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Wanted (2008) - The comics are brilliant, sharp, funny and intelligent. By leaving out everything smart/interesting from the comics they managed to create a mediocre action movie.
this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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Asklemmy
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Basically every Terminator movie after T2. They have some great "what if" premises that could add so much depth to the world, but then struggle to see the vision through is a satisfying way.
T3: Let's actually show Judement Day
T4: Let's show the turning point in the war against the machines (edit: and why people follow John Connor as leader of the resistance)
T5: Exists
T6: What if all this time travel actually branched the timeline? What would it look like if one of Skynet's terminators succeeded?
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I in no way call this "mediocre"; Its just a flat our terrible low budget bullshit film that the director made as an excuse to hang out with shirtless dudes.
But years ago the guys at Red Letter Media did a segment on "Bigfoot vs D.B. Cooper", and that premise alone (what happened after D.B. Cooper landed) has lived in my brain ever since.
It legitimately angers me that such a great high concept idea was completely wasted on what basically amounts to gay porn.
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No Country For Old Men - a slice of life movie about living in Texas.
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The Man from Earth
B4
Triangle
Time Lapse
Daybreakers
Evolution
Knowing
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Show, but LOST, I remember what could've been...
The eternal metric of a good show hitting a point in season 3 or 4 where every episode opens 20 more questions than it answers, making me wonder if its going to Do a Lost on me and just fall apart. (ahem-Yellowjackets&Severance-ahem)
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S Darko was interesting because at it's core it's about the fact that women have to deal with twice as much bullshit
Passengers had the possibility to be really creepy, I still liked it but without seeing Chris Pratts time alone first, we would have all been confused and on guard with Jennifer Lawrence.
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Interstellar is like Neo-Posadism minus Marxism. The premise was awesome. Climate apocalypse and space travel. But the movie doesn't have humanity solve either of those problems. Instead it pops it's collar and says *don't worry bro, ~~the market~~ ~~Marxist space aliens~~ ~~some scientists~~ ~~a famous shirtless hot actor guy~~ fuck you who cares the green guy behind a curtain made a worm hole or something".
I have a feeling Chris Nolan goes into films with some specifically detailed poignant character moments in mind, and then he just hastily weaves a plot to tie them together. It's interesting to watch at least, but maybe too high brow(?) to call entertaining
For Interstellar, at least, I'd say it's incredibly low-brow. The resolution is just "the power of wuv saves humanity!", which is extremely simplistic and easily understood by the masses.
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Not a movie, but a TV show. Revolution.
A sci-fi post-apocalypse show where the premise is that all of a sudden all technology (specifically anything that uses electricity) just stops working and nobody knows why. The show takes place 15 years into the apocalypse. The US has Balkanized into various regional states (although you don't learn this until later). Some regions have devolved into chaos while others have basically reverted to a steam-punk type of society. Since all modern ships use electricity, they've begun to revive large ships from the age of sail. The remnants of the US military at Guantanamo Bay eventually return to the mainland and try to reestablish a much more explicitly authoritarian control over the US. You eventually learn that what caused the global blackout was the creation of a self-replication nanotech which rapidly spread across the planet and shut off all electricity.
Great premise, but it got too much into the soap-opera CW-style of writing and didn't last more than 2 seasons.
Yeah really fun premise slathered in boring characters.
If I recall it devolved into some CW-flavor bullshit revolving around the girl, who is her real father, why is she special. Blah blah blah.
Yep. Sounds like what happened with Jericho. Mystery and intrigue in the starting seasons, and then just weird petty soap-opera style squabbles towards the end
If the writers want to tell a story focused on inter-personal relationships, that's perfectly fine. There are PLENTY of people who enjoy that kind of thing. They just don't tend to be the same type of people who enjoy post-apocalyptic sci-fi puzzle-box shows. I don't know why you go through all the trouble of creating this expansive world and lore only to focus your show on character dynamics that aren't centered around the conceit of the show.
If you're going to build this complex world, let us explore that world!
