One goes in and another is on its way out. Today we The Monuments Men won’t be able to make its December 18 release date and will be delayed to 2014. The reasons given include the visual effects and it seems Alexandre Desplat has not yet recorded the score.
Speaking with the Los Angeles Times Clooney said, “We just didn’t have enough time. If any of the effects looked cheesy, the whole movie would look cheesy. We simply don’t have enough people to work enough hours to finish it.”
For anyone wondering about the film’s lost potential in the Oscar race, Clooney added, “Oscar attention was never his goal for the film.”
[amz asin=”1599951509″ size=”small”]The film is directed by Clooney who also co-wrote the film with Grant Heslov and will star in the feature alongside Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville and John Goodman.
Based on a true story and adapted from Robert M. Edsel’s novel, “The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History”, The Monuments Men focuses on an unlikely World War II platoon, tasked by FDR with going into Germany to rescue artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves and returning them to their rightful owners. It would be an impossible mission: with the art trapped behind enemy lines, and with the German army under orders to destroy everything as the Reich fell, how could these guys – seven museum directors, curators, and art historians, all more familiar with Michelangelo than the M-1 – possibly hope to succeed? But as the Monuments Men, as they were called, found themselves in a race against time to avoid the destruction of 1000 years of culture, they would risk their lives to protect and defend mankind’s greatest achievements.
No new date has been announced, but tomorrow I’m going to have to get in there and update my Oscar predictions.