Larval creationist crawls out of the corpse of an old dead creationist » « What an excellent brain exercise!

Sam Neill does not satisfy the Rule of Three

I refuse to accept the sacrificial substitution of Sam Neill for far more deserving people.

Sam Neill, the popular New Zealand actor whose career spanned five decades and encompassed more than 150 film and television roles, has passed away in Sydney. The actor, best recognized for portraying paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant across multiple “Jurassic Park” installments, was 78.

Lindsey Graham, zombie Mitch McConnell, and then Sam Neill? That’s not a match in any way.

Also, Jurassic Park? Yuck, retch, bleh. To me, he will always be the cursed, damned villain/victim of the Lovecraftian horror, Event Horizon.

Larval creationist crawls out of the corpse of an old dead creationist » « What an excellent brain exercise!

Comments

  3. killyosaur says

    Was sad to hear that. Jurassic Park is still my favorite movie of his and one of my all time favorites. Well acted, well edited, well paced and the visual effects hold up exceedingly well…

  4. rgsherr says

    For me his portrayal of the evil gambler in the screen version of Joseph Conrad’s great short novel, Victory.

  5. cartomancer says

    Don’t worry – Sam Neill was born in Northern Ireland and was of New Zealand nationality. I’m not sure which nation’s tally he comes under, but it’s not yours.

    In the UK we’ve just had vile harridan bigot Anne Widdecombe pop her clogs (possibly murdered, don’t really care), as well as generally jolly and charming newsreader Dermot Murnaghan (I liked him on Eggheads) and 80s pop legend Bonnie Tyler (whom I thought had been dead for decades anyway). So if Sam Neill is on the UK tally we’ve reached 4 already.

  6. cartomancer says

    Also, Sam Neill’s best part was Merlin in the 1998 two-part TV series Merlin.

  7. gijoel says

    Event Horizon for some weird reason. He just had this deadpan derangement performance, kind of unnerving when I first saw it. Also Death in Brunswick with the late, great John Clarke.

  9. says

    Second rule of three: Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Ann Widdecombe (right-wing British politician; anti-choice, anti-EU, anti everything progressive, really).

  11. submoron says

    I always think of Widdecombe in a debate on the motion that the Catholic Church was a good thing. An African bishop told the audience about the benefits that that the Church bestowed on the world. Christopher Hitchens pointed out the evil that the Church had wrought. Widdecombe pointed out in her reply that the they were following the standards then current and Stephen Fry’s retort included remarks to the effect that they if they were no better than the norms of the age they were no exemplars to be admired. The pre debate poll of the audience was mildly contra the final vote heavily against. She wasn’t happy.

  12. seversky says

    I thoroughly enjoyed Jurassic Park and its successors. They were gripping and spectacular adventures and the scientific inaccuracies didn’t bother me.

    My favorite Sam Neill movie was The Dish, based on the Parkes Radio Telescope role in relaying television images from the Apollo 11 Moon landing. It had the flavor of the quirky, British Ealing comedies, I love the scene where the local small town band greets the US ambassador by playing the theme from Hawaii 5-0 because that’s don’t know the American anthem.

  13. Rich Woods says

    Someone please remind the fundies that Sam Neill was excellent in Omen III. I thought the director made a good job of the reprise of the massacre of the innocents too.

  14. Thomas Scott says

    Don’t forget he did a passable job in, “The Hunt for Red October “..
    I hope he got to see Montana.

  15. stevewatson says

    Could people less than, say 80, stop dying for a while, please? I just turned 69 and it’s getting a little alarming/depressing. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do before I pop my clogs.

  16. Callinectes says

    Event Horizon, the unofficial prequel to Warhammer 40K. It’s really too bad they lost the extra footage.

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Sam Neill performance that wasn’t great, no matter what else was going on. For me he always delivered.

  20. cgm3 says

    a few of his other, more villainous roles;

    In Daybreakers, in a world where most of the population are vampires (thanks to a pandemic) and the supply of human blood is running out, he was the CEO of the corporation trying to develop a synthetic substitute that didn’t have unpleasant side effects (and was adamantly opposed to any cure for vampirism).

    In Memoirs of an Invisible Man he was the shady CIA operative who wanted to “weaponize” the title character, and never mind those pesky constititional rights.

