Films directed by
Robert Wise

The Hindenburg

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Day eight of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

Think of The Hindenburg as kind of like Titanic, except without the romance or an interesting story. Both films deal with fictional portrayals of real life disasters involving famous vessels, one at sea, one in the air, but for Titanic to be as bad as The Hindenburg, Captain Smith would have been shown deliberately steering the ship into the iceberg for reasons that would not be adequately explored.

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The Sand Pebbles

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Day seven of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

In 1966, the Vietnam war was just beginning in earnest and Robert Wise made The Sand Pebbles, an epic about another American intervention in Asia forty years earlier. After watching the film, it’s hard to judge whether the film was anti-Vietnam or just about an American gunboat in China in 1926, which is to its credit. Had Wise chosen to stack the deck politically, it would have weakened what was already a powerful story.

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The Andromeda Strain

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Day six of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

The Andromeda Strain is possibly the greatest science fiction film ever made. I know that is very sweeping statement, so I’ll qualify it by adding that it is one of the few films made that genuinely deserve the label of “science fiction,” meaning stories in which speculative science is at the core of the plot.

2001: A Space Odyssey is probably a better film, but it really only qualifies as science fiction if you consider metaphysics to be a science. Most all other films we normally classify as science fiction, or SF, are really just fantasy, action or horror stories set in a futuristic setting.

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Run Silent Run Deep

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Day five of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

Run Silent Run Deep is a crackerjack sub picture that gets a lot of the specific details of life on a WWII U.S. fleet submarine right while the general events of the plot are pure Hollywood. The dialog and procedures aboard the submarine are spot on, thanks to generous cooperation from the U.S. Navy.

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Star Trek: The Motion Picture

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Day four of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

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The most common complaint about the more recent Next Generation Star Trek movies is that they seemed more like run-of-the-mill TV episodes shot on a big-screen budget. While a valid criticism, this is most literally true of this first cinematic outing for Gene Roddenberry’s then-cult television hit.

The plot for Star Trek: The Motion Picture borrows liberally from the original series episode called “The Changeling,” about a space probe named Nomad that comes back, vastly enhanced by some alien race and programmed with a low tolerance point for human imperfection. At the time of its release, some retitled the film, “Where Nomad Has Gone Before.”

The similarity to an existing story is only one weakness. Continue reading

The Haunting

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Day three of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

Somewhere along the way, Hollywood forgot how to tell a ghost story. It happened without much fanfare, so I can’t say when, but certainly the success of Halloween had something to do with it. That isn’t to begrudge John Carpenter his success, but it set the pattern for the modern horror film that has since calcified into rote repetition. Any form of psychological terror has been jettisoned in favor of a geek show spectacle of masked super-killers leaping out of the shadows to disembowel horny teenagers.

The emergence of the PG-13 horror film recent years, much be-moaned by the gore-hounds, has restored some of my hope that the traditional ghost story might make a comeback. However, except for The Others, The Sixth Sense and possibly The Ring, there hasn’t been much to cheer about in that regard.

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The Day the Earth Stood Still

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Day two of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

The Day the Earth Stood Still is a film that has, in some ways, outlived its reputation. It is certainly a cut above other films from “flying saucer” sub-genre of science fiction. An intelligent script, Robert Wise‘s capable direction and a better than average cast all combine to make this a high-quality production. The film’s only real weakness is that its message of “mankind had better learn to get along or else”, which was definitely bold for a film made during the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s, now seems like rather juvenile wish-fulfillment. The idea of advanced aliens coming down to solve our problems for us was an early staple of science fiction but is now a best-forgotten cliché.

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West Side Story

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Day One of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

It was just a coincidence that I had West Side Story in my DVD player the day that director Robert Wise passed away, but as long as I did, I thought it would be a good time to go through his films and include him in this diary. In the next few days, I’ll do The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Haunting, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Run Silent Run Deep, The Sand Pebbles, The Hindenburg, Citizen Kane and an update to my earlier review of The Andromeda Strain.

On with the review:

While I’m anything but a scholar on film musicals, it was instructive for me to watch West Side Story right after viewing Singin’ in the Rain earlier in the week. This wasn’t a conscious decision on my part. I use a computer program to track my DVD collection and it has the ability to spit out randomly picked titles that I haven’t watched recently. So, purely by coincidence, I watched the two most famous musicals in American movie history back to back (except for a few episodes of Lost in between).

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