The original Purge. I thought all the background stuff and setting were super interesting, but the film itself was a generic home invasion movie. The sequel expanded on all the stuff I was interested in, though.
Not a movie, but a TV Show. The Cape.
A former detective is forced into hiding where he is trained in stage magic, sleight of hand, circuscraft, and illusions. He uses them to fight crime.
I thought it was a really interesting concept, a more down-to-earth superhero like Batman, and stuff like this can plausibly happen in real life.
Unfortunately the show was so bad it was canceled mid season and the finale was only streamed on NBC’s website.
Damn sounded hilarious
Six seasons and a movie!
deleted by creator
Madam Web. The premise of your perception being un-stuck in time and the ramifications that has for your psyche is really cool. What’s not cool is hiring bad writers and nepo baby actresses to portray that story
Eragon.
There is a reason that most fans pretend the film never happened
Highlander II
The Dark Tower
It’s a long list but these two were painful.
Highlander 2 is unsalvageable. That movie sucked so bad it wasn’t even fun to watch with friends to make fun of it
The premise of Highlander 2 was awful, too, though.
Mind you, Highlander II would’ve made more sense as a non-Highlander movie that just revolves around space aliens dealing with Earth having a planetary shield now. As a sequel to Highlander its premise was really weird.
Fuck The Dark Tower. That movie doesn’t exist for me. Total waste.
The Fall Guy. The show had a very simple premise (stunt crew moonlights as bounty hunters) that really couldn’t hold up after multiple seasons. The movie just floundered trying to do too much, and ended up far too inside baseball for normal viewers to really identify with.
I never watched the show, but I loved the movie. Almost every character feels competent and clever, so they do at least something that surprised me. There are a few points that hinge on details that feel a bit contrived, but I appreciated that the climax wasn’t just a physical fight between good guy and bad guy. The main characters have emotional problems that are believable and get resolved. Plus, it’s just a little campy.
I think the “inside baseball” that you mentioned gave the world more depth. It felt “lived in”.
I’ll give you that the movie does try to cram a lot into the time, though. It feels a little rushed.
Yeah, rushed is part of it as well for a full 120+min movie.
And, I should say, I also loved the movie and was disappointed to see mostly negative reviews afterward, but I get it. I initially loved the fact that 87North, the director’s own production company, is both listed in the opening credits and is the company making the movie in the movie. But as the final (contrived to look awesome, which is the point, not the actual plot points) moments wrap up, it felt like it was as much an industry commercial for the director’s own production company as it was a movie just being a movie. Maybe that’s a selling feature and I overthought it, but it sort of took me out of it.
Christian Bale faking an actually decent London accent, Gerard Butler being a loveable scot, and Matthew McCaughnehey doing his best Norse/Spartan Warrior impression?
Horrible acting all around (except Bale at times), the lead female character was basically there to soothe/flirt with the lead (wish i was joking), you can barely understand anyone, and yet really impressive set/castle and overall atmosphere. You believe you are there, and that the world is gone.
Huge gaps in logic on the hunting patterns of dragons, helicopters seem to run on infinite fuel, and the final plan to take down the main dragon is just stupid at best… but the execution of fighting dragons in the air with nets dropped by guys without parachutes was a phenomenol air sequence.
Also, the dragon CGI holds up. You never quite see it, but when you do, you believe it’s there, and the CGI team did a great job with consistency in that the dragons are always depicted expelling fluid that they ignite, and you see it every time they cast fire.
Phenomenol movie, and one of the best opening 5 minutes in terms of origin story. Just a lot of bad acting, and some questionable feats in logic plot-wise.
Christian Bale is English. His accent in Reign of Fire is not far off his normal accent.
You are shitting me!
He’s crazy good at assimilating accents so a lot of people don’t realise. Here’s his real accent (apologies for the YouTube link).
his real accent sounds fake… I don’t believe it…
I remember being extremely well entertained by awesome dragons, and that’s it. Which means you’re probably correct.
What Bale’s native accent?
I know it’s a British one, I was wondering what region, since OP was talking about his London accent.
its vaguely welsh, but I actually can’t tell
Nah it’s not welsh at all, he was born there but grew up entirely in England.
It took me a while to figure out what movie you were talking about. But it’s “dragons invade the modern world, with Christian Bale!” (I can’t remember the name)
Eragon: Returns
One of the movie series I was sad to see die before it even began. Read the whole series of books.
