Crapshoot 2017: Fantastic Flops

Hollywood's mightiest failures in Fantasy.

If there’s one genre that you truly can’t cheap out on in storytelling its fantasy.

I don’t merely mean this from a perspective of budgetary constraints however. While having reasonable amounts of money for a fantasy production can be substantially beneficial, a genre reliant on bending, rewriting, and defying the laws governing our reality as the basis for a setting carrying its own societies and myths can’t quite thrive without attention to detail paid towards every step of the storytelling process.

Perhaps this is why the following films flopped so spectacularly last year but regardless of whatever factors critically struck them in their wallets, the lack of commitment, inspiration, and attention to detail in favor of throwing money and resources at the screen have undoubtedly played a key hand in making them suck.

A great deal has been made of Alex Proyas’ alleged white washing of Egypt in his star studded fantasy adventure. Although I wouldn’t quite take umbrage with those that found it problematic, it’s a criticism that I myself won’t be indulging in for two reasons.

Similarly to the casting of Idris Elba as the Norse gatekeeper Heimdall, the film’s depiction of Egyptian pantheon and legend is one rooted in pure fantasy isolated from the geographical makeup of the real region.

That’s not to say that Hollywood doesn’t seem to be grasping the problem with putting a predominant ethnicity literally on a divine pedestal while freely utilizing African American extras, something that they do need to continue being called on, however the problems of the films racial framing have been covered to death in ways that I have little to add to, tying directly into reason number two.

Regardless of how this thing would have been cast, the results would have been the same; “Gods of Egypt” is a laughable riot at best and a dull but perpetually mesmerizing train wreck of a production at worst

Following the adventure of the god Horus to take back the throne from his treacherous uncle Set in order to restore order to Egypt, the resulting film plays out like a 12 year olds film festival entry conceived of after a month long discovery fueled obsession with Ray Harryhausen.

Like “La La Land” was for the classic Hollywood musical, this is a film that seems admirably obsessed with chasing a certain rousing and swashbuckling flair and stylization that has been noticeably absent from modern mainstream fantasy filmmaking. The unfortunate reality of this however is that many techniques of the craft that worked within the context of that timeframe, did so as a means of compensating for things that just weren’t feasible for most productions.

The effects of the late and great Mr. Harryhausen may not stack up to what we can do with computers and animatronics today but there’s a certain charm to their style and execution knowing how well they made do with what little that they had and how effective your own imagination could be with regard to filling in the blanks.

“Gods of Egypt” on the other hand is quite possibly one of the worst things that Hollywood has done with CGI since “Star Wars: Episode II.”

As a massive fan of tokusatsu and their budget restrictive productions, reliant on storytelling over special effects similarly to stage plays asking the audience to imagine the intended effect of the story based on successful conveyance of the material through acting, the lifeless designs, stiff and janky motions, and off putting shine to the CGI creatures was never quite a problem for me.

What was a problem for me was the sheer number of people that they managed to pack into shots of carnage that are clearly in front of green screens.

This pervasive lack of subtly sits in every frame of the film almost front and center, making a production well over a hundred million dollar in total look like a direct to video film and even manages to extend its problematic ways into the cast performances as well.

While it doesn’t help that many cast members such as Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Chadwick Boseman, and Elodie Yung had gone on to give excellent performances in better productions within the same year, all of the admittedly solid talent involved give almost robotic performances rendered nigh helpless by acting against a nonexistent setting to be constructed in post production and a shoddy unforcused script that wants to have its cake and eat it too.

Similarly to the disastrous results of “Ben-Hur (2016),” “Gods of Egypt” wants desperately to feel like an epic hero’s journey but doesn’t effectively lay the groundwork for you to really care about the hodgepodge of characters and plot threads that it throws your way.

The most tragic thing about all of this however is that by the end, I found myself really wanting to care. The handling of the production may have been a massive misfire on just about every executable level but the level of detail and imagination that went into this concept, from the conception of the gods and the metaphysical mechanics of the universe that they operate, to the interpretations of said deities and their interpersonal relationships to one another and the mortals caught in the crossfire, really can’t be ignored.

Somewhere within the idea of “Gods of Egypt,” there was a good movie to be had that perhaps could have led to a cool franchise. It breaks my heart that not only did that film not surface but the man that failed to bring it to life is the same man that managed to use his sheer sense of visual style to salvage the lame duck screenplay for “The Crow,” one of my favorite movies of all time.

Although the nicest thing that I can say about “Gods of Egypt” is that its heart was in the right place, that’s still far nicer than just about anything that I can muster up for “Alice: Through the Looking Glass.”

