Aimed high...but shot low

[Klaus]

...the entire frakking PT is first on my list, in screaming 1000-foot-high flaming letters.

The Matrix... couldn't bring myself to watch the other two.

I feel a little more kindly toward PJ's Kong than some here, but I understand... it may be the most self-indulgent movie in genre history.

 

[T'Baio]

...with bio engineering, the ponciest of sciences with physics being the most manly of sciences...Even the original plot had physics but oh no thats not good enough for the bling 00s, because everything has to be soft and bio.

 

[Trekker4747]

...with bio engineering, the ponciest of sciences with physics being the most manly of sciences...Even the original plot had physics but oh no thats not good enough for the bling 00s, because everything has to be soft and bio.

Yeah, I think my brain is bleeding a little bit with that one too.

 

[john titor]

...with bio engineering, the ponciest of sciences with physics being the most manly of sciences...Even the original plot had physics but oh no thats not good enough for the bling 00s, because everything has to be soft and bio.

yes, physics is a manly science because it involves smashing things at high speeds using big equipment. This is manly. I am a manly man.

 

[RobertScorpio]

Actually, at this point I think so many people have run down Reign of Fire so far that it now no longer qualifies as a disappointment but is now a guilty pleasure.

As Mike Farley says, they made the wrong movie. But the movie they made is still kind of OK.

I think Event Horizon is the epitome of aimed high shot low. Also Sphere.

Strange..I thought EVENT HORIZON was actually pretty good for about 2/3 of the way. Where as Sphere, with that cast, was just a boring snorefest that didn't even seem to be aiming at anything except putting me out of my misery.

Rob

 

[Deckerd]

At least Sphere managed to avoid schlock. Event Horizon was riddled with it.

 

[Mistral]

At least Sphere managed to avoid schlock. Event Horizon was riddled with it.

See, I read Sphere and it was a good book with a lame ending so I think they got the movie right. The one no one has mentioned:

Battlefield Earth

Enjoyed the book but had a tough time watching the movie. Never made it all of the way through. The trailer had me a little excited and Travolta's name had me curious but the flick itself...

Timeline also left me deflated. I love time travel but to see it handled so badly...

And The Puppet Masters. One of my fav books by R.A.H. and when I heard they were making a movie I got all worked up. Now I look back and think, "For what?" And let's throw Starship Troopers into the mix. Why take a radical political/military tale and do it as camp?

 

[RobertScorpio]

At least Sphere managed to avoid schlock. Event Horizon was riddled with it.

See, I read Sphere and it was a good book with a lame ending so I think they got the movie right. The one no one has mentioned:

Battlefield Earth

Enjoyed the book but had a tough time watching the movie. Never made it all of the way through. The trailer had me a little excited and Travolta's name had me curious but the flick itself...

Timeline also left me deflated. I love time travel but to see it handled so badly...

And The Puppet Masters. One of my fav books by R.A.H. and when I heard they were making a movie I got all worked up. Now I look back and think, "For what?" And let's throw Starship Troopers into the mix. Why take a radical political/military tale and do it as camp?

I wanted TIMELINE to be good. I am suprised that Crichton has had two of his better books turned into crap..CONGO being the others..at least, I think he wrote that...

Rob

 

[gturner]

Nobody has mentioned any Star Trek movies yet - because they're all so good!!!

 

[RobertScorpio]

Nobody has mentioned any Star Trek movies yet - because they're all so good!!!

Classics actually!

(except for Nemesis of course)

Rob

 

[Kegg]

Nobody has mentioned any Star Trek movies yet - because they're all so good!!!

Or they didn't aim high.

 

[Forbin]

Hm.aybe ST:V is the very definition of Aimed High, Shot Low.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Nobody has mentioned any Star Trek movies yet - because they're all so good!!!

Classics actually!

(except for Nemesis of course)

Rob

Actually, Nemesis had a pretty kickass trailer, so I guess that qualifies for this list.

 

[JacksonArcher]

X-Men: The Last Stand was a big disappointment. It had so many cool elements from the comics (Danger Room, Fastball Special, Iceman icing up, Joss Whedon's "Cure" storyline, the Dark Phoenix Saga...) but they were just utterly wasted in a very lackluster and overstuffed mess of a film.

Terminator Salvation had a lot of hype going for it. McG kept on relating this back to James Cameron and Aliens and how Salvation would be his Aliens. All of the talk about paying homage to the first two Terminator films. I still enjoyed the film, but in comparison to the likes of T2 it was a big letdown.

