Rating: Summary: The Lawnmower Man( edited 107 minute version ) Review: if it had been the full unedited version i give it 4 stars. as for me i will only buy the unedited director's cut DVD. 142 minute version.
Rating: Summary: I loved it ! Review: It opened my mind to a new frontier where virtual worlds and virtual learning would help people increase their minds and bodies also...
Rating: Summary: Not What You Might Think!!! Review: Lest anyone miss the point other writers weren't making clearly: This is NOT the movie you saw at the theater! New Line Platinum Series has taken the movie apart and reconstructed it as a chopped version on Side A, and if you want to see the twelve sections sliced out you have to flip the disc over!! They've vandalized this movie! Something's rotten here! Really! It's criminal! Damnit!
Rating: Summary: Accelerated Learning Review: My delight in and fascination with this movie revolves around the elements related to accelerated learning - yap, I have a certain obsession with mind-stuff and learning, development of different abilities, so this movie was right up my alley.
The movie involves a scientists who has passion for mental development. His main tools are nootropics (smart drugs) and virtual reality. His experiments are funded by government which is only interested in creating killers. The original experiment is conducted on a monkey. It goes astray when the monkey breaks lose and kills few people. Though, even this neurologically rewired monkey doesn't kill indiscriminately - he assesses whether the individual he is facing is potentially dangerous or not. For that matter, one could say, this would work even on the instinctive level of an animal. This monkey, on the run, stumbles upon a Lawnmower Man - a good-hearted, simple, young man whose mental development has been arrested somewhere around the age of a 5-year old and who just happens to live next door to the scientist's house.
Lawnmower man and the monkey strike instant friendship, however the government agents track down the monkey and shoot him. Lawnmower is devastated (he has identified the monkey as one of his comic strip characters come to life), and so is the scientist. But then, the brilliant idea occurs to the scientist, to continue his experiments in private on the Lawnmower man.
He begins infusing him with nootropics and stimulating his mind with virtual reality. The first images impressed upon his mind, very much in the way subliminal programming is used are the seals from the Solomonic magick. Different parts of his brain are also neurologically stimulated, following by feeding the man's mind with more information.
This is a sci-fi movie, but the learning process does have some parallels to the methods and techniques used in real life. There are lots of people who are taking nootropics (smart drugs), albeit in oral form; and subliminal and supraliminal programming - if not yet quite the use of virtual reality - are alive and well. Those who are familiar with photoreading and different techniques from Neuro-Linguistic Programming, also know that the mind does tend to absorb information better when it is delivered fast, as well as when all of one's senses are engaged in the process (that's the stimulation that virtual reality here provides).
So, the hero of this movie, Lawnmower man, makes extraordinarily rapid progress - together with amassing huge amount of knowledge in record time, absorbing the information mainly subliminally, he also begins to develop different abilities which are normally considered supernatural. This, as matter of fact, also makes sense, because development of such abilities is based on stimulating and creating new neural connections. The more he learns, the more hungry for learning he becomes. There's also the reality that anyone with passion for learning is well aware of. His ultimate desire is to "be all" - yet another element, that those who are involved in spiritual growth are very much into - the ultimate goal of merging with All There Is. This, being a sci-fi movie, instead of merging with the spirit - our hero merges with the virtual reality - which is a decent metaphor for the spiritual reality / a quantum reality, where everything is made out of mind stuff and through the mind one becomes omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient.
In vast majority of the movies, it is this ending where the movie flops and this ultimate level of omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience either for dramatic purposes or due to lack of understanding of those who play with the idea, ends up in feeding individual's ego (that was even worst in Highlander than in this movie), as the one who has become All just won't have any desire to go and kill others - how could he - he IS present in all (even all others) - but for drama needed to make movies exciting this element that one would be all loving at this point, seems as if it would be boring. In any event, here is where The Lawnmower Man II, flopped - it went into cyber neverland and lost the spirit of the original theme.
Rating: Summary: a little snip, snip here and viola... Review: Ok, I would have given it 2 or maybe 3 stars but someone took twelve scenes out of the movie! And at least 3 of those missing scenes were important to the plot! If that wasn't bad enough, they then made those missing scenes available to be viewed! But not put back into the movie. Where's the logic in that?
Rating: Summary: The Worst New Line Platinum DVD ... Anyway 3 stars Review: The DVD EXTRAS aren't as good or as much as you would expect. The 12 deleted scenes are pointless and add nothing to the movie. The Behind the Scenes and interviews are very very short. The only good thing is the COMPUTER ANIMATION MEGAMIX, some kind of music video compelling all the computer graphics effects of the movie with great music. If you can rent it do it, this isn't a good DVD for a collection.
