Movies that went wrong...

[Aquehonga]

Great thread Mr. Scorpio

Alien 3- so disappointing

They defeat the whole point of ALIENS, especially it's ending

Alien: Resurrection- hideous movie! Craptacular storyline, plot, etc et al

So much for that grapewhine scuttlebut before rez came out saying ALIEN IV would make alien 3 a hypersleep nightmare.

Planet of the Apes - the 2001 cover/latest book adaptation.

The 1968 film's a Sci-Fi masterpiece.

The Village - M. Nightmare Shy O'Melon ruined a great film here with his surprise ending/twist gimmick schtick

Star Trek: Nemesis - Killing Data unnecessarily

Prior to release, alot of WWW grapewhine scuttlebut indicated Nemo would be basically a TNG cover of TWOK.

They'd be basically subbing Khan with Shinzon, the grapewhine said.

Too bad that wasn't literally true


The Time Machine (2002) -
Botched picture. Felt like I was sitting through Marky Mark's Apes cover again

The Abyss (1989)-
Saw it once in the theater roughly a score ago.

Never had any inkling to see it again though since.

Maybe I should give it a 2nd chance

Superman IV: TQFP -
Has funny amusing moments & dialogue, but is a fairly retarded movie.

That scene with the Hemingway gal being carried unprotected in space, first by Flying Evil He-Man, then rescued by Superman, was RETARDED

She'd POP like a balloon

She's not an emigrated Kryptonian

The Queen of the Damned (2002) -
Man what garbage

Is to 1994's IWTV what rez & the avps are to the ALIEN(S) films.

Craptacular poop!

SW: Episode I - TPM:

16 years of hope & hype down the toilet

PROBLEMS:
Jar-Jar Binks, marathon racetrack meet, Jar-Jar Binks, the silly looking cartoon devil Darth Mall, who was a 0-personality drip Herbert as well, Jar-Jar Binks, age difference between late teeny bopper Queen Amy Dalla & 1st grader Anakin, inappropriate attraction there, sick really, Jar Jar Binks, Jar Jar Binks, Jar Jar Binks, JJB, JJB, JJB & etc.

I'm out of steam now!

More later, when they come to mind

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I'm going to defend Alien 3. It's my favorite film in the series.

Alien 3 is perhaps the most nihilistic and depressing mainstream film that Hollywood has ever produced. The whole point of the film is to invert every expectation of the series to date. Yes, it defeats the whole point of Aliens, but that's its genius. Aliens' happy ending was... wrong. Alien 3 shows how cruel, callous, and uncaring the universe is. Everything that Ripley has fought for has been corrupted. The innocent suffer the most. And no matter how cruel, vicious, and depraved you are, the universe will come along and fuck you up. That David Fincher could take a production as troubled as Alien 3 and create a film that is haunting and lyrical demonstrates the man's genius. Alien 3 is the necessary corrective to the excesses of Aliens. It's a brilliant film, and perhaps the only film in the series that will stand the test of time.

 

[Aquehonga]

I'm going to defend Alien 3. It's my favorite film in the series.

Alien 3 is perhaps the most nihilistic and depressing mainstream film that Hollywood has ever produced. The whole point of the film is to invert every expectation of the series to date. Yes, it defeats the whole point of Aliens, but that's its genius. Aliens' happy ending was... wrong. Alien 3 shows how cruel, callous, and uncaring the universe is. Everything that Ripley has fought for has been corrupted. The innocent suffer the most. And no matter how cruel, vicious, and depraved you are, the universe will come along and fuck you up. That David Fincher could take a production as troubled as Alien 3 and create a film that is haunting and lyrical demonstrates the man's genius. Alien 3 is the necessary corrective to the excesses of Aliens. It's a brilliant film, and perhaps the only film in the series that will stand the test of time.

I find alien 3 disappointing for the reasons I gave above.

However, unlike rez & the avps, I can understand why alien 3 has aficionados, like you Mr. Gibson.

I've never liked alien 3's tale. David Fincher's a great director. I loved "Fight Club".

Despite being a disappointing movie (I.M.O.), alien 3 has it's charms & positives.

