Thursday, September 18, 2014

ALL YOU NEED IS KILL - what?

I cannot believe Warner Bros almost kept the title for the movie EDGE OF TOMORROW (2014) the same as the book it's based on - ALL YOU NEED IS KILL.  They changed it supposedly because they heard some negative buzz, supposedly surrounding the word "kill" in the title, which is total bull.  The word "kill" does not equate poor reception at the box office.  Did everyone forget KILL BILL Vol. 1 AND KILL BILL Vol. 2??!  Or how about A TIME TO KILL (1995)?
Yeah, people can be really stupid sometimes.  The word "kill" was not the problem.  The problem was the entire title doesn't make any sense.  It's an entire sentence, in statement form, stating an opinion that is hugely debatable and has very little to do with the movie.  EOT is about practice making perfect.  Killing the aliens is the ideal goal, but it's not the central plot point.  Not to mention the concrete pessimism the title evokes.  All you need is kill.  And the admission fee.  Nope.  I'd rather wait for its video release.  Maybe even then I'd pass it up.
EDGE OF TOMORROW as a title lends the feeling of something bigger than one's self, the expansive, earth-crushing weight of time.  In the context of any additional knowledge one can gain about the movie, be it a TV spot or a theatrical trailer, it's even more intriguing.  You can take the title and add in with your own mind "HANGING ON THE EDGE OF TOMORROW", and picture a gigantic city structure surrounded by other city structures that have fallen, and on the surviving one there's a comparably small being, a human, grasping on the last sliver of civilization as he once knew it, unwilling to let go; and you know that when his grip loosens and he falls off the structure, it'll be a long hard fall.  There's so much mediocrity in life, so much monotony, that such a scenario can only be candy for the brain for anyone with a brain that has any active cells in it.
  anyway.  It's good for the studio and good for the viewers that they changed the title.  I just hope the actual screenplay isn't as half assedly written as the title they were once intending to attach to it.  It's still got very favorably reviews by a large qty of Amazon.com customers, so I'm thinking the people attached to the project were just a bunch of nerds who were fans of the book and didn't want to "ruin" such a great book be re-titling the movie - as if such a thing is even physically possible, how does a book become anything other than what it always was just because someone adapts it into a movie???

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