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.
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.
Interstellar. That ending was so unbelievably dumb that I can’t even stomach the rest of the movie thinking about it.
I know it’s got rave reviews, a stacked cast, Nolan directing. Plenty was pretty, cool concepts, high stakes scenes. But that ending… shudders
honestly, i disagree. i really don’t see the big problems with the ending. i actually even like it.
the library (called a tesseract in the movie) is constructed by the future humans, who have control of 5d space, and who include Murphy, who actually lived in the room connected to the tesseract. it’s built to look like that, so Cooper, a 3d being, can actually understand it. it’s basically stretching out time and gravity into a 3d space. the library is not something the black hole made up because Cooper loves Murphy (which i thought what happened on my first watch), it’s what the future humans made with the help of the black hole. love ties thematically into it, 'cause Cooper loves and knows Murphy so well, he knows how to tell her the quantum data from the black hole, or something. and Cooper, or the future humans for that matter, can’t say or do anything directly, 'cause in the past, they’re only able to affect gravity (and because of the construction of the tesseract, Cooper can only control the gravity of that one room.) the reason for why the future humans don’t go just directly do it themselves is explained as them not being able to pinpoint a specific space, or time for it, which is why Cooper, who can traverse the tesseract for a specific point in time and space in that room to tell Murphy the quantum data, which allows the future humans to do all of the crazy 5d stuff.
anyway, sorry for the rambling. Interstellar is my favourite movie, and i really love even the ending of it. multiple scenes, including the ending, make me bawl like a baby, like no other movie has done to me, and i love all the hard sci-fi it has. sci-fi so hard, that physicists learned something new about black holes, because of the equations used to make the black hole cgi in it.
Forest Gump. The 1994 Best Picture nominees were some of the most highly competitive the Academy has ever had, and they went with the one that was just a straight-up terrible fucking movie. It has no value except as nostalgia bait for Americans and propaganda for those who want to believe in the myth of American individual exceptionalism.
Its musical score is also probably the worst thing I’ve ever had the misfortune of performing in an orchestra. Dull and repetitive.
And its most famous line is straight-up bullshit. I’ve heard the book does it differently, but the movie puts “something that kinda sounds deep to a 14 year old” over a level of rationality that stands up to 20 seconds of thought from an average person. A box of chocolates tells you precisely what you’re going to be getting.
Spirited Away
No consistent world, cringy behaviour of the main character, love story out of nowhere, you can’t have a plot twist if you didn’t have any previously established lore. It felt a bit like a dream that was trying to take itself seriously as an actual story.
how dare you
Upvote
Spirited Away, and to some degree all Ghibli stuff leans very heavily on a shared cultural Mythos. It doesn’t do exposition in the same way that zombies or angels aren’t explained; everyone knows that stuff because we all grew up with a million references.
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.
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.
Lord of the Rings.
I understand and respect the seminal role LotR (Book) has as a fantasy work. I have to, as a fantasy nerd myself.
I also believe that those three movies that everyone loves could be edited down into one and not much would be lost.
God DAMN do those films drag ON and ON and ON.
The books, too, drag on like Tolkien was being paid by the individual word. Thankfully with books I can set the pace at which things go.
I also believe that those three movies that everyone loves could be edited down into one and not much would be lost.
Just factually wrong on this one, sorry. I can prove it, too:
The films we have right now are already severely cut versions of the story and many people agree that we lost some good shit in that cutting
As someone who did gonna school: how exactly could you cut Fellowship any further without completely removing something essential? That movie is on fast forward it has so little time to get through the story
If you think Ernest Cline’s movie is cringy, wait until you read his poetry. Absolutely one of the worst piece of writing I’ve ever read.
And it only gets worse from there.
ET, Ghost Busters, Back to The Future, Anything Marvel, DC apart from Joker. And many more.
Inglourious Basterds.
However much I liked all the Tarantino flicks before this one, I just cannot get into Inglourious. Also, everything Tarantino made after that movie is also tainted by the same uneasy feeling I get. If pressed to guess why, I’d say he took the stories out of the ‘now’ and transported them to other times and places, which just does not seem to agree with me.
I think Basterds was his first movie that casually re-wrote history, which threw off the movie’s tone for me. Like a historical “what if” movie. And every movie he’s done since then has the same feel to me now.
Napoleon dynamite was fucking garbage and don’t think it should have ever existed. No humor and barley anything. Honestly feel like the movie rubber was better
What?!?
What?!?
As an older millennial, that movie was a work of art. I was about 20 when I seen it, stoned, and I couldn’t stop laughing.
Fellow elder millennial that also never understood the appeal of Napoleon Dynamite, still don’t and I’ve watched it stoned as hell
Also elder millennial. I watched half the movie and turned it off. It was horrid.
I just don’t get it. I absolutely loved every second of it. From the opening scene to the credits it was one of my favorite movies ever made and still is.
Hard disagree, lol. That’s a classic.
I wonder… is it because you have little/no experience with small town America? I loved Napoleon Dynamite partly because it’s somewhat nostalgic for me. The movie appeals to people who grew up in the sticks and knew people like Napoleon Dynamite.
Donnie Darko.
It was so overhyped back when it came out because the OG hipster crowd of the early 90s thought it was cool, as did younger people who valued things that were “indie” as if that inherently adds value.
Fuck your lack of commitment to sparkle motion.
Oh I have another one. Thor Ragnarok. People loved it because they liked the Thor character and found his earlier films too dull or something, but I loved that they were unapologetically serious about themselves, using comedy in ways that felt very authentic to the characters.
