Critics can tear apart movies however much they want, but it is especially telling when a film’s director apologizes for it, as some have over the years.
The latest apology came on Nov. 18 when a video clip from the special features for the DVD release of “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” was uploaded to YouTube. In it, Peter Jackson basically apologizes for the trilogy not being up to par with the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
Jackson talks in the video about how he didn’t know what he was doing and had very little preparation time for most of the movie. Jackson said, “I started shooting the movie with most of it not prepped at all.”
He only had a couple of months for “The Hobbit,” while he used three and a half years for the pre-production of “Lord of the Rings”.
In 1997, “Batman and Robin” was the sequel to the movie “Batman Forever,” and to this day people still complain about movie. Just in the beginning of 2014, a YouTube channel released a video titled “Everything Wrong with ‘Batman and Robin’ in an Awful lot of Minutes.”
Director Joel Shumacher acknowledges this, apologizing in an interview with IFC during the success of “The Dark Knight” if viewers were disappointed, “I broke a rule of mine, which is never to do a sequel of anything... I take full responsibility for ‘Batman and Robin.’”
With apologies like these, Ata King, a freshman business management from Waipio thinks, “I think it’s very sincere to do that. It makes viewers feel like they mean something to the directors and they’re not just someone giving them money.”
Another superhero movie that made both viewer and director cringe was “Spider-Man 3.” Like Jackson in filming much of “The Hobbit,” “Spider-Man 3” director Sam Raimi started filming before he was truly ready and production had been clearly mapped out.
There is another apology that some students say is either desperately needed and others say is entirely unnecessary. That apology comes straight from the director of Disney’s “Frozen.”
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Jennifer Lee said, “A year ago, I'd meet people who, when they found out who I was, they'd say, ‘Oh, we love the songs! We sing them all the time.’ Now they're like, ‘Yep, we're still listening to those songs.’ I've gone from, ‘Thank you,’ to, ‘Sorry!’”
Some people don’t see the point of such apologies. Dean Lang, a senior general biology major from California, explained, “Them apologizing for it doesn’t change the fact that it was released the way it was. What’s done is done, it doesn’t change how I feel about the movie.”