Steven Spielberg post-1993: Vote for the best

He never knows when to stop with the schmaltz and the bludgeoning metaphors, otherwise I'd say SPR (first act is easily the best war cinema of all time) or Munich (end doesn't obviate the rest, say, but comes damn close to doing so). This leaves Minority Report & WOTW, both of which are A+++++ sci-fi thrillers (xcept for the annoying Cruise factor, but I can deal). Hmm.. I'll go with Minority Report.

Minority Report seconded.

SPR never did anything for me. Munich I've yet to see. Crystal Skulls was awful. AI seems like Minority Report for kids with Jude Law, so no.

Catch Me If You Can is good fun without any baggage (do you see) so that.

Minority Report thirded. I remember the hype over talented newcomer Colin Farrell back then.

I'd say the first act of WOTW is really good but it gets real dull. A.I. is the shittiest of them all.

The only one of these I haven't seen is The Terminal, which I can only presume is the shittiest of them all.

(Qualifier: I am one of those freaks who thinks this is a very rewarding section of Spielberg's career.)

Dunno if yr of the particular mindset, Eric H, but I'm open to critical re-evaluations of A.I.. I've only seen it once, shortly after it came out. I had just arrived back in the States from a trans-Atlantic flight & proceeded to get very stoned w/ a friend & we went to see it. As such, my memory of it is faint, but my impression at the time was that it was aesthetically rich, but too guarded with respect to the Kubrick legacy for its own good. I wouldn't mind reapproaching it, epecially after reading Noel Murray's take on it here.

AI is nearly as clever as it thinks it is.

first act is easily the best war cinema of all time

It's great but it's not THAT great. I suppose it depends on what you mean by war cinema.

OK, so I guess not "easily," but based on what I've seen, the extended Normandy beach scene contains what I can imagine would be the most verisimilitude that war-fiction has to offer but, then again, I've never been "in the shit."

SPR inspired the normandy landing level in Call of Duty, which is probably the most visceral gaming experience I've ever had.

Oh no doubt about it it is great on that level.

tbh I didn't even realise he did WOTW, one of the very few films I have walked out (of the living room) on because of aforementioned Cruise irritation.

I can't decide, I kind of really like JP2. It's fun.

xpost the me/NT - I'll tell you what though: I recently watched Ken Burns' WW2 opus & it made me realize the attention to detail that Spielberg put into that scene. It really is fucking uncanny how similar to actual war footage it is.

I'm with Eric: this is a particularly rich part of his artistic career. The Lonsdale sequences in Munich, for example, have a sophistication – the use of irony and reliance on clever dialogue – you don't expect from Spielberg. I'm very happy with Saving Private Ryan sans the bookends; also War of the Worlds and Minority Report.

Amistad is the only one of these I can't remember thinking was all that great, but when it came out I was still (to my sort-of shame) nuts over Titanic and nothing else in theaters compared.

WotW and Munich are, for me, the best of Spielberg's single-year pop/serious diptychs.

I watched 'Catch me if you can' again the other day. Lighthearted stuff but a lot of fun.

xpost : I would argue for MR/CMIYC in 2002. But can MR be considered "serious?"

Also (to clarify my first post) - I think Munich is brilliant. One of the best films of that year. But the {SPOILER WARNING} fucking/hostage-shooting montage at the end really pissed me off. Kind of like the girl in the red dress in Shindler's List. I just wanted to grab the guys shoulders and shake him & let him know: "We get it already. You've made a film for the times. Leave it to us to read between the lines."

Munich by a pretty healthy margin over AI, Amistad, WotW, Ryan.

Whatever gets my vote here won't have gotten it by a "healthy margin."

I kind of like that this grouping is now bookended with two entertaining but basically unnecessary franchise installments.

yeah, neither of those will likely be part of the discussion.

all the others have more serious flaws than Munich.

Dinosaurs II is the only one I haven't seen, and the latest Indy is easily the weakest of the rest. Tho admittedly it's nowhere as godawful as the last 20 mins of Minority Report.