But Ragnarok? It came out later the same year as this excellent essay about bathos, and it was dripping in it. I was hyper tuned to the problem with bathos, and it leaned even harder into that took than nearly any other MCU film did.
What sucks so much is that it had the bones of a really good dramatic story. The Bruce Banner/Hulk storyline had built up over multiple previous films, and come the climax of this film it’s established that he’s in Bruce form now and has enough control to stay that way, but if he transforms into Hulk it’ll be a big deal and he may never be able to be himself again. So they arrive in Asgard at the climax of the film and it’s pretty urgent. In a dramatic moment you can see him steel himself to make the sacrifice; he jumps out of their aircraft onto the rainbow bridge, clearly intending to transform into Hulk to fight Fenris.
…and he splats. Faceplants on the bridge. Still in human form. It’s played for laughs. The ultimate conclusion of Hulk’s story in this movie and probably the most important moment of his arc over the entire MCU to this point, and it’s undercut by a joke. Not even a very funny one. A slapstick joke that would make Charlie Chaplin cringe.
And it means nothing, because the very next shit, he’s transformed anyway and throwing Fenris around like a doll.
Not to mention it undermines the verisimilitude of the movie. I can suspend my disbelief in these movies pretty hard, but Bruce Banner, in human form, is meant to be painfully average, physically speaking. He should have died from that fall, given he didn’t transform. That’s certainly not the worst thing about the moment, but it is was the sprinkling of salt on top of the wound that just made it that little bit worse.
That moment was the worst bit, but the film as a whole was full of lazy humour and bathos, and it was really just the worst example of what was wrong with a lot of MCU movies at the time. I was shocked to hear so few people came away disliking it in the same way I did.
I’m sorry but all the previous Thor movies (and the one after this) are ASS. Ragnarok is the only good Thor movie.
Saving Private Ryan
I like Spielberg, but compared to others in the war drama genre like Band of Brothers or Full Metal Jacket, SPR is laughably bad.
The tone of the movie, trying to be more inspirational than realistic, was awkward at best. Acting was pretty mediocre, probably because the script and characters were 1 dimensional.
It completely disregards the historical context of the war. You could watch this movie and learn absolutely nothing about the history of WWII.
Now Band of Brothers. That was some amazing retelling of true war stories. It wasn’t trying to be inspirational. It was just honest about the chaos and brutality of war. That made it harrowing heartbreaking, infuriating, and inspirational all at once.
The beginning of Saving Private Ryan is the only part worth to watch. It’s pretty meh afterwards.
ITT: people using the downvote button as an “I disagree” button when the entire point is to name popular movies that you dislike. Sort by controversial for the real answers, I guess.
For me it’s Alien. Maybe because I’m not a horror movie buff, but I do like sci-fi and yet it just didn’t really do anything for me. I somehow found Prometheus to be more engaging.
Oh wow, complete opposite here - I thought Prometheus was hot garbage.
“Hey everybody, let’s just remove our helmets in this totally unvetted environment, we’re all scientists but trust me, this is supes safe!”
“Aw look at the little alien snake, so cute, better get real close!”
“I’m clearly showing symptoms of exposure to some alien pathogen, but let’s just hide it from the entire crew, including my girlfriend, who I will be fucking.”
“Oh, a huge ring is rolling toward me and I’m gonna get crushed, better keep running in a straight line!”
I mean, come on.
Aw look at the little alien snake, so cute, better get real close!
The same can be said when in Alien the scientist shoves his face close to what is clearly a moving egg that responded to him as he got closer.
There were no scientists in Alien. It’s a bunch of space truckers and they’re infinitely more competent than the hand picked group in Prometheus.
Both can be true.
I never watched alien growing up, and only half-watched it with a girlfriend (sorry, good movies are great but… Boobs vs stereotypical teenager watching a movie…)
By the time I watched the movie fully, it just held no scare factor for me.
And so many dumb choices were made in Prometheus, it’s hard to take the people seriously when everyone is acting like children who have never been in space or a dangerous situation before.
angry upvote
But honestly, fair. Alien is a 50-year-old movie, so when viewed with a modern lens it might not seem to be anything special.
Part of the legendary status of Alien is just how influential it has been. Before Alien, a horror-scifi movie would be some schlock about flying saucers piloted by men in gorilla masks terrorizing Hollywood. Audiences certainly weren’t expecting a psychosexual thriller about forced oral insemination and mpreg.
And the android! Robots in movies were walking vending machines, and yet the robot in Alien is just some guy until he starts to malfunction. Plus in the context of the franchise, it makes you distrust every single android in each subsequent movie, and might even leave you guessing who else in the cast could be a robot in disguise.
Other movies have done it better since then. We all stand on the shoulders of giants after all. And the funny thing is, a lot of the time when you look back at the movies that spawn the tropes, they don’t seem that impressive because they haven’t been totally refined yet.
I have a soft spot for Alien, it’s my favorite in the franchise. It relies so heavily on practical effects, it’s got those retro-futuristic computers which I adore, and the smart woman saves the day (sort of) after all the dumb men tell her she’s wrong. And yet despite what I just said, I don’t think anyone is actually very dumb, the characters are all quite human and I understand and relate to their motivations.
It’s a movie that feels far more modern than it is. You might even forget that it’s fifty years old until you see that explosive finale in gloriously bad 70’s CGI
I also liked Prometheus. It’s not the best in the franchise but it’s certainly not the worst, and it doesn’t deserve as much hate as it gets in the community
I was with you until you implied Prometheus was likeable because at least it’s not the worst.
