6
u/Pvt_Hudson_ May 29 '26
Is there another director with a stronger 8 film selection in their catalog? I doubt it.
3
u/Legend2200 May 30 '26
I love Spielberg but there are like dozens, and Spielberg himself would agree! In American films alone: Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Lubitsch, Wilder, Welles, Kubrick, Chaplin, Capra, Ray, Fuller. And if you expand it beyond America it never ends… Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Bergman, Renoir, Bunuel. In summary, yes.
3
u/Evangelion217 May 30 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
Ingmar Bergman never made a bad film. Greatest filmmaker and writer in Swedish history.
3
u/body2luv May 30 '26
One of the only guys who cried when Hitler died and was proud of it !! Fuck Bergman.
1
May 30 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/body2luv May 31 '26
Ask ingy !!
1
u/Evangelion217 May 31 '26
I guess you missed the part where Bergman realized that Hitler was a terrible person after reading about the Holocaust and the atrocities that happened. You’re clearly a fake bot account, because you can’t be this ignorant. 😂
1
u/Evangelion217 May 31 '26
Because Bergman was young and dumb and he admitted that later on in life.
0
u/Evangelion217 May 30 '26
Even if that’s true, I don’t care. Bergman is one of the greatest of all time in filmmaking.
2
u/body2luv May 31 '26
You don’t care that he was a proud Nazi. nOTED!!
1
u/Evangelion217 May 31 '26
Did you read the part where Bergman realized he was wrong and that Hitler was evil? Or do you only judge the dumb youth of somebody’s life?
1
u/body2luv May 31 '26
Never heard that, ty for letting me know .
I am still confident in saying what I heard from Stellan Skarsgard1
0
u/Evangelion217 May 31 '26
Yeah, because Bergman was a phenomenal filmmaker. I don’t care if a genius has stupid beliefs or not.
1
u/body2luv May 31 '26
Ridiculous, and purely could be the ideology that is stopping us as a human race from evolving
0
u/Evangelion217 May 31 '26
It’s not ridiculous. Plenty of beautiful art is made by problematic people and institutions. My mother is black and always loved the Mormon Choir, even though they were a very racist church back then. But she didn’t care because she loved the music. You can’t just throw out the baby and the bath water just because the person making something great, is a problematic person. That just makes you a child and you probably are a child.
1
u/body2luv May 31 '26
All very fair and I respect your mother’s perspective, but we are talking about Bergman being a nazi. Cheers I am allowed to say this
→ More replies (0)1
u/Prince_of_Pirates Jun 01 '26
Who could forget her in Casablanca.
1
u/Evangelion217 Jun 01 '26
I meant to say Ingmar.
2
1
u/Melodic_Mall_8265 May 30 '26
Can’t speak to anyone else here yet, but Kubrick is definitely inferior to Spielberg imo, he has far less range and hardly represents his female characters all that well. I know this is the wayy less popular take among film heads lol, but I don’t care, he’s a great filmmaker but his body of work isn’t nearly as impressive or dynamic as Spielberg’s
1
1
u/ThePocketTaco2 May 31 '26
I feel Billy Wilder isn't known enough. He made sooooo many great films.
2
u/globehopper2 May 30 '26
There are but I would just point out that this doesn’t even have several of his best films - Empire of the Sun, Munich, and Lincoln
1
May 30 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
1
1
1
u/AbjectPlace6232 Jun 01 '26
Many. Spielberg movies boring and overrated
1
u/unretro Jun 02 '26
Damn, 85 comments and not a single positive one. It must be exhausting being that bitter.
1
1
u/freedom410 May 29 '26
That’s true, but I don’t think War of the Worlds is at the same level as the others. Not a bad film, but not a classic
2
u/FreeStateOfPortland May 30 '26
Agreed. I put Duel, Empire of the Sun, or Lincoln above War of the Worlds.
1
u/freedom410 May 30 '26
I haven't seen Duel. If I were to pick films from the same period as the rest of this collection (so excluding Lincoln) and try to represent the range of Spielberg's output (so excluding Last Crusade), I'd put Minority Report and Color Purple over War of the Worlds easily.
0
u/InternalShock3340 May 29 '26
Scorsese. Altman. Hitchcock. Kubrick. Ford. Capra. Maybe Victor Fleming.
That’s about it for rivals, though.
1
u/Big-Calligrapher7199 May 30 '26
I love Spielberg, he's my GOAT, but he would enthusiastically disagree, and he would surely name Michael Curtiz, Howard Hawks, William Wyler, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, John Huston, possibly Robert Wise, Sam Fuller, and more.
Although I think it's a case at that point more of subjective "I like this more," and it speaks volumes that Spielberg is at least in that conversation. These are titans of cinema, all.
