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 supreme overlord wrote:
JA might have been the literal worst movie I have ever seen... In my life.

I hear you.

I walked out of that film halfway through. So much bad that it's soured me on overly glitzy, CGI, sci-fi movies and I have no desire to see Valerian, Luc Besson, or not.

JA... JA...

Ah, Jupiter Ascending!

Yeah, it was terrible, and a total waste of Mila Kunis... But wasn't that the Wachowski Brothers / Siblings? I don't think that Luc Besson had anything to do with it.

Yeah, it was a Wachowski thing - Besson had nowt to do with it.

It was ... very "pretty" and light on the story (and Eddie Redmayne mumbled his way through it).

OK, thanks. Although, I'd say that JA wasn't that pretty. Or rather, I can't recall anything that wowed me from it. Unlike the Matrix or the Fifth Element.

JA was pretty forgettable. Lucy, too, aside from how bad the writing was..

Well, some of the ship FX sequences were brilliantly done in JA.

Hence the "pretty".

As for the rest ... not so much.

About the only thing that really "wowed" me with the matrix movie was the concept design work by Geoff Darrow (and some of the prac FX work by some friends of mine).

As the movies went on, they got less and less "wow"-ey and more and more "less-exposition, more showing please.".

The first Matrix film is still pretty good as a stand alone. After seeing the dumpster fire sequels I just went back to occasionally watching the first one.

I noticed an inverse relationship between money and quality when it comes to Wachowski sisters movies.

Matrix - not too much money, awesome film. The second and third? Mo' money, mo' rubbish.

I figured that JA was what happens when someone says "here's a big bag of money, make a film", quality goes down the toilet.

The deciding event that made me realise that it was a whole new level of bad was when Sean Bean refers to Mila Kunis as "your highness". The next words out of her mouth should have been "what the hell are you talking about?", not waiting 5-10 minutes to bring this up.

I was disappointed that I'd wasted 1 1/2 hours of my time on earth on this tosh and the the only way that things could get any worse would be wasting another 1 1/2 hours watching more chases/shooting /explosions.

 supreme overlord wrote:
JA might have been the literal worst movie I have ever seen... In my life.

Aliens Vs Predator?

 Pacific wrote:

 supreme overlord wrote:
JA might have been the literal worst movie I have ever seen... In my life.

Aliens Vs Predator?

HOW QUITE DARE YOU

I'm glad I paid to see this movie, as I want to support big sci-fi.

But god damn was it awful. It wasn't just bad, some of it was offensively bad. Like, frustratingly awful.

The writing, characterization and pacing were all soooooooo bad. There are some movies that are bad but in a fun way, like early Fast and Furious or Independence Day. This wasn't one of those movies.

 Pacific wrote:

 supreme overlord wrote:
JA might have been the literal worst movie I have ever seen... In my life.

Aliens Vs Predator?

Still better than The Crow: City of Angels, Silent Hill and the Mutant Chronicles movie.

I thought The Crow: City of Angels was a cheese induced nightmare of mine

it's actually a real film?

that's even worse

 Ouze wrote:

 Pacific wrote:

 supreme overlord wrote:
JA might have been the literal worst movie I have ever seen... In my life.

Aliens Vs Predator?

HOW QUITE DARE YOU

Indeed.

Highlander 2 was vastly inferior to all of the above.

Battlefield Earth. The only movie I saw get zero stars in the paper.

 Pacific wrote:

 supreme overlord wrote:
JA might have been the literal worst movie I have ever seen... In my life.

Aliens Vs Predator?

I once heard Aliens vs. Predator described as "like Shakespeare".

The full quote was "Aliens vs. Predator 2 makes Aliens vs. Predator look like Shakespeare".

I'm a big fan of Valerian comics so I finally went and watched it despite the bad reviews. It turned out that reviews were mostly spot-on.
Visually, I find it was quite good and faithful presentation of the comics feel. It sure feels "We have seen this before" now, but that is because the comic was so far ahead of its time, and hugely influental - original Star Wars visuals were partly inspired by Valerian and of course, 5th element even more.

I thought the plot was quite good though pretty predictable, it seemed like a plausible Valerian plot and it was indeed heavily based on one of the albums. Lead actors were visually quite dead-on too so far all fine. I will complain about the costumes, green Galaxity....er, Federation(ack) uniforms were beyond stupid, so were all tiny LED lights splattered all around the exosuits.

And so we hit the major problems first of which is the dialogue which is really hamfisted and boring. It's as if they just did first draft, decided "oh crap we need to start filming" and went with it without any improvements or doctoring.
Lore purists such as myself wonder why so many names were changed - most notably, GALAXITY was called "Federation". What the heck? Next we know, Cpt Kirk will be flying for the "Galactic Empire". Also many aliens were renamed for no obvious reason, especially the iconic Shinguzi.

Laureline is now a product of some "elite school". Umm, okay... In the comics she is medieval peasant girl whom Valerian found during one of his time travels and gave Galaxity education. This is major aspect of her character, since she is not a native Galaxity citizen, which sometimes gives her differing viewpoint on things. Apparently all of this is ignored in the movies. Valerian was made way more reckless ladies man-hero than he is in the comics, where he is slightly awkward socially but very professional in action.

But the biggest problem of the movie is lead duo's relationship. In the comics it was always present but in the background. It was obvious they had something going on beyond being mere coworkers but it was usually not main viewpoint of the story. In the movie it was crammed down the viewers throats first minute in and continued relentlessly through entire flick. Heck, ten minutes in Valerian PROPOSES Laureline. W.T.F??? They don't even attempt to build any kind of chemistry between the leads but immediately jump into romantic hyperdrive, and as a byproduct their bickering also becomes super annoying. Maybe they thought that the movie would bomb so they tied up the romance storyline immediately so it wouldn't be left hanging, dunno. It's too bad since with little bit of dialogue adjustment the characters would have been much more likeable and movie would have easily gained 1 extra star in reviews and I might be slightly excited for the prospect of a sequel, which I am not now.

Backfire wrote:
I'm a big fan of Valerian comics so I finally went and watched it despite the bad reviews.

I am waiting for my local library to get it on Blu-Ray.