A new movie coming from Luc Besson in 2017 - not sure if it's going to be any good, but the visuals are impressive:

I think it will be safe to say that if you liked "The Fifth Element" you'll most likely enjoy this as well. I'll be seeing it!

Yes, it does have the same vibe, at least in this trailer.

Fifth Element is one of my all-time favourite Sci-Fi movies so I'll be checking this out for sure.

They changed the subtitle to "And the City of a Thousand Planets"... which is facepalm worthy if you had read the original comics "The Empire of a Thousand Planets". To avoid Star Wars comparisons? They would be right, you know (but in the opposite direction), but still sounds goofy to me. And they made Laureline a blond... right.

Hope they go with the comic's design of their spaceship, so people go - "They are copying STAR WARS!"

Anyway, based on the Valerian and Laureline series of French Sci-Fi comics. There are several issues over 40 or 50 years, I think. I must have read four or five over the years. Hard to come by when I was younger and never made the effort to find any more. They were good. I have forgotten all about them until I saw this. Maybe I'll try to read them again now.

The trailer looks very good.

Am I the only one who was expecting You Never Give Me Your Money to start playing next?

Kind of a weird choice for the trailer.




The Jedi Master

I really wanted to like that movie but it just didn't work for me.


Wheels

I'm in.

I'm just thankful it's not a reboot, but merely an adaption (and that'll be the closest we'll ever get to "original", I fear).

With Luc Besson, it's always difficult to predict whether the film will be a hit or miss. With the sheer volume of movies he's been chugging out it's understandable that not every one can be good.

It looks a little too heavy on action and special effects. What made Fifth Element great, and any story for that matter, was the characters, dialogue and how they interacted. I'm getting a little episode I - III vibe here...

I looooove Fifth Element... but I don't care for comics.

Trailers aren't going to focus on characters and dialogue. They're going to feature action and fx. I've seen some films where all the action was in the trailer and the rest was a talk-fest, because the marketers wanted people to go to see it.

You can't judge the balance of that on a trailer because it will always be intentionally slanted to appeal to the whizz-bang aspect.



The Jedi Master

After they took just of all Brad Pitt with blond (!) hair to just of all represent Achilles in "Troy", i have given up all hope on Hollywood.. and now they do it in France as well.

The sky is falling !

It is hard to use real filming instead of CGI, when it comes to Science Fiction...

These films did alright in my book without any CGI,


2001
Alien
Star Wars
Blade Runner
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Tron

^ Yes you are right, perhaps i should have said
"It is hard to use real filming instead of CGI, when it comes to Science Fiction nowadays",
to cope with the expectation of the recent cinema visitors.

But those you mentioned are all done very well. I guess nowadays it costs more to build a proper model and arrange it with the scenes, than to do it all on a computer (?)

It depends. The really good CGI that looks almost indistinguishable from something real is very expensive. The cheap looking CGI that you often see in SyFy Channel movies is cheaper than building physical sets and models.

Uh...TRON was the first major motion picture to rely heavily on CGI???



The Jedi Master

Sorry, not Tron. It must have been a momentary brainfart. The glow effects on the suits were done in-camera but obviously all of those wideshots of the computer world were CGI.

Of course, every other film you listed was released before Tron, so naturally they didn't have any.

The truth is there are almost zero films made without using CGI in some way or form. Sunny sky supposed to be cloudy? CG! Making a film taking place in 1982 in NYC? Can't get a twin towers skyline without CG.

The numbers also don't work. In old films, there would be 100-150 FX shots in the entire film. It's not uncommon to have 2000+ today. You can't do a film with that many using 40 year old techniques unless you accept taking 10 years to release it.

I'm tired of people blaming CG for everything when the issue is bad CG. It used to be you'd see a god awful cheap set made of cardboard and you'd know they didn't spend enough money. Yet people didn't complain about too much cardboard in films!

For every bad CG shot you've seen in a film, it could've been done better had they had more time and money for it. They didn't, so it looks bad. THAT is the problem, not the CG itself! It's a tool that wasn't properly used, the tool itself isn't the problem. If you hire a bunch of 3rd graders to build your Roman Senate, I'll bet a CG version will blow it away!

The reluctance to slip film dates today is a major part. I'm relieved every time I hear film XYZ has been pushed back 6 months or a year because there is NO way it would've been ok to release it on time if they feel that way. Yes, it may STILL suck, but the odds are better that it won't than if they'd released on the original date.
Quality takes time and CG is no different.




The Jedi Master

I believe most do blame, as you mentioned, bad CGI. Or an overabundance of "vanity effects" (because we can!). Or using CGI as a substitute for good storytelling (hello Mr. Bay).

The ideal employment of CGI is to use it when necessary, and use just the right amount to advance your story and/or make your Universe look plausible.

Of course, with current recording technology having outpaced traditional film-making techniques, movie makers may find they'd have to rely on CGI even more.

Or, costume designers and especially makeup artists come up with better ways to "conceal" their work (again, depending on the genre), with 4k - or even worse, from their POV - 8k resolution making imperfections previously unnoticed very detectable .

Just look at the remastered version of TNG, which is "only" in HD: you can see where the makeup artists glued the masks to the actors's faces.

The remastered blurays for ST:TOS have revealed some funny goofs. The funniest one is from the episode "Catspaw" where you can clearly see the strings/cables that were used to move the alien puppets around. lol