John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing is a classic of the horror genre, and now those crazy boffins at Universal Studios have unveiled a trailer for the remake/reboot/prequel to that film. Helmed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr, son of Producer Matthijs van Heijningen, this is all looking very familiar. Remakes appear to be inevitable, but why mess with gold?
Antarctica: an extraordinary continent of awesome beauty. It is also home to an isolated outpost where a discovery full of scientific possibility becomes a mission of survival when an alien is unearthed by a crew of international scientists. The shape-shifting creature, accidentally unleashed at this marooned colony, has the ability to turn itself into a perfect replica of any living being. It can look just like you or me, but inside, it remains inhuman. In the thriller The Thing, paranoia spreads like an epidemic among a group of researchers as they’re infected, one by one, by a mystery from another planet.
Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime. Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago. But it is about to wake up. When a simple experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time. And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish. The Thing serves as a prelude to John Carpenter’s classic 1982 film of the same name. Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen, the thriller is produced by Strike Entertainment’s Marc Abraham and Eric Newman (Dawn of the Dead).
For historical purposes, here’s the original 1982 trailer for comparison
The Thing is released on 13 October 2011 by Universal.
From Academy Award(R)-winning filmmaker Andrew Stanton comes “John Carter”–a sweeping action-adventure set on the mysterious and exotic planet of Barsoom (Mars). John Carter is based on a classic novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose highly imaginative adventures served as inspiration for many filmmakers, both past and present. The film tells the story of war-weary, former military captain John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), who is inexplicably transported to Mars where he becomes reluctantly embroiled in a conflict of epic proportions amongst the inhabitants of the planet, including Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe) and the captivating Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins). In a world on the brink of collapse, Carter rediscovers his humanity when he realizes that the survival of Barsoom and its people rests in his hands.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHXTBW5gb5U
John Carter has all the makings of being a modern fantasy classic, or a camp classic of the highest order, depending on whether they are going for the Conan or Flash Gordon vibe. Appearing in a series of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan) novels and stories between 1911 and 1917, Disney is no doubt hoping to manufacture a second major franchise to go with their Pirates of the Caribbean box office magnificence. Without the presence of Johnny Depp – reportedly attached to a number of upcoming Disney projects, including supernatural investigator Kolchak: The Night Stalker, in an adaptation of the 1970s TV series – can this achieve the same level of success? Either way, we could do without the dodgy cover of Arcade Fire’s “My Body is a Cage”.
John Carter is due in cinemas on 8 March 2012 from Disney.
Unless you have just connected to the Internet for the first time since 1995, you will no doubt be aware that there is a new TinTin film coming out soon and a full trailer was released for it this week. Thanks to Paramount Australia, we can now take a look at that trailer.
Using the WETA Digital’s motion capture technology that was so prominent in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and will soon be seen in the forthcoming Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Adventures of TinTin: The Secret of the Unicorn certainly captures a naturalistic movement that is rarely captured in animation.
Will it be any good? This trailer reveals a little bit more of the storyline than the earlier teaser trailer we posted back in May, and it certainly looks action-packed. TinTin has a definite existing audience, and the presence of director by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by Steven Moffat (Doctor Who) and Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World) & Joe Cornish (Attack the Block).
Stars Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot, Defiance) and Daniel Craig (Quantum of Solace, Defiance) will also garner a little bit of pulling power. Expect a massive marketing push at the end of the year.
The trailer is introduced by none other than Robert Downey Jr, who tells us that we can see the trailer exclusively on iTunes. Thanks to the magic of the Interwebs, you can also find it on YouTube and just about every other film website today, including our own vessel.
Filled with the same frenetic energy that filled the first entry, we are introduced to new characters and the same slowing down/speeding up really quickly action that has characterised many recent action films. Let’s hope that it is not too overused in the final film.
We can’t help but be a little bit excited by this one.