To call this a bastardization of Lewis Carroll’s work isn’t an exaggeration of negative opinion so much as it is simply a statement of fact; this film has little to nothing to do with either book its namesake is based on and more or less exists as a means for Disney to pump more money out of what existing rights that it has access to.

Unlike “The Jungle Book” however, this one couldn’t quite manage to pull it off without sucking.

It’s not as though the film is pulling from the strongest of foundations but to the credit of Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland (2010),” the movie did at least manage convey the surreal sense of awe accompanied by the Wonderland setting despite gradually snuffing the magic out of it by applying the rules and consistency that it purposefully and characteristically lacks in.

“Alice: Through the Looking Glass” practically shrugs its shoulders from frame one, in which the anachronistic and pandering feminine empowerment plot of Alice being a rousing and active trade ship captain sailing the dangerous seas has her returning home to be “unexpectedly” chastised by a society that she is not only at odds with but likely wouldn’t even exist within.

But just as she begins to get too bogged down within Victorian-era politics, she’s whisked off to Wonderland… for some reason. Her goal this time, to cheer up the Mad Hatter, who seems to be upset over his family’s death… off screen and some decades ago which we are hearing about for the first time.

Did that sound as though it was thought of from off the top of somebody’s head? If so, then you have successfully replicated the feeling of watching “Alice: Through the Looking Glass,” a movie that felt like it was more or less written as it was shot.

Just about everything in the movie can essentially be summed up as, like the first one, but infinitely lazier. The entire cast, both CGI and live action alike returns to have basically no impact on the plot whatsoever, while Mia Wasikowska’s Alice (who gave a stiff and dry performance in the first, film which was about her rediscovering a magical land) goes through the motions as though the mechanics of Wonderland are second nature to her, killing what senses of urgency and fun could have possibly been had.

Uncovering the mystery behind the Mad Hatter’s family ultimately lead her to travelling through time where she stumbles across Sacha Baron Cohen as the living embodiment of time itself, who is just about the only saving grace to be found within the dearth of inspiration composing of the movie.

His character is amusingly exaggerated but manages to pull back to provide a wisdom and subtlety that the film is in dire need of and manages to provide some of the few jokes and visual gags that actually land and feel at home with the landscape of the graceful incoherence that Charles Dodgson’s setting is best known for.

The only real surprise that “Alice: Through the Looking Glass” really offers at the end of the day is why Disney bothered dumping its release in a year where they were absolutely on fire. Between the Metacritic ratings for “Captain America: Civil War,” “Zootopia,” “The Jungle Book,” “Moana,” and “Rogue One” amongst others, along with bleed over from the late 2015 release of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” adding to their already obscenely large box office takes, I can’t imagine the company has seen that much green in years.

So why drop out this stinker to ruin the hot streak?

Nestled comfortably between the territory of “sequel that nobody wanted to make” and “production of decent components lacking necessary passion to glue them together” is the sequel to 2012’s mediocre “Snow White and the Huntsman,” distinctly not featuring Snow White.

If I may once more however, spare the film’s predecessor from certain harsh criticism, it may not have quite been my cup of tea but it did have an audience and knew what it wanted to be. What it wanted to be is not necessarily something that warranted a sequel, much less one not featuring its primary star.

So what we get is a bizarre hodgepodge of mismatched popular elements blended into a half prequel, half sequel following the giant axe swinging human plot device name sake of the first film, reprised by Chris Hemsworth.

Follwing the Huntsman coming to terms with his past and long lost love, played by Jessica Chastain, while fighting off the evil Snow Queen (Emily Blunt), the movie is a veritable trash can punch of fantasy adventure storylines concocted by marketers that have probably never even heard of a writer’s room, mixing elements of “Frozen,” “Game of Thrones,” “Hunger Games,” “Lord of the Rings,” and a few other high profile properties, failing to capture the charm of any of them. The resulting film that plays out feels like the boring endgame of extreme sequelitis, more content with finding enough of a reason to exist in order to set up its next installment.

The most damning thing about the film’s pitiful attempts to milk the drama of the franchise’s it rips off however is that whenever it gets to do its own thing, it actually can be legitimately charming.

When the Huntsman begins his journey to the Snow Queen’s kingdom, he’s allied with two of the dwarves from the original movie and between the rock solid production values that are easy to get swept up into and the sheer charisma of the actors involved who aren’t afraid to crack a smile, the film actually comes off as refreshingly optimistic.

Unfortunately, every conflict that it sets up seems to get bogged down with a sort of self seriousness that just sucks all of the joy to be had clean from the movie, making “Huntsman: Winter’s War” a perfect example of how great talent can’t quite salvage a production lacking in any true ambition whatsoever.