Oversight Marathon Film 1: The Great Train Robbery (1903)


A wise man once said that too much of a good thing isn’t always a good thing.  Maybe the wise man didn’t say that.  I’m not wise enough to know that for sure.  Someone said something like that at some point.

The reason I am using that saying (which I might have made up) is because I saw The Great Train Robbery.  The Great Train Robbery is a twelve minute film about a train robbery.  Some bandits rob a train and there are some killings.  It’s twelve minutes long, so there isn’t much more than that happening on screen.

The reason I chose to watch The Great Train Robbery is because it was one of the most influential early films.  Being made in 1903, very early in the history of motion pictures, it is no wonder there is influence coming from it.  Most notably, there is a short scene at the end of The Great Train Robbery where a bandit points a gun directly at the camera and fires.  If that sounds familiar, the same sort of thing happened at the end of Goodfellas.

I enjoyed the eleven minutes I spent watching The Great Train Robbery.  It isn’t a great film by any means.  It is a great study in the history of film.  There were some new styles of editing used, which led to my favourite moment of the movie, when a bandit threw a dummy off of the train.  The clear difference between the dummy and the person that the dummy was supposed to be made me chuckle a little bit.  That might seem cruel because of the lack of resources in making movies in 1903, but I couldn’t help it.  There is also some primitive camera movements that would have been amazing at the time but seem flawed when you watch it now.

All the flaws aside, The Great Train Robbery was still quite an entertaining twelve minutes.  A robbery, some gunplay, a chase...what more could you ask of a movie?  If you ever get your hands on a copy of this and you have twelve minutes to spare, The Great Train Robbery is well worth a watch.  It’s a keystone in what films have become and it isn’t as boring as half of what is release in modern cinema.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

First Time Watches: March 2019

Image
I’ve been writing these first-time watch posts for a long time. They are a chronicle, month by month, of the movies that are new to me. They could be theatrical releases or they could be older movies that I’m finally getting around to. Either way, they’re fresh to my eyes, never having gone through them before. With that comes pleasant surprise, a great experience, disappointment, or frustration. There could be many more emotions as well. These posts share my emotions from having watched the movies with whoever decides to read them. I fell behind on these posts a long time ago and have been trying to work my way through them to eventually catch up. This post will cover March 2019 and the movies I saw for the first time over the course of that month. Any rewatches will not be a part of this post. If they aren’t first time watches, they don’t count. March was a month full of all kinds of movies. There were good and bad, like usual, and a variety of genres, also like usual. Th...
Read more

Is "Real Steel" Like "Over the Top"?

When I was going through my weekly movie binge a couple weeks ago, I stumbled upon two movies that I had never seen before that tackled a very similar story.   It was an odd thing to have happen because I didn’t know of any similarities between the two movies.   The first was Real Steel, a movie about a man who participates in robot boxing while bonding with the son that he had left years before.   The second was Over the Top, a movie about a man who participates in arm wrestling while bonding with the son that he had left years before.   Similar?   I think so. Let’s begin with Real Steel.   I watched this one because, why the hell not?   I quite enjoyed the movie and by the end I was rooting for Hugh Jackman’s character to help his robot, Atom, to a victory.   The thing to point out about Real Steel is how good the visual effects were.   I wasn’t expecting too much going in, but I thought they masterfully crafted each robot in a way that...
Read more

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Season 2, Episode 8: The Power Stealer

Image
Last time we sat down with the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers , Tommy was going through some serious stuff.   His powers were running low because Lord Zedd was targeting him.   He felt hopeless.   His friends were comforting him.   There was also a Robo Goat trying to take a powerful sword and use it against the Earth.   There were fights all over the place and an emotional hook that was unmatched in any episode that wasn’t in a multi-part arc. This episode, there might be follow-up to the Tommy storyline.   It would be nice to see more of the struggle with his powers.   Right now, that’s the one throughline that has been playing out.   II hope this episode continues to have some sort of meaning to the overall story, instead of being a self-contained and meaningless.   The show needs to grow and evolve, with a storyline that builds to something significant.   Having episodes that keep the story at a standstill is boring.   ...
Read more