When I first heard about this project, I thought it was a stupid idea. Why remake a movie that holds up as well as MANHUNTER? If you want to do an origin story for Hannibal, then do just that. It would work fine. It would probably be cool. But no. They needed to do this instead. The more I thought about it, the more OK I was with the idea. I like Brett Ratner a lot, and the cast is amazing. Eventually, I was convinced that this movie could actually be better than the original. Well, it wasn't.

This movie sucks a lot. Everything that makes MANHUNTER cool is gone from this film. What we are left with is mediocrity. They've talked about how well they developed the character of the Tooth Fairy in this version. Now he has motive. Who cares? Did Hannibal have motive? Not really. Did we miss that? No. On top of this, the tooth fairy's development is gained at the expense of Graham's character. He is much more two dimensional in this film. That's stupid.

I can't think anymore. I'm not making sense. I'm too upset and too tired, but there are lots and lots of reasons why RED DRAGON is a terrible terrible movie. I could spend days talking about it, but not right now. There is a Hannibal trilogy with three very good movies. They are MANHUNTER, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, and HANNIBAL. They coexist wonderfully in the same twisted movie universe. RED DRAGON does not.
 

Reason? Simple. You stated right early on that you could not be impartial in your review because you are a big fan of the Manhunter Micheal Mann version of this story.

I think the reason that they wanted to do this is simply Money and the fact that Anthony Hopkins did not play Hannibal Lechter in Manhunter, and there was this feeling and need to have some true connectivity.

I do not doubt the level of coolness of any Michael Mann film, I am a fan of his. But I am probably more able to separate myself from my own fanhood to truly discern if the film sucked or not.

I love hopkins and norton both, and really hope to see some fine work between them. I doubt it takes us to the level of Lambs, but we will see.

As soon as I finish watching this film this weekend, I will get back to you and let you know from a very unbiased view if it truly sucked or not.

Dave
 

Brett Ratner, on the other hand, I am very fond of. I was really anticipating RED DRAGON. I was really disappointed. I can say in a totally unbiased voice that MANHUNTER is waaaaaay better than RED DRAGON. What I'm not so sure about is whether or not it's good on its own. But my guess is no, and my feeling is it doesn't matter, because you might as well just watch MANHUNTER.
 

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Hmm... That's an interesting point, but my guess would be no. It was right around that point in time that I was falling in love with a number of excessively long movies, most notably, THE ABYSS.

It's weird. My attention span has gotten shorter as I have gotten older. When I was fifteen, I loved the idea of a three-hour film. Things like LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, APOCALYPSE NOW, and CASINO really appealed to me. It was this sort of thinking, like, "Now THAT'S a movie!" But now, I see that something's under an hour and a half, and I think, "Oh, thank God!" There are exceptions, but most of them are made by PTA.
 

Now that I know that you were only 15 when 'Heat' came out explains many of your movie critiques. Did you get to see 'Silence of the Lambs' when it came out? I liked 'Red Dragon' alot because it gave a similar dark mood that 'Silence of the Lambs' had. Not as dark, but soo much better than 'Hannibal'

It is pretty tough to give quality movie critiques when you admit that your attention span has gotten shorter as you have gotten older. Many of the short modern day movies are mostly action and teenage comedies which don't amount to much. Try and find that desire to watch longer movies like you said you used to because many longer movies are long because there is more substance and plot that require that length to develop everything. (Except for Cosner epics)

I haven't seen "Manhunter" since its original theatrical release. At that time, I liked it enough to pay to see it twice (besides being a good film, where else were you going to hear In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida played that big and loud? ). "Red Dragon" stands very well on its own as a remake of "Manhunter". I liked it a lot. I will say that I didn't get as strong a sense that Graham was risking his own mental well-being as he tried to get into Tooth Fairie's head. But it worked anyway -- just a little different take on things. The 3 Hannibal films with Anthony Hopkins make a good trilogy, and they will probably sell well on video as a package.

I do want to see "Manhunter" again now.

The psychoanalytic element in the script was pretty obvious, though. Here is a mad loner who tortures and then brutally murders deliberately conventional happy, nuclear families, even killing the dog. Do you think he could possibly have had an unhappy childhood and an abusive mother? No, really? Well bugger me with a soldering iron, I'd never have guessed that. This formula worked for Hitchcock so let's milk it dry.

I was worried at this film having a 15 certificate in the UK. I presume the reasoning for this is that you don't see acts of violence or murder in any significant detail - tomato sauce is about the limit of it. But the extent of what is very clearly implied (i.e. in my opinion would be clear to a 15 year-old) goes over the line, I'd say. In particular, the scene in which Ralph Fiennes seems to become sexually aroused by watching a video of someone he intends to kill while Watson is next to him thinking that she's the reason takes sadistic voyeurism way beyond the 15 level. Coming after the attempted rape scene in Spiderman having a PG-certificate, this is becoming a worrying trend.

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I guess the film must have been under budget towards the end of the production schedule, hence the spectacular fire just before the end.

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I would tend to agree that they may have kept this films budget under estimates, and had money left over during the fx process.

For those that do not know, most films are filmed entirely out of sequence for very many good and varied reasons.

Key reasons include the obvious that if you have different scenes in the same place throughout the movie, you just shoot them all at once right there, whether they take place at the beginning, middle, or end (it always helps to have really good actors and a really really good continuity coordiator).

Another reason, albeit secondary, is to keep how the movie ends from leaking out to the public before opening.

And a real big reason, is to shoot the cheap stuff first, and then when you get into fx production, you can see just how much money you REALLY have. Movies with great actors and talented directors and cinematographers, tend to shoot less footage, and take less time overall to shoot, keeping overall budgets of drama based features down. So when they start to wrap things up, BAM, extra cash, and the producer says... "LETS BLOW SOME SHIT UP!!!!"

Dave
 

Now I loved the movie. It had a nice creep out for me and my date. There were moments I wondered just how gross it was going to get, and I was actually glad in the end that this was more a psychological study instead of a gory gross out.

This film holds its own, and although the ending seemed formulaic, I liked it none the less.

Oh and yes, the house blowing up was great. Not that houses blow up like that, but it worked.

Dave
 

Plenty of blotches and negative dirt in what i thought was reel 1, i noticed that david S. saw his blotches on reel 2?