Best Movie Ever?


tom selleck gets sprayed in the face with acid by robot spiders

Runaway. Sigh. In 1984 Tri-Star thought they were going to really clean up with this movie. It seems like a good idea. Huge name writer/director Micheal Crichton (ten years earlier he'd scored big with Westworld... I LOVE Westworld, and both The Terminal Man and The Andromeda Strain based on his novels had also done well). Tom Selleck starring as kind hearted but tough as nails cop in the future? How could it not score big? Basically because it's not that great. Well, it was very Crichton, which I liked, of course. He's the king of "technology is a tool which we control, let it control you and watch the world fall apart". Like most of his work, it's fundamentally a morality play centered around a character or set of characters who are initiates of a technology, but still in some way skeptical toward it.

In the near future, semi-sentient household robots take care of all of our day to day needs. Robots build all of our buildings, drive taxis, cook food in restaurants, etc. Gene Simmons, that greasy misogynist intolerant prick, is an evil mafioso who finances a microchip that makes robots kill people. Tom Selleck is a cop on the "Robot Runaway" unit. Blah, blah, blah you can figure out the rest.

IMDB says that this movie didn't do well because The Terminator overshadowed it's release. I call bullshit on that. Terminator was released on October 26th. This movie came out on December 14th. EIGHT WEEKS LATER. There's no way that the Terminator's box office draw affected this in anyway. That's pure fallacy. Box Office Mojo (the best site on earth) says that for the 50th week of 1984: everyone's favorite train wreck, Dune made $6 million plus, and John Carpenter's Starman made almost $3 million. 2010, released the previous week, made $4 million plus. All four of these movies are rated PG or PG-13, The Terminator is rated R. Not even targeted at the same audience. So fuck you, whoever wrote that thing on IMDB, you're wrong. And a dickhead. This whole thing pissed me off so much, I submitted a correction to IMDB. I'm a geek.
- posted by Mason @ 9:12 PM