Namely:

*Fiorina 161 - beautiful, weird interesting planet.

Fiorina's system & sunrises/sunsets are beautiful scenes.

*A realistic prison in the depths of space. Full of believable felons. The 2 prison employees, the warden & his deputy, were realistic also.

Prisons in space &/or the future is something rarely explored in Sci-Fi.

That's a good idea they explored.

*The environment of Fury 161 was very interesting, both outdoors & in.

*Alien 3 has beautiful music & score.

But, to me, killing off Newt, Hicks, then Ripley at the end was

I hope Bishop can be rebuilt

On ALIEN(S) message boards I see & read a3's aficionados reasons for why they're aficionados of a3.

I've met alot of aficionados on those boards for whom a3 is their favorite ALIEN(S) film.

To be fairer, I was overly harsh equating a3 with "The Queen of the Damned". Corrected that overboarding. Rez & the avps most certainly are in the septic tank with TQotD.

Alien 3, IMO, is a disappointment.

Unlike rez & the avps I can understand someone liking a3.

I respect a3 as a movie in that it does take itself seriously & respects itself. There's no tongue-in-cheek crap or such like things.

Mr. Gibson are you related to Henry, Mel, Debbie, William, or Charles

 

[MyCylon]

^
I think Alien 3 is great as well. I certainly think it's far more substantial than Aliens.

As for movies I thought were disappointing:

- Sunshine: Terrible third act that IMHO had nothing to do with the first two acts.

- Aliens: IMHO just boring with mind-numbing dialogs. Alien was so effective, and Alien 3 managed to add some interesting concepts and deal with interesting topics. Alien 2 was a straightforward action flick which would be fine if it didn't have so much more to live up to, I think.

- The Matrix: Looks neat and has some cool ideas but doesn't nearly live up to its potential.

- The Phantom Menace: The film spends way too much time dabbling in unimportant things and characters (e.g. pod racing and JarJar) and unfortunately also wastes a pretty cool villain as well as a hero in a rather underwhelming action sequence. Plus Williams music is treated really, really badly here.

- Revenge of the Sith: Attack of the Clones actually got my hopes up that the prequel trilogy was getting better as it went on. Unfortunately, I felt RotS was a terrible mess that suffered from pacing as well as characterization problems. It had some great scenes (including the clones turning on the Jedi) but overall it bungled the job in my opinion. Since it's the last one in the prequel trilogy, it actually bothers me more than TPM.

- Ghostbusters 2: I enjoy watching this movie. But it kind of hurts to think of how great this could or should have been. It simply never really manages to recapture the magic and the wittiness of the first film. It's rather pedestrian most of the time (interspersed with some funny moments). But what bothers me most is that a) the Ghostbusters had to get trampled on like this after what they did for the city (it just didn't feel right no matter way you looked at it, I felt) and b) that they had to go down the old, boring path of having the main romantic relationship break up from one movie to the other only to bring them back together again.

- Terminator 3: I actually quite like this film. But it's not nearly as good as it could have been, I thought. For me, there's two main problems. One, I can't stand Stahl as Connor. I never once bought that that guy was John Connor, much and all as I tried to convince myself he was. And two, it's not until the very, very end that the film manages to recapture a bit of that unique Terminator atmosphere of fear and despair mixed with the tiniest grain of hope.

- ST: Insurrection: Boy, was this film a disappointment. Coming of the heals of the remarkable and exciting First Contact and also helmed by Steward, this felt like a bad, bad joke to me when I saw it at the cinema. I loved the idea of Picard going up against Starfleet, as was the way they were selling it. I also loved the idea that they were actually tying it into the Dominion War (if only peripherally). Alas, Picard was merely going up against one corrupt and rather dim Starfleet Admiral. And the connections to the war really amounted to nothing, I felt. Add stupid attempts at humour, an unbearable romantic plotline (FC cleverly avoided this), Trek's perfect world of hell type village, and some pretty bad writing, and you've got one of the few movies I ever wanted to walk out on.

