The Last Jedi.
I left the theatre angry that they spent enough money to take mankind back to the moon on something that stupid.
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The Last Jedi.
I left the theatre angry that they spent enough money to take mankind back to the moon on something that stupid.
I can't leave it at that. I have to add some details.
Both the empire and the rebels repeatedly made tactical decisions so stupid a five-year old would know better. The opening battle involved sending unprotected bombers against a ship with anti-bomber defences and keeping the enemy commander talking on the phone to delay his response. That works in a Mel Brooks movie, not in Star Wars.
They killed a fan-favourite character off-screen. What, was the puppet too old to reprise its role?
The empire's main guy decided to chase the rebels down instead of destroying them immediately. For fun, I guess.
Phasma's a badass. Except that she capitulates at the first sign of personal danger.
All Holdo had to say was "yes, there's a plan. Not telling you what because of operational secrecy". Instead she expected Poe to blindly follow orders when he'd already shown he couldn't do that.
"Oh no, the sacred texts!" ...that you attempted to burn a moment ago.
My favorite bit:
Leia gives Rey a pendant and tells her that she can use that to track them wherever they go.
In the SAME SCENE, with NO CUTS, they are tracked by the first order and shout "THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!"
You just described, IN THE SAME SCENE, how it is, in fact, possible.
Bonus: Putting a tracker in the Falcon was how the Death Star found Yavin IV in the very first movie.
All Holdo had to say was “yes, there’s a plan. Not telling you what because of operational secrecy”. Instead she expected Poe to blindly follow orders when he’d already shown he couldn’t do that.
Well, he did fine following orders in the first movie, and then they changed the entire character in the second movie but kept the same name. I have no idea why they did that.
I highly highly recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuuDTnMPMgc
I think you'll like it a lot. I realized that bathos is what I hated about the Last Jedi. They killed so many truly deep moments to have stupid jokes. They couldn't let anything just be serious. It ruined the tone of the movie, couldn't decide if they wanted to be a comedy or a drama, and so they did neither.
You expect a movie director only interested in pretty scenes to write a good plot!?
... your name must be Kathleen Kennedy...
And yet... it's my favorite post-OT movie. It could've used another draft to tighten a couple things up here and there, but it was good.
Now... TRoS is one of the worst films I've ever seen in my life and is the only Star Wars property I've only seen a single time and never will watch again. Hell I watched Book of Boba Fett twice. Shit, I've watched In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale twice. I'd have to go back to Battlefield Earth to think of an equally terrible film.
But when watching The Last Jedi I feel nothing but joy.
'Live action' remakes of animated classics, or any remake of an already good film.
Remake the ones that had potential. but failed in the execution.
All those Disney live action remakes are sooo bad. People just don't have the expressiveness of cartoon characters. The Lion King was the worst. The characters were animated and still wooden
I think Christopher Robin and maleficent were good. As long as they're telling a new story it's fun to see the old characters. When it's just the exact same plot but a little darker and live action over animation it's so dumb. Our CGI just ain't good enough to justify that.
They're remaking Moana already, and still a new movie, relative.
The Hobbit trilogy. It's hard to understand how Peter Jackson could mess up movie after movie after movie like that.
Simple:
He and his crew had 2 years of prep for Lotr, storyboards, finding locations, making props and sets, etc.
New Line Cinemas forced him to do that same prep in 6 months for the Hobbit. Allegedly they didn't even fully finish the script and had to cut in Del Toro scenes.
The forced trilogy structure also really hurt it. When the Hobbit film adaptation was initially announced (at the time just two movies, even), I thought that it didn't make any sense to adapt a book shorter than any of the individual LotR installments into multiple movies. When they revealed it would be a trilogy, I knew it was some studio decision to milk it for money and didn't have high hopes.
There is actually a fan edit floating around online somewhere called "The Hobbit: Extended Edition" which, contrary to what the name might imply, cuts down the trilogy into a single movie of comparable length to the LotR Extended films. Still not perfect, but a huge improvement in quality just from cutting out all of the extra garbage that didn't need to be there.
There are a few different edits, but my fave is the M4 Book Edit. It only follows what was covered in the book and cuts out all the additions like the Kili/Tauriel love story (and Tauriel is cut out completely along with Azog until the end), the Dol Guldur stuff, and Gandalf's escapades outside the party. It cuts the trilogy down to 4hr18min. Aside from a few unavoidably janky transitions, it's great.
