Consumer report

[seriousfic]

Okay, I consider this something of a public service announcement. Don't go see The Devil Inside. I won't go tell you what you should see, but that movie... never have I seen so many people coming out of a theater with so many variations on "What a waste of seven bucks" in my career. Just from doing the math (start-time to drop-time, with 10-20 minutes for previews) I can tell you it's about an hour and twenty minutes long. As if that's not bad enough, the credits are the slowest I've ever seen. Literally, they go by at a snail's crawl. I was shocked at how quickly the audience left prior to the movie dropping. Most movies have four minutes of credits, this had eight. So either the country of New Zealand took a break from making The Hobbit and mourning Legend of the Seeker to all pitch in for this, or they're scamming you with some straight-up Roger Corman shit to get to feature length. An hour fifteen, that is not feature-length, that is maybe a two-parter of your average TV show.

What's more, the movie doesn't end. It literally stops mid-scene with a note saying "That's all the footage we have, go to this website to find out more." Other movies have ARGs to support them, this is a movie dedicated to supporting an ARG. I mean, it was kinda bullshit when you had to buy a book to find out how Babylon 5 ended and it was really bullshit when you had to play a Flash game or whatever to find out key plot points on Lost, but this is like the shit of Bullos, King of Bulls.

Comments

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

I knew the movie had a rare "F" rating from the AV Club, but damn, that's kind of impressively awful.

Wait, speaking as a fan of B5 and someone who watched all of Lost on DVD, what are you talking about for each respective show? What was the bullshit ending that wasn't in the show, and what key plot points were revealed?

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

Babylon 5 introduced, in I think the next to last episode, that there Drakh were planting a Controller in a gift to Sheridan's son, but to find out how that ended, you had to buy some tie-in novels.

And on Lost, you never found out what the Numbers were or what Walt's deal was unless you played an ARG/watched an extra on the DVDs.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

I take it that the B5 novels were crap, then?

I thought we never got any info on the Numbers or WAAAAALT's deals because both of those were bullshit that the writers hadn't even figured out? I mean that literally, since I read interviews with writers actually confirming that at some point. They actually came up with explanations about them?

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

The novels weren't that bad--Peter David, for what it's worth--but man, you'd think they'd spend some time on the heroes' son being threatened instead of all that Psychic Fabio stuff.

And the numbers/Walt were almost worth it just for the insane handwaving that they got. It's the kind of thing you'd expect from a comic book. "Oh, Madame Hydra didn't really kill Pepper Potts, just an LMD that had malfunctioned and thought it was the real thing due to a spell Dr. Strange cast that went wrong. Meanwhile, the actual Pepper Potts was in an alternate dimension with Jubilee."