I’ve recently played Resident Evil 6 for the 1st time after playing Resident Evil 4 (an absolute masterpiece) & Resident 5 (a pretty good game). I was already aware of the hate this game got over the years. But after experiencing it, it’s only bad in an artificial way. Like yeah, it’s nothing like the classic games and it’s too much in the action category.
Otherwise, as someone who loves action games, it’s a pretty fun game. Especially in Mercenaries Mode, where it’s fun to mow down body-horror themed enemies. As a Resident Evil game, it’s pretty bad. But…as an action third person shooter with splatter punks, it’s quite well executed
I was fine with Waterworld.
Iirc most of the press was just “this cost waaaaay too much to make” rather than “its a bad movie”
Thanks for reminding me I still need to actually watch it, though. And ive got a few hours to kill.
Just watched it for the second time last month educating the youth of today. Deserves a sequel more than Moana did.
The Stunt show at Universal Studios was really cool tho
Yes, which reminds me of another hated movie I love: The Cable Guy aka Cabo Goobla:
“Dry land is not a myth. I’ve seen it.” Kevin Costner. Waterworld. I don’t know what the big fuss is about. I saw that movie nine times. It rules!
- Chip Douglas
So much so that I’m always surprised when they get the quote wrong in Waterworld itself! 😅
It’s mad max on the water, what’s not to love? Now postman on the other hand…
Hey now, I actually liked Postman.
Especially back in the day. It was a major action movie event.
I kind of feel the same way about Cutthroat Island. It was a massive failure, but the production value was great and I thought it was a fun action flick.
Side Note: Waterworld is one of the few movies I recommend NOT watching the extended cut. The scenes are very low quality and feel like a TV production compared to the rest of the theatrical cut scenes.
I watched that movie when I was a kid and genuinely liked it. (I do still have really broad taste, the question can be answered for me with “most media, apparently”)
It has a special place in my heart as one of a few dozen vhs we had that I could watch with no restrictions. (One of the banned movies was A clear and Present Danger, and I still don’t know why because I can’t stay awake through it because its boring. Another was Pulp Fiction. Maybe the first was a ruse!)
Is it a good movie? Idk. But smeat is still funny to me in ways that probably would have hit the same if I’d watched it today for the first time, so…
I like the Super Mario Bros movie, I don’t care how loosely connected it is to the games.
The Last Jedi. It took me a while to even process the hate, and I still don’t really respect it, but I think I understand it. TLJ is flawed but by far the best sequel, and an Ep9 where Kylo is beyond redemption and rebels and force users are bubbling up from everywhere could have been really interesting.
Even if they’d backtracked thematically, The Rise of Skywalker made a huge mistake in overtly shitting on it, literally fucking over its own story (such as it was) and pacing to do so, and thereby pleasing no one. Even if you don’t like what your partner did, you have to “Yes, and…,” not go full “Michael Scott in improv class.”
I thought that most of the movie was somewhere between fine and fun, but that casino planet sequence was so unbearably bad that it soured the entire movie for me. I thought it was poorly-done, ham-handed social commentary awkwardly shoehorned into a strangely long sequence. And then at the end of it, they were in the exact same position they were at the beginning. It took a huge chunk of the second act, and it basically amounted to nothing.
It took a huge chunk of the second act, and it basically amounted to nothing.
Love it or hate it, and the fact that some people will decide they hate it is what I had to come to terms with, this was very intentional and played into the theme of Poe’s arc while letting Finn get the small amount of character growth they layered on in TLJ. It also made it clear that Rose is not so much a fully fleshed-out character as she is a stand-in for the entire Resistance, so she gets a chance to make its case and show its impact. Fighting the good fight is worth it even if, in the short term, it seems doomed. Narratively, I thought Canto Bight did a lot.
The biggest issue with TLJ that I don’t see brought up a lot is that it left no where for the story to go.
We enter the movie with the First Order the only force in the galaxy after only destroying a few planets in the last movie, and somehow the resistance is even smaller than it was before.
We end the movie without really anything changing (except the resistance is even smaller - like 20 people).
Unless it was going to be four movies, TLJ doesn’t leave a lot of directions for the story. It basically has to be Rey trying to decapitate the head of the First Order by killing Ben. Rise of Skywalker fails because TLJ didn’t do anything to move the plot, forcing two movies worth of plot into one.
