When it comes to famous fantasy movies, I believe most children's shoes will blurt out: "Lord of the Rings" .
Indeed, the status of the "Lord of the Rings" series in fantasy movies is just like Zhang Sanfeng in "The Legend of the Dragon Slayer", belonging to the exclusive level.
Therefore, even though the movie ended as early as 2003, a large number of fans around the world hope to see the story of Middle-earth on the screen again.
Under such circumstances, Warner Bros. launched the prequel film "The Hobbit" series of "Lord of the Rings" in 2012~2014, which once again set off a frenzy in the magical world.
At that time, Legendary Pictures, which cooperated with Warner Bros., took advantage of this shareholder's wind to launch a "Seventh Son: Battle of the Demon" , hoping to take over the fantasy after the end of "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" The banner of the movie .
Lessons learned from old partners?
In fact, Warner Bros. has long understood that this "Seventh Son" is impossible to succeed.
Therefore, in the early productions, Warner Bros. did not plan to form a joint venture with Legendary Pictures, so the nearly $100 million production cost of "The Seventh Son" was entirely from Legendary Pictures.
After the end of the cooperation between the two parties in the later period (the cooperative relationship has been restored now, but this is a later story, let’s not talk about it) Warner Bros. did not strive for the film too much, and directly let the legend take it to find another cooperative manufacturer. In the end, "The Seventh Son" is published by Universal Pictures.
As Warner expected, after the release of "The Seventh Son", the word-of-mouth box office both suffered a disastrous loss, causing Legendary to lose more than $150 million.
After all, Warner Bros. has produced famous fantasy movies such as "Harry Potter" and "The Hobbit" , and has a good understanding of the subject matter and quality of this type of film.
As for Legendary Pictures, although it has cooperated with Warner for many years, it seems that it has not learned how to control fantasy movies from this old partner .
The film "Seventh Son: Battle of the Demons" has three flaws:
- duration
- Plot tension
- Human set
Tell a story of 720 minutes in 105 minutes?
The story frame of "The Seventh Son" is actually a traditional Western magical hero adventure.
The protagonist is a young man in the countryside. One day, he has the power of evil. Then he met a powerful mentor, took him to travel and temper, and after a series of adventures, he finally succeeded in knocking down the evil forces, and the protagonist became a new generation. hero.
The traditional story template is not necessarily a shortcoming, because if you shoot well, you can also play many interesting things, and at the worst, you can keep it well.
But the flaw of "The Seventh Son" is that the "evil force" of the story belongs to the world-class BOSS , and the time left for the protagonist group is only seven days .
Under this premise, it is an impossible task to tell a country boy from nothing to a fighter who can deal with this level of BOSS in just 105 minutes in seven days .
Take a look at "Lord of the Rings", it is also a world-class BOSS, but "Lord of the Rings" used three movies, and the director's cut version adds up to a total length of about 720 minutes to tell the entire Lord of the Rings story.
This length is enough to allow more space for the whole world view and the main characters of multiple lines to portray, and the audience can see their growth process exactly.
Of course, the scale of the story of "The Seventh Son" itself is not as large as that of "Lord of the Rings", and there are not many characters to be portrayed, but this creates another problem.
She is a world-class BOSS, and it is undoubtedly too fake to deal with her with such a small amount of people as the protagonist .
To solve this problem is actually very simple.
Set the first villain as a "regional" BOSS. In other words, the frame of the background story can still be made very large, but the plot structure is reduced first when it comes to the movie itself .
In this way, it is enough to make the protagonist's growth span not so exaggerated, and there will be no big problems in terms of duration.
House-like plot
In view of the fact that the movie "The Seventh Son" is going to fight a world-class boss at the end, the protagonist's upgrade speed is almost as fast as riding a rocket .
After several "man-machine training", it was enough to contend with the first-class army under the BOSS. Before the final battle, he simply opened the plug-in . After that, all the villains were waiting to be killed in front of him.
However, perhaps the film party also felt that the male lead’s halo was too dazzling, so in the end, the boss asked Queen Malkin and her sister to have an infighting , so in the end the male lead purely went up to win the head....
At the same time, because of the time limit, the relationship between the male lead and the female lead is also a "quick" word. After meeting once or twice , the female lead can go to sleep , and then the female lead willingly betrays her relatives for the lead...
In view of the fact that too many plots have progressed too quickly, many points appear to be quite " fast food" , and the details are unclear or even perfunctory, which directly makes the whole movie quite exaggerated .
Wonderful drama conflicts often require a good plot and a deep characterization of the role as a driving force.
And "The Seventh Son" has neither, so the plot of the whole film will make people feel that there are "drama needs" everywhere , resulting in a very poor viewing experience.
Bad personality
Personality is the biggest failure of the whole movie , not one of them.
The protagonist's character is quite unpleasant. When raising pigs in the country, he always looks like I will do great things in the future .
Even though you are the leading actor, you don't have to put your halo on your mouth all day, right?
Even the mentor who treats himself is a superb look , I won't, so you have to teach me, or I will lose my temper, and at the same time, you can't make me too embarrassed, otherwise I will kill you.
The protagonist's mentor Gregory, known abroad of hunting magic, but it does a genuine slag male .
He had a mess with the Dark Queen Malkin when he had a wife. In the end, Malkin found out that he had been tricked to kill his wife, so he designed to seal Malkin and preached everywhere that the Dark Queen was indeed the Dark Queen....
Although Queen Malkin is a poor woman who was deceived by a scumbag, after waking up, she wanted to destroy the world because of her love and hatred for Gregory. Obviously, she would not be recognized by others.
The rest of the characters are basically quite instrumental due to the length of the movie , including the characters of the heroine, the hero's mother, etc., are out of the surface.
Because of such erosive personality , the audience does not have even a slight sense of resonance with any character in the whole movie, but the sense of disgust continues to rise with the unfolding of the plot.
In layman's terms, it just makes the audience look very uncomfortable.
A fantasy movie that was originally good was forcibly turned into a family ethics drama by a terrible character .
In recent years, fantasy movies have been severely impacted by comics, and many of the poor quality movies are also known as fantasy blockbusters, so these kinds of movies have indeed become less popular.
Let's see if there will be a movie that can take over this fantasy banner in the future.
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