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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Only this time. Instead of a face. It’s got Four Arses.

If it also had a retractable leg and a terrible fear of stamps, I might have enjoyed the film.

 Momotaro wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Only this time. Instead of a face. It’s got Four Arses.

If it also had a retractable leg and a terrible fear of stamps, I might have enjoyed the film.

'kin hell

I'm sure we've utterly baffled a fair proportion of non Brit dakka there Ted

Adding Bladerunner 2049, had three runs at it and still unsure about it so think I'll side with disappointing

Endgame. 10 odd years of set up for an overly long, boring movie. Infinity war was at least fun in what it did.

The last predator had 4 asses for a face? Good god keep it away from the beans then!

As for me, the last godzilla movie was just awful, and i mean it was beyond disappointing.

Now I know I'll get people ing and moaning at me, but the end just made it total to me. The reason being it was a perfectly american ending. (yes yes people will call that too political, well, you're wrong.)

It was a cultural thing. The human race ing up the world with pollution, and the titans were beginning to wake up maybe because of that. The people who wanted to fight what humanity was doing were portrayed as stupid evil nuts who woke up ghidorah to fight pollution. They acknowledge a problem, then make the only people wanting to solve it the bad guys.

So our buddy godzilla saves the world and the rest of the kaiju (not titans) start fixing the world for us. They reboot the amazon, clean up pollution, bring dead species back to life, their droppings become a new green superfuel, etc. We don't have to change our awful ways at all, we don't have to clean things up, stop polluting, etc. No, the giant monsters will do everything for us so we don't have to change anything.

What a perfectly american ending. Keep driving the SUVs and wasting plastic by the ton, everyone. it's ok, the kaiju are here to fix the world for us! American consumers don;t have to change anything, american businesses don't have to change anything.

To be honest, the ending made me ashamed of how america handled the whole godzilla concept.

So that's one reason I found the last godzilla movie to be a titan-ic disappointment and almost an embarrassment to america. As far as godzilla movies go i'd say it was one of the worst when you compare it to the message of the original. The original was that the monsters were the results of our actions and we need to change them. Now the monsters are here to save us from the consequences of our actions and fix things for us.

Ugh. Not just disappointing but embarrassing. And that's a slap at american culture, not politics.

Superman 4 was just plain terrible and stupider than the comic books of the day. Absolutely awful looking effects, stupid plotline, bad acting and just one WTFGIMMEABREAK moment after another.

I have another recent stinker - Greyhound.

Looked awesome, with Tom Hanks, Navy WWII, how could it miss? Well, let's rush through it, like we ran out of money paying a probably hefty salary for TH. The worst for me was all of the squandered opportunities to invoke some real suspense - what a miserable 'love' interest backstory - why show it at all? What was going on under the water in the subs? What about the other allied navy ships or convoy ships? Why have the sub commander taunting without using it for real impact? Maybe there is a director's cut with more elements, but it was just so flat...

 Pacific wrote:

I am sounding like a stuck record but did you see Dunkirk in the cinema? It was a really awesome experience - the soundtrack, the effects, the way it was filmed. There were a couple of silly bits (Tom Hardy's perpetual gliding Spitfire) but I thought it was a really well made film and I think more than anything else has made me feel like I was there. I know it was unpopular with a lot of people because it wasn't particularly glorious and something that is regarded as a 'defeat' seems overly pessimistic. But, in my mind it showed the individual acts of valour and sacrifice and was much more poignant than Mel Gibson stood on a hill with a machine gun.

I did see it in a theatre and I did love the soundscape and thought the parallel storytelling was a neat and workable idea. Scenes in the Spitfire's cockpit were fun claustrophobic - really got the feeling of being inside a cramped war machine, like in 'Das Boot'. But the characters were bad, very simplistic and often idealized one-note characters. The war it was supposed to depict did not seem believable. The movie begins with a guy running from the Germans who shoot at him, he goes 10 metres and is on a beach and suddenly Germans are nowhere to be seen (until the end when they suddenly start shooting because the plot says so). Everything is clean, there are almost no bodies (actual Dunkirk beach was littered with corpses), there is no artillery, no distant rumble of war, not a single shot from an AA gun at the German planes constantly making attacks. It didn't feel at all like I was watching war, it felt like I was watching a play on a stage.

 Pacific wrote:

Kingdom of Heaven - I thought Orlando Bloom was the wrong lead for that film, otherwise it was great.

It might have worked if he would have been an idealistic kid going to this Holy War, instead he was this cynic guy forced in to it. He was just the wrong guy for it.
Supposedly the directors' cut is much better, but my biggest disappointment were the lame characters and weak dialogue so I think there's limit what it can do.