My take away was that the protagonists were too caught up in being the protagonists and the outcome would have been better if they had just done nothing.
Which just isn’t a very good adventure story.
Yeah it’s the best of the 3, but it’s also just about the worst middle part of a trilogy they could do. It rejects the setup and doesn’t really set up well for the finale, while going off and doing its own thing. The trilogy was pretty doomed before it, but it was the killing blow
You see, i don’t think so. I think it is definitely redirecting the setup, but apart from sheer number of remaining rebels, I think it tracks really well with ESB. The great victory from the opening movie reveals vulnerability and removes the threat of clean and instant apocalypse, but doesn’t truly alter the new balance of power (sigh… JJ could have given us a functioning New Republic dealing with an insurgency of its own, but no…). Our chosen one meets a reluctant mentor who eventually acquiesces to train her. She has a troubling but cryptic dark side experience and leaves after learning some but not enough. Hero confronts a dark truth about her history but ultimately can’t truly defeat the villain. Through pluck and sacrifice, our heroes live to fight another day and we are left only with the implication of useful resources (“the fleet” in ESB, the allies who hadn’t yet answered in TLJ).
Now, I’ll concede the time jump would have needed to be more like ANH->ESB than ESB->ROTJ for it to work, but I also think the set up for an Episode 9 where the call is answered/being answered could work. In Canto Bight we’re made aware that the Alliance/Resistance’s iconography is inspirational, and we learn that the Force is out there, and there are people who want to believe in the cause of both. Additionally, we have a villain who is struggling between the light and the dark, but ultimately rejects both, as he understands them, to make his own path and pursue his own goals, motivated by emotional torment and a tragic sense of abandonment. There’s good bones there, much better than “here’s a hatful of fan theories. Pick one and let’s chase some mcguffins.”
It’s the GOTCHA! (well that’s a good part of it.)
TLJ is just about the best movie in the whole series. The hatred is 85% pissed-off fans who thought the franchise belonged to them. And the rest is just anti-woke hysterics.
In time, TLJ will get the respect it deserves.
I do think the movie was weak on the handwavium when a few lines could have turned the siege/chase into something a little more compelling. Some of the dialogue skewed a bit Marvel-y, and Finn’s TLJ arc was way too similar to his TFA arc, only nudging forward his circle of empathy a bit. I also wish wish wish somebody had simply said the Holdo maneuver worked because she locked onto the hyperspace tracker: BOOM, two birds with one battlecruiser. Casino planet dragged a bit, but I didn’t mind it nearly as much as others. Maz was wasted, and in some ways, the whole movie actually mapped too closely to ESB (subversion indeed).
However, Luke’s arc hit me exactly right given that they were forced to revisit a Hero’s-Journey hero whose journey was done, because JJ Abrams set up the galaxy in possibly the least compelling way possible. Luke’s return from backsliding into his own old habits, accepting his failure, and using the energy he had left to secure a future for the next generation… that’s good stuff, and a lot of the boomers and older X’s who idolized him would do well to heed the lesson.
The initial tone poem with Rose’s sister was beautiful. DJ absolutely fit as a tweak on Lando and commentary on what all this is supposed to mean. The Poe arc that he can’t simply Maverick his way into leadership, the idea that Rey was no one and yet everything, that Force users and resistance could come from anywhere, and that Ren was on a path apart from Snoke’s but equally irredeemable, all these things were HUGE improvements from TFA and were setting things up for a very compelling finale.
Instead, JJ crammed in his own Episode 8 into the first 45 minutes, left no time to have his own movie make any sense, just channelled Harry Potter and the Avengers for its conclusion, and repeatedly reminded people that TLJ was being undone (“come with us, Rose!” “Can’t! Leia gave me homework!”… We picked “Yer a Palpatine, Rey!” from the hat full of fan theories!), thereby reminding TLJ’s fans that it was being undone, and its haters that it existed. Just a piece of shit movie all around, and to top it off, with my “ACKSHULLY” cap on, it still didn’t connect the tracker with the Holdo maneuver!!!
Finally, for what it’s worth, TLJ is the only ST movie to engage in good faith with the PT, which is something you need to do, even if (like me) they’re far from your favorites.
I really enjoy the original live action Super Mario Bros movie from the early 90s. The production was an absolute mess from beginning to end, but somehow, an actually watchable movie came out of it, and the story is actually somewhat entertaining, even if it has nothing to do with the actual games.