Robert Downey Jr. reprises his role as the world’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, and Jude Law returns as his formidable colleague, Dr. Watson, in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Sherlock Holmes has always been the smartest man in the room…until now. There is a new criminal mastermind at large–Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris)–and not only is he Holmes’ intellectual equal, but his capacity for evil, coupled with a complete lack of conscience, may actually give him an advantage over the renowned detective. When the Crown Prince of Austria is found dead, the evidence, as construed by Inspector Lestrade (Eddie Marsan), points to suicide. But Sherlock Holmes deduces that the prince has been the victim of murder–a murder that is only one piece of a larger and much more portentous puzzle, designed by one Professor Moriarty. Mixing business with pleasure, Holmes tracks the clues to an underground gentlemen’s club, where he and his brother, Mycroft Holmes (Stephen Fry) are toasting Dr. Watson on his last night of bachelorhood. It is there that Holmes encounters Sim (Noomi Rapace), a Gypsy fortune teller, who sees more than she is telling and whose unwitting involvement in the prince’s murder makes her the killer’s next target.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is released in Australia on 5 January 2012 from Roadshow.
For the majority of the film going public, it has been a fair while we’ve heard from John Sayles (City of Hope, Lone Star). Yet his independent films Silver City and Honeydripper have earned him acclaim and critical applause, including the National Board of Review naming Honeydripper one of the Top 10 Independent Films of 2007. Now he’s back with Amigo, and ambitious looking film about the Philippine-American War that ran from 1899 to 1902. Starring regular collaborator Chris Cooper, the trailer is below.
AMIGO, the 17th feature film from Academy Award-nominated writer-director John Sayles, stars legendary Filipino actor Joel Torre as Rafael, a village mayor caught in the murderous crossfire of the Philippine-American War. When U.S. troops occupy his village, Rafael comes under pressure from a tough-as-nails officer (Chris Cooper) to help the Americans in their hunt for Filipino guerilla fighters. But Rafael’s brother (Ronnie Lazaro) is the head of the local guerillas, and considers anyone who cooperates with the Americans to be a traitor. Rafael quickly finds himself forced to make the impossible, potentially deadly decisions faced by ordinary civilians in an occupied country. A powerful drama of friendship, betrayal, romance and heartbreaking violence, AMIGO is a page torn from the untold history of the Philippines, and a mirror of today’s unresolvable conflicts.
Amigo is due out in US theatres on August 19th, 2011. It does not currently have an Australian release date.
“You blew it up! Damn you. God damn you all to hell!” Despite our unfortunate future, as depicted in the 1968 sci-fi classic The Planet of the Apes directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and starring Charlton Heston, the story evolved through four sequels, two TV series and a Tim Burton re-imagining. Yesterday, we were treated to a sneak peek of about 20 minutes worth of footage from the reboot of the series, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, along with a very special Q & A with special effects guru Joe Letteri (The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Avatar, King Kong and the forthcoming The Hobbit).
We were shown a series of clips from the forthcoming film, which as we were reminded in the introduction by Angela Bishop, has been bumped up from November to August, the height of the American summer season. Not for nothing either: the Apes franchise has an established name, despite a shaky reputation after Burton’s version of it, and the work of WETA Digital on the film has already begun to grab attention from the footage we’ve seen so far. The 20 minutes worth of completed clips we were shown on the day are early indicators that they will only cement WETA’s reputation, with Letteri adding that the work-in-progress has over 1000 effects shots, second only to Avatar.
Minor spoilers ahead. Ye have been warned.
What was particularly interesting about the four or so clips that we were shown were that Fox has chosen to steer away from the sheer action-packed “extended trailer” approach that other previews have given us, but rather chosen a key number of clips that emphasise the emotional impact of the scenes. Thanks to advances in the performance capture/motion capture (or ‘mocap’), the suited performances of actors, later replaced with CG created photorealistic apes, are no longer confined to the studio. Case in point, in the first clip we saw, Will Rodman (James Franco, Your Highness) is taking the super-smart ape Caesar (Andy Serkis, Burke and Hare) on a walk through a park. In the scene, Caesar is confronted with a dog, opens a car door, sits down and through sign-language asks what he is. Here we get our first sense of the stunning amount of detail in the ape characters, with human-like expressiveness and fluid motion now possible from the characters. We are a fair way from Uncanny Valley.
