benmcfee
Joined Jan 2008
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benmcfee's rating
There is a great deal of controversy surrounding this film's blatant similarity to Repo! The Genetic Opera. Some call this malicious larceny, and others offer coincidence as a possible explanation.
The first difference between these films is obvious. One is a rock opera. The other is a drama. But these are not the only differences.
While both films are character studies of a man who repossesses human organs for a living, the approaches taken are quite different. Nathan Wallace in the Opera is a loving father, and caring person who has been coerced into doing a job he finds horrific. It drives him mad, and effectively splits him into two people. One of the Opera's main themes is emancipation and redemption; both his own and that of his sheltered daughter, Shilo. Remy, in Repo Men, is a thug, pure and simple. He jokes about the people he kills. He makes a game out of the slaughter. His change of heart only comes when just this happens: he needs his heart changed.
The Opera seems to focus more on moral decadence. It's a society obsessed with plastic surgery, drugs, money and power. It is a world where not only is human life cheap, but death is profit. Imperialism is the main villain. Repo Men makes a statement, but it's more of an afterthought than anything. The Union in Repo Men really seems to think that it's doing good. GeneCo in the Opera makes no such pretence. It doesn't have to. Organ failure in that world is epidemic. Anyone who doesn't go to GeneCo simply dies. They've got the world by the balls.
Both these films are very well done. Both have some serious flaws. Other reviewers have commented much more effectively than I on these, so I won't get redundant and repeat them here. I will say that while the imagery, and the rock opera approach to Opera is far superior, Repo Men has better dialogue. Each movie should be seen, as they both compliment one another very nicely.
Now, back to that controversy:
For me, there are several nails in the coincidence coffin. The marketing strategies are virtually identical. The Genetic Opera used comic-book animation to fill in some of the scenes which they lacked the funds to shoot. On the Apple trailer website, a seven minute motion comic teaser for Repo Men appeared just a week or so ago. The stories could be coincidence, but the same language and the same imagery?
Unless someone switched on Arthur Dent's Infinite Improbability Drive, the likelihood of this is incredibly low. No whales have materialized miles above the earth. The moon did not suddenly turn into a giant floating blancmange. No team of monkeys has written their own version of Hamlet. The Improbability Drive is off the table.
The huge nail for me, though, is the fact that whatever powers that be in the movie industry seemed determined to kill the Genetic Opera before it had even begun. It was denied widespread distribution. Its trailer appeared on Apple once, and to my knowledge, nowhere else. Production on the film was delayed, hampered, an stonewalled. All this supposedly because the execs thought the Genetic Opera wouldn't sell.
Now we have Repo Men (admittedly, coming from a different studio, so different execs likely at work), being granted massive publicity, funding and widespread distribution. Perhaps someone at Universal saw that the concept actually would sell, and decided to go for it. I think it much more likely, though, that someone at Universal had already sunk a substantial amount of capital into Repo Men before finding out about the Genetic Opera, and demanded of a friend at Lions Gate that it be killed.
This is, of course, pure speculation. However it is not an uneducated guess since money can be everything in an industry as expensive as film. If enough of it were sunk into a project that fans of another highly original film might brand a rip off, then this could be devastating, and it has caused trouble at the very least. Unless you believe Eric Garcia's unverifiable claim to a short story written in 1997, the Opera is the first incarnation this story. The two films were made at roughly the same time.
Re-telling a story is no sin. One of the greatest writers of all time, William Shakespeare, often would draw his ideas from plays and stories that already existed. The problem here is not the similarity since, as I said, both films seem to compliment one another rather than copy each other. The problem is the fact that Repo Men's writer, Eric Garcia, is determined to play that tired old "You stole my story!" game, though there is no doubt that Genetic Opera fans have been unfairly vicious, as well (I'm sorry to say that I am not innocent of this, either).
Had Garcia given a friendly nod to Darren Smith and Terrence Zdunich (or hell, simply claim that his was a different take on the same idea) there should have been no problem for anyone other than a greedy lawyer. These are both excellent films. But if this is going to come down to a copyright war, then it is a war that Garcia will lose.
The first difference between these films is obvious. One is a rock opera. The other is a drama. But these are not the only differences.
While both films are character studies of a man who repossesses human organs for a living, the approaches taken are quite different. Nathan Wallace in the Opera is a loving father, and caring person who has been coerced into doing a job he finds horrific. It drives him mad, and effectively splits him into two people. One of the Opera's main themes is emancipation and redemption; both his own and that of his sheltered daughter, Shilo. Remy, in Repo Men, is a thug, pure and simple. He jokes about the people he kills. He makes a game out of the slaughter. His change of heart only comes when just this happens: he needs his heart changed.