It was silly like a cartoon. It was deeply flawed on nearly every critical metric but it made us laugh, with it or at it.
I have to say I enjoy that movie a lot too. I’m not denying that it’s a terrible movie, but it’s terrible in a very watchable and enjoyable way.
It’s just a fun movie. I don’t know if I only think that because I grew up with it though.
“Some body once told me, the world was gonna roll me, I ainʻt the sharpest tool in the shed…”
All Star is on my hate list because I’ve heard it too many times at this point. It joins
- Don’t Stop Believing by Journey
- Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen
- Nevermind by Nirvana
- A few Red Hot Chili Peppers songs
You forgot something that you’re going to start remembering very soon
you sonofabitch
I meant Mariah Carey, not The Game.
Oh right, that song I heard too much Last Christmas
You forgot the killers - Mr brightside
You’ll probably hate this then
Civ VII. Every version makes changes and people scream and shout - and I’m sure many legitimately don’t like the changes. But I do. I started with Civ IV and I liked V, VI, and now VII.
How did you feel about Civ: Beyond Earth?
It sounded interesting, but I never obtained it, alas. :)
The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy.
Story time. I’m nearing 30 and had only seen bits and pieces of the original trilogy (not more than 10 minutes or so at a time), and I saw episode 7 in theatre. Last year, my roommate (who is a huge Star Wars fan) and I decided to watch through the whole series. We started with the original, then trudged through the sequels so we could line up the prequel rewatch with the 20th anniversary of episode 3 and see it in theatre.
I went into it “knowing” that the originals were the best, the sequels were embarrassingly bad, and the prequels were pretty heavily shit on but still decent. I actually ended up liking the prequels more. From a technical standpoint I’d argue that they are probably “worse” movies. There’s the obvious things that don’t make sense (like Anakin being a child in episode one and a young adult in episode two yet Padme looks relatively unchanged) and the dialogue is certainly goofy at times, but I felt a lot more connected to the story and had more fun with the prequels than the originals.
The sequels were, in fact, absolute dog shit though.
Really, a lot of the prequel hate comes from them taking such a huge step down from the OT. In 1999, The Phantom Menace was the first major Star Wars film in 16 years; it wasn’t just a cool new thing, it was a cultural event. People expected great things.
Obviously it failed at that. Not once, but twice. Revenge of the Sith barely even got a chance.
And so the backlash was brutal. While the critique wasn’t unfair in its points, it also came from a perspective of starkly emotional disappointment. People say the prequels are looked at more fondly now due to ‘nostalgia’, but mostly I think it’s that the emotional pain has faded and we can analyze them more objectively as flawed, but ultimately solid films rather than ‘disasters’.
It may be that one day the sequels will be more coldly studied as well, with more focus placed on the issues produced by cycling directorship and management pressures… but I also think even a coldly analytical appraisal of them will still come up as “hollow and emotionless”.
flawed, but ultimately solid films rather than ‘disasters’.
I think they might still be at least verging on disasters, though certainly more interesting ones than JJ’s movies (see elsewhere in this thread for my thoughts on TLJ). The PT actually reminds me a lot of other passion projects (Megalopolis is probably the most recent, and surprise surprise, Coppola is a friend and mentor) that reveal the limitations of deferring to the auteur’s singular vision in a collaborative artform.
The “saved in the edit” narrative for ANH is disingenuous I think, inserting a miracle for a particularly strong example of how the workflow for a weird project should work, but it does hint at the truth that somebody like Lucas has as many bad ideas as good ones, and only the ones he can sell to fellow respected professionals should stay in the final product.
I also think it’s fair to say that because he was frustrated by the “compromises” with actors, writers, directors, and studios who all felt they were equal stakeholders, the unfiltered Lucas was a jarring departure from the OT, yet ostensibly targeted the exact same demographics, and that made it even harder to evalute the PT on its own terms. For me personally, I could never truly get over the stilted line readings that felt exactly like the cheesy serials that Lucas loved, but that the New Hollywood “kids” and British stage veterans refused to let infect the OT. “You can write this shit, George, but you can’t say it.”
The sequels have a bipolar plot, it gives you whiplash seeing the tonal shift and direction change each movie goes through.
The prequels are definitely flawed (George, how much political mumbo jumbo do you really think people want to see in their space wizard drama?) but they have a more or less coherent story. You can see how A>B>C and it makes sense.