- Mission Impossible 2: I enjoyed the first MI movie quite a bit. I'll admit that it didn't stick in my mind for long but, boy, did I remember it again when I saw this terrible, terrible film. Part one appears like a master piece of film making in comparision IMHO. And instead of building on what part one had established and what was good about that film, in part two they effectively decided to chuck it all out the window and turn it into a mindless, unbearable action Cruise love fest with pidgeons. This is another film I almost walked out on.

- The World is Not Enough: I really loved Tomorrow Never Dies and felt that Brosnan's Bond was absolutely on the right track at the time. I had high hopes that TWINE would possibly continue that trend. Boy, was I disappointed. What a boring, boring film. You know there's something wrong with a film when there's explosive barrels EVERYWHERE so that action can be injected whenever it's needed, which seemed like all the time here. Add in some silly story about why the bad guy is evil beyond all reason and a character name based soley on a bad pun, and you know something's not right. Again, I film I almost walked out on.

- Die Another Day: If I had wanted to destroy the James Bond franchise, this is the way I would have done it. Totally over the top, badly written, tasteless, and just dumb, dumb, dumb (IMHO), this was easily the worst of the Brosnan Bonds and one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I think I was too shocked to walk out.

I'm sure there's more. But that all that comes to mind right now.

 

[sojourner]

Wild, Wild West - This movie was promising from the early buzz on the internet before production began mainly due to the 2 stars attached to the project, George Clooney and Kevin Spacey. Instead we get Will Smith and Kevin Kline with a terrible plot involving a giant mechanical spider. I still some times catch an old episode of the show and think "what if?".

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I find alien 3 disappointing for the reasons I gave above.

Aqua, please don't think I was singling you out in my defence of Alien 3; several others in the thread brought up their own issues with the film.

However, unlike rez & the avps, I can understand why alien 3 has aficionados, like you Mr. Gibson.

Yeah, we have meetings. And a secret handshake, too.

Also, please, it's Allyn. No one calls me Mr. Gibson.

But, to me, killing off Newt, Hicks, then Ripley at the end was

Tell me how you really feel.

For that story to work, Ripley needed to be alone. That meant that Newt and Hicks needed to be gone. (The other option the studio looked at was to go the other way -- get rid of Ripley and focus on Hicks, which is what William Gibson's screenplay did.)

The death toll is the point of the film. You're supposed to be uneasy with it. The autopsy scene is supposed to be queasy. Ripley's death is her final act. People misread it as a suicidal gesture, when it's not. The Xenomorphs have taken everything in her life from her -- they took her friends, they took her career, they took her daughter (since she grew old and died between the first two films), they took her substitute family, now they were taking her body. Ripley goes to her death, not out of some suicidal impulse, but because she's fighting to the last breath in her body.

Alien 3, IMO, is a disappointment.

That's fair. It's much darker than I think anyone was expecting. And it's so tonally different than Aliens that it's difficult to grasp.

Mr. Gibson are you related to Henry, Mel, Debbie, William, or Charles

No, Fuck No, Don't Think So, Not At All, Met Him But No.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I Am Legend - not terrible, but could have been much better.

Fantastic Four - destroyed by terrible casting (tho they got The Thing and Johnny Storm right).

But everything pales in comparison to the disappointment of those damn Star Wars prequels.

But oddly, I wasn't disappointed in how the Star Trek movies have gone in the toilet lately. I just don't think the TNG cast ever had that much potential to transfer from the small screen to the big - they're TV characters, really. They lack that larger-than-life oomph. My expectations for the new movie are much higher.

 

[judge alba]

alien v preditor before it came out i thought 'hey great two of the best aliens in sci fi together' watched the film and got so bored i left the cinema an hour into it.
nemsis was another one that looked good in the trailers but was rubbish though i did mange to watch all the way thruogh it. also the judge dredd movie. although it was a good film it wasnt 'the' judge dredd there was something not right about it.
i am legend was boring as hell. oh nearly missed one resident evil extinction wasnt all it was cracked up to be

 

[Orintho]

Phantom Menace: a potentially great villain gets five minutes of screen time and is killed off. No reason is ever given why the Sith are pissed off. Thus the prequel series damns itself to rely upon conniving old men and one mixed up hormonally-driven youth to be our scary villains. *yawn*(with apologies to Christopher Lee and the other actors - I don't blame you.) Jar Jar Binks dominates the movie. Anakin starts out way too young. And so forth and so on.