 Pacific wrote:

I agree about Blair Witch. The only mitigating thing for that is I think if I had seen it in the US, and it was when all of the viral advertising (and comments of "is it real life?") advertising campaign coincided with the release of the film and was certainly quite clever - I think if I had been in the US and seen it under those circumstances then I can understand why it caused such a stir. Watching it years later on Netflix, when the hand-held cam has been done to death, it really hasn't aged very well though.

Yes, I liked the BWP when I watched it back in the day, saw some of the viral stuff before it and so on. It was groundbreaking, even genius. Now when it has been copied and parodied gazillion of times and 'found footage' is a tired cliche, it loses nearly everything which made it intriguing at the time and without the context it's just boring and annoying.

The newest Hellboy movie. The Hollywood obsession of making every movie of this type as the origin movie of the character.

Let's take the final storyline (where the Hellboy dies) and make it as the origin storyline! WTF?

I was fine with the new HB actor (altough Ron Perlman rocked as HB in the previous movies), my disappointmen was the plot that just stomped all over the actual HB plotline. You already have a great plotline in the form of the graphic novel series. Why do you need to change it for the movie.
The fans of HB want to see the HB plotline in the movie… Why change it just for the sake of changing it?

And this movie was advertised that Mike Mignola had approved it and was part of the team behind the movie.
Maybe that is why I had such high expectations of it?

I don't usually get so invested in movies that I get disappointed when they fail. I just shrug it off and move on.
But this one I remember being pretty po'd about.

Voss wrote:

 Pacific wrote:

I am sounding like a stuck record but did you see Dunkirk in the cinema? It was a really awesome experience - the soundtrack, the effects, the way it was filmed. There were a couple of silly bits (Tom Hardy's perpetual gliding Spitfire) but I thought it was a really well made film and I think more than anything else has made me feel like I was there. I know it was unpopular with a lot of people because it wasn't particularly glorious and something that is regarded as a 'defeat' seems overly pessimistic. But, in my mind it showed the individual acts of valour and sacrifice and was much more poignant than Mel Gibson stood on a hill with a machine gun.

I did. It was overly loud with terrible sound editing (even vets of the actual battle complained that it was louder than the real battle) and very, very dull. More a comedy of errors without the comedy or any reason to care about the characters as they're passed along failed and emotionless escape attempts and finally end up exactly where you expect.

By far the most moving moment was Kenneth Branagh standing at the end of the dock clearly having an internal soliloquy on the subject of 'What the hell am I doing? I'm better than this!'

---
the Mel Gibson comparison is a weird strawman for an argument nobody raised.

It definitely qualifies as one of the most disappointing films I've seen in a theatre in the last few years. Not for being objectively terrible but just for doing nothing of any note. Its a forgettable, not-accurate-enough portrayal of a moment of history that could have been served better, laboriously going over the same ground from different perspectives but not handling any of the details well (despite the details being exactly what that sort of laborious style lives or dies by).

Sorry I mentioned Mel Gibson as an example of a glorification of what war represents (absolutely nothing to do with anything you had said). The Platoon portrayal to the John Wayne shootin' bad guys, with Dunkirk being more of the former.

Fair enough - we can't all like the same thing !

I do think some effort was made with accuracy though, even though certain bits of it were very much dramatisations. If you read this account from a veteran that was there for example https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/dunkirk-film-premiere-christopher-nolan-veteran-tears-watch-harry-styles-cillian-murphy-tom-hardy-cinema-a7856456.html

Finally - I think it's very possible the film means more to me as a British person than for anyone from another country (apologies if I am wrong there - just going off the little flag on the profile!) This event was very much a story told to me many times growing up, in history classrooms, in documentaries and in books so that it is part of the British culture and psyche.
I know that doesn't mean everything, but it made this film especially powerful as it was something I had read about many times, to the point it put shivers down my spine as I was watching it. But, I do recognise that it's very much a subjective thing and the film won't have appealed to everyone.

In my view a much more exciting, well crafted film about Dunkirk with actual characters and a plot is the 1958 film - which although "of its Time" succeeds in these areas where the Nolan film fails.

 Jadenim wrote:
Tenet; I was so looking forward to another cool, slick sci-fi thriller like Inception, but the plot exposition was poor and marred by the worst sound editing I have ever experienced. I was literally sat there wishing I could turn the subtitles on!

Oh man, I had thought it was just me about wanting subtitles lol!

Unlike a few folks in this thread though, I absolutely LOVED the movie! So much so, I saw it twice paying waaaaaaay closer attention to dialogue the second time.

Much like Inception, seeing it a second time explains so much. I thought it was just brilliant, and loved the two main male protaganist characters in particular.