Plus, the absolute memefest that the prequels turned into has helped a ton.
I’ve never understood the hate for the prequels. I thought The Phantom Menace was kind of boring and I’ve never successfully removed Jar Jar’s voice from my head, but I straight up liked Attack of The Clones and Revenge of The Sith.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
I like the movie and have watched it three times, now.
I’ve tried to watch it, but couldn’t.
The lead actor’s voice does not match his face, and the lead actress acts like a plastic doll. Both of them have the chemistry as a bag of marbles, with the charisma of a broom stick.
For my money Dehaan was the worse of the two. She was sort of written as a stick in the mud, but Valerian himself was supposed to be, y’know, fun.
While I know we’ve all soured on Chris Pratt, I do like the joke that Passengers and Valerian should have just traded leads.
I liked it for the world building potential, it does feel like it’s the 2nd or 3rd movie in a trilogy I terms of story.
It needed different leads, for some reason those two give off huge and I mean HUGE brother/sister vibes… Ruins the movie.
sword art online, sure it doesn’t have a sensible plot or good writing but it has so much potential.
Honestly i really liked the relationships in it. The premise is really good too. I get why the later seasons just didnt deliver the same though.
Isn’t it just a what if hack sign was a harem anime?
I watched it fresh back in the day and I liked it too.
The one thing that really gets me is that in a world that loves gaming, they didn’t have a regulating body or at least Gamers’ Nexus to look over the headset and say, “this could fucking kill someone.” I get that it would kill the entire franchise but I feel like they could have tried harder.
I could never tell you why, but the hate SAO gets is really obxious and is the reason why I hate the anime community
Bubsy in Claws Entounters of the Furred Kind.
Bubsy walked so Crash could run.
Lest we forget the internet master of Bubsy, Ulillillia
I had a love/hate relationship with Bubsy. Loved the almost surreal environments. The difficulty almost drove me to preteen violence though. Not sure I ever beat the two titles I have.
I mastered the original. Beat it a few times. Can’t even get past the past few levels these days ha.
At least Bubsy 4D was a bunch of fun!
(2002) Time Machine with Guy Pierce and Jeremy Irons
Wasn’t a big hit when it came out and it’ll never be as iconic as the George Pal Time Machine from the 60’s. But the 2003 adaptation has the coolest looking time machine to come around in a while (at the time it was the most expensive prop ever built, might still be but I’m not sure.)
Critics shit on it for not having the cataclysmic event that destroys humanity be global warming. While I’m all for talking about global warming I can kind of understand why they didn’t use that and why they didn’t reuse the 60’s disaster of nuclear war.
spoiler
In the 2002 film humans destroy the moon while nuking underground living spaces to build a low gravity retirement community for the elderly.
But to be fair to the writers their choice to destroying humanity was original, kind of a tongue-in-cheek joke about the elderly crisis we’re currently entering into and the plan is in fact an idea that has been discussed before.
Aside from that the film is pretty solid. In the book by HG Wells and the 60’s film the Time Traveller (doesn’t even have a name) has zero motivation aside from achieving a new scientific advancement. Thats cool and all but modern audiences, having had several successful time travel stories since Wells time, do need a better eureka moment than that. The 2002 film provides a good and believable motivation.
spoiler
His girlfriend is killed while he proposes to her. His first time traveling event is going back in time to save her, only to have fate killed her in some other cruel way. So instead of repeating the event he goes forward in hopes someone in the future will figure out how he can change the past.
The film also features a believable super-distant future where the human species splits, just like in the original stories. Samantha Mumba is a member of the tribe of humans that live above ground and are technologically ignorant, thought not exactly like the child-like race we see in the 60’s version. They do maintain that there are no old people and why that is.
spoiler
Morlocks are eating them up before they get old and the meat gets all tough and stringy.
Samantha Mumba did a great job in her role and while I don’t normally discuss a persons race the fact her father was Zambian and her mother Irish did kind of lean into what a future race of people could look like. She has a distinct look which played to the role.
Orlando Jones makes a couple appearances as a sort of AI librarian. It’s nice to see him in the odd movie role.
Jeremy Irons is the head morlock, the race of humans that stayed underground, and doesn’t disappoint, although his character is more of a cameo.
spoiler
He is the one who eventually explains that the issue with changing the past is a temporal paradox since Guy Pierce wouldn’t have built the machine if his lover hadn’t die, thus she must die because without the machine he couldn’t have went back to save her. Then to save his new future girlfriend the 2 fight to the death and he uses the time machine to sort of blow up all the other morlocks.