In a second scene, the combination of action and emotion can be seen in the relationship between Caesar and Will’s Alzheimer’s stricken father (John Lithgow, Leap Year), who attempts to drive a neighbour’s car in a befuddled state. Attacked by the aggressive neighbour, Caesar leaps to his defence, swinging through trees, repeatedly pounding the man before biting his finger off. As the police arrive, Caesar curls up reassuringly in the father’s arms. Aside from being a damn fine action sequence, with the CG and motion capture technology requiring hidden cameras all of the set according to Letteri. The only unconvincing thing about the scene was Lithgow’s over-the-top portrayal of an Alzheimer’s sufferer, although WETA’s work is unsurpassed in this thrilling moment.
Although the lead ape Caesar shares a name with the protagonist of the ape revolution in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, and the ruler of Ape City in the fifth and final film, Battle for the Planet of the Apes (played by Roddy McDowell), the storyline in Rise of the Planet of the Apes appears to bear little relation to those earlier films, short of the connection to the title and the concept of an ape revolution. Yet where those earlier films were based around the idea of an ape traveling back in time to the present day, starting their own predestined chain of events, this new film appears to return to the themes of the 1968 original, in that man is the unwitting creator of his own subjugation. In a sign of the times, it is cell research and the cure of Alzheimer’s (and not the A-Bomb) that is the God-defying tool that brings down mankind by enhancing the intelligence of the apes, showing that while our technologies may have evolved since the 1960s, our fears have not.
The remaining footage we saw, along with some of the uncompleted clips that Letteri introduced, focused largely on the foundations of the ape revolt. Some of these scenes promise to be as spectacular as they are creepy, particularly as Caesar begins to teach the other apes to communicate and work together. The looks of disdain that Caesar slips to the ubiquitous Brian Cox (seriously, he’s in everything at the moment), or the fiery rebellion he displays to one of the keepers (Tom Felton, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1) are subtle, powerful and indicative of the level of acting that is now possible through these “digital masks”. Indeed, used as they are here, they are more like a skin-tight suit through which the performers can emote and utterly convince the audience that it is apes sharing the screen with the humans. As we have already seen from the trailers, this is building up to a spectacular attack scene on the Golden Gate Bridge, although we only saw glimpses of this on the day.
During the final questions, Letteri was asked if he foresaw a day when humans could be replaced by the technology on display in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, including the likes of Marilyn Monroe or Humphrey Bogart in modern films. In light of the wondrous creatures that Letteri and his team have created over the last decade, his answer to this was simple: why would you want to?
[stextbox id=”custom” caption=”The Reel Bits”]What was remarkable about the footage we were shown is the emotional impact of it. Rise of the Planet of the Apes doesn’t just promise to be a visual masterpiece, with the highest grade of special effects available, but an engaging drama as well. We can’t wait until August![/stextbox]
We would like to thank Fox for inviting us to the special screening and Q & A, and we look forward to bringing you more details on the completed film as they arrive.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes is released on 4 August 2011 in Australia from Fox.
Hot on the heels of The Borrower Arrietty, Studio Ghibli has just released the trailer for their next film, Kokuriko-Zaka Kara (From Up on Poppy Hill), directed by Gorō Miyazaki, the son of Hayao Miyazaki (Ponyo). Gorō Miyazaki was last seen on Tales from Earthsea.
Based on the serialised manga of the same name from 1980, it tells the story of young girl in 1963 Yokohama who is forced to grow up quickly when her father goes missing.
This will mark the second film in a row from the studio not directed by the legendary Hayao Miyazaki, but the master will be co-writing Keiko Niwa, and music composed by Satoshi Takebe, marking another break from series regular Joe Hisaishi.
The trailer does not come with English subtitles, but it plays out more like a gentle music video. Aoi Teshima, who sang the theme song for the film Tales from Earthsea, sings the theme song for the film. Indeed, it seems to mark a return to the kind of contemporary seaside reminiscence we last saw from the studio in Ocean Waves.
