Rules: explain why
Ready player one.
That has to be one of the cringiest movies I’ve seen, is tries so hard, too hard with it’s “WE LOVE YOU NERD, YOU’RE SO COOL FOR PLAYING GAMES AND GETTING THIS 80S REFERENCE” message and the whole “corporation bad, the people good” narrative seems written for toddlers… The fan service feels cheap and adds nothing to the story.
Finally, they trying to make the people believe that very attractive girl with a barely visible red tint spot on her face is “ugly”… Like wtf?
Yet it received decent reviews plus being one of the most successful movies of that year.
Much of this thread be like…
I mean… what did you expect? You came to a thread titled “What successful or popular movie that many loved you just HATE?” It’s going to be full of unpopular opinions that people are going to disagree with. Coming in and hoping to agree with everything is being that guy on a Lemmy thread.
James Cameron’s Avatar series.
Then again… Does anyone actually like it? It seems to have all this online hype when it’s such a boring visual spectacle.
It’s like the opposite of the other Avatar franchise, which wasn’t a commercial hit, and seems less popular on paper, but seems to have a massive cultural impact.
My understanding of most people’s opinion is that the visuals are stunning but otherwise whatever. It’s definitely mine. Avatar 2 has one of the worst written and worst paced stories I have seen in a long time. But it’s still almost worth the watch solely to admire the visuals that over-shadow other movies by a mile.
I liked the first one!on acid. On a 3D TV. I don’t see myself ever watching the second.
I believe the impact was mostly to do with the visuals. And, honestly, that is very fair. While it is inctedibly dull and cringe story-wise, the visuals are phenominal, especially since the movie is now already 15 years old.
I feel the same way about Jurassic Park in that sense, though it is much less cringe than Avatar (but still pretty basic story-wise).
But the original Jurassic Park was fun. The writing was sharp and memorable, the cast charismatic, even if the plot is not that important (which is fine).
I did love JC Avatar’s alien flora and fauna, and some small details like the realistic spaceship, but I guess it feels much less exciting in hindsight without anything to “attach” it to.
And again… the IP its name collides with is nothing to sneeze at, visually. You can pause it almost anywhere, even in “mundane” scenes, and get gorgeous fantasy shots and incredible music:
the worldbuilding is what’s interesting in Avatar, imho. The visuals support that. Story wise it doesn’t do a good job of being surprising
See, I’m baffled by this one, now I’ve only seen the first movie so maybe there’s something in the second I don’t know about in world building. But the first, the world building was to me… meh? Okay, the alien planet was interesting, they have a culture, they seemed to do a fine job with that, cool. But the story makes humanity so blitheringly stupid that I cannot comprehend the worldbuilding beyond “We need some Captain Planet level villains.” They’re after unobtanium, a mineral that has properties for anti-gravity and wrecking havok on radar. Soooooo… We’re going to work hard on inserting someone to convince the locals to dig up under the religious tree for the major vein of it instead of the MULTIPLE floating mountains all over the place.
Which then when the military decides to do its thing, this spacefaring species uses glorified helicopters that fly lower and slower than modern military aircraft, again through the mountains of unobtainium in a low altitude approach for a strike operation that only makes sense if the enemy has radar… which the aliens definitely did not. I seriously might have missed something but I couldn’t get past humanity in it was just carrying the idiot ball throughout the movie.
Yea all that to me belongs to script. And I agree it’s not very good. When I say worldbuilding, I’m talking about the ecosystem and its interconnectedness. It does a good job of mirroring the Earth’s and I consider it to be a proper -although indirect- awakening to the beauty of terrestrial biology.
What is that other Avatar franchise? I watched the first movie when I was just a kid so my opinions highly influenced by my emotions. I don’t think it is the best sci-fi movie out there but I really like Avatar (2009).
Avatar the Last Airbender, and the Legend of Korra.
The animation, specifically. The Netflix series is OK, and there is absolutely no movie adaptation.
Funny enough, I watched them when I was like 19, but Korra, Zuko and Iroh are still three of my favorite characters in anything ever. I remember it vividly, where I can’t remember a single line from the James Cameron Avatar (which I watched as a teen when it came out).
Thank you for making it clear that there’s no movie. There’s a lot of misinformation on the internet and some people happen to think that there is one.
There is no movie in Ba Sing Se.
Here, we are safe. Here, we are free.
I have never seen it. I got wind of the similarities between the American Indian Wars and Dances With Wolves/Ferngully and decided that my time and money were better spent elsewhere. I don’t need another reminder of the pain it is to be Lakota and look into the past.