Nemesis: I thought the fans were promised a Romulan 'Undiscovered Country' kind of film. Instead we get a movie that damn near killed the franchise and whose very story relates to Trek about as much as a Peewee Herman episode would. Way to go Paramount.

X Men Three: am I the only one who thought the plot was merely an escuse to write certain actors out of the series? Why else would the film go so against what occurs in the comics?

Troy: Word was the filmmakers omitted the Olympian gods from the story because they feel it would have been embarrasing - a la 'Clash of the Titans' (which is an awesome movie BTW.) Unfortunately cutting the Olympians from the story of the Iliad is like taking Yahweh out of 'The Ten Commandments'. Not much point without that burning bush.

 

[Greg Cox]

VAN HELSING. What a disappointment. As a huge Universal Monsters fan, I was really looking forward to that movie, but, boy, was it a mess. A big, noisy, exhausting video game that wasted a great premise and bunch of classic characters.

Don't get me wrong. I like a good popcorn flick, too, but nothing but nonstop action and special effects gets old very fast. It's not entertaining; it's numbing.

 

[RobertScorpio]

VAN HELSING. What a disappointment. As a huge Universal Monsters fan, I was really looking forward to that movie, but, boy, was it a mess. A big, noisy, exhausting video game that wasted a great premise and bunch of classic characters.

Don't get me wrong. I like a good popcorn flick, too, but nothing but nonstop action and special effects gets old very fast. It's not entertaining; it's numbing.

I agree..good one GREG. What did you think of LEAGUE OF EXTORDINARY MEN? I felt the same thing happened with that movie as well.

Rob

 

[Jeyl]

I can only list so much so I'll list mine throughout the thread.

AvP: My hate for the film all started with the two words ON EARTH. Aliens on Earth? Well, maybe it's set at a time when those little buggers finally managed to get on Earth, infested it beyond recognition and the humans turn to the Predators for help. But no, it's set in modern times where the writers (And director Paul Wes Anderson) wrote the Predators as being the ones responsible for humans being able to build societies and used us as a means to hunt aliens.......

Ok. I'm with Ripley on this one. If one of those things ever got to Earth, even a warrior, it's over. The whole point about the Aliens is that they cannot be contained and they're like a plague that spreads and consumes. To say they've been on Earth for thousands of years unnoticed by us diminishes the very threat that these creatures have represented in all the movies before it.

And why is it that because of one movie that depicts a Predator hunting humans does everyone automatically generalizes their whole entire race for doing nothing but hunt? I saw Predator when I was six and even than I came up with the idea that this Predator was probably breaking his own laws to hunt humans.

I remember during the filming of ALIENS that James Cameron deleted a scene with Burke being cocooned against the wall saying that he could feel the alien gestating inside him. James Cameron deleted this scene because it didn't match anything that came before it. For example.
- Anyone who gets face hugged does not remember the events leading up to being impregnated by the face hugger.
- The period is far too short. It took about a whole day for the Face Hugger on Kane to do it's job yet the one on Burke completes it's job in less than an hour.
- When the victim regains consciousness, it takes a few hours before the embryo to tear it's way through the victim.
All of these points were ignored for AvP. From the egg stage to an adult Alien stage took only 15 minutes.

And again, NO ALIENS ON EARTH!

 

[JediKnightButler]

I would agree with most of the movies already mentioned here (that I've seen anyway).

The BIGGEST disappointment in recent years for me personally was Star Wars Episode I:The Phantom Menace. I don't know exactly what I was expecting but the first 1-2 times I watched it I was mostly lost because they introduced so many new characters, locales, and terms- not to mention made connections between established characters that seemed somewhat improbable (i.e. Anakin built C-3PO?!!). I had no idea who "Sidious" was although he looked like Emperor Palpatine from the OT, I had no idea WTF "midichlorians" were, I thought the "chosen one" prophecy, as well as the whole "virgin birth" thing with Anakin was wierd (not to mention totally unnecessary). I had never heard of the Sith, the Trade Federation, Neimodians, Naboo, Gungans, etc. It was just so far removed from the OT, both in terms of style and chronology, that it barely seemed like a Star Wars movie. It certainly was MUCH different than I had envisioned the PT, particularly with Anakin being just a little kid. I mean, I still ultimately liked it (AOTC & esp. ROTS were much better) and thankfully the following two movies tied things together but I was still awfully confused and kind of let down on my first viewing- after waiting 16 years since ROTJ!