Pvt Ryan gets all its credit for being explicit, which is all that keeps it (after the opening sequence) from being a very long update of WW2 movies like A Walk in the Sun.

"Pvt Ryan" is nothing after the opening sequence.

But that (the opening sequence) alone justifies its greatness.

voting for munich. haven't seen private ryan (or wotw), and i don't remember much about minority report besides lots of white surfaces and blinking lights. a.i. and crystal skull are terrible.

xxp

noo, that final part with the sniper guy in the tower describing the position of the oncoming germans, and the only thing the audience was aware of was the thundering sound of tank tracks, was intense.

If Spielberg made "short films," well then whatever.. but he paints in broad strokes only, so it unfortunately becomes necessary to edit his films for him.

totally forgot he did the terminal. i saw it in a hotel room and it sucked me in, but it's not a great movie or anything.

I've seen zero of these movies. I haven't specifically avoided them because of Spielberg, but none of these looked even vaguely interesting. Am I missing something?

xxxpost: yes, I forgot about that. you are correct.

xpost: yes

voted wotw, which was pretty scary and good except for the scenes with acting, but i haven't seen pvt. ryan or munich or amistad

i will admit to enjoying the "light" films on this list, ie the terminal and catch me if you can

indiana jones is the only one i can remember actively hating, though i think maybe a.i. pissed me off too

but Tom Cruise acting is pretty scary!

TLW - Noisy and incoherant with flashes of vintage Spielbergian tension.
Amistad - Saw it on telly once, think I found it OK but overlong and a little preachy.
SPR - Best first 20 minutes ever, rest of the film pointless.
A.I. - Lovely first act, some nice ideas all the way through but a mess.
Minority Report - Would be an absolute cracker without the final act.
CMiYC - Great fun the first time, tiresome the second.
The Terminal - Very poor. A good idea for a movie, but the tone is woefully misjudged.
WotW - Really overrated. Nice effects though.
Munich - The only one I haven't seen, and the best of the lot from what I gather.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Cock - Just stop it.

I think it goes to Minority Report, on balance.

The Terminal and Catch Me If You Can are light only on the surface, which is all that Spielberg-dissers tend to see.

so you would agree that they are "light"

Minority Report isn't my least favorite on this list (that's probably Amistad or Catch Me If You Can), but I think it's problems might be the most crippling.

(And it's got a far less risky/raw Cruise performance, too.)

still the only Colin Farrell film I like too.

Not a New World fan either, huh Alfred?

when it gets the inevitable director's cut release, I'll watch it again (or has it got a director's cut release already?).

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51nlL%2Bwd8XL._SS500_.jpg

which one is Farrell?

(I just went to his filmography to try to come up with any other titles, but Miami Vice and Phone Booth were the only two good ones I pulled up. I'm probably in the minority for liking those ones.)

mohawk, bro

(xpost)

DiCaprio's Catch character is more authentically tragic than whatever the fuck was sposed to be going on with him in The Departed.

imagine if Spielberg had directed that

see i totally WAS misremembering!

LITTLE MAN

still totally scarred by that movie

that ending would be fifteen minutes longer and we would've cut to the wayans brothers escorting real life little men to billy barty's star on the walk of fame all solemn like

lol

RIP Billy Barty you were great in Day of the Locust

P sure Armond was a fan.

of billy barty? well, who wasn't!

god i loved under the rainbow so much when i was a kid

best setpiece in ai was when annoying chris rock robot gets shot through a fan, but thats about it

i havent seen amistad in a long time (and obv only once) so its hard for me to id what i hated so much about it, def on the oscarbait thing for one, but there was more than that

"oscarbait" needs to be more rigidly defined imo

AI is a deeply flawed film, but there are parts of it that I really enjoyed and have stayed with me.

omg i remember the LITTLE MAN thread! i have spent my entire adult life on ilx, it turns out.