The funny thing is James Cameron acts like the movie and message are so profound.
Honestly at this point I think he’s saying whatever he can to continue funding his submarine hobby.
He’s not completely wrong, sure the story has been done a ton because it’s a solid and engaging tale to learn about a new world/culture. Also the technological portion of the movie used several new methods and cameras for the first time in a theater and introduced so many methods that are in use today.
Deadpool.
I’m not sure if I absolutely hate it, but I definitely don’t get the hype—especially with Deadpool and Wolverine. There were some funny bits, but I feel like most of it is almost Family Guy-tier reference humor.
The plot feels as unimportant as ever—there are no real stakes or anything significant going on. It’s all about the “jokes,” fourth wall breaks (which get tiresome almost immediately), and Ready Player One-level “recognize the character” moments.
Maybe the last part is the biggest reason why I don’t connect with it. I’ve never really been into comics outside of film and television. But I feel like that shouldn’t be the main driving force for a movie anyway—or at least not for a good movie. Like, Ready Player One was fun, but not good.
Pretty much all of the Avengers films.
They aren’t engaging in any way. The characters are unintelligent and full of self importance. The whole franchise is Just loud noises and shark jumping.
I find nuggets in them. Iron man 3 had issues, but I was fascinated by the portrayal of Tony stark’s ptsd after the battle of new York. Sure, seeing a bunch of robots is fun, but it’s not really engaging. The intersection of everyday life, mental trauma, and super powers and responsibilities is fascinating to me.
It makes me feel snobbish to say you have to be literally juvenile to enjoy it. I just don’t get it. There’s no suspense at all, no surprise in anything. They’re all boring, intelligent characters. Even as films aimed at kids they’re bad, but I’m eternally surprised at the traction they get with 20s-30s…
Kind of agree with you. I liked it until endgame, but it was a downward slope afterwards
I liked the MCU, at first, but it had no business continuing after End Game.
I feel the same. Everything up until Endgame had some entertainment value. Most of what’s after is a low-quality cash grab
I mean they’re silly by default. They are not supposed to be high art. I like half of the MCU. Raimi spiderman Is as silly yet I consider it a masterpiece of a film, 2 even more.
In the spirit of this post, drag doesn’t like Spider-Man 2. The first half of the movie is just watching Peter suck at his life and be punched down down down. It’s torture porn. No wonder he lost his mojo, being Spider-Man sucks. And if Peter isn’t Spider-Man, then people die in burning buildings. Peter’s arc is realising that he needs to intentionally ruin his life and suffer, because the alternative is worse.
It’s maybe a good piece of ethical philosophy and it makes us admire Peter, but it’s just fundamentally unfun and depressing.
My problem is witg cg fights. I feel like I’m just watching a three hour long cut scene.
Saw.
It is on the very tiny list of movies that I am actively angry I watched because I’m never getting that time back. It is one of the single worst movies on “Tell don’t show” that I felt like I was being actively gaslit by the writers because what they were telling was opposite of what they were showing.
“Jigsaw tricks people into killing his victims” says the cops, and says all the people watching the movie. NO. He kills people and gives them a potential for a way out. Setting up a maze with cutting wire and a door sealing off if you don’t make it in time isn’t “tricking someone” it’s killing them with extra steps. It’s like blaming fucking landmine victims “Well if they didn’t step there they’d be okay”. Legit the logic that movie gives I find my blood pressure rising just going into it again.
And the ending. I guess spoiler if you haven’t seen the movie, I’m not gonna bother to figure out the formatting for it so here’s your warning to stop reading. The surprise twist was why my friends made me watch this movie, the logic above was explained and how clever Jigsaw was they said I’d like it. I’m not a horror guy but I love Scream because holy fuck it was clever and well done. Saw, the victims are looking for where Jigsaw is watching them and I just said “He’s the dead guy in the middle of the room.” and questioned why would I come to that so early in the movie my reasoning was simple. It was a dumb movie that was up its own ass so much to say that it was clever that was the obvious “clever” haha we got you option it could be. Anything else would have actually been clever.
I compare Scream and Saw so much. Scream is a very clever movie masquerading as a dumb movie that deconstructs a genre and pulls of a fantastic twist that if you didn’t see it coming will shock you and when you go back there’s all sorts of clues. Hell, part of the twist is realizing they put thought into the killer instead of just “slasher villain #85” that the genre had done for so long, but if you know what’s happening the movie is winking with you with such amazingly dumb and clever things like “He’s behind you Jamie”. Saw is a dumb movie that masquerades as smart, it wants to be clever and philosophize at you and wants to pull off a twist that is unearned because there’s no clues for the twist, so unless you watch a lot of movies and realize this one is up its own ass, of course you’re going to be surprised. It’s like a guy who built a tesla coil and (think he) knows how it works and no one else does so he shows up in a cheap top hat and a wand and expects everyone to applaud like he’s David Copperfield. Sure, everyone loves tesla coils, but that reaction is unearned.
