Recently I watched what was a pretty good thriller on T.V. -- Assault on Precinct 13, a 2005 remake of a classic John Carpenter film which I haven't seen.
I would say the operative words here are 'was a pretty good thriller' up until the last 10 minutes when a movie set in downtown Detroit inexplicably grew a conifer forest.
What drew me into the film at the beginning was the scene of an urban street in a blizzard. Gee, that looks like Detroit, I thought. Sure enough then came along the River Rouge and Zug Island works and the city of Detroit skyline. It had an excellent cast and moved quickly. Though there were obvious flaws in its plot: why didn't the bad cops use tear gas in the beginning, or just set the place alight to accomplish their aim? I would have given it a hearty thumbs up.
But this film is an extreme example of how to ruin a good film with very sloppy handiwork in the last 10 minutes. The van carrying the 'good' guys crashes in an industrial site and in the next frame the main character is hiding out in pine trees with obvious fake snow and one of the protaganists from the crashed car appears unscathed in the same woods (though others have clearly died in the crash). Listen folks, there are NO FORESTS IN DOWNTOWN DETROIT -- especially pine forests. IF there were trees near a Detroit industrial site they would be Carolinian, such as maples and oaks.
The filmmakers, just to prove they hadn't totally forgotten where their movie was set, ended the movie with a shot pulling away from the forest to show a badly airbrushed fake city skyline, which was set rather high on a hill. THERE ARE NO HILLS IN DOWNTOWN DETROIT.
With all the money spent on films and all the meticulous work involved in their making, how do things like this happen?
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