Jack The Giant Slayer

The prevailing thought throughout a lot of Hollywood is the idea that the common person is dumb and that with movies there has to be a lot of exposition and hand holding - this, of course is for a lot of the "modern day" movies. The biggest offender's being the current crop of movies that have come out, most of which we have covered on our podcast (www.diicast.com and click on the Average Joe's link). Let's get specific on this though. Jack The Giant Slayer. The reason this movie is a fundamental failure is 2 things. The writers have taken Jack And The Beanstalk and Jack The Giant Killer and combined these movies instead of telling two distinct stories and combining them into one larger story.

To break it down even further, we all know the story of Jack And The Beanstalk, to a degree. Jack is told by his mother to go to town to sell the family cow. Jack goes to town, trades the cow for magic beans, brings them back, his mom, angry, tosses them out the window. The next day, a gigantic beanstalk has grown out of the ground, reaching towards the heavens. Jack climbs the beanstalk (after hearing tales of the golden egg and the harp) to this new land where he befriends the wife of a giant, who feeds Jack and cares for him. Becoming friends, Jack takes advantage of this, stealing gold, the hen (not goose) that lays the golden eggs, the harp and a few other things. The male giant finds out about this and chases Jack to the back to the beanstalk. Jack climbs down and chops the beanstalk down, killing the giant, living happily ever after.

Jack The Giant Killer, the story is about a person named Jack whom kills giants that live in England. It's an Arthurian legend. Jack saves one of King Arthur's retainers and is given a seat at the roundtable. Jack then proceeds to roam the countryside killing the giants, insighting a war, where the knights of the roundtable prevail.

This movie would have been better off being made into two movies, first telling the story of Jack and The Beanstalk and then The Giant Killer. The story could have started off with Jack at a young age, following the story to a T, befriending the female giant, killing the male giant and making off with the gold he steals, creating a better environment for him and his family. On top of that, he could have dropped the beans in the giants castle, thus creating a link to the second movie, where the female giant wants revenge on Jack.

Then in the second movie, Jack, now older, has gone on with his life, becoming a giant killer. No one know's exactly where they're coming from, but they are living in the land. Jack saves one of Arthur's knights or retainers (or what have you) and gains a seat on the roundtable for his actions. The female giant, finding out about Jack, through his reputation, proceeds to attack Camelot and in return, the knights defeat the giants, but not before they escape with Jack. Arthur gather's a small contingent of knights and tracks the giants to where these beanstalks are and proceed to rescue Jack, kill the giants and cut down the beanstalks.

Instead, we got a mashup of both stories, with a weak predictable plot. The best part of this movie was the "animated" beginning, done in the style of the Harry Potter Deathly Hallow's animated story, in which one of the character's in the Deathly Hallow's movie relates to Harry about the Cloak, The Wand and the Stone, all wonderfully animated. If Jack The Giant Killer had continued with their animated beginning as the basis for the story, it would have been a better movie.

I guess what I'm saying is that even though I picked Jack The Giant Slayer for this rant, lack of good story will always kill a movie and it seems that's really all we're getting now. There are hundreds of great movies, Django, The Hobbit, etc etc. But those are far and few between the schlock we're getting now. Even the new Die Hard movie was a disappointment, there are too many finger's in the cookie jar making decisions on story and direction. I'd rather have fewer movies come out during the year that are really good, than be hammered with movies that were just tossed together at the last moment and shoved down our throats.

We have The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug coming, Iron Man 3, the new Superman movie, Kick-Ass 2 and a few other's that will be good, but we also have Scary Movie, The Great Gatsby, The Croods and several other's that won't be good. The bad outweigh's the good in terms of what's coming out or are out and its a wonder that Hollywood sits there and believe's that if they increase the amount of movies that come out per year they can continue this vicious circle of making these movies on the hopes that one of them will be a massive hit at the cost of something good. That's too bad for us. But it's good for me and my movie review blog and podcast.

Thanks for reading.