• @Gewoonmoi@lemmy.world
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      34 months ago

      That’s like 90% of modern genre pictures, where the filmmakers have a terrific concept but then have no idea where to go with it. MADs was like that recently.

  • shoulderoforion
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    244 months ago

    I loved Prometheus, I thought it was going deep canon on the Alien franchise, and even though it wasn’t perfect I so very much dug it, Ridley Scott saw some bad reviews, pussied out, and put Alien:Covenant out there to undo all the stuff he began with Prometheus. Covenant was such a garbage forgettable movie, followed by Romulus which was garage/fan service waste of time. Oh for the timeline we could have had, had they built upon the canon/story of Prometheus.

    • vegetvs
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      03 months ago

      Same here. Pretty disappointed with how the momentum created with Prometheus got lost in Covenant and then how the saga completely derailed with this last excuse of an entry. Romulus is an offense to the watcher’s intelligence and a spit in the face of long-time Alien fans. There’s no script there and it adds absolutely nothing to the series.

  • @heavydust@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_live

    A very funny movie with good actors and everything, except for one major disappointment: at the end of the movie, you understand that some humans collaborates with aliens, they get magical watches, free money, and the aliens even have some kind of interplanetary door to teleport yourself to zombie-land. But they don’t go further in that explanation because the movie is already over.

    They could have made a whole sequel with that new world, but instead we are left with a few pictures, and the ending credits of the movie. It felt like “Poochie died on the way back to his home planet. The End.”

    • Destide
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      44 months ago

      How about instead we do close ups of the gun barrel over and over?

  • @realcaseyrollins@thelemmy.club
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    4 months ago

    The Eternals - Could have been amazing if they weren’t trying to tell like six origin stories AND THEN a team-up story in the same film

    Honorable mentions:

    The Marvels - The first act was some of the best post-Endgame stuff in the MCU, the bickering between the three leads really reminded me of how the Avengers fought in the first Avengers film. It really was a shame that they just said “sorry” in a cornfield and released all the tension right at the end of the first act.

    The Substance - Had the potential to be a timeless classic but it forgoed poignancy for 40 extra minutes of absurdist, overindulgent and redundant body horror

    The New Mutants - They should have never hired the director of The Fault In Our Stars for a movie like that

    LEGO: The Adventures Of Clutch Powers - Too much setup without payoff

    We’re All Going to the World’s Fair - HORRIBLE pacing really hurts this movie even though the story, atmosphere and worldbuilding were incredible

  • FartsWithAnAccent
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    314 months ago

    Downsizing: It was a very interesting premise (people choose to shrink themselves in order to continue being able to afford living) but it is squandered on a pretty bland plot that wastes the premise to tell a mundane story.

  • @psyspoop@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    Recent one for me is Love Hurts.

    Had a few things going right for it. The early fight scene between Ke Huy Quan and Marshawn Lynch’s characters was really fun and cool. You could see the bones of a really fun John Wick clone but with a bit of an 70’s/80’s kung fu twist to it. But then they completely ruin it with the love interest plot and the boring bad guy and boring later fights. Take that early part of the movie and expand on it, and drop the love interest crap, and it might have been pretty good.

  • @Akasazh@feddit.nl
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    64 months ago

    League of extraordinary gentlemen.

    If they would have just stick to the awesome plot of the graphic novel, instead of sitting the budget on hiring Sean Connery, who understood less about the role than he did with Gandalf it could’ve been great.

  • spicy pancake
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    4 months ago

    Daybreakers (2009)

    Excellent premise: vampire post-epidemic society trying to deal with the scarcity of blood, ethical ramifications of keeping the remaining humans sedated for blood harvesting, technical challenges like adapting infrastructure and vehicles to be sun-proof, etc.

    The only thing I clearly remember is the premise, cuz the plot, characters, dialogue, action, etc. was all dog trash

    Actually, I do remember how badly it mangled the social commentary on the vampires who couldn’t afford blood. Perfect setup for depicting the inhumanity of artificial scarcity and they botched it.

    • @immutable@lemm.ee
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      34 months ago

      Agreed. I like the film but it feels like two movies stuck together.

      One about the vampire society which is really interesting and novel. And another which is just a run of the mill “rebel faction finds the cure and restores humanity story” that you could find in any zombie film.

      I sorta get it though because I think it’s a problem a lot of comments in this thread deals with. An interesting world is not an interesting story. You have this cool vampire society, but then what’s the story? I sorta get why it always ends up being the hero’s journey just in a cool world, because otherwise the comments here are “super cool world but nothing happens”

      • spicy pancake
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        24 months ago

        Yeah the only example I can think of that doesn’t fit that mold is American Mary

        the cool premise in which isn’t a world, but a hypothetically possible situation (desperately broke medical student turns to stripping, which leads to back alley surgery for gangsters, which leads to black market body modification surgery) and the letdown isn’t the characters or plot, it’s the hamfisted script and acting lol

    • @Hugin@lemmy.world
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      34 months ago

      I think that’s intentional and setup nicely in the dialog.

      “You never understood why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you… then you got to see something really special.”

      It’s hammered home that the secret isn’t interesting but what the magician goes through to maintain the secret is the interesting part. You are supposed to figure it out but reject the idea because nobody would go through that for a trick.

      It sounds like you were like the boy in the beginning who figured out the bird trick and wasn’t buying the more fantastic explanations in favor of the truth that the magician is just willing to be that cruel.

  • @Freshparsnip@lemm.ee
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    94 months ago

    65, a movie where humanoid aliens crash land on earth in the time of the dinosaurs and get out right before the asteroid hits. It’s a generic survival/monster movie where dinosaurs are just obstacles in the way of the heroes escaping the planet. The movie should have shown the beautiful parts of the Dinosaur world and we should have been sad when they’re wiped out at the end.

  • edric
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    74 months ago

    There was this alien invasion B-movie like 10 years or so ago that I don’t remember the title of. But it was your typical main character and a couple of friends trying to find a way out of the city. Very generic. Then in the last 10-15 mins of the movie, he gets abducted and it gets far more interesting. But it ends there as a cliffhanger. I would’ve loved to see a version where that happens in the middle of the movie instead and we see more.

    • kilonova
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      104 months ago

      It still absolutely baffles me that they bought the franchise for so much money, yet couldn’t even come up with a coherent story for the trilogy. Absolute tragedy.

    • shoulderoforion
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      64 months ago

      I deleted my previous replay because my brain is broken and roman numerals fuck me up, what I meant to say was Star Wars I, II, and III (not IV, V and VI, though Return has always been a lesser ran in my book)

      • @0ops@lemm.ee
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        44 months ago

        Haha, I figured that’s what you meant when I saw that comment the first time, but then I was just like “maybe it’s just that this guy’s got some bold-ass movie opinions. Respect”

    • @Zozano@aussie.zone
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      34 months ago

      I actually encourage a watch of the fourth film, but not as a Matrix movie.

      Lana Wachowski took her beloved franchise, executed it, pissed on its corpse, and left it unburied.

      The film explicitly states that Warner Bros threatened to make it without her, so she decided to produce it in a way that would guarantee fans ignored it, and the franchise would be definitively concluded.

      The entire movie is a “fuck you for making me do this” and I applaud it for that. It’s such a shit film, but I need to give it credit for its stance.