The movie Oliver Stone despises: “Disgusting beyond belief”
Known as one of Hollywood’s most outspoken and uncompromising filmmakers, the American director Oliver Stone has made some of the most challenging movies of modern cinema. Helming a trilogy of Vietnam War movies that questioned the human morality of the controversial late 20th-century conflict, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and Heaven & Earth are each considered classics.
A Vietnam War veteran himself, Stone witnessed the horrors of war and violence firsthand and, therefore, holds a pretty hard line when it comes to the visceral action scenes we see in contemporary cinema. Critics of the director will hold up the violent 1994 flick Natural Born Killers, written by Quentin Tarantino, as proof of his hypocrisy, but the film was made as a satire against the abundance of such gory imagery in the media.
Inspired by the images and material seen on MTV during the 1990s, Stone once said of his own movie, “I think it’s a very fine piece of filmmaking and I think it transcends time…It’s very fine cutting we worked on the cutting for almost a year and we shot it in a highly unorthodox style that you see more and more on TV. It had never quite been done before — a mixture of stocks and styles”.
Indeed, Stone is very careful in his approach to violence in cinema, either avoiding it completely or depicting it in proper, realistic detail, as seen in 2012’s Savages. As a result, there are a fair few modern movies that the director actively despises.
“I saw John Wick 4 on the plane,” he told Variety in a recent interview, “Talk about volume. I think the film is disgusting beyond belief. Disgusting. I don’t know what people are thinking”. Referring to the type of content he would watch during his own childhood, he added, “Maybe I was watching G.I. Joe when I was a kid. But [Keanu Reeves] kills, what, three, four hundred people in the fucking movie. And as a combat veteran, I gotta tell you, not one of them is believable. I realize it’s a movie, but it’s become a video game more than a movie”.
Extending his rant to a more general criticism of the wider industry, Stone adds: “It’s lost touch with reality. The audience perhaps likes the video game. But I get bored by it…How many cars can crash? How many stunts can you do? What’s the difference between Fast and Furious and some other film? It’s just one thing after another. Whether it’s a super-human Marvel character or just a human being like John Wick, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s not believable”.
To make up your own mind about one of cinema’s most beloved recent action flicks, take a look at the trailer for John Wick 4 below.
