Point of order with regard to the headline/article (screengrabbed at right): I’d be amazed if a studio would dare to call for an embargo of reviews already written. Can you imagine 20th Century Fox ordering the Los Angeles Times not to print its theater critic’s column until the film’s actual release date? The Times would laugh.Â
What a studio can do (and what seems far more likely) is refuse to screen the film for critics until the release date (or the day before), who therefore then can’t write reviews in time to run prior to the film’s opening.
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Having said all that, even if every review was glowing I wouldn’t waste my time seeing this film either in the theater, three months from now when its available on-demand, or a year from now when HBO airs it for free. The reason being this literally is the very same story that was done a brief 10 years ago.Â
Has it really come to this that creativity is so extinct in Hollywood that a decade-old film is worth a redoing in its entirety. That a studio can just pointlessly slap a new cast, crew and effects together to retell something so recently done. Are they counting on attention deficit disorder being so prevalent in moviegoers that they won’t remember the version with Michael Chiklis, Chris Evans and Jessica Alba?
Maybe so. But for those of us with greater recall, as a frame of reference, imagine reading about a reboot this summer of “War of the Worlds” (which also came out in 2005) with, say, Mark Wahlberg in Tom Cruise’s role?Â
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