March 15th, 2011
I missed it last week, but Drew Mcweeny has a very elegant and sensible takedown of the entire fanboy worldview of the movie industry. Worth your time.
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It might be a better takedown if the writer actually remembered anything about At The Mountains of Madness (ATMOM). Here is his brief description:
“it’s a sprawling tale of an expedition to the Arctic in search of signs of a lost civilization that predates man, and what happens when the people searching find something alive, something not remotely dead, something that is ready to reclaim the Earth as its own.”
Uh, no. It’s not sprawling, it’s a novella, probably not even 200 pages. The expedition was to Antarctica, not the Arctic. It was not to search for signs of a lost civilization, it was a geological survey using a new drill. The Elder Things were not “ready to reclaim the Earth…”. It is not entirely clear what the Elder Things planned to do, they clearly were attempting to enter the pool underneath the city, perhaps to live underwater as they had eons ago. The Shoggoths that lived off the giant penguins and ultimately killed the Elder Things had lived for millions, potentially billions, of years and had not attempted to “reclaim earth”. The dude can’t even get basic points about this classic right, hard to take him seriously.
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SkinsFanPG,
Are you crazy?! The Cthulhu comment was obviously meant in the context of “not another PG-13” movie that should be rated R which he thinks Lovecraft’s work in general merits.
Also, he says he has read versions of the movie script, so you have no idea of how faithfully those scripts hew to the original source material.
Finally, Last is on the money — this little article is a brilliant smack down of Harry Knowles, who is really way too full of himself for my tastes anyway (I mostly go to AICN for the letter “N” — the news, not the reviews or Harry’s rants about this or that).
He lays out the economics of the industry and explains why Universal (probably) makes the decisions it makes. All very sensible and I found myself nodding in agreement throughout (although I must say that I HATED the movie “Scott Pilgram v. The World”). Meanwhile, I can’t wait for “Your Highness” — has everyone watched the redband trailer? If not, hide the kids and get to computer right away. Danny McBride is comic gold.
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JS, perhaps I should have included the full sentence from McWeeny’s article:
“If you don’t know the book or if you’re not familiar with Lovecraft, it’s a sprawling tale of an expedition to the Arctic…”
He’s not describing the scripts he read, he’s describing the book. Would you take me seriously if I wrote the following explanation of The Lord of the Rings:
” If you don’t know the book or if you’re not familiar with Tolkien, it’s a quick tale of an adventure in Central Earth where a bunch of friends go to Scary Mountain to destroy the One Earring…”
As for the PG-13 Cthulhu comment, I understand the context. Given the writer’s poor memory of the overall story, I think it is perfectly acceptable to assume he believes Cthulhu is a character in ATMOM. Furthermore, his overall point, that ATMOM shouldn’t be a PG-13 movie, is utter nonsense. Go back and read the book, there’s nothing particularly violent that would become a movie that warrants an R rating. There is one scene of potential gore, but the action itself takes place off-screen/stage. When Dyer and Danforth find Lake’s party massacred there is some allusion to the horror, but like all great scary stories, most is left to the imagination.
I’m sure the rest of the article is fantastic, but if you can’t get basic plot points right about one of the most important books in its genre, I’m not going to continue reading.
BTW: You’re dead-on about McBride. The guy is hilarious.
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SkinsFanPG,
Once more into the breach! But the sentence before the one you quote is the following: “And I’ve read drafts of the script over time by Matthew Robbins and Guillermo, and they’re awesome.”
That said, I Googled around and it is clear that the script always had the exploration taking place in Antarctica, so that was just a stupid mistake. The script also had Cthulhu making an appearance, which drove this fanboy crazy:
http://templeofghoul.blogspot.com/2010/08/at-mountains-of-madness-script-review.html
So I think you have to cut him some slack for the confusion in describing the story. That said, I think you make an excellent case for the PG-13 rating and I’m glad we could conduct this little debate in a mutual spirit of respect. Any friend of Last is a friend of mine!
SkinsFanPG March 15, 2011 at 12:10 pm
One more quibble: McWeeny (oh boy do I hope that’s his real name) claims he doesn’t want a “PG-13 Cthulhu”. Good, because Cthulhu doesn’t appear in ATMOM. Several references are made to “Cthulhu Cults” in ATMOM, but Cthulhu never appears. Let me repeat, because this is a common misconception: At The Mountains of Madness has NOTHING TO DO WITH CTHULHU!