From what I understand from others who’ve seen the rest, even what little cleverness goes away on the character and it just becomes a show to watch more elaborate ways to see people get hurt. It’s the only way I can comprehend that the series is loved by as many as it is. I work in healthcare, I can see plenty of that on the day to day basis.
The saw movies are basically gore/torture (both physical and psychological) porn.
I like these threads when people complain that “old classic movie” is formulaic and trope ridden or unoriginal… seemingly forgetting these films set the tropes, formulas and genres that all subsequent film makers hopped-on. That’s why, in retrospect, it appears clunky.
In another similar thread somebody said the band Queen were boring… yeah, maybe now. But fifty years ago when they first released? Not so much.
Just saw someone comparing Blade Runner to Ghost in the Shell and Fallout 4. (They had other criticisms too, though.)
That’s the exact comment that partly inspired me to post off topic…
I guess it’s perspective and all that. I can understand not personally liking any particular film, that’s fair enough, but SOME of the reasoning in this thread is fundamentally flawed.
Anything by JJ Abrams. He only knows how to start his shitty mystery box plots but never finish them.
His talk about the mistery box concept is infuriating tbh. Pro-tip to anybody that is interested in writing: do not copy JJ
I mostly agree with you, but his Star Trek film from 2009 is absolutely great. I say that as a big trekkie who gets offended by a lot of these new shit, because of action-over-plot-or-consistency and bad writing and all. “Star Trek” additionally has all the stuff I normally hate with a passion - L E N S E F L A R E S, constant camera movement, a lot of quick cuts. But in this movie everything came together and made it absolutely great. It feels like if the original Star Trek series is an ancient tale od Kirk and his merry crew of brave scientists that boldly go… And so on. Just a new interpretation of it. The movie in spite of being just a cool scifi sction flick also gets me really hard emoionally. A lot of the scenes - the way they are edited and combined is really hitting hard. The scene when kirks mother is in labor whole his father is in the process of sacrificing his life - oh boy - I prefer watching that movie alone in order to not embarass myself 😅 Or captain pike’s speech to kirk after the bar fight. A lot of the themes are about virtues that are just so well done.
I guess it’s because of a well written script that abrams could work with. But his style just perfectly fits there. His other stuff is just forgettable. Maybe he’s just a bad writer? He wouldn’t be the only one.
Not really hate but, I just don’t love. Inside out. I find that the metaphor of little people living in Riley’s head removes agency from her and makes it seem like people are just mech suits for tiny people that make the real decisions. I’m indifferent to this movie.
Riley’s emotions aren’t controlling her, they’re more like the punishment/reward mechanisms of her brain. Riley decides to do something and then gets sad afterwards, or happy, or angry. It’s only when her emotions are out of balance that she is overwhelmed by sadness and loses control. I do agree that the perspective of the film makes it seem like the emotions are calling the shots and we don’t see enough external emotional regulation, like from her parents. I’d also have liked it if Riley herself could have turned the ship somehow at the end. I think having the emotions control the memories was a mistake, they should’ve been separate mechanisms, maybe feeding into each other at most. That way Riley could recall happy memories by herself and influence her emotions. But that is a bit of emotional regulation that a child might not have learned yet.
Ted.
Juvenile fratboy humour done badly, very badly with lots of fan services to get the brainless cheering.
Made me laugh once in the first few minutes (I can’t even remember the joke) and walked out of the cinema after about an hour.
You tried to watch this movie sober, didn’t you?
That’s the problem, lol. You have to turn off a bit of your brain to enjoy yourself properly.
That just means the film is stupid.
My wife and I don’t drink alcohol… non-starter for us I guess 🤷🏻♂️
Does your wife want to sleep with Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, or Amanda Seyfried? Because I think that may be a qualifier that helps people enjoy those movies as well.
You have to turn off a bit of your brain to enjoy yourself properly.
People with this attitude are my enemies. Specially if they propose alcohol as method.
Marvel movies. Yes all of them. They’re trash. It’s just cgi slop, badly written one-dimensional characters, cliché tropes, formulaic stories, plotholes bigger than meteorcraters and brainless action sequences. A cashgrab.