Alien 3 was another major disappointment. I loved Aliens and was just totally turned off from Alien 3 after they killed off Bishop, Hicks, Newt after their near death in the previous movie. I hate when, in sequels, main characters are offed so easily despite overcoming seemingly impossible odds in the previous movie. It's one of the most annoying things that directors/writers do in (bad) sequels. I don't mind a good death like Optimus Prime's in TFTM or Obi Wan Kenobi's death in ANH but I hate POINTLESS ones like those in Alien 3. I didn't even bother to watch Alien 4.

I didn't think that Star Trek: Nemesis was that bad of a movie in most respects but there were a lot of scenes that were deleted that could've made the movie feel a little more lighthearted and meaningful but overall I thought it was MUCH better (and eventful) than Insurrection, which was quite a major letdown after the brilliance of First Contact. It must have been the "odd numbered movie curse".

With the new Transformers movie coming up this summer, I'm anxious to see how that will turn out. Although I was initially "iffy" about watching the first live-action movie, I ended up rather enjoying it after I finally watched it and mostly looking forward to the next one but I'm anxious about them possibly killing off Optimus Prime (It's possible that the teaser is a "red herring" though).

 

[MeanJoePhaser]

Ang Lee's The Hulk, sure it has its fans, and so does Howard the Duck.

But who am I kidding, I didn't have high hopes for it beyond basic entertainment.

Terminator 3 sucks I fell asleep rewatching it on AMC. The first was memorable, the second was groundbreaking. "SKYNET was SOFTWARE, WE wasted our time. Judgment Day cannot be STOPPED. You'd think FUTURE JOHN CONNOR would've known that and relayed that to past me. My moms died because she wasn't dumb enough to sign on for this film. All these chase scenes were POINTLESS. WHAT DID YOU DO TO DESERVE SUCH PUNISHMENT?" (Oh, that's right it was Nick Stahl, not James Callis...)

Never make a sequel to a James Cameron movie unless you are James Cameron...and I'm not even that much of a Cameronite.

Also, Robo-Cop 3 was horrible, even compared to the spotty Robo-Cop 2. Never make a sequel to a Paul Verhoeven movie, either.

 

[DaleC76]

Masters of the Universe. That movie should've ROCKED! Instead...

 

[MANT!]

Dare we?...

Battlefield Earth..After reading L Ron Hubbard's magnum opus, I was looking forward to an old fashioned pulp movie ride..and I got John Revolta's steaming shit-burger-ed suppository of a MOVIE...from the wildly improbable to the freakin impossible..
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185183/goofs

I squirmed and winced my way throughout

I actually wrote the studio and demanded my money back..or failing that the 2 hours of my life wasted..

Never got a response...

Damn them, Damn them to HELL..

 

[Darth_Pinche]

Any Alien movie after Cameron's Aliens have been bitter disappointments.

Luc-ass's attempts to recapture his glory by reinventing Star Wars stung badly as well.

But the biggest actual disappointment for me has to be Matrix Reloaded. The overbloated, pompous crap that the Wachowskis gave us still makes me mad. I'm mad because I fell for it twice.

 

[Aragorn]

Fantastic Four: Three of the five leads were botched in casting, and to top it off, you get the director of Taxi!!!!

Die Another Day: There was quite a lot of stuff in the first half that kicked ass. There were a lot of new places they could go with a tortured and weary Bond. But then they turn it into a Roger Moore movie.

Pearl Harbor: It had everything going for it except the director and the script. A good script and a director who was right for it could've done wonders even with Affleck and Hartnett.