The Opera seems to focus more on moral decadence. It's a society obsessed with plastic surgery, drugs, money and power. It is a world where not only is human life cheap, but death is profit. Imperialism is the main villain. Repo Men makes a statement, but it's more of an afterthought than anything. The Union in Repo Men really seems to think that it's doing good. GeneCo in the Opera makes no such pretence. It doesn't have to. Organ failure in that world is epidemic. Anyone who doesn't go to GeneCo simply dies. They've got the world by the balls.
Both these films are very well done. Both have some serious flaws. Other reviewers have commented much more effectively than I on these, so I won't get redundant and repeat them here. I will say that while the imagery, and the rock opera approach to Opera is far superior, Repo Men has better dialogue. Each movie should be seen, as they both compliment one another very nicely.
Now, back to that controversy:
For me, there are several nails in the coincidence coffin. The marketing strategies are virtually identical. The Genetic Opera used comic-book animation to fill in some of the scenes which they lacked the funds to shoot. On the Apple trailer website, a seven minute motion comic teaser for Repo Men appeared just a week or so ago. The stories could be coincidence, but the same language and the same imagery?
Unless someone switched on Arthur Dent's Infinite Improbability Drive, the likelihood of this is incredibly low. No whales have materialized miles above the earth. The moon did not suddenly turn into a giant floating blancmange. No team of monkeys has written their own version of Hamlet. The Improbability Drive is off the table.
The huge nail for me, though, is the fact that whatever powers that be in the movie industry seemed determined to kill the Genetic Opera before it had even begun. It was denied widespread distribution. Its trailer appeared on Apple once, and to my knowledge, nowhere else. Production on the film was delayed, hampered, an stonewalled. All this supposedly because the execs thought the Genetic Opera wouldn't sell.
Now we have Repo Men (admittedly, coming from a different studio, so different execs likely at work), being granted massive publicity, funding and widespread distribution. Perhaps someone at Universal saw that the concept actually would sell, and decided to go for it. I think it much more likely, though, that someone at Universal had already sunk a substantial amount of capital into Repo Men before finding out about the Genetic Opera, and demanded of a friend at Lions Gate that it be killed.
This is, of course, pure speculation. However it is not an uneducated guess since money can be everything in an industry as expensive as film. If enough of it were sunk into a project that fans of another highly original film might brand a rip off, then this could be devastating, and it has caused trouble at the very least. Unless you believe Eric Garcia's unverifiable claim to a short story written in 1997, the Opera is the first incarnation this story. The two films were made at roughly the same time.
Re-telling a story is no sin. One of the greatest writers of all time, William Shakespeare, often would draw his ideas from plays and stories that already existed. The problem here is not the similarity since, as I said, both films seem to compliment one another rather than copy each other. The problem is the fact that Repo Men's writer, Eric Garcia, is determined to play that tired old "You stole my story!" game, though there is no doubt that Genetic Opera fans have been unfairly vicious, as well (I'm sorry to say that I am not innocent of this, either).
Had Garcia given a friendly nod to Darren Smith and Terrence Zdunich (or hell, simply claim that his was a different take on the same idea) there should have been no problem for anyone other than a greedy lawyer. These are both excellent films. But if this is going to come down to a copyright war, then it is a war that Garcia will lose.
One review (official review) that I read while watching the trailer to this film described it at "an intellectual horror movie." Having listened to Mike Ruppert speak in the past, this comes as no surprise. From his scathing indictment of Dick Cheney in his talk "The Truth and Lies of 9/11" to the speech he gave in Seattle in January of 2005 (available in two parts on YouTube under the title "Talk by Michael C. Ruppert") the picture he paints for the future of the world has been a stark one for some time now.
However, gloomy is one thing. Being deadly accurate in nearly all predictions is another thing altogether. Ruppert, and his team at From the Wilderness (his newsletter) have been bang on the money when it came to oil prices, housing prices, and of course the collapse of the US housing market, and in other areas as well including drugs, the CIA and 9/11 itself. Ruppert being an ex LAPD narcotics officer who was born into an intelligence family, has had experience in seeing truth where others bury their heads in the sand. When he tried to bring to light evidence that the CIA was dealing drugs within the USA, he was shot at and forced off of LAPD. This was only the beginning of his investigative career, and of the vicious repercussions he suffered because of it. In November of 2004, his book "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire and the End of the Age of Oil" went largely unnoticed, even though it could serve as a final nail in Dick Cheney's political coffin concerning his culpability for 9/11. Ruppert has said, "This is a book that I, as a detective, would... drop in the lap of a DA and say, 'I want a filing for murder, premeditated, first degree, multiple counts with special circumstances." The best part: he makes no mention of bombs in buildings, or holes in the pentagon, or molten metal, but merely treats the case as another crime to be pieced together and solved. His conclusions are staggering.
