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 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
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.
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
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.
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.
No Country For Old Men - a slice of life movie about living in Texas.
The Man from Earth
B4
Triangle
Time Lapse
Daybreakers
Evolution
Knowing
Show, but LOST, I remember what could’ve been…
S Darko was interesting because at it’s core it’s about the fact that women have to deal with twice as much bullshit
As featured in the picture, Reign of Fire. I had forgotten about it. I truly don’t think there is a film out there that has represented dragons as I see them better.
I really think about Quinn’s character a lot. How the world entirely changed for him on that pivotal day he discovered that male dragon, and the decades he spent running and surviving and living in fear of something that he inadvertently set in motion, and then the turning point as an adult as he confronts his fear and wields it to put an end to what he started.
What I like about him, is that he’s not actually that unique – anybody could have woken that dragon, and if Quinn hadn’t been there on that day, one of his mother’s coworkers would have. He’s not particularly heroic as an adult either, opting to hide and scrounge for survival, and openly admitting to everyone that he’s winging it on the leader front. And yet he inspires his community with fierce devotion to keeping them all alive. When he finally goes to confront the dragon, he does it almost alone, inspiring no one with his courage other than himself.
As a character I find him weirdly relatable as someone just coping with heavy trauma the best that they can
many
A few favorites:
- Constantine
- The Last Jedi
- Jupiter Ascending
- Minority Report
- Prometheus
- Valerian
- Logan’s Run
I love Constantine, and genuinely do not get the hate that film got. Sure it was different from the comics, but it was good in its own right, and the casting and acting (with the exception of that guy from Even Steven) was spot on
Constantine and Minority Report shouldn’t be on that list, IMO. The former in particular is very well executed and thoroughly enjoyable!
I’ll be that guy that enjoyed The Last Jedi explicitly because it was something different, and leaned into more of the mystical side of the force while on the “big screen.”
Edit and spoiler just in case
I just remembered the hyperspace “weapon” moment, and both how cool it was and how much it could affect the empire. They probably didn’t mean for it, but that you could effectively point and shoot a ship like that was an amazing usage.
Bruh Constantine is one of my favorite films ever. It’s so fucking awesome!
Hot take, “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”. The radio play, books and 80s bbc show were not represented very well at all. They missed well over 75% of the jokes, Mos Def and Zooey Deschanel added nothing to it, and they added plots and scenes, I think just to get more “blockbuster actors” in, that ruin the original story of the radio play. Sam Rockwell, Alan Rickman/Warwick Davis and Bill Nightly were the highlights. One of the few movies I wish they would remake.
Sam Rockwell as Zaphod was spot on. He was the only one who actually read the books, and had to even tell the director to add “Froody” to the script. What a shitshow it must have been for the director not to know that…
Just watched The Gorge (2025) recently. I wouldn’t say it’s a bad film, but it was really mediocre.
I love the premise of having the two guard towers, one on each side of a mysterious and foggy gorge, not supposed to communicate with each other, guarding us all from whatever is down there. People have previously gone in but never come out. Strange monsters sometimes attempt the climb up the cliff walls. Is it the gate to hell? What’s the story behind it all? Chemistry slowly happens between the guards of the two towers.
(If you think you might enjoy this movie, don’t read my spoilers. Just watch it. I liked it even though it was a bit disappointing.)
spoiler
But the good setup and world building is quickly over and then they both enter the gorge, and it’s just an old evacuated biological lab that created super soldiers, and the whole thing instantly stops being mysterious.
They could have kept it mysterious for longer and given us some kind of twist perhaps, like they might discover they’re guarding the site of an old defunct biolab, but some things don’t add up, and it turns out to be the actual gates of hell. I also don’t think Drasa should have dived straight in to rescue Levi. Let her hesitate for a while. Create tension. Keep them separated, him somewhere below and her in her tower (perhaps she will need to get over to his tower to reactivate the auto-turrets or do something important, she believes he’s gone), and cut between showing both their struggles. Perhaps he then manages to contact her, and then a rescue effort begins.
Somebody played Enshrouded and decided to make a post-Cold War movie out of it
the trailer didn’t entice me that much, so I went ahead with the spoilers. Yeah I hate when a good mystery is ruined by over-explaining.
