's "Batman," Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," and assorted images from David Cronenberg and Terry Gilliam.
Proyas must have seen every film noir ever made at least twice, from "M" to "L.A. Confidential," with stops in between for everything from "The Big Heat" to "Blade Runner," and it shows.
Proyas' overwrought MTV camera jitters tend to highlight characterisation that's two dimensional even by comic book standards, and the film can't stand the inevitable comparisons with Blade Runner or Brazil.
Line up the other recent candidates, which include Tim Burton's Batman, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner , Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessan and The City of Lost Children , and Terry Gilliam's Brazil , and Dark City equals or bests them all.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Knowing (2009)
Plot Themes
What do you get when you cross "When Worlds Collide," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and "Deep Impact?"
With Knowing, director Alex Proyas (The Crow; I, Robot; Dark City) has scooped up a little M. Night Shyamalan, tossed in a heaping helping of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and written most of the cheques on his rumoured $50 million budget for CGI trickery.
Blending doomsday mysticism, otherworldly phenomena, parental concern and quasi-spiritualism, Knowing blatantly references Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
It's unlikely that Knowing will become a classic YouTube howler like The Wicker Man (go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6i2WRreARo to enjoy the hilarity), but this latest dud starring Nicolas Cage does bring to mind the title of MAD magazine's Close Encounters of the Third Kind spoof.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact, and, most directly, Signs (and its heavy-handed spiritual overtones) all factor into John’s emergence from his crisis of faith, with the film suffering from a derivative and patchwork second half that doesn’t satisfyingly follow through on its initially intriguing setup.
The same kind of speeches Butler gave the Spartans in “300” that were so inspiring come across in “Gods of Egypt” with so little enthusiasm its as if he’s trying to rally the troops into an afternoon nap.
Gerard Butler regurgitates King Leonidas from 300 and spends most of his screen time stomping around, waving his weapon, preening, and yelling.
He did Knowing , a much-derided Nic Cage vehicle with, it must be said, the courage of its loony convictions, and now here is Gods of Egypt , many years late to the post- 300 ripoff boom.
It’s a mix of “300,” “Clash of the Titans” and “Prince of Persia,” all rendered to look like a video game.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau trades in his missing hand as Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones for an eye patch and Gerard Butler is back in 300 beast mode as a very naughty god who pouts over not being the Chosen One, but neither can save this CG mess.
Mientras que Nikolaj Coster-Waldau y la bella Elodie Young parecen pasárselo genial en la piel del orgulloso Horus y Hathor, la seductora (y traviesa) diosa del amor, respectivamente, y Gerard Butler pasa de marcar abdominales como el heroico Leónidas de Esparta de 300 (Zack Snyder, 2006) a convertirse, con cierto desparpajo, en el malvado de la función; menos inspirado se muestra el joven Brenton Thwaites como un héroe terrenal de manual, casi un sosias del Matthew Broderick de Lady Halcón (Richard Donner, 1985), sobre el que se sostiene la mayor parte del protagonismo de la cinta.
Unfortunately, Proyas and his battalion of screenwriters had to come up with answers and once they do, it’s all downhill (toward the apocalypse) from there with plot elements borrowed from George Pal’s 1951 science-fiction film, When Worlds Collide, Stephen Spielberg’s 1977 science fiction classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact (a.k.a. the Other Asteroid Movie).
Before the film is half over he manages to evoke memories of "Blade Runner," the Gotham of Tim Burton's "Batman," Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," and assorted images from David Cronenberg and Terry Gilliam.
There are chases and confrontations, as well as gorgeous and elaborate set design, including a subterranean fortress that looks inspired (like so many movies) by Fritz Lang's Metropolis , but the movie isn't a patchwork thriller.
When it first came out in 1998, I thought it was a little too derivative of the aforementioned "Blade Runner" as well as its biggest inspiration, Fritz Lang's classic "Metropolis."
Stirred by the visionary power of " Dark City ," I revisited Fritz Lang 's "Metropolis" and once again fell under its eerie spell.
Such results have proved repetitive in the cinema, especially for pictures that have followed "Metropolis"s way of thinking (most recently with Alex Proyas' "Dark City").
This bizarre un-reality -- an amalgam of Gothic architecture, '50s costumes, "Metropolis"-inspired art direction and film noir technique -- is the creation of writer-director Alex Proyas ("The Crow"), who successfully draws his audience into this uncomfortable world.
Years ago, a staple of weekend matinees were movies based on Greek mythology, whether it was badly-dubbed Italian films about Hercules, or cheesy epics with great stop-motion special effects by Ray Harryhausen, like “Jason and the Argonauts.”