And in light of this, to hear what he predicts is yet to come is guaranteed send a chill down your spine, even if you don't believe him. And what does he predict? Nothing short of the collapse of industrialized civilization itself. How could this ever happen? Quite simply, the world runs out of oil. Since everything we do is dependent upon oil... well it's probably best if I let Ruppert speak for himself.
The film plays like one of Ruppert's more impassioned talks, albeit with some cinematography added in to keep the eye amused. We are in an undefined space that looks like a bunker, or an interrogation room. Ruppert sits in a chair, smoking cigarettes (presumably to calm his nerves, or as he's been known to say "I smoke as many cigarettes as I want to, but not nearly as many as the movie would have you believe") and tells us what's on his mind. And by the time you're done seeing "Collapse" it'll be on your mind too... no matter how hard you try not to believe it.
What makes "Collapse" so much more powerful than the angry rants and shenanigans of Michael Moore is that while Moore may be passionate about what he's talking about, it's clear that Ruppert is more than passionate... he's scared to death. What's worse, and also unlike Moore who has received greater publicity than many fiction filmmakers, Ruppert has suffered from a kind of Cassandra syndrome for sometime. His writings and speeches are prophetic and yet, until recently, he has gone mostly unnoticed by the majority of people. Despite this, he's cracked open some of the biggest cases of all time: the CIA dealing drugs, empirical evidence that Dick Cheney was directly responsible for thousands of deaths on 9/11, and most recently, the collapse of the global housing market. It's not difficult to picture a similar but more ancient voice shouting "Don't let the horse through the gates of Troy! It will bring ruin!" only to be met with violence and humiliation.
As is true with so many visionaries, Mike Ruppert is just now beginning to be heard... and like so many useful visions, the realization is coming too late.
However, gloomy is one thing. Being deadly accurate in nearly all predictions is another thing altogether. Ruppert, and his team at From the Wilderness (his newsletter) have been bang on the money when it came to oil prices, housing prices, and of course the collapse of the US housing market, and in other areas as well including drugs, the CIA and 9/11 itself. Ruppert being an ex LAPD narcotics officer who was born into an intelligence family, has had experience in seeing truth where others bury their heads in the sand. When he tried to bring to light evidence that the CIA was dealing drugs within the USA, he was shot at and forced off of LAPD. This was only the beginning of his investigative career, and of the vicious repercussions he suffered because of it. In November of 2004, his book "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire and the End of the Age of Oil" went largely unnoticed, even though it could serve as a final nail in Dick Cheney's political coffin concerning his culpability for 9/11. Ruppert has said, "This is a book that I, as a detective, would... drop in the lap of a DA and say, 'I want a filing for murder, premeditated, first degree, multiple counts with special circumstances." The best part: he makes no mention of bombs in buildings, or holes in the pentagon, or molten metal, but merely treats the case as another crime to be pieced together and solved. His conclusions are staggering.
And in light of this, to hear what he predicts is yet to come is guaranteed send a chill down your spine, even if you don't believe him. And what does he predict? Nothing short of the collapse of industrialized civilization itself. How could this ever happen? Quite simply, the world runs out of oil. Since everything we do is dependent upon oil... well it's probably best if I let Ruppert speak for himself.
The film plays like one of Ruppert's more impassioned talks, albeit with some cinematography added in to keep the eye amused. We are in an undefined space that looks like a bunker, or an interrogation room. Ruppert sits in a chair, smoking cigarettes (presumably to calm his nerves, or as he's been known to say "I smoke as many cigarettes as I want to, but not nearly as many as the movie would have you believe") and tells us what's on his mind. And by the time you're done seeing "Collapse" it'll be on your mind too... no matter how hard you try not to believe it.
What makes "Collapse" so much more powerful than the angry rants and shenanigans of Michael Moore is that while Moore may be passionate about what he's talking about, it's clear that Ruppert is more than passionate... he's scared to death. What's worse, and also unlike Moore who has received greater publicity than many fiction filmmakers, Ruppert has suffered from a kind of Cassandra syndrome for sometime. His writings and speeches are prophetic and yet, until recently, he has gone mostly unnoticed by the majority of people. Despite this, he's cracked open some of the biggest cases of all time: the CIA dealing drugs, empirical evidence that Dick Cheney was directly responsible for thousands of deaths on 9/11, and most recently, the collapse of the global housing market. It's not difficult to picture a similar but more ancient voice shouting "Don't let the horse through the gates of Troy! It will bring ruin!" only to be met with violence and humiliation.
As is true with so many visionaries, Mike Ruppert is just now beginning to be heard... and like so many useful visions, the realization is coming too late.
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