Folks should definitely give this a shot when it releases (possibly with subtitles ). Much like Blade Runner 2049, this might not slay the box office but is just incredibly well done for its type imo.

Don’t get me wrong, there was an awful lot of good stuff in that film and I am looking forward to home release, but that’s why it was so disappointing; the sound design ruined it for me.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, I love Blade Runner 2049 and don’t understand why it didn’t perform well, given it was a spot-on sequel in terms of tone and theme.

Suicide Squad (the first one) for me, because at the time it seemed like something different from DC for once and the trailers seemed interesting enough. It was one of the few movies where my friends and I were watching halfway through, looked at each other and flat out said, "This movie kinda sucks". We didn't walk out since we were almost done at that point, but we spent the after-movie event ragging on how confusingly bad it was. It's only gotten worse when they've shown through 2 separate DC animated movies with the suicide squad that had way better writing and acting.

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Endgame. 10 odd years of set up for an overly long, boring movie. Infinity war was at least fun in what it did.

I don't particularly care for comics, but I'll spare everyone the reasoning.

Despite that, I loved the MCU up until Endgame. The onscreen reimagining of the characters was excellent. The way everything was tied together and built upon all the way up until Endgame was brilliant.
When Thor 2 and Iron Man 2 are arguably your biggest missteps as a franchise you've done well. Then Endgame came out and it was a hot mess.

I think ten years from now people will look back at it as the turning point in quality for the MCU.

 Jadenim wrote:
Don’t get me wrong, there was an awful lot of good stuff in that film and I am looking forward to home release, but that’s why it was so disappointing; the sound design ruined it for me.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, I love Blade Runner 2049 and don’t understand why it didn’t perform well, given it was a spot-on sequel in terms of tone and theme.

I hadn't realised that BR2049 hadn't done well, really surprising. I wonder if it came out alongside some other releases and badly timed?

But then I think the first one was even more of a commercial disaster and has gone on to cult status.

 Pacific wrote:

 Jadenim wrote:
Don’t get me wrong, there was an awful lot of good stuff in that film and I am looking forward to home release, but that’s why it was so disappointing; the sound design ruined it for me.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, I love Blade Runner 2049 and don’t understand why it didn’t perform well, given it was a spot-on sequel in terms of tone and theme.

I hadn't realised that BR2049 hadn't done well, really surprising. I wonder if it came out alongside some other releases and badly timed?

But then I think the first one was even more of a commercial disaster and has gone on to cult status.

I enjoyed quite a bit of the new Bladerunner film and like the first - it looked great BUT

I was far more interested in the AI/replicant relationship than the Decker/child story and I found the ending a bit of a let down.
For me it was far far too long.

Quite a bit of it did not make sense and because it was slow you had time to think about it.

Making replicants surely can;t take as long as breeding them - there was no real reason why - and given most people live in poverty what are you trying to replace - a cheapo labour force? That kinda damaged one of the central pillars - was the main bad guy just supposed to be falling into insanity?

Despite that, I loved the MCU up until Endgame. The onscreen reimagining of the characters was excellent. The way everything was tied together and built upon all the way up until Endgame was brilliant.
When Thor 2 and Iron Man 2 are arguably your biggest missteps as a franchise you've done well. Then Endgame came out and it was a hot mess.

Interesting - what elements did you not like - I really enjoyed the attention to detail, the fact that it was still (like all MCU films thus far) about people, that they took the time to give so many people clever moments in the film.

...and the final fight scene was really good.

Yeah, I enjoyed the hell out of Endgame. It was certainly not as polished as some of the previous films, but it had an awful lot of ground to cover.

On the disappointment front, I finally got around to checking out the sequel to Cube the other day. So very not as good as the first one. But because I'm a glutton for punishment, and on a bit of a 'dodgy sci fi' kick, I then went and watched the prequel (Cube Zero) and was pleasantly surprised by how much like the first one it was, while still being a very different take on the premise.

Cube Zero is definitely superior to Hypercube.

Original is a stone cold classic of course. A standout example of how to do a lot with very little.

Cube Zero works perfectly as a prequel.

Thanks for the tip about Cube Zero - will take a look! I enjoyed the original, was a really good idea and had some great (and disgusting) set pieces.

Cube Zero is certainly on point for disgusting deaths...

If you like the "cube" movies you might like a dark little one I reviewed here recently called "Domain" from 2018.

I wasn't too fond of it but i didn't really like the cube movies either.

 insaniak wrote:
Cube Zero is certainly on point for disgusting deaths...

Isn't Cube Zero the sugar-free version of Cube?

Judge Dredd.

To be fair, that was my initial impression.

See, the Stallone effort came out just as I was really getting into Dredd, but before I’d read much of the historical stuff.