King Kong was extremely self-indulgent and unnecessarily over-bloated, and The Lovely Bones didn't have to be that expensive and flashy. The story was very poignant and subtle but the film completely missed the boat. All of the nuisance and heartache of the book was gone and replaced with overblown melodrama.

The Road was also another example of a recent adaptation that aimed very high but unfortunately shot low. The visuals were very stunning and the production design was appropriately stark and muted, but the film was so oppressively bleak without any of the hope or refined simplicity of the novel. One wonders if an adaptation was even necessary in the first place. Same for The Lovely Bones.

The two Transformers movies. The first one looks like Shakespeare in comparison to Revenge of the Fallen, though. What an utterly abhorrent piece of cinema.

 

[Luckyflux]

I was disappointed by I am Legend (the movie, not the troll). I thought it was going to be awesome, but it just kind of fizzled for me...

Same thing with Hancock, great concept, but it just missed the target...

 

[RobertScorpio]

X-Men: The Last Stand was a big disappointment. It had so many cool elements from the comics (Danger Room, Fastball Special, Iceman icing up, Joss Whedon's "Cure" storyline, the Dark Phoenix Saga...) but they were just utterly wasted in a very lackluster and overstuffed mess of a film.

Terminator Salvation had a lot of hype going for it. McG kept on relating this back to James Cameron and Aliens and how Salvation would be his Aliens. All of the talk about paying homage to the first two Terminator films. I still enjoyed the film, but in comparison to the likes of T2 it was a big letdown.

King Kong was extremely self-indulgent and unnecessarily over-bloated, and The Lovely Bones didn't have to be that expensive and flashy. The story was very poignant and subtle but the film completely missed the boat. All of the nuisance and heartache of the book was gone and replaced with overblown melodrama.

The Road was also another example of a recent adaptation that aimed very high but unfortunately shot low. The visuals were very stunning and the production design was appropriately stark and muted, but the film was so oppressively bleak without any of the hope or refined simplicity of the novel. One wonders if an adaptation was even necessary in the first place. Same for The Lovely Bones.

The two Transformers movies. The first one looks like Shakespeare in comparison to Revenge of the Fallen, though. What an utterly abhorrent piece of cinema.

Great list Archer....and totally agree with you. The best part of Transformers II was the scene with Megan Fox straddling the motor bike in those awesome DaisyDuke shorts..I have that poster in my office at work (not at home of course)...

Rob

 

[Aragorn]

Highlander

 

[Rii]

Hypercube

 

[RandyS]

Nobody has mentioned any Star Trek movies yet - because they're all so good!!!

Classics actually!

(except for Nemesis of course)

Rob

I liked Nemesis. For me, the exception would be Insurrection.

 

[23skidoo]

Many many scifi movies have come with such great fan fare, and yet, months later, they are forgotten because they ended up not being as good as the hype suggested...

Great thread title, by the way.

Of course it's a matter of taste. I'd actually love to include Avatar on this list -- except you can't really say it shot low given how popular it is. Beautiful movie, "low-shooting" story. But methinks it won't be fading into obscurity anytime soon.

I agree with King Kong. That film was so heavily promoted that everyone expected it to be LOTR 2.0, but it really didn't do much. And now you can find the DVDs for $2 at Wal-Mart. Including the much-ballyhooed Production Diaries DVD that was released months before the movie came out. I don't think anyone's tried doing THAT again.

The 1998 Godzilla was probably the most heavily promoted film I'd ever seen. Or rather didn't see because it got such awful reviews I stayed away as did many others. The only good thing to come out of that was a bunch of stuff related to the original Japanese Godzilla/Gojira showed up. But as far as the 1998 version goes, this is no joke I was in Wal-Mart a few weeks ago (around the time I saw the $2 King Kong), and I heard people reacting with surprise when they found out there was a Godzilla movie made in the US. That thing became an instant obscurity.

As did Dick Tracy. A hugely promoted movie. I bet you'd be lucky to five 4 in 10 SF/F fans, never mind the general public, who remember this Warren Beatty/Madonna misfire which is the only movie that made me physically ill by its color palatte alone.

I'm going to be mean and include Serenity here. Not that it, on its own, was a bad movie. But it was a case of a studio and filmmakers drastically overestimating the strength of the fanbase. Those who love Firefly REALLY love Firefly. And they rightfully loved the movie. Problem was there wasn't enough of them for this to do anything substantial at the box office, and the film fell almost instantly into the problem late-period-Trek films faced in that those not familiar with the series didn't really have any incentive to go see it. This was a case of the sights aimed impossibly high, making a low shot an inevitability.

Alex