Re: Other sucky "sequels" [Re: [vox] [OT]: george lucas - agalactic gasbag]

[Micah Cowan <micah@cowan.namMAPSe>]

On Thu, 2002-04-11 at 00:53, Mark K. Kim wrote:
> On 2 Mar 2006, Micah Cowan wrote:
> 
> > Still, even that didn't suck as bad as, say, the second Highlander
> > movie.
> 
> They ran out of budget so they fudged the whole thing.  They fixed up the
> whole thing and re-released the second movie -- look for the director's
> cut from Joel's video store (Alternative Universe, I think).
> 
> I didn't see the original so I can't compare the director's cut to the
> original, but my roommate at the time kept on saying "this is so much
> better than the original version" over and over.  After the movie, it has
> a mini documentary about why the original release sucked so much and what
> they did to fix it.

So, I *have* the director's cut ("Renegade Version"), and didn't see
much improvement.  In particular, it still had all the flaws I just
mentioned.  However, I didn't watch the featurette.

The only thing I can really figure out that they did was, add 19 minutes
of footage (no idea where those are), and use the *correct* aspect ratio
(apparently, the original was created in a non-standard aspect ratio!). 
I seem to remember the special effects to the original being exactly as
good as this (the one good thing).  I don't doubt that they ran out of
budget, considering how much they must have spent on the SFX, but I
think the real problem was the scriptwriter.  It is quite clear to me
that, from the beginning, the folks behind it had absolutely no idea
what they were doing.  Seems to me they probably hired a newbie
scriptwriter to make a sequel, and this newbie was just *itching* to
write a Sci-fi/space-alien movie, and decided to take it out on
Highlander, which before now was clearly not in that category.

-Micah

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