I still haven’t forgiven Steven King for writing all those sequels to The Gunslinger
Jupiter Ascending
They seed the galaxy and harvest whole planets to create an immortality serum. Fantastic world concept … but a subpar story to make a movie about within that world.
oh yeah, I remember liking the genetic aspect of that too. But yeah, poor story, and not Mila Kunis’s best acting
In Time (2011). Time is currency in the dystopia in the film - paying for something decreases your lifespan, earning wages increases it.
The movie sets up a really cool class structure, wherein there are rich people born with/inheriting hundreds of thousands of years of life, and poor people barely managing to scrape enough hours to stay alive until they can earn more the next day. There are segmented areas of the city that cost years to get into.
Overall incredible premise, but the story wasn’t exceptional beyond a couple of the cool mechanics you might expect based on said premise.
Agree. Great premise and decent world building in the film, but it just felt like a generic action thriller after 30 mins.
The Last Jedi was an amazing deconstruction of Star Wars. I don’t think better execution would have helped it with a fan base that wants to be stuck in the past reliving the hero’s journey ad nauseam but it had a lot more potential than you see on screen.
with a fan base that wants to be stuck in the past reliving the hero’s journey ad nauseam
This seems counter to most complaints I’ve seen about the movie that they just rehashed the original trilogy.
That is an apt criticism of TFA and TRoS, but not TLJ at all.
I think I’m really unusual in that I dislike almost everything after IV. I think the first film was brilliant, back when Lucas was fighting for money and had to rely on vision and didn’t have Campbell to advise with. Introducing cutesy characters strictly for marketing, they all lacked the charm of the original.
I know I’m an exception. Nearly everyone liked V and/or VI more. Everyone dunks on Jar Jar, but I could not stand the Ewoks. It was so disgustingly blatant.
At the time I was dying for sequels, and when they finally came I was so disappointed. You know, I think I just realized that it was the Vader/Luke connection that sunk it for me. That all of the major characters had to be related somehow made the universe smaller, and more petty. They only got worse after that; I think I watched all of I-III, but I actively hated those.
Anyway, I think there might have been a path, and I’m no story teller so I couldn’t fix it, but I think the while thing went off the rails after IV.
Good friends have told me the Mandelorian was good, but “Baby Yoda” represents everything I loathed about the series and I refuse to watch it.
Anyway, what were you saying about the Hero’s Journey? Maybe I should watch The Last Jedi, because while the Campbell formula worked for the first film, it didn’t improve any of the sequels, so maybe I’d like it. As long as there are no obviously pandering character designs that exist clearly because they can easily be marketed as toys. Looking at you, BB-8.
There are a bunch of adorable space critters that you’ll think are that when you’re watching the movie, and they certainly were marketed and merchandised like crazy, but they’re actually there due to the unwanted presence of adorable Earth critters during filming. They couldn’t shoot the scenes without including these birds that lived where they were shooting so the solution they came up with was CGI-ing weird faces on them and including some close-ups to make them look deliberate.
Disagree. The first two sequels kept making a defeated bad empire stronger and stronger without any explanation. The rebels then suddenly became just 400 to 20 people. A different type of journey would have been welcomed with open arms if clever enough.
And I think embracing the jedi, but killing the wars aspect, rather than trying to destroy the jedi but keeping the wars it would have been a much better answer to the franchise.I’m also pro-TLJ, but I do think it could have done with a few tweaks to the script to catch some stuff. In terms of how it looked and was acted on the moment-to-moment scale they nailed it though, so I’m not sure if that falls under “better execution”
I mean it’s a high budget Disney film, the script should be the only place for improvement.
True, but I would argue that TLJ actually did substantially better than the Disney and Star Wars averages on the visual front. Not necessarily in terms of the technical execution of the effects since they’re always basically as good as they get for the time in both Disney and Star Wars stuff, but in terms of the composition of shots
Never watched it, but am intrigued. How so?
Rian Johnson is a master of deconstructing genres.
if you went this long without watching it I won’t spoil it but to say the themes are not typical of the rest of the franchise and the fans hated it for that.
