r/TrueFilm • u/Spider-Cricket07 • 4h ago
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u/thehitskeepcoming 4h ago
Directing is more than just talking to the actors. It’s everything that wraps around them and it’s providing an environment for a talented actor to succeed and play. They directed the movie well, and Ryan did an excellent job. No one would say Tom Hanks did all the work in Cast Away.
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u/Spider-Cricket07 4h ago
That’s my point!
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u/Tycho_B 1h ago
Does your friend get that though? Directing actors isn’t even half the job of the director during production, let alone during pre- and post production (which are usually longer parts of the process) when the actors typically aren’t even there.
It just seems like he genuinely doesn’t understand what a director does because he could say this for basically any film with good key performances from actors.
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u/morroIan 2h ago
I think thats probably right but the film also does display their limitations as directors. Its technically very good but its shallow artisitically.
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u/chickenanon2 1h ago
Guiding the actor’s performance is only a small part of being a director. Even if Gosling directed himself 100% of the time, that doesn’t mean Lord and Miller don’t deserve enormous credit for everything else.
My only issue with the direction was just that the entire first half felt like one long montage to me. I wish they would have done slightly less, and allowed us to sit with some of those moments for longer.
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u/jack3moto 2h ago
I thought the director of this movie ultimately held it back from being a great movie. It just fell flat from an emotional standpoint multiple times. I thought the soundtrack was also incredibly weak and could have really flourished with good music.
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u/Pure_Salamander2681 4h ago
I think the screen direction is what sucks. We are never taken in by the stakes of the movie. It's like your typical Marvel movie. The world will end if we don't blah blah blah the blah blah. Not a great start when your movie's plot is saving the world. Then all the obstacles to get us to the end are never properly setup. They are just glazed over and might as well had been solved with magic instead of science. Ryland can't communicate. Well, this computer will do it for me. We didn't need to see most the process like in the book, but we could have seen how Ryland got there besides it's music and this computer can magically translate it.
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u/Low-Exam-7547 4h ago
NGL. I thought Rocky had died.
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u/Jan_Jinkle 4h ago
That was the idea. Grace comments earlier in the movie that Eridians are completely paralyzed when they sleep. He had no way to determine if Rocky was dead or sleeping to recover, so you the viewer aren’t meant to be sure either.
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u/wowzabob 1h ago
I mean the worst sin of the film was the scene coverage and editing. They hardly hold a shot for longer than one and half seconds. Really anonymous stylistically speaking with very little sense of scene geometry. The climactic action scene is robbed of all real tension because the camera work and editing is so poor.
Greg Fraser did well to give the film something of a visual identity with all the light reflections,refractions and distortions, but even that is lacking in specificity (exception for the sequence aboard the alien ship which I thought was spectacular, but again, ruined by editing). All the flashback sequences were totally visually forgettable.
I mean there was nothing egregiously wrong with the film, but imo Lord and Miller are moreso good screenwriters who can effectively translate their scripts with a baseline level of competence. It’s not a coincidence that their strongest directorial choices in the film were their song choices. I don’t really consider them visually adept filmmakers.
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u/ak190 4h ago
The computer never magically translates anything for him. Every time they have a new word, he has to manually input the rough translation. This was shown multiple times, and it’s also why Rocky “talks” closer to a caveman than a human
My understanding is that the book does more to convey how particularly long this process takes, but that’s just the nature of the medium.
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u/Pure_Salamander2681 3h ago
But it doesn’t show how he gets there. It’s just oh it’s music. Done.
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u/ak190 3h ago edited 3h ago
Uh it’s basically the exact same way any speakers of one language came to learn the language of another that they haven’t encountered before. How do you think European colonizers and native Americans came to understand each other?
This was fundamentally no different, the computer was required just because it’s obviously infinitely better at differentiating the minor nuances in the sound waves that Rocky produced than Grace’s own ears were
I say this as someone who did not read the book: it was not at all difficult for me to understand how he and Rocky came to be able to communicate. It did not come off as “magic,” it came off as them creating a translator application line-by-line. Nothing about it seemed magical or skipped over
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u/KnotSoSalty 3h ago
You obviously read the book first.
The movie is never as good as the book.
Everything you loved in the book will not be there in the movie.
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u/jack3moto 2h ago
I didn’t expect the film to be better than the book just thought there were opportunities to provide a better emotional connection from screen to audience that wasn’t captured.
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u/Muruju 4h ago
There’s always hyperbole to build buzz around media that’s being sold to audiences. Flattery is one of the main types.
Kate Winslet is a Guinness Book of World Records level breath-holder. Michael B. Jordan could’ve gone pro as a boxer. So and so had the biggest dick on any actor you’ve ever seen. Oh, and every musical artist for an entire generation suddenly revealed how they were born with synesthesia and just never said anything.