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This is NOT a prequel to “Alien.”

Well, it’s 95% not a prequel…

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Prequels usually mean studios can hire a younger, more demographically friendly cast to extend a popular franchise. Fans, in turn, get to see how a beloved story began. But audiences need something else – a credible reason to turn back the clock. That’s where the otherwise perfunctory prequel ‘The Thing’ comes up short.

The new ‘Thing,’ which takes places days before the events in John Carpenter’s 1982 classic of the same name, merely replicates that film’s tactics with less panache.

‘The Thing’ churns out the kind of slick special effects Carpenter would have killed for at the time. But the 1982 model teased out the story’s paranoia with crude but effective tools. The new ‘Thing’ feels like an artificial attempt at bringing a monster franchise back from the dead.

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I just watched this prequel trailer on my computer in broad daylight in my sunlit office with the windows open, the birds singing and the comforting sound of a lawnmower mowing somewhere off in the distance … and it still scared the hell out of me.

Can’t wait for October 21 … or for it to hit Redbox.

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Mike Fleming at Deadline Hollywood Daily has some details on the upcoming spinoff’s story, which comes directly from Frank Miller’s graphic novel. Because Miller wrote the story for the original “300,” we can have hope that Hollywood won’t break our hearts with this prequel that tells the back-story of Xerxes — the antagonist in the “300.” As we all know, it wasn’t the violence, ripped abs, or CGI that made “300″ such a classic. It was the rich themes that boiled down to live free or die, what it means to be a man, and a fighting for a cause bigger than one’s self. You can bring together all of the same elements of “300,” but if you remove those themes it’s just another mind-numbing video game playing out on a big screen.

DHD:

The film, a spinoff  to 300, is one that the film’s original director Zack Snyder was going to direct. That was until Warner Bros and producer Chris Nolan offered him Man of Steel, and Snyder and wife and producing partner Debra Snyder put Xerxes aside and moved on to rebooting the Superman franchise because Warner Bros needed it. The Snyders have been all over this director selection process. Snyder had written a script with his 300 cohort Kurt Johnstad. Like 300, it is based on a Frank Miller graphic novel that will be shot with the kind of stylized period green-screen action visuals that became the signature of 300 and helped the film gross $456 million worldwide. Xerxes was the Persian leader seen in 300. Miller’s graphic novel told the story of how Xerxes became this peculiar god-like entity. That mythology goes back to the death of his father, Darius, from injuries sustained at the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. Darius had told his son not to attack the Greeks because they can only be punished by a god, and so Xerxes tried to transform himself into a deity to gain revenge.

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X-Men: First Class reboots the wallowing X-Men franchise with a burst of fresh energy and giddy pop invention. It’s a rare blockbuster that actually busts some blocks. The last film in the original trilogy, which had the lamentable Brett Ratner stepping in for Bryan Singer, who directed the first two pictures, was a strained, stumbling mess. Here, new director Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass) whips the contending mutant teams back to life, restoring the fun and the thrills that had dwindled away.

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As the title indicates, First Class is a prequel. It begins with an expansion of a scene in the first film, set in 1944, in which we see young Erik Lehnsherr—the future Magneto—being separated from his mother and father in a Nazi concentration camp. Erik erupts in a fit of super-fury, which is spotted by a mercurial Nazi on the scene (Kevin Bacon, as future bad guy Sebastian Shaw), who wants to groom Erik into an invincible killing machine. He’s not entirely successful, apparently, because, leaping ahead to 1962, we find Erik in Geneva, in grim pursuit of his evil mentor. “Let’s say I’m Frankenstein’s monster,” he explains to an ill-fated thug at one point. “I’m looking for my creator.”

Meanwhile, rich young telepath Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), who has already befriended the shape-shifting Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), is graduating from Oxford as a specialist in genetic mutations. He’s approached by Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne), a sympathetic CIA agent who’s just back from Las Vegas, where she was surveilling a summit of mobsters and Russians convened by Sebastian Shaw. Aided by his mutant henchmen—the storm-bringer Riptide (Álex González), the Satan-esque Azazel (Jason Flemyng), and the icy Emma Frost (January Jones)—Shaw is scheming to foment a war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (Cue the Cuban Missile Crisis.)

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I hated the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark. No, not the Citizen Kane homage rosebud scene at the end – I loved that – but the ending of the movie. I didn’t want it to end. I hadn’t enjoyed a film that much since, well, Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, or Jaws. I wanted it to continue. I wanted more. 

I got more and I didn’t want it. 

Why don’t sequels do well? Obviously, I’m not alone in feeling the way I do about Raiders or Star Wars or Jaws or any other great character-rich, dynamically set film that pulls you in and doesn’t fully let go even after the end titles trail up and we see that film certification symbol fade out. So, why is it that more of what we love, we hate? Well, maybe not hate, but not love quite so much. What’s going on here?  (more…)