By Drew Dietsch | Published
I recently had to write a script for a list of films that I felt a little or a big debt to The matrix. One of the films on which I focused on the shortest period of time in this video was 2002 BalanceWritten and directed by Kurt Wimmer, writer and director of the 2020s Children of cornOne of the worst Stephen King films that I have ever seen.
So now that I admitted to having given Kurt the science film Mangle The sequels, I want to give Wimmer the best effort of staging to shake just by looking at him, because the film and its release are really worth another look.
The balance makes smart sci-fi stupid
Thus, the very first criticism of Balance We must approach the history and the future alternative world in which it takes place, because a word I am sure that it is used against this film is “derivative”.
It is a word used when a work of art takes on a recognizable source of inspiration and people do not feel that it does anything … Well, inspired. Instead, they can’t help but see it as a copy work and stick.
Balance Undoubtedly inspire novels and dystopian classic and therefore familiar disorder fictional fiction images, creating a world where human beings live in a fascist state where emotion and artistic expression are suppressed in the name of the elimination of war.
It reminds me more than my favorite video that I made for this channel on Harrison Bergeron. You should look at that.
Libia’s company in BalanceAn openly fascist state (nobody has ever accused Kurt Wimmer of subtlety), maintains peace by forcing everyone to take a medication killing emotions called prozium. As I said, Kurt and subtlety are not bed companions, even if it is only a topical riff and a change of brand of Huxley Brave New World.
BalanceThe treatment of his inspirations reminds me of another science fiction film which obtains the word “d”, 2013 Oversight. The visual styles of these two films are focused on action, and their conceptions of the science fiction world are elegant, stripped and rationalized. The same can be said to their plug-and-play approach with their influences.
Imagine that each specific inspiration for a work of art is a wooden wooden block, like children alphabet with children. Do children still play with them? I haven’t been a child for a few years now. Anyway, artists take each of these wooden blocks and can use them as they want to build their own art. Some could sculpt the blocks in new shapes, some could crush the blocks into pieces, then stick something new in the broken bursts.
But films like Oversight And Balance I feel like I take these blocks and do a little more than put them next to each other. The best thing they can find about their influences is just a bigger block.
I think this kind of mind is what people try to cross when they call a “derived” film. And I would say BalanceThe story of science fiction and the world succumb to the biggest block problem. Thus, even if his themes, his arcs of character and his global story are strongly presented, they bring almost nothing new to the table which has not been better explored in better stories.
Rifles, actors and shattering pumpkins
What Balance Offer that these literary tales are not a bunch of cool and stupid cannon fights with Christian Bale which seems stupid. Balance is at its best when it comes to a simple but elegant action film. It can be an empty head action (literally at a given time), but Wimmer understands how to make firearm fights that have unique locations or conceptually elegant sequences such as the used shooting.
And in addition to Christian Bale, the rest of BalanceThe casting exactly does what is requested from them and raises the equipment with which they worked. There is really no weak link overall. The real heroes of Balance are in fact the casting directors. I mean, Angus Macfadyen is there. Komodo of Warriors of virtue! Love them.
And Wimmer takes full advantage of the shooting in Berlin, a place whose fascist architecture certainly helps to bring home the fears of the real world that he uses in Balance.
Okay, I don’t know where it can go to the script, so before talking BalanceThe release and the box office and all these good things, I just have to do something to the editor, so stay with me while I explain stuff very quickly.
A “temporary track” is a soundtrack of temporary music composed of mounted musical equipment (generally other film scores) which is used when modifying images, allowing filmmakers to have music with whom to work before having their own original score.
If you watch as many movies as I do it as long as I do, you can start to hear when an original partition try to look like another familiar film music, and it is likely that they have obtained this familiar film music for their temporary song.
What has it to do with Balance? In case I never have the opportunity to illustrate this again, I theorizes that Balance Used a very unique choice on its temporary track: the song Smashing Pumpkins “The Begin is the end is the start” of the Batman and Robin soundtrack. Not the partition, the soundtrack. Do I go crazy, all of you?
The secret success of balance
Okay, so what happened with Balance To overcome it a failure? Well, he did not obtain a very warm reception of most criticism at the time and currently had a 40% criticism on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert gave him three in four stars, so if you have followed our videos, it’s always half a minute than Spawn.
If you look at the basic data as BalanceThe American theatrical outing and the box office taking, it looks like an abject failure, opening in place n ° 20 on only 301 screens in the country, well at less than 10% of the American theater screens available at the time.
Balance Railed $ 1.2 million at the US box office and an additional $ 4.1 million dollars, which barely makes its theatrical a quarter of its $ 20 million budget. Does not look like anything other than bad news, right?
Well, this is a case where real money had already been made before the film reaches a single screen. Thanks to pre-liberation sales in various world markets Balance had enough profit for distributors, Miramax, decided to withdraw promotion and advertising, which in turn meant to reduce the number of screens on which the film would play everywhere.
Fortunately, Balance seems to have left this failure late, because the public helped the film to adapt quite largely. It is not maintained such a strong efficiency for me as time has continued, and some of its biggest block problems are even more lunking today, but I can always enjoy its simpler and even more stupid pleasures. And I’m going to take any anti -fascist action movie that I can get now.
And hey, I’m even going to launch Kurt Wimmer an OS. I always say Balance is his best implementation effort, but he also wrote Beekeeper Last year, which surprised me with the way in which was just as cheeky by his socio -political comment while managing to be stupid and fun.
Balance is stupid and fun, and it goes even if it tries to appear much smarter than that. It’s really smarter than Children of corn.
Discover the podcast Cat sematary where I prompted an entire episode on Stephen King of Kurt Wimmer Children of corn. Discover the Gender episode on Warriors of virtue For more of my obsession with Angus Macfadyen.
And above all, continue to come back to find out more about Giant Freakin Robot.