Anything by Uwe Boll -- Granted, he makes bad movies into terrible movies, but someone else could've taken the interesting aspects of the video game stories and put a good spin on them.

 

[TheMasterOfOrion]

Alien Resurrection.

I mean they took the director of the amazing Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, let his co-director Marc Caro do the set design and enlisted Ron Perlman and Dominique Pinon, the 4 of whom have made an awesome team in the past and turn out easily the worst installment of the franchise, not counting the AvP movies.

I mean what the hell was that giant white sad eyed monster thing at the end? It was awful.

I'm not surprised Jeunet skulked off back to France and never raised his head in Hollywood again after that.

Joss Whedon wrote the thing and he still hangs around polluting the industry like a smelly fart.

Chud’s Biggest Disappointment list

For all that Alien3 got wrong, it’s no match for the top-to-bottom botch job that is Alien: Resurrection. Written by fanboy saint Joss Whedon and directed by the whimsical Jean-Pierre Juenet (whose partnership with Marc Caro ended when he agreed to direct this film), Resurrection promised a new beginning for a franchise that had been literally consigned to molten lead; what it delivered was a jokey, dramatically uncertain, tonally scattershot cash-in which, the abominable AvP notwithstanding, finished the series off for good. It was the second attempt at a coup de grace for the Alien franchise. Initially, Sigourney Weaver had envisioned Alien3 as the concluding chapter, but when that film evoked a hostile response from a fan base displeased with the unceremonious dispatching of Hicks (Michael Biehn) and Newt (Carrie Henn) from Aliens, a fourth go-round seemed like a good idea. Enter Whedon, who concocted a convoluted rebirth of Ripley that cleverly called for her to be crossbred with her acid-bleeding burden. Whedon also dropped in a group of pirates who sold stolen cryo-tubes to the military for experimentation - another viable story element.

But did any of this shit make sense in an Alien movie? Though the notion of a partially-xenomorph Ripley was intriguing, Whedon invests the proceedings with his usual glib bullshit; rather than write an actual character, he just slathers on the lame repartee. Though we love Ripley, the real Ripley died when she did the Nestea plunge at the end of Alien3. The protagonist of Alien: Resurrection is just some hybrid dreamt up to extend a franchise that seemed revivable. It wasn’t. And the new characters, led by a tough-talking clone that should never have been played by Winona Ryder, are just as flimsy. Michael Wincott and Ron Perlman have fun with their scoundrel caricatures, but they don’t hang around long enough to make much of an impression. Brad Dourif gets the best scene in the movie as a sadistic scientist who tortures the xenomorphs until they can’t takes no more.

Alien: Resurrection might seem like a stretch for this list, but you have to remember the hype back in 1997. People thought the series was salvageable. I recall excitedly purchasing a ticket to see the movie a week early at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens as part of an Alien-themed weekend of screenings; by the time we got to Resurrection, the entire theater felt ripped-off. As with The Phantom Menace two years later, I tried to talk myself into liking it, but I knew. A decade later, the film’s uselessness is undeniable. - Jerem

 

[The Boy Who Cried Worf]

AvP- They almost had it right. Humans are completely inconsequential to both the Aliens and the Predators. All they should do in these movies is die. So why populate your film with a bunch of humans and just have them get killed for 90 minutes instead of actually doing something cool with, I don't know, AN ALIEN VS. A PREDATOR!

28 Days Later- The worst last third of a movie I have ever seen. A decent twist on the zombie genre even if the concept didn't make much sense. So why junk all that to make some lame anti-militaristic point at the end?

Scanners- Heard about this film for years and years. Finally saw it. Not a bad premise, but amateurishly executed. The bad guys are after them. They flee to find some help. Bad guys catch up with them kill there new found friends. They run away and this starts all over again.

H.H Guide To Galaxy- A movie about life, the universe, and everything and after 25 years the best they decide to do with it is turn it into a lame romance picture?

Mars Attacks- Mind numbingly unfunny comedy? Mindlessly silly sci-fi action film? Yes to both of them.

Hancock- So I take it somebody dropped that last part of the script into the fire and they told the actors they were just going to have to make stuff up as they went along.