Rating: Summary: Deleted scenes not what they seem Review: The Lawnmower Man has always been one of my favorite movies since the first time i saw it in the theater. I saw it so often i got to the point where i memorized many of my favorite scenesOnly one porblem... when i watched the DVD, parts were missing. i flipped to the deleted scenes menu and wouldn't you know it, there they were, but you couldn't watch the whole REAL Movie with them in. The deleted scenes were nothing more than scenes deleted from the actual movie to give the illusion of adding something to the DVD version. not only shouldn't you buy this movie, you should write many many angry letters to the makers of the DVD
Rating: Summary: Underrated sci-fi/horror flick, Review: The Lawnmower Man is a pretty cool film for those who like to think a little bit about what they watch. Essentially it's the Frankenstein story updated for a more modern generation, but it also makes a statement about technology and how it's development could possibly bring about our own undoing. The cast is very good, the effects are rather remarkable and this DVD transfer looks excellent. The only qualm is in regards to handling the missing scenes as DVD 'extras' rather than include them in the picture like the superior VHS director's cut. This aside, the film is very good and well worth checking out for fans of the genre.
Rating: Summary: Virtual Mess Review: THE LAWNMOWER MAN is an example of a movie that thinks it's better than it actually is. Dr. Lawrence Angelo (Pierce Brosnan), is working on a revolutionary type of virtual reality software, that he thinks will better mankind. After he fails to find success, working with animals, he finds his first human test subject. Jobe Smith (Jeff Fahey), a mentally disabled groundskeeper, who sees the tests as a game. However, the good doctor has enemies, who wish to use the technology and Jobe, to create an indestructable war machine. The film starts off with a pretty good premise, but after awhile, it seems as though the F/X are their to make us forget the plot. The director tries to make the film seem on the cutting edge, or visionary sci-fi, in doing so Brett Leonard fails to make things interesting. Brosnan seems like he is cursing his agent the whole for getting him this gig. Fahey seems to act in much the same fashion. The commentary track has Leonard and co-producer and fellow screenwriter Gimel Everett, talk endlessly about how lucky they were to make this film (I'll say). The deleted scenes offer a better sense of the story. Too bad they were not incorporated into the movie. It might have made a difference. The storyboards, and other making of stuff don't seem like fun, if the movie isn't any good...Buyer Beware
Rating: Summary: An epic vision of mankind's possibilities and risks ... Review: There are a lot of people (especially in the movie industry) who doesn't like Brett Leonard ; and his other movies like "Virtuosity" (with Russell Crowe & Denzel Washington) clearly shows he is revealing an insight beyond Stephen King (his short story has very little to do with Leonards script !) into the so-called evil . Of course Kubricks Clockwork Orange is in remembrance , but Leonard does what Kubrick couldn't do - probably due to Burgess novel and the "impersonal" story-points of C.O. - by letting us into the evil guy and by understanding his secret of the deepest darkest unhappiness known to man : The Luciferian state .
However , TLM is a different movie than "Virtuosity" and battles with "brighter" themes !
TLM is from 1992 ; Windows 3.1 was only just announced (Windows 95 didn't exist yet of course :-) and Windows NT was only on BETA-stage ... The wonder-promise of virtual learning , which now is commonly accepted (people "speedlearn" from the Internet and softwares on computers) , takes further steps into the future to a threshold we eventually will run into (when we have eliminated spam-mongers and cyber-terrorists !) sooner or later .
And here TLM starts it's "evil magic" , not like Fausts choice , but like a two-way-responsibility gone apart between the individual (Fahey) and the society (Brosnan , Slate etc.) resulting in tragedy on both parts . We can learn a lot , but we cannot learn how to unlock our civilized psychological prison as we ARE the prison of our mothers "milk" or symbolically in Jobe's case , the aggression-chemical !
Yet I find there are many other themes (in example : the creator and the creation / the mystery of sex and the mind etc.) , this underrated ahead-of-it's-time-movie treats , that is worth paying attention to ; this is a masterpiece in more than one way . And I find most of the actors great in this movie , of course with Jeff Fahey as the real leading star here and Mr.(X?)Bond/Brosnan to give a slightly unconvincing performance .
I'm looking forward to see his "Hideaway" (with Jeff Goldblum & Alicia Silverstone) based on Koontz novel .
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