But for whatever reason it made me feel emotions about something I would have never have thought would reach me that way. I think what struck me the most personally was the relationship the maker established with his son. But plenty of others I know have reacted to it in very different (but still highly positive) ways.
I don't know, because my memory of it is vague at this point. The octopus is definitely fascinating, I love all that stuff, but the narrative didn't really grab me and I think maybe it felt long winded and all that combined with the hype left me feeling a bit high and dry.
Umm yeah, just couldn't make it past the whole "post-colonial meta-narrative [for white people]" bit. That's pretty much a good summing up of all the criticism I've read of the film: that because it was made by some relatively-well-off white dude in South Africa, that there can be nothing of value to learn from it.
I'll take the one that required dedication and hard work to obtain never-before-seen footage of animal behavior over a snarky YouTube hot-take criticism any day.
When you understand the relationship between directors, producers and studios it's not surprising at all.
Directors rarely see their version of the movie on the screen. Sometimes they don't even see the final product before it is on the screen.
It is easier afterwards to work on a directors cut/version since studios see that as an opportunity for an additional cash grab after the 1.0 is no longer generating money.
If you read the article and more about the backstory of the production, the director did not get to make the film he really wanted to make. From the very start the producers demanded he turn it into a summer blockbuster and changed all kinds of script and other sequences to be more cheesey action movie fluff.
It's actually pretty rare that a director has complete creative freedom on a film. Only huge names like Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, etc. once they gained acclaim could put any damn thing they wanted on film and know that no one would question or change a thing
Why weird? Musicians change songs in subsequent albums and live versions (done with different arrangements etc, not just being slightly different) all the time.
And they don't have as heavy external influence as film-makers do, where tens or hundreds of millions are at stake, to the point that they're often denied certain decisions, frequently denied final cut, have different scriptwriters brought in by the producer, and so on. So they often end up with an end result that it's not what they'd wanted (and that's aside from technical and other issues).
