Patrick R

The Ranking Of the films of Steven Spielberg By The Coward Robert Ford

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Pretty sure Amistad is the worst Steven Spielberg movie. I would gladly debate anyone that disreputable clunkers like Crystal Skull, Lost World and even The BFG (awful!) are better. 

 

They play coy with when they do and don't subtitle the Africans, so they never get to be the protagonists, just plot devices. It's super gross and cynical. Part of Spielberg's agreement with Alice Walker that allowed him to adapt The Color Purple was that the crew had to be at least 50% black, and he's talked about how vital that was to make the film better. Clearly didn't happen again this time.

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The shorts are also worth seeing, particularly One Week and The High Sign.

 

This year I set out to see every Steven Spielberg film I hadn't seen before. Yesterday I finally concluded with Schindler's List, so now I have The Definitive Final Objective Steven Spielberg Power Rankings. Please note that Jurassic Park is so low only because it kinda sucks, but A.I. is the point in the list where I actually stop liking these movies.

 

1. Jaws

2. ET

3. Raiders of the Lost Ark

4. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

5. Schindler's List

6. Empire of the Sun

7. Saving Private Ryan

8. Catch Me If You Can

9. The Sugarland Express

10. War Horse

11. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

12. Duel

13. The Color Purple

14. War of the Worlds

15. Lincoln

16. Bridge of Spies

17. Minority Report

18. 1941

19. Munich

20. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

21. Jurassic Park

22. Murder by the Book (Columbo episode)

23. The Lost World: Jurassic Park

24. The Adventures of Tin-Tin

25. A.I.

26. The Post

27. The Terminal

28. Something Evil (TV Movie)

29. Amblin' (Student Film)

30. Twilight Zone (his segment only)

31. Always

32. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

33. Hook

34. BFG

35. Amistad

36. Night Gallery (both his episodes)

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On 12/26/2016 at 10:41 PM, Patrick R said:

now I have The Definitive Final Objective Steven Spielberg Power Rankings.

 

I'd put Last Crusade and Jurassic Park higher up, but otherwise a solid power ranking.

 

I just saw Ghostbusters 2016 and I cannot fathom how so many of you liked it so much. It was a passable Scooby Doo movie at best. An unfunny mess of a movie, seemingly aimed at 6 year olds.

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2 minutes ago, Ben X said:

 

I'd put Last Crusade and Jurassic Park higher up, but otherwise a solid power ranking.

 

I just saw Ghostbusters 2016 and I cannot fathom how so many of you liked it so much. It was a passable Scooby Doo movie at best. An unfunny mess of a movie, seemingly aimed at 6 year olds.

 

Agreed with your second point.

 

As for the first, all I can say is that Spielberg's daddy thing really grates on me in movies where I don't feel it fits, and it sinks Jurassic Park pretty bad for me. It's a monster movie! I can accept pausing for joy and wonder to show off the CGI dinosaurs for the first time, but the saccharine speeches about flea circuses and Grant learning to be a dad is death. 

 

But my local arthouse theater is doing a triple feature of the IJ trilogy tomorrow, so maybe I'll change my mind on Crusade. I like that Jones' desire for approval subverts his badass nature, but also that whole movie has a childish feel to it that puts me off it. Temple of Doom may have an annoying kid character, but Last Crusade feels like it panders to 9 year-olds in a way the other movies don't while still being kid-friendly. It feels like a half-step towards Crystal Skull.

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I know what you mean about JP - it's pretty softened compared to, say, Jaws. But it's still brilliant in so many ways (and I don't think I'd call the flea circus scene saccharine - I read that speech as (aiming for) pathos for an old man suddenly regretting all his mistakes). And Last Crusade is definitely the comedy of the three films but I'd rather that than a poor facsimile of the original (which I think Skull leant back towards), and anyway the banter between the two leads and Spielberg's skill at tightly constructing comedy setpieces to go along with the action ones make the heavier comedy aspect a success for me. (Finally: I actually really like Short Round and Quan's chemistry with Ford, it's Willy that sinks it for me, along with other issues with the movie.)

 

Hope you enjoy the trilogy screening - I've seen Ark and Crusade on the big screen and they're glorious, especially the first one.

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Watched Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom last night after discovering them on Prime video. I have seen Raiders and Crusade before but never Doom. The difference in quality is stark. Raiders has racism for sure, but nothing even close to the scale of what Doom has. The whole plot, the rituals, the banquet scenes, short round, its all so horrible! I'm sad I ran out of time and couldn't end my night with Crusade which i remember being pretty good.

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As a representative of the Idle Thumbs Podcast, and as a human being, I simply cannot get on board Jurassic Park being place below so many of these other films, but I respect the thoroughness involved in assembling this list.

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Oh hey, my post got it's own thread.

 

I see no need to belabor my feelings on Jurassic Park, but for anyone curious, I did write capsule reviews for the last two times I watched it in 2014 and last year.

