I remembered this as a great movie when it first came out. Saw it again tonight for the first time in 27 years, and it just feels so dated and cheesy now. It was still fairly interesting, but whatever "dazzled" me in 1981 looked more like a college film project today. Well, maybe not quite that bad, but it just didn't seem to age well.
shareI'm with you; time has not been kind to Altered States. Probably partially because high end digital effects have made a lot of the acid-trip looking stuff look pretty cheesy in retrospect. Then again, all that monkey suit stuff is silly no matter how you cut it. What's sad is that Stanley Kubrick used the same kind of visuals in 2001: A Space Odyssey 10 years earlier. I would have thought some of this stuff looked dated already in 1980, but I guess people were still reading Castaneda books and looking for a big screen trip.
If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed. -- Stanley Kubrick
Hmm, that is interesting. The visuals did not seem dated to me, but then the so-called high-end modern stuff has never been very convincing to me. It all kind of feels "plastic" to me in a way that would be difficult to define. While some of the visual techniques used here no longer used, I think that the quality in which they have been assembled is still quite good. A studio might have been tempted to do the sandstorm scene with digital effects, for instance, but the usage of actual sand structures and wind machines to create this eerie effect casts a level of "realism" to it that I don't think any computer could yet match. It is a very creepy scene, and in part because it looks so real.
Something I have noticed with visuals from the '80s and '70s is that they feel much more inspired to me---directly influenced. I think this is largely due to the fact that the director is capable of sitting down actually directing or in some cases, helping with their construction. Digital effects require teams of people all working on something and waiting weeks for renders. Changing a small detail becomes cost prohibitive, and thus much of the creative detailing is left to those who can move the pixels. Consequently, to me, a lot of effects feel "the same" because they are in effect coming from the same individuals even though the directors and movie styles are different. You see similar, boringly predictable effects in a pirate movie, a horror movie, and a science fiction movie.
The stuff in Altered States is more personal; some of it is cliche effect from that time, but large parts of it are unique to the film. So unless you mean dated in nothing more interesting than fashion sense, I'm afraid I cannot agree.
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You're such a stalker. ;)
shareI watched this film yesterday for the first time (2011) and don't think that the visuals are outdated or bad at all. In the contrary! They completely blew me away.
I think this movie is visually 10x more interesting then Avatar.
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SEUL CONTRE TOUS
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this is one of the best sci/fi films ever no matter what time period you watch it in!
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I agree with the OP. I had fond recollections of this movie but on actual rewatching 33 years later I was amazed how bad it was. I suspect I might have been high when I saw it back in 80. Difficult to know what went wrong given the quality of the participants, but the ape scenes are comically ridiculous, the dialogue is stilted and pretentious, and the ludicrous attempts at dressing this up with science or philosophy would make a New Ager blush. It's also derivative of 2001: A Space Odyssey amongst others.
I can see why Paddy Chayefsky disowned this.