I found the Hounsou's WE WANT FREE chanting in the courtroom grotesque and offensive coming after the Middle Passage sequence.

yeah the reason i only like amistad is that iirc the rest of the movie is kind of offputting in terms of racial politics...i actually don't even remember what i mean by that, though.

wasn't it "GIVE-IVE US FREE"?

I found it hard to be put off by that considering that if I was in a similar situation and had a tenuous grasp of the language I was trying to communicate in, I think I would still do exactly what he did.

Luckily John Williams would have had your back.

I would really need to watch the whole movie again to defend this position but what I remember is that there are large chunks of uncomfortable/disagreeable instances of racial politics that were entirely appropriate given the subject matter and the time period.

for me at least, the power of AI doesn't come the "robot with human emotions" angle but more like "humans are robots with emotions." so there's that Freudian "uncanny" effect in watching this robot perform at being human, and that leads to a reflection on your own performance as human, your own robot-ness. which is profoundly unsettling but also true, imo.

and that's why the final scene resonates so strongly with some people, i think: it's this constructed fantasy of a reconciliation, of becoming a "real boy" and not a robot, or of giving yourself that illusion, and so , i think, the ultimately untenability of our ultimate desires, that even if we got them we'd reject them as false.

I did find it shrewd that the scriptwriters made the decision to frame the Amistadians victory before SCOTUS as a sentimental one. "What is their STORY?" John Quincy Adams asks Morgan Freeman more than once. The movie suggests he accepted the case to settle a score with political enemies who denied him reelection and used the best strategy to win; the fact that Adams was the most notorious opponent of the gag rule in the House is barely mentioned.

If Spielberg had hired better scriptwriters, he could have a historical tale as fraught with ambiguities as Munich. Instead we get GIVE US OUR FREE, the queen of Spain jumping up and down on her bed, and that embarrassing confrontation between John Calhoun and Martin Van Buren.

the queen of Spain jumping up and down on her bed

Oh god, I'd forgotten this entire movie.

War of the Worlds was one of the most affecting and harrowing film experiences I have ever had -- what was said about the sequence from the lighting storm through the first tripod attack, or even the whole first hour, was OTM. Also I thought the scene where the tripod first emerges was incredibly beautiful -- the way the onlookers are torn between their flight impulse and their irresistable curiosity (everyone filming, Tom Cruise continuously looking back in wonder even as he tries to escape death). I also loved the way it looked when people were vaporized.

I agree that the son surviving was hard to believe, but I thought there was a wry twist in the ending -- "Your son is alive...but so are your ex-inlaws"

amistad isn't the best of these but hounsou's is definitely one of the better performances from this bunch

i rescreened war of the worlds over the weekend and it was killer, really one of the best end-of-the-world movies ive ever seen

at the end when tom cruise and son are hugging my grandfather wandered into the room and said skeptically "they gay?"

I still maintain that War Of The Worlds could have been an amazing movie if Cruise was killed off somewhere before the Tim Robbins scene and the rest of the movie was about the kids. I'm not being knee-jerk anti-Cruise either, I think it could have been a great shocker and a way to give the storyline a needed lateral kick where the film needed it (gawd, that Robbins scene is HORRIBLE)

i kinda always thought that robbins and cruise should have switched roles, but rewatching it i thought cruise was pretty great

woulda been great if Anthony Hopkins had shown up as John Quincy Adams to give Cruise advice.

givvus us fee, he no doubt quipped when approached

o_O at the 3 votes for Lost World

wtf objecting to Give Us Free

suprised to see so much love for minority report, AI and war of the worlds. i haven't seen amistad, but the former three are uniformly terrible. biggest problem is that they're emotionally inert. spielberg & williams work frantically to manufacture a semblance of sentiment, but to no substantial effect. none of the characters is worth caring about, and the circumstances of their cinematic lives are only as involving as the action sequences and special effects propelling them. AI tarts itself up with vague philosophical questions and abrupt tonal shifts, but never manages to be much more than "interesting". minority report blows an interesting premise with hamhanded execution and gaping plot//thought holes. and war of the worlds, for all the money and technological wizardly at its disposal, can't improve on its campy 50s predecessor.