A saw a couple; I gave them a fair chance. They’re all the same. The appeal is beyond me. Brainrot at its finest.
I’m a huge Marvel Comics nerd and I completely agree. The Daredevil series was decent though, that’s the only exception I can think of.
didn’t even like the Spider-Man movies? or iron man? first captain America? usually the origin movies are pretty solid.
Spider-man is Sony.
All Captain Americas are forgettable.
Iron man 1 is good. Ben Kingsley is great.
the new spider-man, not toby mcguire. it’s a “marvel” character, says so right at the start and in trailer, Marvel Studios.
The only new Spiderman film I enjoy is the one with Dafoe and Mcguire in.
Ben Kingsley is great, but he’s in Iron Man 3, not 1.
Yes. I didn’t want to say that iron man 3 was great. The suit army was ridiculous.
Pretty much any of the popular comedy movies. The Hangover, Hot Tub Time Machine, Elf, etc.
Not one comment in here about Lord of the Rings.
Which I agree with. Amazing movies. Glad everyone’s on the same page.
For me, it’s James Cameron’s Avatar. Visually stunning, especially for its time, but the story has to be the most cliche, predictable, boring, lazy piece of writing to ever have existed. It’s like they held an environmentally conscious 11 year old at gun point and made them write a story. The cigar chomping military guy working for corpos wants to pilfer a beautiful planet for its resources with disregard for the native populations that live there. Where have I seen that before? Oh yeah, ALL AROUND ME, EVERY FUCKING GOD DAMN DAY. Get an original idea.
Fuck this stupid piece of shit dumbass movie. It’s intellectually insulting. It’s a disgrace.
/endrant
Elf.
Explain
Really anything with that dude is just not funny to me. But that movie is a real low point.
Harry Potter.
Before JK went mask off, I had dropped the books about half way though for being increasing annoyed with how they ended. Never any change to the status quo except Harry actually regressing in character development. I watched the first movie, but that was around when I dropped the books and never looked back.
I was able to just quietly keep my opinions to myself, but with with JK becoming increasing unhinged with both her tweets and books, I haven’t felt the need to be polite with the “separate the art from the artists” types. Especially when they just assume that you’re a fan if you don’t correct them.
I haven’t read the books, but liked the movies. This is more of a expression of what I liked than anything else… But while JK turned into a mess, the movies generally were good even though
The first two are okay but the third one in particular is a favorite of mine. It’s less because of Harry Potter and more about just how well it stands as a well made movie. It is darker in the literal sense and movies a lot more away from the magic wonder feeling the former movies had. In particular by adding a horror like element that adds so much more tension then the older ones. When I was a kid it was terrifying how unsettling and discomforting things were made to be.
And despite it being the movie which used the never-seen-after completely world breaking time turners, it does an amazing job actually using them.There are all these things that go wrong, but just in the right way that the time loop works out without actually changing the first iteration we saw. The books probably do it the same way, but as a visual adaptation it’s right on the mark, down to the sense of time running out when the time travel shenanigans happen.
Then again, I’m weak for “good feelings” making a difference and similar, so the protection spell that chases the Dementors away at the crucial moments sure makes me giddy. So it’s a thematic bullseye for me, despite how much emotional discomfort the movie played with to get there.
I’m just gonna hop on to say that there is zero world building in Harry Potter. I know that’s because it was written for a youngish audience, but like the only things that are ever built on are used directly for the story in that book, then mostly left alone.
No one comes back years later with a Time Turner and wrecks havoc, for instance.
The few comparisons to Tolkien I’ve heard of her works are so unbelievably unfounded and off base.
Not to mention she’s a TERF
Sanderson’s third law of magic: Expand what you already have before you add something new.
Not sure why this was downvoted. It’s a very good point. Sanderson doesn’t like being openly critical of other authors but it’s pretty obvious that applying his laws to Rowling explains a fair amount of why her writing is bad.
No one comes back years later with a Time Turner and wrecks havoc
Fuck I hate her bullshit inconsistency with this. Prior to that shitty play coming out I could have given you a simple explanation for this. First: the time turners were all made inoperable during book 5 when the team went to the Ministry. This was shown explicitly in the text (and is an example of Rowling’s delayed reaction to criticism that I think the Shaun video brings up). It could be bypassed pretty easily if you wanted, but it also works well enough to explain why nobody else uses one anymore, for a kid’s book.
