5 Crappy Movies That Put Insane Detail Into Their Worlds

Sure, it's cheesy and over the top, but it's a modern adaption of one of the foundational "sword and planet" novels. You couldn't do this story without John Carter swording everyone to death despite the fact that they have lasers. You couldn't do this story without basically every female we meet happening to be a princess of some kind. And of course you couldn't do this story without a functioning Martian language which arguably lends a slight degree of authenticity to five minutes in the slowest part of the movie.

The Detail They Nailed:

John Carter employed linguists and dialect coaches from Avatar and Lord Of The Rings to create a fully functional Barsoomian language that matched up with the 420 words in the original 11 books. They diligently taught the language to the actors until they could communicate with one another in Barsoomian and began to influence one another to create a cohesive dialect for their tribe. They constructed a new language so that the Martian speech wouldn't feel like filler gibberish.

What They Missed:

I'm all for movies that go the extra mile to get the details right. (Did you know that the costume designer for Rome went to India to find materials to make 4,000 truly authentic-looking costumes? Neat!) I merely suggest that the "Let's construct and learn an artificial language" phase of production should come after the "Let's figure out why everyone's obsessed with jumping, even though they have airships that fly on light" phase of production. People literally watch John Carter's jumps agape from their flying airships. "Wow!" they seem to say, "it's almost like he can do what we can, only with less control!" This contradiction really leaps out at the viewer in one of the first scenes where the male and female leads talk to one another:

Princess: "How did you learn to jump like that?"
Carter: "I don't know. How can your ships fly?"
Princess: "Everyone knows how to make ships fly, you IDIOT!"

Walt Disney Pictures
"You're so lucky you have that six-pack and face to get by on."

Now, maybe mocking John Carter for having inconsistencies is unfair, like poking fun at Michael Jordan for his batting average. To that I say, "Don't play fucking baseball!" A director mistreating an inherently campy premise is how we wind up with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter instead of Shaolin Soccer. As a side note, my problems with this jumping plot have nothing to do with the fact that I have a vertical leap that makes me jealous of Benedict Cumberbatch.

In 1980, Paramount set out to make a live-action movie musical adaptation of a popular cartoon that was sure to be a hit with kids. But when they lost a bidding war for the rights to make Annie, they decided to make Popeye instead.

The Detail They Nailed:

The movie takes place in Sweethaven, a poor fishing village.

Paramount Pictures
See that flag? I'm looking forward to the inevitable "Does Popeye take place in a post-apocalyptic Trump-run America?" article.

Director Robert Altman had a specific vision for the look of the town, and he wasn't satisfied with dressing an existing location to match it or building sets on a sound stage. Instead, he hired 165 people to work for seven months to build him an entire village on the island of Malta. That meant access roads had to be built for the construction crew and a breakwater had to be built to protect the set from the changes in the tide.

Of course, if you're going to go though all the trouble of building a village in the middle of nowhere for your movie, it's not going to be just any village. It's going to look exactly like what you envisioned, down to the timber used. They imported hundreds of logs and thousands of wooden planks from Norway, and all the roof shingles were brought in from Canada. Because if there's one thing we know about Popeye, it's that it should take place in a Mediterranean town built by Norwegians and roofed by Canadians:

Frank Vincentz//Wiki Commons

What They Missed:

A lot of people like to shit on Popeye. It has a confusing plot, it's hammy and sentimental, it's slow, and Popeye hates spinach in it. The end product, though, is a dark yet heartwarming acid trip that feels like the movie Altman wanted to make. It might not be for everyone, but the things people complain about seem to be choices, not oversights. There is one aspect, however, that was as clear a mistake as leaving your read receipts on: Critics and audiences alike found the dialogue really hard to understand. It seems difficult to justify building a whole town (and the infrastructure to support it) when many of the main character's lines are unintelligible to most viewers.

The clearest evidence that Altman couldn't see the forest for the Norwegian timber is that the town still stands (and is a huge tourist destination), while the film itself has faded into obscurity.