They nailed the look, yes. But got so much wrong it irritated a little edgelord purist me.....at the time.

I’ve now read about as much Dredd as anyone, and in particular all the early stuff (thanks, Hachette!).

And y’know, they managed to blend up a fair few classic strips into a single movie. So whilst still no great, my opinion has softened, and it’s my Guilty Pleasures list.

The Fountain

I expected something a bit more profound than a Disney-fied Circle of Life theme.... but no.

There were essentially three divergent story lines from different timelines, that all lead into one big theme.

I was expecting something more from it, and it ended up making me very mad!

With regards to the Endgame big bash, for my own part, the end fight scene was more Ready Player One pop-culture extravaganza than anything else, it felt like it was about mashing as many characters on screen as possible in a giant combat that made zero sense to fight the way it was fought with ultimately meaningless Deus Ex Machina events all over the place (e.g. everything about Captain Marvel in that fight). That said, for many viewers, a pop-culture character mis-mash extravaganza was exactly what they were there for admittedly, but so much of it was narratively irrelevant and forced that it was hard, for me at least, to keep my suspension of disbelief in check.

So by Captain Marvel, you mean the character already shown to be fundamentally invulnerable, more than capable of simply flying through enemy ships, and generally being quipped?

Who eventually shows up to...erm....be fundamentally invulnerable, fly through and wreck the enemy’s sold capital ship, and be quite quippy?

Granted, the whole “don’t worry, she’s got help” felt superfluous, because it was equivalent to the Justice League saying they’ve got Superman’s back.....

But....really?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
So by Captain Marvel, you mean the character already shown to be fundamentally invulnerable, more than capable of simply flying through enemy ships, and generally being quipped?

Who eventually shows up to...erm....be fundamentally invulnerable, fly through and wreck the enemy’s sold capital ship, and be quite quippy?

Granted, the whole “don’t worry, she’s got help” felt superfluous, because it was equivalent to the Justice League saying they’ve got Superman’s back.....

But....really?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "quippy" or "quipped" exactly.

However, my issue was basically with the character showing up to neutralize a threat that was really kind of hamfistedly inserted in there specifically for the character to defeat for the sake of making an appearance. Had you cut Captain Marvel's appearance completely, there's really nothing of narrative value that Endgame loses.

Granted, I had that same opinion of the character in their own movie (within the larger MCU, you could have just cut CM from that flick and just had it be a Nick Fury origin story and it would fit just as well within the larger narrative and be no less capable as a stand-alone movie really), but Endgame as a whole felt that way for a lot of stuff, it wasn't unique to Captain Marvel.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
So by Captain Marvel, you mean the character already shown to be fundamentally invulnerable, more than capable of simply flying through enemy ships, and generally being quipped?

Who eventually shows up to...erm....be fundamentally invulnerable, fly through and wreck the enemy’s sold capital ship, and be quite quippy?

Granted, the whole “don’t worry, she’s got help” felt superfluous, because it was equivalent to the Justice League saying they’ve got Superman’s back.....

But....really?

One of my fav bits of that glorious film was her showing up and kicking ass.

 Easy E wrote:
The Fountain

I expected something a bit more profound than a Disney-fied Circle of Life theme.... but no.

There were essentially three divergent story lines from different timelines, that all lead into one big theme.

I was expecting something more from it, and it ended up making me very mad!

And a score that good warranted a movie that deserved it, imho

Casualty wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
The Fountain

I expected something a bit more profound than a Disney-fied Circle of Life theme.... but no.

There were essentially three divergent story lines from different timelines, that all lead into one big theme.

I was expecting something more from it, and it ended up making me very mad!

And a score that good warranted a movie that deserved it, imho

The score is phenomenal, for sure.

 Vaktathi wrote:
With regards to the Endgame big bash, for my own part, the end fight scene was more Ready Player One pop-culture extravaganza than anything else, it felt like it was about mashing as many characters on screen as possible in a giant combat that made zero sense to fight the way it was fought with ultimately meaningless Deus Ex Machina events all over the place (e.g. everything about Captain Marvel in that fight). That said, for many viewers, a pop-culture character mis-mash extravaganza was exactly what they were there for admittedly, but so much of it was narratively irrelevant and forced that it was hard, for me at least, to keep my suspension of disbelief in check.

The final fight scene was a hot mess. The girl power moment was horrific pandering that could have easily been done naturally and better.

@MrMorden

Everything up until the time jump was fine. I hated everything after that. They could have gone in so many directions even with that opening and went with the laziest, pandering story they could have possibly come up with.

I wish they had done something along the lines of a figuring out how to defeat Infinity Gauntlet Thanos before tracking him down and defeating him.