My pick: The Silence of the Lambs
Literally never got the hype, it’s an aggressively mid movie. Not scary. No deeper message. Just a snoozefest of a movie.
Bonus Pick: The Godfather
Although I did like the movie, I didn’t think it was top tier like its commonly placed. There’s a ton of pro-AmeriKKKan propaganda and undertones in it as well.
Bonus bonus pick: The Matrix
I can see why people enjoyed it, the themes are interesting first time around. I just found the action scenes and Keanu Reeves character incredibly cringy. Kind of ruined it for me.
Alright Hexbear what are the most overrated movies in your opinion? Feel free to call me an uncultured pleb in the comments too.
Forest Gump, final answer
I could write a whole fucking novel about what an overrated piece of reactionary trash this sad excuse for a movie it is but I really don’t feel like wasting any more time even thinking about it because that’s just how much I hate Forest Gump
I would like to hear more
My dad agrees
I loved that movie so much for so long, but the older and lefter I get, the worse I think it is lol.
Same lol
The Matrix is my favourite film of all time, it’s a commentary on the human condition and one’s purpose in life, but it’s not a timeless film. It’s almost explicitly about cultural stagnation and the veiling of authoritarianism as enabled by the context of a newly encroaching digital age. I would personally call the fight scenes fantastic, but I see them through the lens of 20 odd years ago when I had quite literally never seen anything like it before.
I think it struggles now with something that Halo 1 struggles with - It pushed its medium beyond the limits and borderline invented a new genre. But now that people have experienced the thousands of films(/games) that took that and built on it, people don’t get the hype and will say it looks tired and overdone, in the context of today.
Agreed and very well put. I think it was revolutionary both in content and context, but has definitely been battered by time and the numerous other forms of media that took some cues and inspiration from it. That said, I think it still holds up very well.
I very much agree, and would still 100% recommend people watch it now. There are many timeless parts to it.
But there is an inescapable tie to the times - rotary phones, dial-up noises, talk about the 90s specifically, cubicle offices, ‘hardlines’, alarm clocks. I think even these were largely important and great parts of the film, but I could see how someone who knows nothing of that era might not “get it” quite so easily.
Yeah I was refraining from calling it a period piece of sorts, but the things you just brought up here I think I can confidently call it that.
When I first watched the matrix it was 1999 and we watched it three times in a row, back to back. The final movie is mid but the first one was a sweeping phenomenon, given the subtext and the closeted nature of 1999
My wife says Scarface “or every western ever”
My pick : Lawrence of Arabia
Radically underrated movie of all time : Waterworld 😏
Lawrence of Arabia
4 hours long and the only romantic film about the great war, even the cool shit way overstays its welcome
the deer hunter. ultimate lib movie about how we waged the vietnam war but we feel bad about it and didn’t they deserve it just a little bit? really gross.
I like young christopher walken’s performance quite a bit but it also ends on a scene where all the characters gather round a table and sing ‘god bless america’
yuck
It also does the thing where it depicts crimes done by the US as being done by the US’s enemies. The NVA did not slaughter entire villages (including children) and definitely not just because. There were extrajudicial mass killings of reactionaries, spies, and collaborators, but never My Lai type shit the US and its allies were doing.
yes!!! it’s real atrocity propaganda bullshit
That’s interesting bc I always saw this movie as a depiction of how the US imperialist war machine destroyed young men and American communities. I thought the singing scene was bitterly ironic. Been a long time since I saw it now but I recall it as an anti war movie
I think your read on it was right…which is part of why the movie makes me so mad. It does put a lot of effort to depict how fighting in Vietnam destroyed these men, but it also validates the supposed reasons americans were there in the first place by depicting the viet cong as murdering civilians for actually no reason at all. The obsession with death instilled in these men throughout the movie are shown to originate from the vietnamese(seen through the famous russian roulette scenes)…not the American military
The singing scene has a quality of
dissent after everything that came before it imoHm, very interesting. I saw it when I was much younger so maybe I was less critical of the VC depiction than I would be now.