Poor Jericho, I need to hunt down the graphic novels that supposedly gave it a proper ending.
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many
As featured in the picture, Reign of Fire. I had forgotten about it. I truly don't think there is a film out there that has represented dragons as I see them better.
I really think about Quinn's character a lot. How the world entirely changed for him on that pivotal day he discovered that male dragon, and the decades he spent running and surviving and living in fear of something that he inadvertently set in motion, and then the turning point as an adult as he confronts his fear and wields it to put an end to what he started.
What I like about him, is that he's not actually that unique -- anybody could have woken that dragon, and if Quinn hadn't been there on that day, one of his mother's coworkers would have. He's not particularly heroic as an adult either, opting to hide and scrounge for survival, and openly admitting to everyone that he's winging it on the leader front. And yet he inspires his community with fierce devotion to keeping them all alive. When he finally goes to confront the dragon, he does it almost alone, inspiring no one with his courage other than himself.
As a character I find him weirdly relatable as someone just coping with heavy trauma the best that they can
A few favorites:
- Constantine
- The Last Jedi
- Jupiter Ascending
- Minority Report
- Prometheus
- Valerian
- Logan's Run
I'll be that guy that enjoyed The Last Jedi explicitly because it was something different, and leaned into more of the mystical side of the force while on the "big screen."
Edit and spoiler just in case
I just remembered the hyperspace "weapon" moment, and both how cool it was and how much it could affect the empire. They probably didn't mean for it, but that you could effectively point and shoot a ship like that was an amazing usage.
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Bruh Constantine is one of my favorite films ever. It's so fucking awesome!
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Constantine and Minority Report shouldn't be on that list, IMO. The former in particular is very well executed and thoroughly enjoyable!
I love Constantine, and genuinely do not get the hate that film got. Sure it was different from the comics, but it was good in its own right, and the casting and acting (with the exception of that guy from Even Steven) was spot on
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Hot take, βHitchhikerβs Guide To The Galaxyβ. The radio play, books and 80s bbc show were not represented very well at all. They missed well over 75% of the jokes, Mos Def and Zooey Deschanel added nothing to it, and they added plots and scenes, I think just to get more βblockbuster actorsβ in, that ruin the original story of the radio play. Sam Rockwell, Alan Rickman/Warwick Davis and Bill Nightly were the highlights. One of the few movies I wish they would remake.
Sam Rockwell as Zaphod was spot on. He was the only one who actually read the books, and had to even tell the director to add "Froody" to the script. What a shitshow it must have been for the director not to know that....
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Just watched The Gorge (2025) recently. I wouldn't say it's a bad film, but it was really mediocre.
I love the premise of having the two guard towers, one on each side of a mysterious and foggy gorge, not supposed to communicate with each other, guarding us all from whatever is down there. People have previously gone in but never come out. Strange monsters sometimes attempt the climb up the cliff walls. Is it the gate to hell? What's the story behind it all? Chemistry slowly happens between the guards of the two towers.
(If you think you might enjoy this movie, don't read my spoilers. Just watch it. I liked it even though it was a bit disappointing.)
spoiler
But the good setup and world building is quickly over and then they both enter the gorge, and it's just an old evacuated biological lab that created super soldiers, and the whole thing instantly stops being mysterious.
They could have kept it mysterious for longer and given us some kind of twist perhaps, like they might discover they're guarding the site of an old defunct biolab, but some things don't add up, and it turns out to be the actual gates of hell. I also don't think Drasa should have dived straight in to rescue Levi. Let her hesitate for a while. Create tension. Keep them separated, him somewhere below and her in her tower (perhaps she will need to get over to his tower to reactivate the auto-turrets or do something important, she believes he's gone), and cut between showing both their struggles. Perhaps he then manages to contact her, and then a rescue effort begins.
Somebody played Enshrouded and decided to make a post-Cold War movie out of it
the trailer didn't entice me that much, so I went ahead with the spoilers. Yeah I hate when a good mystery is ruined by over-explaining.
I still haven't forgiven Steven King for writing all those sequels to The Gunslinger
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