Avatar takes place on a distant moon called Pandora that clearly must have been named by a real optimist. The movie centers on the planet's neon-colored natives, called the Na'vi, who are surprisingly sexy, given that they have no genes in common with Elizabeth Banks. We watch human Jake Sully get to run around in a Na'vi body, have sex with sexy Na'vi, learn their culture, have sex with their horses, fight for their survival, and also have sex with their birds/dragons.

20th Century Fox
"What means this word 'herpes,' Jake Sully?"

The Detail They Nailed:

Despite the fact that the main character only fucks one plant in the whole film, the plant life of Pandora got a lot of attention from filmmakers. In fact, they hired Jodie Holt, a plant physiologist, as a consultant. She helped create the flora section of the Pandorapedia, which is like an encyclopedia, only even less welcome in the 21st Century. It contains taxonomic, ecologic, and ethnobotanic information for dozens of plant species on the planet. She used her considerable knowledge of plant evolution and adaptation to create a plausible story of how these plants came to be, given the environmental pressures of Pandora (presumably, Jake Sully fucking everything in sight is too recent a development to have impacted botanical development).

20th Century Fox
The sequels are just him raw-dogging the Tree of Souls.

What They Missed:

Backstory is primarily helpful if it is allowed to influence what we see in some way. Avatar is rife with examples of the proverbial dog being wagged by the tail that is also a sex organ. The analyses and descriptions above were only used to justify existing designs, not to discover what would logically follow from the rules at work on Pandora.

So all of the work Holt did was just an exercise for whatever James Cameron thought would look cool. Ever notice that the trees are earth-green, while everything else is weirdly colored? That has nothing to do with photosynthesis. There was actually a big push by the design team to make them cyan (which would make the coloring of a lot of animals make more sense), but the special effects department wanted to give the planet a cyan atmospheric haze, which would have then been harder to see. By letting the aesthetics drive every decision in the film, they wound up with a bunch of sexy plants that would have made a better music video than a movie.

Big Fish is the story of an estranged son trying to get the truth about his father's life. Even on his deathbed, his father insists on relating his story through tall tales. One of the key locations is a town called Spectre, which is idyllic at first, but (like the movie as a whole) then becomes a dilapidated shadow of itself whenever Ewan McGregor isn't in it.

Columbia Pictures
Which is the same with real life, to be honest.

The Detail They Nailed:

In order to ensure consistency between the idyllic and depressed versions of Spectre, the crew pulled a Popeye and built the town (or the facades, anyway) on an island near Montgomery, Alabama. While they didn't have to fly in Norwegian logs or Canadian roofs, this was only one location in the production. Building a small southern town on an island for just a couple scenes shows commitment to detail.

Columbia Pictures

What They Missed:

In the end of the film, the main character realizes that his father's tall tales had more value than an accurate litany of the events in his life would. The nitty-gritty of what did or did not happen to him is less important than the stories he loved to tell. The take-home message of the film appears to be that the gist of a story is what matters, not whether or not the details are right.

Columbia Pictures
"Maybe I caught the fish. Maybe I Jake Sully'ed it. It's journey that counts."

This is an incredibly strange message for a movie that went through the trouble of building a town to ensure consistency between shots. The very filmmaking techniques used in the film argue against its central point. Nailing the details, even when they aren't central to the gist of the story, gives your portrayal an authenticity that helps the whole thing. If accuracy isn't important, then why not shoot the movie on a sound stage?

Maybe I'm reading too much into the themes of Big Fish here. It's about a father who tells stories that his son hates. Like the father's stories, the movie is fantastical, schmaltzy, and rambles aimlessly. Maybe it has a much simpler message: Stories like this one are terrible. Stop telling them.

Dau is about the life of physicist Lev Landau. Director Ilya Khrzhanovsky pitched it on the heels of his debut film 4, which was widely acclaimed on the international festival circuit.