After reading your comment I found this extremely in-depth article about the making of the film and the controversies which surrounded it and a lot of your criticisms seem to have been made around its release, it was a good read:
Based off the IMDB list and the AFI list:
Forrest Gump. Just a nostalgia montage, and the “mentally handicapped guy ends up being ridiculously rich by chance” plot in retrospect feels less heartwarming, more emblematic of how much the boomers got life handed to them on a silver platter. Plus it’s the poster child for the “you never go full r****d” problem with dramatic acting.
Wife’s choice: Gladiator. Overrated acting, overwroughtly manly man schtick. Like, fine as an action film but not Oscar-caliber. Plus, I knew someone who was deep into ren faire and historical recreation and she was so annoyed it won the best costume Oscar despite there being costume elements involving metal working techniques that didn’t come along until the middle ages.
It won the best costume Oscar despite there being costume elements involving metal working techniques that didn’t come along until the middle ages.
That’s hilarious. I had no idea.
There’s a bunch. Rome wasn’t white marble, they painted the shit out of everything (also dicks graffiti’d everywhere). Over millennia, the paint wore off and people in the Renaissance didn’t have the technology to scan the marble, so they thought it was plain white. All the fascination with Greece and Rome during that era resulted in depictions of Rome as a white marble city. The show, Rome, has a more accurate representation of what the city would have looked like.
In the opening scene, the “catapults” are trebuchets, something invented hundreds of years later for destroying castle walls, not launching fireballs. It’s like if you had a movie about the American Civil War and the Union calls in a drone strike using flag signals. Also, flaming arrows were never a thing (a lot of movies do this).
The forest isn’t right, either. It’s a monoculture forest, which wasn’t something that existed until early industrialization when Europe had cut down too many trees. To make up for overharvesting, they planted as many trees as they could, using whatever they had available. Germania during the Roman Empire would have forests that were incredibly diverse, even during winter. There would have been dozens of species.
You don’t slash/cut with a Gladius. You can because it’s still a sharp sword. But the primary method of using it was stabbing. They were meant to expend as little energy as possible while fighting in tight formations. The blade could easily slip between two shields while the shields were held up to block. Opponents with other weapons would have trouble staying in packed formations like the Romans could while wearing themselves out. Gladiator isn’t the only movie guilty of this, though.
Those are some of the main ones. It’s still one of my favorite movies, but it’s about as accurate as Enemy at the Gates.
The forest isn’t right, either
The rest of this seems pretty fair but I imagine scaring up a historically accurate forest is… impractical
Also, flaming arrows were never a thing (a lot of movies do this).
Relevant
I thought this was going to be the robin hood men in tights opening
Fire arrows are cool ngl
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Ridley Scott is a deeply incurious man who prefers telling a “good story” to any sort of historical accuracy. See also: the whole Napoleon shooting the Sphinx, and this rather interesting video on orientalism in music about using Armenian instruments in scenes depicting Morocco.
I actually find the plots in most of his movies really boring though. Alien and Blade runner are the only movies of his i like
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Any “historical media” that isn’t run by a complete history nerd with absolute control over every decision is going to have tons of shit like this. It’s almost all terrible for anyone who has a clue about the time periods being represented.
The Venn diagram of “dudebros who loved The Matrix for the shootout scene” and “people who know that the red pill is ethinyl estradiol” looks like the taillights on an early 1980s Corvette.
Wtf. Just an hour ago my brother said the two most overrated movies are the godfather and the matrix.
Are you …?
i think to really get the matrix you had to have been a teenager in 1999.
a lot of the matrix just feels corny now due it being memed and copied to death
After the big reveal, the movie loses steam and gets super boring
Is this a joke thing I don’t get? I don’t think of the Matrix as having a ‘big reveal’.
the whole “neo is actually in the future and all of the reality he’s known is an elaborate simulation” doesn’t stand out as a reveal?