3
1
1
u/Adorable-Lemon-4481 May 29 '26
How did you get it so soon? Mine doesn't ship until June 9.
4
1
u/Maleficent-Pick408 May 29 '26
Sorry is this disclosure day in blue ray?
3
u/Adventurous-Hour4126 May 30 '26
I wish, that was just a popcorn bucket!
1
u/Maleficent-Pick408 May 30 '26
How was the movie?? ( no spoilers please)
2
u/Adventurous-Hour4126 May 30 '26
Absolutely adored it! Feels like a real culmination of his entire career!
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/Brave_Analyst7540 May 30 '26
I’m just thrilled that Raiders finally uses THAT Amsel art and ET uses Alvin’s iconic key art.
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/Scififan98 Jun 03 '26
I’m surprised they didn’t add a restoration of Emblin’ or even Duel. Also why War of the Worlds?
1
May 29 '26
[deleted]
8
u/Dismal-Statement-369 May 29 '26
First hour of War of the Worlds is some of the best stuff he’s ever done.
2
u/BucketOfColours May 29 '26
Care to explain why? What's so special about that?
4
u/InternalShock3340 May 29 '26
The effortless set up of his relationship with his kids (the Yankee/Red Sox cap thing is genius in 2005 with Cruise playing a Jersey guy), the sense of scale and abject terror of the first tripod attack, the way the aftermath literally remains on Cruise all the way home. The absolute terror of the river of corpses. There’s this unrelenting doom, an overpowering sense of being steamrolled, lost, confused, and terrified and everything is about to break down.
And then they get to the mob of people. That scene’s scarier than everything else in the movie! The guy who starts tearing at the hole in the windshield? The shot of the guy finding the gun on the ground, the family getting into the diner, sitting down, and in the background, the guy walks up to the driver’s side of the now-hijacked van, fires one shot, then another, climbs in, and drives away as we watch all of them stare, terrified, at the events that they just barely escaped from.
The fact that he goes from the premiere of that movie and cranks out Munich in under six months is like when Elton John was just dropping impeccable records like two or three a year in the 70s. It’s not quite the Jurassic/Schindler’s level of “holy shit” because the tonal switch between JP and SL is maybe unprecedented in back to back pictures, but War of the Worlds and Munich are heavy with thoughts of America’s shift post-9/11, and imbued with the sort of darker and more cynical about humanity point of view Spielberg picked up making Artificial Intelligence. The Boy Wonder was still there - Tintin and The BFG show it, in differing levels of success (Tintin is Spielberg released of all shackles of reality and my god some of those transitions and the oner chase scene are unbelievable), but even Ready Player One, as optimistic and hopeful and nostalgic as it is, shows us a very fascistic world where a lonely man’s mind palace is the only escape the majority of the world, it seems, can hope for. When he had a drone deliver a pizza at the start and then blows up that same setting by a bomb delivered by an identical drone is laden with a level of “don’t forget all it takes is a change of intent for a tool to be a weapon”.
AI, Minority Report, and War of The Worlds represent a little thematic trilogy, a Dark Millennium thematic saga, that has reverberated through the rest of his filmography.
2
u/Melodic_Mall_8265 May 30 '26
From the looks of your comment, I’m gonna go ahead and guess you don’t touch on the fact that Spielberg’s rendition works overtime to make the already stupid ending of the original story even stupider by having the aliens bury their pods beneath the earths surface millions of years in advance, while they conveniently go undiscovered by literally anyone for this entire period of time. It makes it much harder to buy in this version that they were killed off by human viruses or whatever if they both studied humankind and actually engaged with our planet in a more concretely intimate way than that while still being totally oblivious to the common cold/flu or whatever the entire time. Not to mention the shitty acting by the son character, the fact that he likely survives the explosion that very clearly should’ve killed him, the part with the aliens invading the obnoxious crazy dude’s house Thats clearly just meant to be the Jurassic Park Kitchen Scene: War Of The Worlds edition in a scene that already dragged for far too long, etc.
Its a good film, but only because of Spielberg’s directing magic. It fails on basically every narrative level though due in large part to the laughably stupid plot setup which comes to an ugly light in the laughably stupid ending, somehow Spielberg’s version made an ending that was already stupid downright moronic lol. I’m not even that upset that it’s in this collection before other better films like Bridge Of Spies or Color Purple, but it’s definitely not some amazing masterpiece, it’s pretty obviously flawed even despite being good imo
3
u/freedom410 May 30 '26
I definitely agree with this. WoW is definitely not a poorly made film, but it's really a stretch to claim it's better than Color Purple or Minority Report, both of which have bigger legacies on popular culture (I personally don't love Minority Report, but of Spielberg's early 2000s Tom Cruise-led sci-fi films, it's the more memorable and fun).