  21. Rob Grigjanis says

    astringer @18: ‘horrific’ was applied to the crime, not Widdecombe herself.

  23. birgerjohansson says

    Rich Woods @ 12

    “Someone please remind the fundies that Sam Neill was excellent in Omen III. ”

    Sam Neill made an otherwise insufferable film worth watching.

  24. birgerjohansson says

    Reginald Selkirk @ 9

    Is Qatar’s former ruler the dude that had a granddaughter kidnapped from Britain when it seemed she did not want to go back for her assigned role as a subservient family member?

  25. birgerjohansson says

    Sam Neill made a Lovecraftian horror film, In The Mouth Of Madness.
    It did not get enough promotion and bombed despite good qualities.

  26. birgerjohansson says

    There was a film with him as a crerpy catholic dude SA children at an orphanage.
    .
    Also, a film set in Australia during the Apollo 11 mission, when the big radioastronomy dish there made it possible to maintain contact when the rest of thevworld was turned away from the moon.

  28. nomadiq says

    I liked him in a few movies but the one that came to mind was ‘The Dish’. I have a few strong sentimental attachments to that movie that I couldn’t possibly explain here. But my favourite line that he delivered was ‘Failure is never quite so frightening as regret.’ The line has three simultaneous meanings to the story arcs of the characters. Ultimately it is a statement about getting on with living while you can because one day it will all come to an end.

  32. Akira MacKenzie says

    Meh, the “evil” in Event Horizon seemed more Judeo-Christian than Lovecraftian. Now In The Mouth of Madness? Now that’s a Sam Neil horror movie that’s got cosmic horror written all over it.

  34. UffDah! says

    When filming Even Horizon, Neill insisted that the Union Jack in his character’s Australian flag patch be replaced with the indigenous flag. What a great man.

  35. StevoR says

    @26. birgerjohansson : “Also, a film set in Australia during the Apollo 11 mission, when the big radioastronomy dish there made it possible to maintain contact when the rest of thevworld was turned away from the moon.”

    Been mentioned here already and an awsome film that I love too called The Dish (2000) | Official Trailer – 2 mins 3 secs length.

  36. StevoR says

    @ ^ Which is based on a true story and our CSIRO has this page on here :

    What’s your favourite line from the movie ‘The Dish’?

    Created and written by Rob Sitch, Jane Kennedy, Tom Gleisner and Santo Cilauro, the 2000 film is an Aussie classic. It features Sam Neill, Tom Long and Kev Harrington as staff at Murriyang, our Parkes radio telescope, in rural New South Wales, and how they supported receiving and relaying the live TV broadcast images of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

    The Dish is loved by audiences and critics: “David and Margaret” both gave it 4.5 stars! We love the movie so much we thought it’d be fun to take look at what’s fact and what’s fiction, all in the name of a good story, of course.

    Source : https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/Articles/2025/October/the-dish-fact-vs-fiction

    As that page notes the omission of Honeysuckle Creek was a notable diversion form history :

    To be fair, the film did get a lot of things right — the astronauts did decide to walk early, and it was windier than usual in Parkes on the day of the Moon landing.

    It was also true that the Moon was originally too low for Parkes to get its signal, and for a few seconds, the picture transmitted was upside down.

    But what the movie creators did not include was that, because of these things, a NASA-run tracking station just outside of Canberra became responsible for broadcasting the first eight minutes of man’s arrival on the Moon.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-18/the-dish-is-a-great-comedy-but-certainly-not-a-documentary/11318862

    But still alot of it is true.

    See wikipage : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkes_Observatory#Apollo_11_broadcast

  37. auntbenjy says

    @ John Morales #31

    He doesn’t get carried away with it to the point that almost none of the coverage mentions that he has a knighthood. He was always Sam, never Sir Nigel.

  38. mcgeekan says

    I loved his first film, (Sleeping Dogs, 1977) based on CK Stead’s novel, Smith’s Dream. Set in a dystopian future with a fascist (NZ) government, propped up by an equally fascist USA military, Smith (Neill) is unwillingly drawn into the conflict. It’s dated, but seems prescient.

    Left leaning student me loved studying the film and book for English at high school (where we also studied his second film, My Brilliant Career, another classic)

    Vale.

Leave a Reply