The explanation of what the Matrix is? I know it’s shocking, but there are indeed people who haven’t seen the movie or clocked the computer simulation pop culture memes about it
And in 1999 the reveal was even more impactful
I don’t know if it’s the most overrated, but there’s a special spot in my spleen for Arrival. It establishes a universe with hard determinism and then totally fails to engage with it. The plot is resolved by a Chinese general convincing himself not to Launch the Missiles via a time paradox that, again, the movie makes no attempt to engage with. It’s a perfect artifact of its time (2016) because it’s a pure distillation of American liberalism, a broody, pseudointellectual exercise so convinced of its own inevitability that it no longer needs to justify itself.
didn’t they lift the whole time travel mechanic from slaughterhouse 5?
It’s apparently based on a Ted Chiang short story that’s allegedly better, but I haven’t gotten around to reading it.
Feel free to call me an uncultured pleb in the comments too.
i think SotL is an excellent story with Jodie Foster facing down both rampant workplacce sexism and Anthony Hopkins at his creepiest (he only had 16 minutes of screentime). watching them play mind games with each other is like Light vs L … Buffalo Bill tho
2001: A Space Odyssey.
It’s Absolutely Incredible in a lot of ways, but is incredibly disjointed. I don’t even mind the length or slow pacing, but I can’t excuse how the 2nd act has little thematic connection with anything else in the movie. And the psychedelic 3rd act is just bad. It’s a good example of how a movie can be Great, but not Good.
The Dark Knight. I guess it’s not exactly Godfather or anything, but it seems to be held in greater esteem than most comic book slop, probably because the dialog is I’m 14 and this is deep. It has horrible Bush-era politics in it too (we have to give all our data to cops or the terrorists win), which makes it incredibly dated, although the sequel outdoes it in that regard. I won’t even mention that the plot makes no sense, because that usually doesn’t matter that much in movies like this.
Nolan loves himself way too much, he thinks he’s the best director ever and every shot has to be Epic, and every line has to be Epic, and every character Epic. It blew my mind the first time I watched it because I was 14 and had never thought about themes before. Half of the dialogue in the Dark Knight is just characters stating the themes allowed, like “oooh chaos vs order, oooh the Joker thinks people are all bad but he’s wrong”.
Actually that brings up something I’ve not thought of before, which is that Batman does nothing to prove the Joker wrong. The big push against his ideology is when the people on the boats refuse to blow each other up, but Batman has nothing to do with that. He spends the entire movie being an Ubermensch and fighting people, then the Joker’s ideology is defeated and Batman’s just like “yeah I guess you’re wrong, not that I had done anything to prove my investment in you being wrong.”
There are plenty of good elements to the movie, it’s not a catastrophe of filmmaking, but I just hate Nolan and everything he stands for.
I’m embarrassed by how much I liked The Dark Knight when it came out. Probably the biggest 180 I’ve ever done in my opinion of a movie.
Hey, at least it’s not the worst thing people liked in 2008 and did a 180 on
The Matrix
Isn’t that the movie about a guy who takes a red pill and becomes a men’s rights activist
… No
children of men
Legally, you are allowed to have this incredibly incorrect opinion.
it’s quite boring and whatever the allegory was meant to be didn’t come across at all. bringing a child into that world seems like a cruelty to that child.
I only got around to seeing this about a year ago, and while it was worth the watch, it definitely did not live up to all the hype it gets imo
Dune is an offence to the media. The only movie that put me to sleep in 3 seperate attempts to honestly watch it. With the 1st being the in theater with the mindset of “ok what’s all this hype about?” And I liked the new Bladr Runner this director has chops. No I wasn’t expecting Star Wars but…something of a universe.
Devoid of charecter, life, color, a universe that seemed lived in. Empty sets. Horrific acting on a scale that makes
seem like an oscar winning dramatic performance.Overhyped by
cultists, Zendelamain ogglers (which I also didn’t care for) and paper sadists that get off on page count over all else.On top of all the emptiness and lack of life and empty set pieces and any sense of immersiveness like they forgot to hire prop people, the blasted thing gets awards for cinematography? I submitted a picture of actual dried paint and people took it seriously as art of the film. What the Nobel prize is this?
Which Dune movie?
The new ones.