And he has to, because the pair’s script is rather laughable, a melodramatic hodgepodge of ideas liberally borrowing from influences as varied The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars , Flash Gordon , Raiders of the Lost Ark , Cleopatra and any number of Ray Harryhausen event spectacles ranging from 1958’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad , to 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts , to 1981’s Clash of the Titans .
Experiencing the shot-in-Sydney Gods Of Egypt is a bit like watching Jason And The Argonauts (1963) or Clash Of The Titans (the 1981 original, not the remake), in that the action unfolds with a twinkle in its eye, and you’re either on board or you’re not.
That’s only appropriate for a movie that will make its most lasting impression on children, just as Clash of the Titans , Jason and the Argonauts and The Thief of Bagdad once did on me.
It wants to play with surreal Egyptian imagery but is so 2016 that it mistakes human gods with animal heads for organic derivatives of Michael Bay's Transformers .
God of Egypt wants to be a swords-and-sandals epic that can upshift into a Transformers movie when it needs to, but the movie is so roughshod and anemic that it barely wrestles up the energy to be either.
I will, however, compare the film to a franchise in the same medium, Michael Bay's "Transformers," which is pretty much as far from fun as I've ever experienced at the multiplex.
I compare this to Transformers because it really looks like someone thought, “You know what Exodus needed?
Or take something more recent like the first “Transformers” film.
It’s weird, traumatic, and violent, borrowing ideas from “Knowing,” “10 Cloverfield Lane,” and “The Mist” as it explores thought-provoking themes of destruction, salvation, and sacrifice.
A surprising film this reminded me of was Alex Proyas’s “Knowing,” which also used visions and premonitions to build an apocalyptic narrative.
For one thing, youâ??re never quite sure what time or place Underworld exists in â?? most of the production design seems borrowed from The Crow by way of The City of Lost Children, and the few normal people who turn up from time to time do so in order to flee in terror only moments later.
Bathed in television-blue and punctuated by splashes of red, "Underworld" borrows much of its look from superior entertainments — "The Matrix" hangs heavily over the film, as do "The Crow," "Blade" and countless Hong Kong shoot-outs — but director Len Wiseman brings a nice Goth flavor to the proceedings.
In between are tons of rip-offs of everything from The Crow to The Matrix to the leather fetish and arms of Blade to the sweaty bodice-ripping of Anne Rice to the Alien3 wall-crawling monster views of David Fincher.
The look is a combination of Blade and The Crow.
The squalid, burnt-out tunnels of the subway (where the lycanthropes nest) and the vampires� stately manse are gorgeous to behold, but much of the nonsense that goes on in them is woefully derivative of The Matrix, Blade, and The Crow, and Underworld is not as pleasing as any of those films.
And he has to, because the pair’s script is rather laughable, a melodramatic hodgepodge of ideas liberally borrowing from influences as varied The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars , Flash Gordon , Raiders of the Lost Ark , Cleopatra and any number of Ray Harryhausen event spectacles ranging from 1958’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad , to 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts , to 1981’s Clash of the Titans .
Where's Flash Gordon 's Brian Blessed when you really need him?
It belongs in an era where the cheesiness of Flash Gordon (1980) and Masters of the Universe (1987) miraculously garnered a cult following.
Silly but somehow touchingly sincere, this defiant throwback mixes up old 1940s Saturday-afternoon serials, Indiana Jones flicks, Disney cartoons and Ray Harryhausen adventures such as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad .
And he has to, because the pair’s script is rather laughable, a melodramatic hodgepodge of ideas liberally borrowing from influences as varied The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars , Flash Gordon , Raiders of the Lost Ark , Cleopatra and any number of Ray Harryhausen event spectacles ranging from 1958’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad , to 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts , to 1981’s Clash of the Titans .
And he has to, because the pair’s script is rather laughable, a melodramatic hodgepodge of ideas liberally borrowing from influences as varied The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars , Flash Gordon , Raiders of the Lost Ark , Cleopatra and any number of Ray Harryhausen event spectacles ranging from 1958’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad , to 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts , to 1981’s Clash of the Titans .
Experiencing the shot-in-Sydney Gods Of Egypt is a bit like watching Jason And The Argonauts (1963) or Clash Of The Titans (the 1981 original, not the remake), in that the action unfolds with a twinkle in its eye, and you’re either on board or you’re not.
There is a harum-scarum raid on a booby-trapped vault right out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, an encounter with the riddling Sphinx and a desert showdown with a pair of warlike goddesses riding giant fire-breathing serpents.
We get some elaborate pyramid-raiding, with too-busy death traps that suggest the filmmakers haven’t seen Raiders of the Lost Ark but have played Lego Indiana Jones.
And he has to, because the pair’s script is rather laughable, a melodramatic hodgepodge of ideas liberally borrowing from influences as varied The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars , Flash Gordon , Raiders of the Lost Ark , Cleopatra and any number of Ray Harryhausen event spectacles ranging from 1958’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad , to 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts , to 1981’s Clash of the Titans .
