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Borderlands
Every Michel Gondry film other than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I think Charlie Kaufman saved that one.
He has such fun premises but the execution is just dull and lifeless. Be Kind Rewind could have been fun and silly but just fell flat.
League of extraordinary gentlemen.
If they would have just stick to the awesome plot of the graphic novel, instead of sitting the budget on hiring Sean Connery, who understood less about the role than he did with Gandalf it could’ve been great.
Downsizing: It was a very interesting premise (people choose to shrink themselves in order to continue being able to afford living) but it is squandered on a pretty bland plot that wastes the premise to tell a mundane story.
Literally came in here to say Downsizing. Great premise ruined by being nothing but a not-so-good romcom.
I was so salty after watching that movie. All the trailers billed it as a comedy. Maybe the first 10 minutes had me laughing. Bored to tears after that.
Star Wars VII, VIII and IX
It still absolutely baffles me that they bought the franchise for so much money, yet couldn’t even come up with a coherent story for the trilogy. Absolute tragedy.
I deleted my previous replay because my brain is broken and roman numerals fuck me up, what I meant to say was Star Wars I, II, and III (not IV, V and VI, though Return has always been a lesser ran in my book)
Haha, I figured that’s what you meant when I saw that comment the first time, but then I was just like “maybe it’s just that this guy’s got some bold-ass movie opinions. Respect”
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I thought In Time had a really cool premise and could have been a great commentary on wealth disparity, but it didn’t do much with it.
I loved Prometheus, I thought it was going deep canon on the Alien franchise, and even though it wasn’t perfect I so very much dug it, Ridley Scott saw some bad reviews, pussied out, and put Alien:Covenant out there to undo all the stuff he began with Prometheus. Covenant was such a garbage forgettable movie, followed by Romulus which was garage/fan service waste of time. Oh for the timeline we could have had, had they built upon the canon/story of Prometheus.
So true, Prometheus did a lot of the hard stuff right and then really made a mess of pretty basic things like dialogue and believable character motivations. Instead of tightening that stuff up in the sequel he just completely dumbed down the entire franchise again in Covenant to the extent that it is once again a complete waste of time (see Romulus).
Jupiter Ascending was doing some awesome stuff with worldbuilding that you can tell the studio just wimped out on. Can’t get too sci fi, might scare away audiences.
My theory is that Jupiter Ascending was supposed to be a trilogy, but the studio would only approve one movie with a wait-and-see approach to the second and third installments, and the Wachowskis just said “Fuck it,” and crammed 6+ hours of plot and world building into a two-hour movie.
I got that vibe too, and that vibe with a lot of movies now. Everything has to become a trilogy, nothing can just be good on it’s own
The 2024 horror movie ‘Out if Darkness’. I was really disappointed with where they decided to take it in the end. So many cool possibilities, and I felt they went with the most boring option.
That’s like 90% of modern genre pictures, where the filmmakers have a terrific concept but then have no idea where to go with it. MADs was like that recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_live
A very funny movie with good actors and everything, except for one major disappointment: at the end of the movie, you understand that some humans collaborates with aliens, they get magical watches, free money, and the aliens even have some kind of interplanetary door to teleport yourself to zombie-land. But they don’t go further in that explanation because the movie is already over.
They could have made a whole sequel with that new world, but instead we are left with a few pictures, and the ending credits of the movie. It felt like “Poochie died on the way back to his home planet. The End.”
How about instead we do close ups of the gun barrel over and over?
Matrix: Revolutions. I didn’t even see the fourth one.
I actually encourage a watch of the fourth film, but not as a Matrix movie.
Lana Wachowski took her beloved franchise, executed it, pissed on its corpse, and left it unburied.
The film explicitly states that Warner Bros threatened to make it without her, so she decided to produce it in a way that would guarantee fans ignored it, and the franchise would be definitively concluded.
The entire movie is a “fuck you for making me do this” and I applaud it for that. It’s such a shit film, but I need to give it credit for its stance.
I honestly never minded the matrix revolutions. It was fine. The 4th Matrix movie completely sucks though.
You should continue not seeing the fourth movie. I want my time back
A more recent one: The Gorge. Good premise and setting, but it becomes bland when the mystery is unraveled.
This was one that popped into my pre coffee morning mind as well.
Instead of exploring the mystery of the gorge and it’s workings and using it to maybe explore the sticky situation characters find themselves in, americans and russians just do their favourite pastime and genocide the local populace for fun.
A recent example is Conclave, which had an ending that felt very rushed and not really consistent with the tone of the rest of the film. I left feeling quite disappointed despite the majority of the film being one of the best I have seen. Another film I saw recently with almost the opposite problem was The Prestige, which I feel shows far too much of its big twist hand throughout the film and has an extremely predictable ending as a result. I think the thematic idea of the twist is very clever but it almost underestimates the ability of the audience to follow along. Although, having said that, there are seemingly a lot of very stupid or distracted people out there who had no idea what was coming and think it’s a masterpiece so maybe it was made for them and not me.
I think that’s intentional and setup nicely in the dialog.
“You never understood why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you… then you got to see something really special.”
It’s hammered home that the secret isn’t interesting but what the magician goes through to maintain the secret is the interesting part. You are supposed to figure it out but reject the idea because nobody would go through that for a trick.
It sounds like you were like the boy in the beginning who figured out the bird trick and wasn’t buying the more fantastic explanations in favor of the truth that the magician is just willing to be that cruel.
It’s definitely intentionally setup in such a way that the thought enters, and then exits, the audience’s mind at least once - as all great twists and reveals are. The best mysteries are always the ones that give you the solution, but do so in a way that make you second-guess your intuition and instead follow a bunch of red herrings and completely unrelated events down a different rabbit hole that ultimately lead to the wrong conclusion. My problem with The Prestige is that it repeatedly gives you the solution again and again throughout the entire film in an almost taunting/mocking fashion that insults the intelligence of anyone who figured it out, with the idea being that anyone who hasn’t will be completely shocked at the end when they see the montage of how many times they were presented with the answer. It’s so fixated with setting up the biggest “gottem” moment ever at the end that it doesn’t even try to re-engage the viewer like myself with the mystery. Your comparison to the bird trick scene with the young boy is quite accurate in a sense, because Nolan is sort of like the magician just going “oh well, you figured it out…don’t really care though because everyone else is dumb enough to believe me and think I’m a genius”. That attitude is what holds it back from being a truly great film.
Assassins Creed
For the uninitiated, this is based on a game series with the premise of people in the modern day using a simulation to relive the memories of their ancestors. And in every day, the modern day is the frame story that sucks and the real, cool story is the simulation.
So of course they made the crappy frame story like 90% of the movie and it sucked. Obviously it’s hard to capture the entire feel of a game on film, but what they could have done is had the entire movie in the past and actually focused on telling a good story, and then revealed it was a simulation right before the credits. Heck, they could have just stolen the ending from Assassins Creed 2 and then cut to modern day Callum with a setup for a sequel.
Instead we got an entirely forgettable film.