I’d watch this, but only because sometimes I need to watch bad movies
reign of fire
I’m a crazy, or did you completely fail to mention what movie you’re describing?
many
The punisher 2004. It’s fun.
Battlefield Earth. It’s a get drunk and veg kinda movie for me. It fucking sucks. But I like it.
Dark City (1998) could definitely fit the bill, it has so many unique ideas for that time in film and you can see there’s of all sorts of future sci-fi movies in it from the matrix to inception, it’s a very visually ugly movie and the acting is subpar but as a premise it’s super interesting. Generally I think remakes are a waste of time and money but I’d love to see this movie with a proper budget and modern technology
Jennifer Connelly is the best part of the movie
I just watched this! It felt like the director wanted to go real big with it but technology just wasn’t there with effects. It also tried very hard to be a mindfuck movie but also kept spoiling the twists somehow lol. Overall solid 7+ movie.
Just joking. I really liked the movie for its style and the frightening bad guys in all sizes. Also Kiefer Sutherland with a mad scientist touch.I really like that movie. But watch the directors cut, for the love of all that’s good! It removed the narration at the beginning that gave away the whole plot. Much better that way.
The city itself was interesting as hell
Not a movie, but a TV show. Revolution.
A sci-fi post-apocalypse show where the premise is that all of a sudden all technology (specifically anything that uses electricity) just stops working and nobody knows why. The show takes place 15 years into the apocalypse. The US has Balkanized into various regional states (although you don’t learn this until later). Some regions have devolved into chaos while others have basically reverted to a steam-punk type of society. Since all modern ships use electricity, they’ve begun to revive large ships from the age of sail. The remnants of the US military at Guantanamo Bay eventually return to the mainland and try to reestablish a much more explicitly authoritarian control over the US. You eventually learn that what caused the global blackout was the creation of a self-replication nanotech which rapidly spread across the planet and shut off all electricity.
Great premise, but it got too much into the soap-opera CW-style of writing and didn’t last more than 2 seasons.
It was such a good show, but man did they just keep pushing it
Ah yes, the Lost-likes.
Manifest, Fast Forward, Continuum, Revolution, Terra Nova… loved them all. All of them canceled.
From isn’t canceled yet.
Haha fair, that fits the definition of Lost-like, but I was thinking of that narrow era of network mystery boxes that popped up in the immediate aftermath of Lost chasing its success.
No matter how good they were, none of them were Lost so they got canceled. (Except for Fringe thank god)
From at least gets to live outside that shadow.
Yeah really fun premise slathered in boring characters.
If I recall it devolved into some CW-flavor bullshit revolving around the girl, who is her real father, why is she special. Blah blah blah.
Yep. Sounds like what happened with Jericho. Mystery and intrigue in the starting seasons, and then just weird petty soap-opera style squabbles towards the end
If the writers want to tell a story focused on inter-personal relationships, that’s perfectly fine. There are PLENTY of people who enjoy that kind of thing. They just don’t tend to be the same type of people who enjoy post-apocalyptic sci-fi puzzle-box shows. I don’t know why you go through all the trouble of creating this expansive world and lore only to focus your show on character dynamics that aren’t centered around the conceit of the show.
If you’re going to build this complex world, let us explore that world!
Poor Jericho, I need to hunt down the graphic novels that supposedly gave it a proper ending.
Interstellar is like Neo-Posadism minus Marxism. The premise was awesome. Climate apocalypse and space travel. But the movie doesn’t have humanity solve either of those problems. Instead it pops it’s collar and says *don’t worry bro,
the marketMarxist space alienssome scientistsa famous shirtless hot actor guyfuck you who cares the green guy behind a curtain made a worm hole or something".I thought the bigger issue was the premise. If earth is in a climate apocalypse, and we have extremely advanced technology that lets us bring life to far out planets, then why are we leaving earth? Can’t those same technologies be applied to saving the earth people?
The whole “we have to go space” feels like manifest destiny and the desperate urge of capitalism to expand.
The wormhole doesn’t feel that far out, the whole movie is already far out. Griping about the realism of a fictional space movie is a losing game
It can be easier to start with a fresh slate than it is to salvage a mess.