Luckily a mortal boy named Bek (Brenton Thwaites), an expert burglar, manages to rescue one of the magical sparkling eyes from its place amid a deadly series of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”-style traps.
Opulent, gold-plated visuals, B-level actors, 300 ripoff… you’d be forgiven for confusing Gods of Egypt with Immortals (if you remember it), and for confusing Proyas, the poor bastard, with Tarsem Singh, who also has a distinctive music-video sensibility that hasn’t always been served by his Hollywood career—but has made more of a go at it in recent years than Proyas.
As a friend said, the movie, if it were going to have those elements, should have been a hard R so they could have focused on the really dark stuff in mythology, which made me remember the noble failure that was Immortals from Tarsem Singh.
En este aspecto, Dioses de Egipto hace bien no tomándose a sí misma demasiado en serio, incluyendo unas buenas dosis de sentido del humor que hacen que el filme sea más divertido que otro fiasco reciente de similares características como fue Immortals (Tarsem Singh, 2011).
Thanks to the success of films like 300 and Clash of the Titans, every studio has been scrambling to latch onto their coattails with their own action-filled fantasy epics, which has ultimately led to diminishing returns for the weaker sequels to those films and obvious rip-offs like Immortals.
What’s more, there’s a method to the director’s madness here – the slow-mo shots and whirling camera-play he employs to capture destructive brawls between the gods (who sometimes enter a kind of beast mode, transforming into super-sized mech creatures of combat that resemble an unholy cross between one of Immortals ‘ gold-fetishizing warriors and a super pissed-off Transformer) make those sequences an absolute blast to behold.
At its best, the visual milieu is fondly reminiscent of Tarsem Singh’s Immortals, his immensely flawed but visually stunning ode to mythology.
The setting is a rainy big city where everyone feels trapped and the sun never seems to shine - like the costumes and general downbeat atmosphere, it's borrowed from classic film noir, but there is futuristic machinery, in the manner of Gilliam's "Brazil."
More glaring than plot faults, though, is the obvious theft of imagery from the films of German director Fritz Lang, as well as some nods to "Brazil" and the French fantasy "The City of Lost Children," all of which are superior to this muddled mess.
Proyas' overwrought MTV camera jitters tend to highlight characterisation that's two dimensional even by comic book standards, and the film can't stand the inevitable comparisons with Blade Runner or Brazil.
Line up the other recent candidates, which include Tim Burton's Batman, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner , Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessan and The City of Lost Children , and Terry Gilliam's Brazil , and Dark City equals or bests them all.
"Dark City" looks like bits and pieces of "Blade Runner," "Batman," "Hellraiser," "Phantasm," "Brazil," and director Alex Proyas's own previous film, "The Crow," with the added glumness of "Dune" thrown in for good measure.
Think of a loud, unimaginably confused (visually as well as narratively) "Brazil" with absolutely no sense of humor, and you'll get the general idea.
On the way is a small hit squad of supernatural psycho-terrorists called The Strangers, inevitably compared to Hellraiser's Pinhead, but more comfortably head-geared in black fedoras.
Moments before the black-clad, beetle-browed Strangers, a Hellraiser-like cabal with names like Mr. Quick and Mr. Hand who are clearly up to no good, show up to deal with him, Murdoch slips away, finds his wallet, and begins to track down what might be his past.
"Dark City" looks like bits and pieces of "Blade Runner," "Batman," "Hellraiser," "Phantasm," "Brazil," and director Alex Proyas's own previous film, "The Crow," with the added glumness of "Dune" thrown in for good measure.
I, Robot is meant to be a cautionary tale, but we've been cautioned so many times -- starting with Michael Crichton's 1973 Westworld, in which amusement park robots go on a murderous rampage -- that it's become a little like listening to white noise or a Britney Spears album.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced I, Robot (2004), Dark City (1998)
Themes Plot
"Dark City'' by Alex Proyas is a great visionary achievement, a film so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like "Metropolis'' and "2001: A Space Odyssey.''
Picky sci-fi fans will complain that the film is glaringly derivative of "Blade Runner" and borrows a key story element of "2001: A Space Odyssey."
While that does not speak highly for " 2001: A Space Odyssey " (1968), it is certain that the screenplay for this film, by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman , is not adult, complex or worthwhile, although it is indeed science fiction.
This belongs in an outre canon with films such as David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, Alex Proyas’ Dark City and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon. All these films have their detractors and their acolytes, in large part because they defy convention and genre in a beautifully reckless way.
Film lovers will find that Dark City is overflowing with references to classic pictures -- everything from the silent Dracula adaptation, Nosferatu , to Hitchcock's masterful Vertigo .