 

I've heard theories that all the hand-wringing over the science in it is actually Spielberg being ambivalent about introducing CGI to the world, knowing that big blockbuster film-making would be forever changed by it (and, many would say, for the worse). It's an interesting lens to watch the movie through but it holds no water historically, since Spielberg was already in the process of making Jurassic Park "the old-fashioned way" when he saw ILM's test footage.

 

Either way, the way that Spielberg softened the character of John Hammond while simultaneously making him the clear director surrogate always makes me groan a bit.

 

 

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11 minutes ago, Patrick R said:

Either way, the way that Spielberg softened the character of John Hammond while simultaneously making him the clear director surrogate always makes me groan a bit.

 

I mean, I read the book relatively recently and, in it, Hammond is a miserable, money-grubbing industrialist. The presentation of the park as the brainchild of someone who's just out to fuck over all the dummies out there and take their money would be vastly less effective as the setting for a disaster movie than a charming, well-intentioned grandfather who just wants to make people happy and, for some reason, thought that massive bloodthirsty creatures were the way to do it.

 

Now, if you want to debate the problems introduced by Grant's arc as a surrogate parent, there's more room for that, certainly.

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8 minutes ago, Gormongous said:

 

I mean, I read the book relatively recently and, in it, Hammond is a miserable, money-grubbing industrialist. The presentation of the park as the brainchild of someone who's just out to fuck over all the dummies out there and take their money would be vastly less effective as the setting for a disaster movie than a charming, well-intentioned grandfather who just wants to make people happy and, for some reason, thought that massive bloodthirsty creatures were the way to do it.

 

I don't think that's inherently true. A lot of disaster movies have villains who are culpable for, if not the disaster event, than being unprepared for it. I feel like Jurassic World has several of these characters and while that movie is terrible (for different reasons) it was a massive success.

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Just now, Patrick R said:

 

I don't think that's inherently true. A lot of disaster movies have villains who are culpable for, if not the disaster event, than being unprepared for it. I feel like Jurassic World has several of these characters and while that movie is terrible (for different reasons) it was a massive success.

 

Hammond is responsible for the disaster, regardless of his personality. There's no attempt to shirk that in the movie, which states outright that Hammond relied too much on Nedry because he wanted to get the park up and running as fast as possible. My problem with the novel version of Hammond is that he has as flat a character arc as possible because he's the personification of predatory greed that was everywhere in the eighties. His last thoughts in the novel are about covering up this disaster and starting over again, before he's summarily killed, in order to show that these kinds of people never learn. Having a kindly entrepreneur may be more family-friendly (and more self-aggrandizing to Spielberg) but I still think it improves on the novel. 

 

Also, I don't think "effective" and "successful" are referencing the same things? Financial success and viewership numbers are only one rubric of a movie's quality, and the bluntest one at that.

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I thought you were implying audiences would reject Hammond if his character was such a monster, which is why I brought up Jurassic World's success. My mistake.

 

There was a tendency in Spielberg's career (especially before he won Oscars for Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan), both onscreen and in interviews, to always try to address critics who dismiss his work as kiddie fare. He was actually a very self-referential filmmaker in the earlier half of his career, and his movies would often make callbacks to his other films, to his career, to audience expectations of what a Spielberg movie is, etc. This is the form his desire to address critics would occasionally take and I think it's an irritating and misguided desire because you don't need to defend films like ET, Jaws, and Raiders in the first place.
 

I think the flea circus scene plays more as Spielberg trying to justify how important his films are for audiences than anything else. It opens with a shot of all the Jurassic Park merchandise, and most of the scene's emotion is expended on Hammond nearly weeping talking about how beautiful the little kid pretending to see the fleas is. Sattler's reply shuts him down, but the scene ends almost immediately after and if his character actually has changed, it doesn't affect the story in any real way.

 

I can definitely agree with you that his character arc is flat in the novel, but the change isn't really that compelling to me either. It just makes what would be a cliche monster movie baddie into a cliche Spielberg sentimental character. Considering my general problems with the film, I'd gladly opt for the former.

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I understand your misgivings about Jurassic Park, although I personally don't really care how the movie treats anything in the book differently; in general I think adaptations should be judged on their own merits. If you believe the Hammond of the film to be an uninteresting character, it should be because of what's on screen, not because of what was on the page.

 

For whatever reason, I also don't find the CG to have aged to the point that it detracts from the film for me. The movie still plays how it's basically intended to when I watch it, I think.

 

I do really think Jurassic Park is a great collection of characters, with adults who basically interact with each other like adults, which certainly isn't something I can say about many modern movies cut from similar cloth--or (for instance) Temple of Doom, which is higher up on this list and has its own suite of other issues that make it tough to watch at this point. Temple of Doom used to be my favorite Indiana Jones movie but at this point I only really rate Raiders; I'll happily watch the other two but I don't think either one is a great film in the way I believe Raiders to be, or Jurassic Park for that matter.