these are "watchable" movies, and they can certainly be involving. i'd happilywatch any one of them on cable if i were bored and nothing else struck my fancy. speilberg hasn't lost his gift for staging suspense and action scenes, but there's something depressingly vacant about all of them.

i think that A.I. is bad and crappy, but MR and WOTW are both fairly entertaining. you don't really care about the characters in them, which definitely hurts the movies, but that's more of a script problem than a spielberg problem imo

it's a tom cruise problem, rly

it is and it isn't. i mean, i don't hate tom cruise. i'd like to cuz i think i should cuz he's clearly a putz, but he's not a bad actor and he's singularly good at just plain being charming on a movie screen. i loved eyes wide shut (and i did, up to the last 10 min) as much for cruise's performance/presence as for kubrick's direction and all the bug-nutty goings on. cruise can do well if used well, so i guess i do blame spielberg for the emptiness of his recent film. i mean, that used to be his gift: his ability to invest big-budget spectacle with affecting sentiment, and to invest mere sentiment with something that felt like genuine emotion.

"...recent films."

i think his performances range from fine to good for large parts of both movies, right up until we're asked to empathise with him in any way- unfortunately, these are usually focal points, and maybe it works for a kubrick study of a situation, but imo it falls down when it's spielberg asking you to *feel*

again, i really think the problem is on the page. the first half of war of the worlds is great - and involving on a character level imo - but it really loses its way after the son runs off. i kinda see what you mean with minority report - the set pieces run away with the movie, plus the third act sucks. though i think it's still a perfectly entertaining movie, and the actors bring a lot to the table where the script couldn't be bothered (thinking of samantha morton and colin farrell, even neal mcdonough)(and peter stormare, duh).

also, just a thought: spielberg might be the best director ever when it comes to his ability to break down a cynical audience (which is why his detractors find him so problematic), but these movies are... i hesitate to call the material 'adult' but they're darker than his great crowdpleasers of yesteryear, which perhaps = fewer opportunities to paper over problem areas in the script with jurassic park style wonderment. (dont take that as a knock against JP btw, which is an amazing freakin movie)

I really enjoyed "Jurassic Park" but the whole "I know this operating system... it's a UNIX system!" thing killed me with lols and came perilously close to throwing me out of the entire movie.

also: wtf objecting to Give Us Free Morbs OTM

From what I remember, anything dealing with Djimon Hounsou in Amistad was worthy. Everything else was tedious.

i think i'd go with that, yeah

suprised to see so much love for minority report, AI and war of the worlds. i haven't seen amistad, but the former three are uniformly terrible. biggest problem is that they're emotionally inert. spielberg & williams work frantically to manufacture a semblance of sentiment, but to no substantial effect. none of the characters is worth caring about, and the circumstances of their cinematic lives are only as involving as the action sequences and special effects propelling them.

well, one response to this is that they're just not emotionally inert, especially not AI. but that doesn't get us very far beyond our own emotional reactions to the movies. (and not sure why you'd be surprised about AI, it has a pretty substantial reputation at this point, though don't ask me to prove that.) and accusing AI of a lack of sentiment is....interesting.

but another response is that i think you're judging the movies according to a standard that doesn't quite matter with later Spielberg, for better or worse. the family story in War of the Worlds really seems pretty much incidental to the real thrust of the movie, which gets its emotional heft from our own contextualizing of the movie within historical/real-world catastrophe. whether the family survies or not is basically a macguffin of a sort.

oh im sorry, i was typing too fast. i mean "a semblance of sentiment" (as you put it) in regard to AI...

i mean you've basically given a great summary of why AI is so fascinating for me.