But more crucially, the way time turners work in the original is pretty clear: it’s a one-way trip back in time. In book 3 they travel back a matter of hours, and then work back to the “present” in real time. You can’t use it to go back and kill Hitler or something like that, unless you want to be permanently stuck in the past. It’s never said, but it’s feasible that it could have been expanded on by placing a hard limit on how far back you can go at all. Then she went and wrote the play and (supposedly—I never read or watched it myself) completely broke all of that. I suppose you could be generous and say she was following Sanderson’s 3rd law, but IMO it wasn’t so much “expanding” on what she already had as it was “completely retconning the way it works in a way that also undermines previously-established plots”.
And they were made inoperable in the laziest way possible. Like someone bumped a cabinet and ALL of them broke. Easy, no more time travel.
Fine enough for a kid’s book, but it tried to take itself WAY more seriously than that, just to continue to pick up and drop plot points and ideas constantly. I wouldn’t mind it if a fair few people didn’t hail it as if it’s a great work
I’m just gonna leave Shaun’s review here.
Harry Potter unintentionally made a whole subgenre of fiction that could be called “Harry Potter, but fixed”. Little Witch Academia’s workers union episode was great and Reign of the Seven Spellblades is a mid, but still fun anime that seemingly takes aim at opposing Harry Potter and JK(specifically, her anti-trans shit) at every turn. I haven’t read it, but Shaun seems to think that The Hog Father is a direct reaction to the house elf shit in HP.
JK Rowling holds a very common position amongst older feminists and really doesn’t deserve the constant rape threats for funding women’s refuges. I’m pushing back on the party line here, and no, I don’t believe trans people deserve to be killed, or any bullshit like that. I promise to hide them in my non-existent attic if it comes to that.
Edit: the books did get progressively worse after the third or possibly fourth one, though, and the films aren’t very good.
Her or her friends are running those charities. It’s a way to hide money from tax collectors.
Looking back with adult eyes, her books push a very pro-Class based society. That’s why nothing ever changes.
Edit: The books got progressively worse because JK wrangled more and more control away from her editor.
I’m not sure about the ownership of foundations, charitable funds and the like; some degree of corruption wouldn’t surprise me unfortunately.
I will say that she won’t have been deliberately pushing class-stratification given her socioeconomic background, however the whole setting is heavily influenced by Victorian-era children’s novels about boarding school adventures which were absolutely saturated with classism.
They surely needed a team of editors towards the end.
JK was never poor. Her “homelessness” was couch surfing between friend’s houses in Edinburgh.
If she didn’t approve of the class system, then why was the sorting hat never wrong? Having kids switch houses between school years would have been an easy to to signal character development for a younger audience. Her class system is depicted as shitty, but something you just have to accept as true and deal with to become stronger. Look at how they treat the one character to oppose slavery. Even our MC, who’s an outsider to the wizard world thinks it’s weird to be opposed to slavery.
It being common does not make it ok. If she were just quietly anti-trans in her personal life that might be something we could overlook. But she is proudly and actively hateful towards trans people. She ignores the fact that trans women are even more likely than cis women to be victims of gender-based violence and pretends that trans women are actually predators. And she engages in bullshit “transvestigating”, drumming up witch hunts against butch cis women. She is actively causing harm against women, including the cis women she claims to want to protect. She’s a terrorist using stochastic methods.
The John Wick series
Watched them all over the course of a weekend - its the same fucking moving over and over and over and over again. The amount of disbelief I needed to suspend got exponentially larger so by the time I got to the last movie I just couldn’t take it anymore. There is no real plot or any development of characters, it’s just implausible fight scene after implausible fight scene.
I think if I put a few months between each movie I wouldn’t have this opinion - on their own the movies can be mindlessly entertaining but all together was too much for me.
I love the first one and would argue it’s fairly grounded, it’s the sequels that quickly got unhinged.
Dude murders everyone over a dog. So grounded.
Murdering people over a dog part is still plausible. But the secret assassin organization where they pay for services using secret gold coins and talk about guns like fine wine, that was just a bit over the top.
I enjoyed the first movie; The “I hear you have struck my son.” scene sold it for me; if the movie was perfectly cliche that scene would have ended “Sorry sir, it’ll never happen again!” while a red laser dot is wiggling up his chest and then Viggo says “I know.” and we hear a gun shot through the phone. No, that “He stole John Wick’s car, sir; and he killed his dog.” “Oh.” It was a fresh helping of big Hollywood action movie. And for a big improbable ridiculous one man army action movie, it still had some restraint. It was at least a little grounded.
The second movie went right up its own ass. So, literally everyone everywhere in the world is a secret underground contract killer? I haven’t seen…I saw a thread about “there probably won’t be a John Wick 5 because Keanu’s knees” so 3 or 4. I enjoyed the first one.