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To address your points in reverse order there is, I am terribly ashamed to admit, nothing definitive or objective about my power rankings. I'm a fraud. I am in fact extremely ambivalent about Temple of Doom (as the review I linked to earlier in the thread states) but nostalgia overwhelms me. That said, I think there are a lot of things about Temple of Doom besides childhood memories that impress me far more than anything in Jurassic Park that I also address there.

 

I really like the characters of Grant, Malcolm and Sattler. I think the casting of those three is pretty perfect. But the way they're split up, and Malcolm is injured at the halfway(?) point, means that dynamic is relegated solely to the first half of the movie. The rest of the characters are fine, but don't strike me as unusually well-written for the kind of movie they're in.

 

The CGI has aged very well, because Spielberg does such great work shooting it conservatively and keeping effects practical whenever possible. Since starting on a project to watch all the Harry Potter movies I can appreciate the CGI in Jurassic Park now more than ever because those movies are older and the effects look terrible. I only brought it up in my 2014 review (which I think you are referencing as it's the only place I've negatively spoke of the CGI here) because I had always been a "CGI has not progressed since Jurassic Park" person, and that was the first time I realized the dinosaurs could look better. It negatively affects my viewing experience only in certain shots of the raptor kitchen scene and the first big reveal.

 

My misgivings with the Hammond character aren't because he's different than in the book. I just used the changes made to illustrate the choices Spielberg made with the character that I don't respond to. I absolutely agree that adaptations should be judged on their own merits.

 

Also, I would like to say that it is always an awkward position to trash a movie that is not only near-universally beloved, but that you also like, just not nearly as much. But that's the bed I made, so I'll lie in it. But I'd rather talk about how War Horse is sort of misunderstood and way darker and more interesting than most people give it credit for.

 

EDIT: My mistake! I re-read my Jurassic Park reviews and my 2016 one also cites an over-reliance on CGI. Can't recall much more than what I mentioned above, though.

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I think I agree that there could be something more subtle going on with Hammond, Patrick, but I enjoy Attenborough's grandfatherly performance so much that I'd miss him if he were more of the carnival barker and eccentric millionaire that he hints at being when he's not showing off his new amusement park with his grandchildren. As a casualty of Jurassic Park being the first blockbuster that got me hyped to see it, at the age of seven or eight, I don't think I can get enough distance to float an alternative properly.

 

35 minutes ago, Patrick R said:

The CGI has aged very well, because Spielberg does such great work shooting it conservatively and keeping effects practical whenever possible. Since starting on a project to watch all the Harry Potter movies I can appreciate the CGI in Jurassic Park now more than ever because those movies are older and the effects look terrible. I only brought it up in my 2014 review (which I think you are referencing as it's the only place I've negatively spoke of the CGI here) because I had always been a "CGI has not progressed since Jurassic Park" person, and that was the first time I realized the dinosaurs could look better. It negatively affects my viewing experience only in certain shots of the raptor kitchen scene and the first big reveal.

 

I feel like the raptor scene should be taught in film school, because it's a brilliantly staged and executed sequence, built around state-of-the-art CGI, and it's gone from the crowning moment of the movie's visual effects to its conspicuous low point. There's just no way to futureproof CGI except by only using it where necessary, I think.

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I've only seen 14 Spielberg movies, so my ranking can only be very partial. I've included the scores out of 100 that I give to each movie so you have cardinal in addition to ordinal ranking information:

 

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark (100)

2. Jaws (95)

3. Schindler's List (91)

4. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (90)

5. Munich (87)

7. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (84)

8. Saving Private Ryan (81)

9. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (80) (yes I liked this movie a lot)

10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (79)

11. Minority Report (77)

12. Jurassic Park (68)

12. Catch Me If You Can (68)

13. The Terminal (62)

 

As you can tell, Jurassic Park wasn't my favorite in the world. It has good music and the Goldblum but not much else, really.

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27 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

9. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (80) (yes I liked this movie a lot)

 

Would love to hear more about this, honestly.

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Indiana Jones as a cranky old man is great, Marion is always amazing (although she didn't have much of a part), Cate Blanchett hamming it waaaay the fuck up, aliens moving the series on from 30's and 40's serial adventures to 50's pulp sci-fi, Mutt was legitimately good, the scene between the greasers and the Socs was worth the price of entry, the chase in the university town was exciting and had great music, and that's a wrap. I'm also not bothered by stuff that probably also bothers lots of people, like the godawful CGI in parts (I mean come the fuck on, what even happened there?!) or the fridge, which I was fine with - mostly I just liked that scene because realizing he was on a nuclear test site was pretty funny and exciting.

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I like these lists - certainly I can find nothing to disagree with in @Patrick R's top 15. 

 

But I'm surprised to see that nobody rates A.I. Artificial Intelligence more highly. Surely it's at least better than The Lost World? 

 

I haven't watched it all the way through in a long time, but I'm very fond of the version of A.I. that exists in my head. For all its problems I'd take it over something like Catch Me If You Can in a heartbeat.

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