And here we thought Hollywood had totally run out of fresh ideas, and then they go ahead and prove us right. Who'd have expected that?

Let's reach way, way back to Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld Stories...Mark Twain, Tom Mix and Sir Richard Burton (not the actor...) battling against Prince John and Herman Goerring... Farmer had all of history to draw from.

It's interesting, because "Hollywood is out of ideas" is itself a cliche.

Is it too meta to think of a post about unoriginality as being unoriginal?

Is it some form of irony to continuously point out that Hollywood is out ideas?

That said, this sounds like some sort of lame fanfic, only without the star power.

I also fail to see how this movie will go much further than "things blowing up real good", yet I probably will still end up checking it out.

@braak: Damn you and your fast fingers!

Can you say "Mortal Kombat"?

I'm pretty sure that even the Romans considered this idea cliche.

Thus introducing the 6th Type of Conflict: Man vs. Man vs. Man vs. Man. Sophocles' Royal Rumble, now out on DVD.

"Will this spate of unoriginality never cease?"

I wager 50 Quatloos that it won't.

@braak:

I've always enjoyed Jeff Ross's blog on music and his take on James Horner.

Das Lied von der Brad
Over the weekend I saw the new Wolfgang Petersen picture, Troy. (I always liked that old Spy magazine piece in which someone went round to movie theaters asking for tickets to "the Ivan Reitman picture" and "the film by Chris Columbus," getting blank stares from the cashiers.) A few minutes in, I experienced a tingling sensation of déjà vu. Where had I heard this music before? Where had I heard music borrowed in this way before? Soon enough, it hit me: I was listening to another omnivorous musical collage by James Horner, the artist of Titanic. This most stylistically codependent of Hollywood composers is once again up to his old tricks. The principal Bradmotif derives from the finale of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. The Greeks' march on Troy played out to the first few bars of Prokofiev's "Battle on the Ice" from Alexander Nevsky. The Trojans parade to pealing fanfares from the Sanctus of Britten's War Requiem. [Postscript: A reader points out that the Vaughan Williams Tallis Fantasia becomes a Josh Groban song during the closing credits. I fled a little too quickly to notice this.]

There are two possible interpretive approaches to this challenging opus. One is that Horner is presenting us with a kind of musical meta-narrative of deconstructive requotation-a postmodern tour-de-force on par with the Pierre Menard Don Quixote. Notice the emphasis on Shostakovich and Prokofiev, two composers who served unwillingly as mouthpieces for totalitarian terror. We are being told that the hero Achilles has let himself become a figurehead for the tyrannical Agamemnon. The citation of Britten, meanwhile, is a sly acknowledgement of the story's homoerotic subtext, which was evidently omitted for fear of persecution by the Bush regime. Thus, music becomes what Theodor W. Adorno might call a negative dialectic of original unoriginality, allowing the seeming banality of impoverished invention to serve as a vessel for the lamentations of the outcast. By reducing other people's masterworks to cheap ditties, Horner shakes his fist at the suffocating weight of bourgeois culture. In the absence of an individual voice, we are given to perceive the destruction of individuality itself.

That's one explanation. The other is that the man is a hack.

May 24, 2004 | Permalink

Sorry. that's Alex Ross.

[www.fastcopyinc.com]

You're welcome.

And, oh yes, Brown got credit for his story for ST: O.G.

I'll wager 50 quatloos on Zap Brannigan!

Hmmmm... this sounds strangly like the premise behind Quake III Arena.

Yes, it's unoriginal. It's also COMPLETELY AWESOME. This is exactly why fun ideas get recycled in the first place.

I know what would make this even more original? Have the referee as a living lava creature with wicked rock claws. Oh, and make the arena filled with stuff you can use to make weapons will.

I'll wager 200 quatloos on Colonel Scott.

Sounds like Heroscape.
[www.hasbro.com]

every great warrior from all over the universe and time fighting in Valhalla fighting all day and partying all night for all eternity

Narfle the Garthog!

What's the subtitle? "The Race to Quad Damage?" "Twilight of The Spawn Campers?"

The estate of Frederic Brown ought to be a hell of a lot bigger than it is.

I wager all my quatloos on the guys with the biggest guns and best armor.

My quatloos are on Team 300. All of my quatloos on King Leonidus! Shit, I'm broke. Can one of you loan me a few hundred thousand quatloos?

"SPARTANS. TONIGHT, WE DINE IN--"

*twip*

"Boom, head shot!"

I've seen this movie before.Oh yeah.It was Arena!!!They shouldn't be allowed to remake movies made in the eighties. There's a quality to the sci-fi and horror films of the era that manage to make even the worst films campy and enjoyable. This'll just be an effects laden piece of crap, starring Hayden Christensen as Steve Armstrong or something like that.Damnit Hollywood! Stop pissing on my nostalgia!

Meh, I'm not going to dignify the culmination of unoriginality with a discussion of how the criticism on the lack of creativity itself is a lack of creativity, but I WILL continue to whine until something really cool and new-thinking comes onto the scene. That said, there is certainly stuff out there that rehash the known clichés in fresh and interesting directions; OTTMH, Judd Apatow reenvisioned the inane loser-genre with a style that made it appealing (at least to me).

This does not sound like that sort of thing, it sounds more like a "How can we make epic battles even more epic and big booms into bigger booms?" ploy. Though I might be wrong, and it would please me to no end to find this film actually breaking all boundaries of established conventions.

Also, of course I know that a cliché is a tried-and-tested formula of something that works, which is why big-budget flicks continue in the same trend, and that is the same reason the bicthing and moaning of people like me does likewise. In other words, I realize I contribute to going in circles myself, but refuse to think about it :-P

@jbq: Wait a minute... I just did, didn't I? D'OH!

This also reminds me of an arcade game I used to play at lunch time circa 1993. It was a fighting game a la Street Fighter with combatants from various eras of time. There was a Caveman, a Viking, a future guy with a chainsaw (?), and probably some others.

Does this ring a bell for anyone else?

Hold on, god bless Google and Wikipedia:

Time Killers:
[en.wikipedia.org]

For some reason, this makes me think of Larry Niven's Ringworld book. I believe that Napoleon and a bunch of other famous people from history are all reborn in the Ringworld and leading opposing primitives armies ... am I right or way off track?

@JaggyGT: Way off. Niven wrote "Ringworld," and Farmer wrote "Riverworld," which is the one with the historic characters. All though I don't remember Napolean, there was a very confused Jesus Christ in the original short story.

Sounds like one of the installments of the Batman V Judge Dredd graphic novels.