The film also had a good soundtrack and special effects that features the classic “years passing in seconds” stuff that was iconic from the 60’s film.
But ultimately the film is mostly forgotten to audiences.
This is one of my favorite popcorn flicks. The first half of the movie is amazing (up to the part where the moon gets destroyed), but I feel like they could have done more to make the second half more entertaining. I don’t know what, but it feels like it’s missing something. I also like how the film predicted the concept of LLMs and giving them an avatar, even though they predicted it happening about decade too soon IIRC.
The core problem is the source material is also boring. Aside from the motivation issues and the fact Wells never even bothers to name the Time Traveller, the whole plot is a bit slow. Sure, the morlocks eating people is creepy but it never manages to get to the horror level like how Jurassic Park or Jaws was able to achieve. You never really felt like they were going to sneak up behind you and slash you or tear you limb from limb.
The changes they made to the story helped: named the character, moved him to New York instead of London, gave him a deep motivation, even the morlocks had a more organized system that was more believable (hunted the Eloi and were controlled telepathically by Jeremy Irons.)
Maybe having more Irons in it would’ve helped but with the plot elements they had to work with it would’ve been tricky. The good thing is they didn’t drag it out, 90 minutes is the proper length. Nowadays they’d try to make it 2 1/2 and it’d be bogged down.
I still like watching the time traveling sequence.
That and the machine itself are the real star of the film. I came across some behind the scenes of the build years ago and it was impressive. The wood deck is all steel painted to look like wood. Since the spinning bits weighed a ton, acrylic and brass, they had to have it be secure. Even the geared computer (forget what it’s called… a baggage computer?) worked. Really impressive prop that doesn’t get enough love. Makes the Pal time machine look like a joke.
I was a young man when this came out and I certainly remember Samantha Mumba’s performance.
Yeah she was fun. Shame she didn’t do more stuff. I’d probably blow up my time machine and live with her instead of going back too.
Definitely!
Scrubs s9 and the Star Wars prequels.
The Marvels. The first movie wasn’t great but this sequel was genuinely pretty fun.
Some projects are weaker than others, of course, but there is a part of the Marvel audience that can let an Antman movie slide by with little comment, but if they have to watch a girl be strong for 100 minutes, and it’s not some hybrid of peak George Lucas, Mel Brooks, and Shakespeare, then clearly it’s fucking awful garbage and they need to tell everybody how bad it is, but also they’re not sexist because they liked Scarlett Johansson in those other movies.
The Marvels was fun and better than several Antman and Thor movies, among many others.
I’m pretty cautious of attributing hatred of the women-led movies purely to misogyny-- I think it’s usually overzealous-- but I really can’t think of (and haven’t heard of) any other reason to dislike this particular film, so… yup, seems like it.
Side note but I actually really like the antman movies. You have to like them for what they are though. I think The Marvels actually leans a bit towards a similar fun atmosphere.
David Lynch’s Dune. I understood the hate it got. It is a horribly difficult book to put on film. I thought the style and feel of it was great and so over the top at times. I read the book so I knew what was going on but I understood the criticisms. Sting in a speedo though, wtf? lol
Edit: Almost forgot, a great lineup of actors too.
Best Dune movie ever and I’ll die on that hill. Never read the books and I had no problem following it.
The hallucinatory scenes on Giedi Prime horrified and fascinated me (I was way too young when I watched it).
I saw Tron: Ares in the theater. I’m honestly indifferent to Jared Leto as an actor/person, and I was just interested in how the movie would build on the Tron universe. It don’t blow me away but I didn’t hate it either. But I get why it flopped. Sadly, it probably means we won’t ever get another Tron movie.
Every Tron movie has flopped and they still reboot it every so many years so who knows? 😅
Look, as long as they hire great musicians I don’t even care about the actual movie. Best part of their mediocre Tron movies is new Daft Punk and Trent Reznor. Its hard to hate the objectively weak films when they splurge on the other stuff.
All true! Like Jay from RLM said: “they’re vehicles for awesome soundtracks”. And very interesting visuals too, at least in the first two movies, the third one felt a bit repetitive and too “videogamey” IMO. 👍