yeah, that's fair, and i do find AI more and more fascinating every time i see it. i put "interesting" in quotation marks, but it's a genuinely interesting film. problem is that it it isn't very involving on any other level, and doesn't seem to understand its own intentions. it consists of three distinct mini-movies, each with its own rewards and problems, and while they're clearly connected with one another, the larger film never really makes any real sense of this jigsaw structure. the opening sequence is a small-scale family drama, resembling something that might once have aired on amazing stories, i.e., a twilight zone episode focused on the emotional dynamics of a family. this is probably the most successful part of the film, as the home & family culture are convincing, the mother's grief and need are affecting but subtly portrayed, and HJO's david is both sympathetic and subtly terrifying. the filmmaking often veers into the easy emotional/situational shorthand that's both spielberg's greatest gift and greatest weakness as a filmmaker, but the deliberate, "kubrickian" chill he seems to be shooting for keeps things balanced.

the second chapter is a picaresque quest, in which our robot pinocchio seeks to become "real" and thereby to earn a reunion with his lost mother. here the icy restraint of the first part of the film is jettisoned entirely, in exchange for wild action, broad comedy and a colorfully exaggerated (but hardly convincing) vision of the future. the radical discontinuity is clearly meant to indicate a gulf between isolated, genteel wealth and nearly post-apocalyptic poverty, but it simply doesn't work. what we see instead is a contrast between the comfortable, middle-class lifestyle that spielberg has always presented as "normal" and a garish, phony-baloney, disneyland-cum-thunderdome thrill ride. david's eventual encounter with his maker and location of the "blue fairy" gives this 2nd act a wonderful false conclusion, and i half think that the movie should properly have ended there ― not that this would have "fixed" its structural problems.

love the third chapter. it has almost nothing to do with the first two, and only makes an emotionally, narratively and tonally incoherent movie that much more nonsensical, but it's brave, looks great and does finally manage to wring some real pathos from david's plight. the main problem here is that it makes a long and episodic movie feel nearly interminable and adds nothing to what we've already seen. the shots of drowned david praying eternally to the blue fairy made exactly the same point, but in a crushingly downbeat manner. the unearned deus ex machina that finally allows him to experience the connection he desires exists only to give us, the audience, a moment of conflicted uplift and a sense of narrative/emotional resolution. spielberg clearly wants to give us those things, that's his style and even his philosophy. i can see what he thought he was saying: "you want it, but you can't have it, and it isn't real, but it seems real, and isn't that real enough?" it doesn't work for me, though. we already understand the horribly limited and selfish nature of david's desire, and see too how he is us, how false and real, rational and irrational are arbitrary distinctions when it comes to human emotional need. giving him what he wants, as beautifully as this final act is realized, adds nothing to a film that never decided what it meant to be.

Oh I guess I never saw the structure as anything other than a Disney style three act thing (with the middle act being the weakest).

1) middle class utopian thing (except it's really about the attempt at the middle class utopian thing, what with intense grief and this notion of literally buying love undercutting it all--I agree this would be an effective movie in itself).

2) the fall from grace and attendant wandering. Etc.

3) the third act revelation of his own, for lack of a better word, repeatability or falseness.Which leads into the repetition or "false" version of act one (again pretty obviously undercut).

All of this is interesting to me because it demands to be interpreted along the Disney or early Spielberg lines but almost constantly makes that investment recoil as repeatable/mechanical etc.

yeah, that's fair, and as the deliberate subversion of an expectation based on what "spielberg" and "disney" are ordinarily taken to mean, it's both laudable and intellectually engaging. but for me, that's a thin reward. *shrug*

do want to take back the "terrible" characterization, though. that was far too harsh, as all three are ambitious and interesting, if not wholly successful, AI being the best of them and war of the worlds the worst, IMO.

The fractured structure may well be Kubrick's DNA showing through. I've been watching the Kubrick blu-ray boxset and it's mentioned a couple of times in the documentaries that Kubrick liked to work on getting a number of separate story parts (I think five was the number mentioned) for each film, then tried to join them with whatever connective tissue he could come up with. This pretty much bears out when you watch the films.

This poll needs a redux: A Steven Spielberg Poll (1994-2018)

Forgot about all the great slapstick in Minority Report. Cruise having to keep his eyes from falling into the grate, so good.