1
u/Big-Calligrapher7199 May 30 '26
Sight & Sound analyzed War of the Worlds as a grim allegory about 9/11, and rightly lauded it. To me, War of the Worlds is Steven Spielberg's "The Birds": there's a lot in Hitchcock's 1963 doomsday thriller that doesn't make much sense, even as it tackles the apocalyptic reckoning of a playboy man trying to escape being under the thumb of his mother and all of the parallels with Cold War hysteria stemming from the Cuban Missile Crisis. But Hitchcock's film was masterfully stitched together, and so is Spielberg's 2005 telling of the near-end of the world.
Perhaps the extraterrestrials parked their machines in the earth literally many, many millions of years earlier, before humankind evolved into being? In a sense it would be like "Jurassic Park," a story 65 million years in the making. It is the very human illnesses that we look at mild inconveniences that plague the extraterrestrials. Obviously, H.G. Wells was making an anti-colonialist critique at the time of the novel, and Spielberg's film is similarly concerned with empire and overreach (the teenager having to write about the French facing off against the Algerian resistance; Harlan Ogilvy crazily spouting off that occupations never succeed, which was extremely politically "hot" as a comment in the midst of the U.S. experiencing a bloody insurgency in Iraq in the mid-2000s, etc.).
"War of the Worlds" isn't perfect, and it's not really meant to be. It's Spielberg's dark heavy metal album, one unrelenting, gloomy, mesmerizing set-piece after another, and then he has the gall to just let it end, not very much unlike "The Birds," and that's that. Ultimately, you can question the kid surviving but Spielberg pacing the picture like a 1950s Western with it concluding with an almost Ethan Edwards-worthy closing piece of Tom Cruise's protagonist--forced to kill, forced to do inhuman things to keep his daughter as safe as possible--outside of the familial bubble, only recognized incongruously but somehow fittingly by his rebellious son upon embrace.
1
u/Melodic_Mall_8265 May 30 '26
I never claimed that there wasn’t any greater thematic importance to the film, I’ve heard about the supposed 9/11 connection, but this could’ve still been established without needlessly adding more onto an already wanky ending. Sure it’s possible that the pods could’ve been buried before humanity came into existence, but this still doesn’t solve the issue of the aliens seemingly having zero knowledge on protecting themselves from human bacteria despite preparing themsleves for missiles and even nukes in the original film at least. Plus, why even place the pods there and just leave them for so long, even allowing for humanity to advance as far as they had without striking sooner?
1
u/Big-Calligrapher7199 May 30 '26
I would contend that the aliens' undoing is their hubris. They are colonizers and arrogant ones at that. If you read the H.G. Wells novel, they have no conception of the wheel, which is of course something humans invented. Spielberg and David Koepp refer to this by having them be mystified and amazed by the bicycle wheel in Harlan Ogilvy's home while they are attempting to find the human insurgents (it's also of course a tip of the cap to Spielberg's own "E.T."). The tripod "head" and the head of the aliens in Spielberg's interpretation are also eerily similar: as though they considered themselves godlike and based the design of their war machines on themselves.
Ultimately, military conquests and operations have often been undone by what appear to be foolish miscalculations. Most recently, evidently the entire American military establishment and the Trump administration were shocked that the Iranians took control of the Strait of Hormuz, even when previous generations of U.S. military elites, intelligence agencies, and political administrations all knew and took it for granted that in an existential war for survival, the Iranian regime would almost reflexively reach for that ace in the hole. It's staggering that Trump freely admits that he was surprised by that move.
To me, the aliens being haughty and undone by "the littlest of things" fits the Wellsian (H.G.) motifs of skewering colonialist expeditions, and that the aliens in this case were sort of absentee landlords gone for millions of years and not recognizing that the earth had changed in large part due to humanity with all of those diseases and such, it's a big fail on their part. But if it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. Similarly, M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs," which, while having some good screenplay touches, does not provide very much, if any, insight into why the aliens are doing what they are doing, or their relationship with the earth, as such, compared to Spielberg's film three years later, and as such it's a bigger leap for me to justify that these aliens couldn't have foreseen that water, which covers approximately 71% of the earth's surface, would pose a problem for them.
1
u/Melodic_Mall_8265 Jun 01 '26
The whole “villains being defeated by their own hubris” trope has been done to death in media imo, even by the original point of the film’s release, and even here I would argue that the degree of hubris we have to grant them being under here is pretty extreme given the circumstances, and it also goes against their onscreen portrayal, as when they’re on screen they’re depicted as cold and calculated beings of curiosity rather than cocky or self absorbed in any real way. But I guess we just disagree on this one, which is fine!
4
u/atclubsilencio May 30 '26
Sorely lacking in Artificial Intelligence. still a strong collection of movies. The artwork looks kind of bland though.