Kokuriko-Zaka Kara will be released in Japan on 16 July 2011 from Toho. It does not currently have an Australian release date.
Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s Wu Xia, also known as Dragon, is the next Chinese-language film to get a release in Australia. Although a low-res teaser has been floating around for a little while, thanks to WeDistributionHK we now get a look at the full trailer of the new Donnie Yen vehicle, still kicking after all these years.
Event Cinemas has the following official blurb: In the late Qing Dynasty, Liu (Donnie Yen, The Lost Bladesman) is a papermaker, leading a simple life with his wife Ayu (Tang Wei, Beginning of the Great Revival) and their two sons. Into their remote village comes Detective Xu (Takeshi Kaneshiro, Red Cliff), who is investigating the deaths of two bandits during a robbery. Xu quickly realizes that the incident in question was no ordinary botched robbery – and his dogged inquiry threatens to dredge up the dark secrets of Liu’s buried past, threatening not only Liu and his family, but the entire village.
This looks to be a slick and fast-paced actioner from Chan (Warlords, and producer of this year’s Mr. and Mrs. Incredible) and veteran Donnie Yen (Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen), who shows no signs of slowing down as he approaches 50, still churning out and average of three major pictures a year.
We are very keen to keep supporting Asian cinema in Australia here at The Reel Bits, as it frankly doesn’t get the promotion and the exposure that it deserves outside of the home entertainment market.
If you care about seeing Asian cinema in Australia on the big screen, we encourage you to go out and support the regular screenings at selected Event Cinemas and the regular Asian Cinema screenings at Hoyts Cinemas. Increasingly they are day-and-date with their Chinese release, so there are no excuses for that ‘other method’ of acquiring them.
Wu Xia is released in Australia on 7 July from China Lion.
It was only a matter of time before superstar Tom Cruise got around to doing another Mission: Impossible film, having enjoyed a series of hits in Tropic Thunder and Valkyrie and a bit of a miss with Knight and Day. Now, only days after a version of the trailer was leaked online, Paramount has unveiled the official trailer for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol via Yahoo! Movies.
Directed by Brad Bird (Ratatouille, The Incredibles), Simon Pegg, Josh Holloway, Michael Nyqvist and Jeremy Renner star alongside Cruise. Details of the plot remain reasonably under wraps, as one would expect from anything that J.J. Abrams has anything to do with, but the trailer below gives us a hint.
UPDATE (11/7/2011): Thanks to Paramount Australia, we now have the Australian version of the teaser trailer available for your viewing pleasure.
The wave of remakes, sequels and reboots, it was inevitable that Footloose would eventually get the remake treatment. The trailer has been playing across the web all weekend, and now thanks to Paramount Australia, we have the official local version – complete with exploding bus – to share with our readers. We’ve also included the brand-new international poster for the new film.
Made for the modern audience, the cast rocking the Ray Bans, dancing to hip hop, kicking it in converse and those red boots have taken this film to a whole new place. Julianne Hough plays Ariel and Kenny Wormald, Ren is dubbed to be the next Kevin Bacon. Haven’t heard of many of the actors? That’s because this film represents many dancers come actors to replicate and enhance the classic that is Footloose.
Just for historical reasons, and for a bit of fun, here’s the trailer to the original Footloose, with decidedly fewer bus explosions. It’s a little bit more country to boot:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4wyQAbinXA&w
Paramount has also included the new international trailer, which differs significantly from the one we posted on out 2011 Release Guide late last week.
Footloose is due to be released in Australia on 6 October 2011 from Paramount.
John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing is a classic of the horror genre, and now those crazy boffins at Universal Studios have unveiled a trailer for the remake/reboot/prequel to that film. Helmed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr, son of Producer Matthijs van Heijningen, this is all looking very familiar. Remakes appear to be inevitable, but why mess with gold?
“You blew it up! Damn you. God damn you all to hell!” Despite our unfortunate future, as depicted in the 1968 sci-fi classic 