I absolutely adore it for 2 reasons: One, I really dislike the trilogy as a whole, but that's because of the bloat, which M4 gets rid of. Two, the older I get the harder it is to go through LOTR as often as I like. I usually do an LOTR rewatch once a year, and tried to add in the Hobbit, but usually stopped after the first. It's just too much time for not enough payoff. With the M4 edit, I'll get stoned and watch it 5 or 6 times a year.
For as much flack as Jackson gets the for The Hobbit movies, he did a phenomenal job where it counts. There really is a wonderful, true-to-source Hobbit adventure scattered throughout the 8hr52min bloat that is the trilogy.
For funsies, if you like the other bits there's another fan edit called Durin's Folk and the Hill of Sorcery that's 1hr8min that covers Gandalf's adventure after he fucks off from the party at Mirkwood.
Borderlands. How did they spend that much money and none of the decision makers stop and think "nope this is crap"
Battleship. It's just such a bizarre license for a movie, and certainly one nobody ever asked for. (Well, outside Hasbro execs clearly desperate for another Transformers-level hit.)
Oddly watchable in a big dumb fun kind of way, at least. And hey, it has Jesse Plemons not playing a total sociopath, so that's neat.
Cats
The moment they announced Cats I knew it wasn't going to work.
First, the story sucks. A bunch of cats prancing around and learning not to be a dick to that one cat.
Second, Cats is a spectacle. The reason you go see Cats in a theater is for the spectacle. Everyone is dressed up and dancing around. It's meant to be an experience. You can't translate that to film.
Avatar.
Avatar at least had the excuse of existing to push 3D and mo-cap technology.
Not sure about Avatars 2-5...
i love that the answer to "which one?" is "doesn't matter, they suuuuuuck"
Ohh i forgot another one of my favorite. Ghost in the Shell live action. I love that movie because of Scarlett Johansson, but if you watch the original anime, everything just feels better, and the live action is simply unnecessary.
I'm gonna go in a different direction than everyone else here.
is a big budget movie that had absolutely no business getting made, because:
Pirate movies have always been box office poison. Less than a decade earlier, Cutthroat Island made the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest box office bomb of all time, the latest in a series of pirate-themed failures. The only vaguely pirate-themed movies that had ever had anything you'd call success was Muppet Treasure Island and Goonies, and you could argue that Goonies wasn't really a pirate movie, it had some pirate theming in it. In 2002, Disney's Treasure Planet, basically Treasure Island IN SPAAACE had proven a box office flop. Treasure Planet is a well-written, well-made, well-advertised, well-reviewed pirate movie that failed at the box office. What idiot would bankroll another pirate film?
It was a movie based on an old ride at Disney World. It was their fourth attempt at this, they made a TV movie based on Tower of Terror in 1997 that they're apparently not proud of, 2000s Mission To Mars was a "commercial disappointment" and 2002's The Country Bears was a critical and commercial flop. Yeah the year before they made Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney made a G-rated pastiche of the Blues Brothers out of The Country Bear Jamboree. They decided to do that and nobody stopped them. No movie based on a theme park attraction had ever made its money back.
The public's reaction to the announcement was "They're making a movie based on WHAT?" This wasn't going to work. This movie had no business being made.
The film achieved massive critical and commercial success as the 141st highest grossing movie of all time taking $654.3 million against it's $140 million budget and spawning four sequels.
There's a distinction to point out between "absolutely no business getting made" vs "the final product turned out to be shit". I can't really think of anything that belongs to the former... I haven't actually seen most of the films mentioned here so far, except the SW sequels... which turned out to be shit, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have made SW sequels at all: they just shouldn't have made them shit.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
At least it was better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Waterworld. At the time the most expensive movie ever made and the most spectacular flop of all time.
But I like Waterworld.
I "think" John Carter beat it, but yeah.
John Carter suffered from an awful title.
"Princess of Mars," would have resonated better with marketing. And is actually one of the book titles.
Pearl Harbor. 5 minutes of cool CGI, rest of it being absolutely forgettable.
not sure if it was "big budget" but Madame Web.
It was, essentially, a Spider-Man prequel that simply didn't need to happen story wise. It introduced a bunch of characters from the comics that do indeed have Spider-Man like powers but in the film they simply "suggest" it. You had a villain whose entire purpose for doing what he did was he had a dream where said "spider people" killed him. You had Uncle Ben shoed in to simply say to the audience 'hey, HEY ASSHOLE! look...It's a Spider Man Prequel!" and THAT was the ONLY connection to Peter Parker.
It's like having a Star Wars Prequel where Uncle Owen is in it and he's hanging out with a bunch of people who could potentially be Padawans but we're not sure and they're being hunted cause some random Sith had a dream that sure, they could potentially be Jedi one day. Now none of them actually are but they COULD be one day, just not in this movie.