I just rented this movie and have to say is that it is slightly less boring than watching grass grow or paint dry. I've seen art school films that are less pretentious than this movie. And if Blockbuster didn't let you keep DVDs for a week, I'd have never finished it because I fell asleep trying to watch it - twice.
I've seen the original, too. Barring the fact that it wasn't in English (Russian?) and it had that late '60s / early '70s Andromeda Strain / 2001 eat-a-bunch-of-acid-and-check-this-out feel to it, I thought it had a pretty good story.
But as for the update, I wouldn't call it an improvement at all. They changed some of the plot elements to make it more of a love story, but lost most of it in the translation. Now I like movies that challenge the viewer, but this one is downright perplexing. And the highly overrated George Clooney is wooden as ever.
It's as if the director sought to recapture the mood of the original while making the story more relatable to the times. Unfortunately, he failed at both. Absence of background music works as suspense for Kubrick, but not this time. I expected a little more from Cameron and Soderberg.
I've seen the original, too. Barring the fact that it wasn't in English (Russian?) and it had that late '60s / early '70s Andromeda Strain / 2001 eat-a-bunch-of-acid-and-check-this-out feel to it, I thought it had a pretty good story.
But as for the update, I wouldn't call it an improvement at all. They changed some of the plot elements to make it more of a love story, but lost most of it in the translation. Now I like movies that challenge the viewer, but this one is downright perplexing. And the highly overrated George Clooney is wooden as ever.
It's as if the director sought to recapture the mood of the original while making the story more relatable to the times. Unfortunately, he failed at both. Absence of background music works as suspense for Kubrick, but not this time. I expected a little more from Cameron and Soderberg.
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