Roland Emmerich is a director specializing in films about divorced men saving the world. The threat may be extraterrestrial (Independence Day), mutant (Godzilla), climatic (Tomorrow’s Day), an astral body (Moonfall) or a Mayan prophecy (2012). Okay, maybe not all of his protagonists are divorced; some have been dumped by their girlfriends. Since Emmerich often writes his own scripts, we know what kind of material tickles his fancy enough to trigger blockbuster fanfare and artillery. Even in a film so seemingly alien to him as Anonymous (on the identity of William Shakespeare) knew how to handle himself as if each line of the script were pure transcendence. Nothing in him is verist. Everything is artificial, even in his first films (Joey’s secret and The secret of the ghosts) you can see the desire to replicate the great Hollywood successes. I won’t say that he is a great director, but he is certainly a very competent one, with a remarkable ability to make entertaining films.
This is why it is difficult to understand why his recently released series (Those About to Die) is an uninteresting bore, plagued by slack planning and a script that misses any chance of being interesting. Everything is right in this series. The costumes, the castingthe special effects, the music, the characters… but we don’t care about anything. The plot is suggestive enough to make a good series with the excuse of gladiators and bets, but it stinks of a script written following to the letter all those rules of film writing that you have to know how to skip to make something that hooks you.
Projects start with the script, and if it doesn’t have some magic, disinterest takes hold of everyone involved, starting with the producers, who look at the money, and the platforms, who look at the engagement. The laziness spreads from one to another and reaches a point where everyone thinks that, well, the project is not that big of a deal and it doesn’t matter if we all let it die together. When you wonder why nobody raised the alarm on this or that film, be clear that it is one of those cases in which the money was there and, since we were at it, it had to be spent however it could be. There was no need to save the world this time, just make an entertaining series. It’s a shame that laziness has been more powerful than any cataclysm.
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