The project was a selection of L'Atelier de Cannes, and the pitch was so successful that the sophomore director was given carte blanche on the project. After all, with 4, he had proven he was capable director, creating what Stephen Holden of The New York Times called "as close to the experience of an actual nightmare as anything I've seen on the screen." So what's the worst that could happen?

Khrzhanovsky was given the green light for Dau in 2006. The project has now been in production for ten years. Not in the way that your neighbor has been working on their dystopian YA novel for 10 years; actually in production for 10 years. When Khrzhanovsky started this project, he was 30. He is now 40. When he started this, iPhones did not yet exist. When he started, we were watching Mentos go into Diet Cokes and were singing about dicks in boxes. That was an entire "Daniel Craig as James Bond" ago. Or my preferred measurement of time: five Step Up movies ago.

Touchstone Pictures
He started back when people thought Channing was some kind of verb.

Between Star Wars Kid and #FirstWorldProblems, Khrzhanovsky shot Dau. Like Popeye, Dau takes place mostly in buildings specifically constructed for it. But instead of a little ramshackle town, Khrzhanovsky built a Soviet city circa 1952, complete with a main square, apartments, and a stadium.

The Detail They Nailed:

From the accounts of the few journalists that were allowed inside, it seems as though they got nearly every detail right -- to a frightening degree. To get into the city, journalist Michael Idov had to get a period-appropriate haircut and change into period clothing that included period underwear. Laugh all you like at the phrase "period underwear," because this story is about to get dark.

What he saw was not a film set, but a functioning city. There were stores, like a barbershop and commissary, where the actors worked all day, and then apartments where they would go to sleep at night. Khrzhanovsky made them live there 24/7 to achieve complete authenticity. They earned Soviet money which they exchanged for Soviet canned foods stamped with 1950s expiration dates to put in their Soviet refrigerators.

Caravan Magazine
An abacus. The cashiers had to use a fucking abacus.

The attention to physical detail was obsessive. Actors playing construction workers were fired for not hammering in a period-appropriate motion, and custom pipes were built so that the toilets flushed with the appropriate timbre. The truly chilling part, however, was the reproduction of the social aspects of the time.

No one was allowed to acknowledge that they were on a set or in the present day, which meant no use of words like "scene," "director," "shooting," or "Stockholm syndrome." This meant that everyone was constantly watching what they said, creating a doublespeak they had to constantly self-monitor. If they slipped up, one of their neighbors would report them to an actual police force, which would fine them for the transgression.

Caravan Magazine
"Big brother is watching you ... because he'll fine us if we don't."

In a twist of evil genius, Khrzhanovsky used the very fact that people knew they were being filmed and recorded to further the reality of their Soviet experience. The cameras and microphones were hidden in walls and lighting fixtures, just as they were in Stalin's Russia. Michael Idov witnessed the strain caused by this place when a beautiful girl who had been there only four months propositioned him, almost certainly at Khrzhanovsky's order. He felt it himself so strongly that he sincerely denounced his own cameraman after the cameraman was exiled for breaking protocol. The movie cameras weren't even rolling during the period Idov visited.

Hollywood has plenty of horror stories of directors gone mad with power. The shoot for Apocalypse Now lasted eight months. Stanley Kubrick tortured Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise for 15 months, breaking the Guinness world record for longest continuous film shoot. In typical Russian form, Dau is tragic on a different scale from its Western counterparts. Principal photography lasted six years.

Caravan Magazine
That's nearly four Step Up movies.

What They Missed:

The larger thing this film missed was actually making a film. Dau was the most anticipated movie of 2011. It was then the most anticipated movie of 2013. According to the most recent sources I could find, it is currently the most anticipated movie of last year's Cannes Film Festival. Another prominent journalist who visited the set, Oleg Kashin, is convinced it will never be released. Perhaps this film being a complete exercise in futility will be its ultimate historical accuracy.

Aaron Kheifets is an occasionally mustachioed comedian, writer, and director. You are allowed to follow him on Twitter, watch his videos, and look at his website.

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