Who is the mess? Going off world, to me, is the perfect opportunity for billionaire and bureaucratic assholes to try and create an ethno state. Who decides who gets to leave the planet? This planet isn’t a mess, that’s what eco-fascists want you to believe
There is no real response because we’re talking about a fictional future, with unknown ailments, established by maybe 20 minutes of film as a backdrop. They wanted to tell a story titled “interstellar”, not “terrestrial”.
Given all those unknowns, it stands that there are times when starting fresh is easier than undoing. Trying to unmix brown pigments comes to mind.
You asked:
If earth is in a climate apocalypse, and we have extremely advanced technology that lets us bring life to far out planets, then why are we leaving earth? Can’t those same technologies be applied to saving the earth people?
This is a potential answer, given the lack of established truths in this fictional universe.
Ion what you tryna say, it was honestly a whole lot of nothing. Wtf does “trying to unmix brown pigments” mean? That’s cryptic asf and doesn’t make any sense, wouldn’t it be impossible to unmix any pigment color combo? And wtf does that sort of metaphor even mean?
Look man, what I was saying in response to your comment was that I don’t think it’s acceptable to call the planet an unfixable mess. Maybe it’s easier to start fresh for some people, but that was literally the problem I was trying to point out to you.
I just hate how Interstellar tells the audience that in a climate apocalypse, the only solution is to leave the planet. It’s ecofascism
wouldn’t it be impossible to unmix any pigment color combo? And wtf does that sort of metaphor even mean?
It’s an example of a situation where it’s easier to start fresh than undo past actions, which by your point you show you understand.
I don’t think it’s acceptable to call the planet an unfixable mess.
Let’s differentiate between OUR planet, and the planet depicted in the movie. Are you saying that there are no ways in which a fictional future earth is unsalvageable?
Do you also rally against movies set in, for example, a dystopian cyberpunk setting due to not liking the scene it was set in?
I also didn’t like the “I’m going to fuck off and let everyone else die” philosophy of not solving the climate issue at home.
What I got out of it was that plant life got diseases that killed them/made them unedible and corn was the only one holding off until the start of the movie. Also in my extremely slim understanding of planetary modification you need to release gases (carbon dioxide, oxygen etc) on a planet to create an atmosphere and it’s way easier to release gases than remove them.
So their plan was to let the earth crops rot away and plant fresh ones where there is no diseases.
I have a feeling Chris Nolan goes into films with some specifically detailed poignant character moments in mind, and then he just hastily weaves a plot to tie them together. It’s interesting to watch at least, but maybe too high brow(?) to call entertaining
For Interstellar, at least, I’d say it’s incredibly low-brow. The resolution is just “the power of wuv saves humanity!”, which is extremely simplistic and easily understood by the masses.
Well I meant mostly the talking parts which we were told to care about but most people forget
That would explain why his best films are based on books
Passengers (2016) is a shit film with an excellent premise but I never think about it, in fact it reminds me of its opposite, a superb film with a ridiculous premise called Sunshine (2007)
Passengers had the possibility to be really creepy, I still liked it but without seeing Chris Pratts time alone first, we would have all been confused and on guard with Jennifer Lawrence.
I think it would have been a much better film if the audience had also been kept in the dark about him opening her pod as well. That way we can also go through the range of emotions with her at the same time when she finds out.
Just start the movie from her perspective. Pod opening and Pratt is already there. He tells her his pod just opened and he’s confused too. Then we get the whole “wandering the shipn for the first time” montage where they could drop subtle hints that it’s not actually his first time doing any of those things.
His character is absolutely a bad person, but it’s a situation we can sympathize with because being truly completely alone for any amount of time fucks with people badly. She has every right to hate him for the rest of their lives, but it turns out that if he hadn’t done what he did they all would have died because of the damaged engine or whatever it was (I can’t remember).
They could have made the movie much harder hitting and/or creepy for the first half, but they opted to try and make you sympathetic to his situation from the start.
It’s the movie that always pops into my head when thinking about wasted potential.
Pandorum is, to me, what Passengers was trying for. The claustrophobic horror of hurting through the void, other humans being both your salvation and your tormentors, all that.
The execs ruined it to make a vehicle for some big names.
I’ll check that out!
I love Pandorum. I have a huge FanTheory on it on reddit from years back if you want to check it out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/gmlo53/pandorum_earth_took_serious_countermeasures/
Me, too.
Can you imagine the creation myths that would evolve in the society that developed from the survivors? There were just a handful who had survived and experienced that descent into hell. The others had blissfully slept.
