Equilibrium
Downsizing
First 20 minutes (give or take) seemed like a solid start. But then they did absolutely nothing with the concept.
It kind of did just wander.
Oof. Horrible movie. Bad Matt Damon!
Mortal Engines
I haven’t watched it yet, but this basically confirms my suspicions.
It’s worth a watch if only just for the effects and the world-building. I’m not against the premise, either, but like the title of the sub points out there was poor execution.
Mortal Engines is literally a refutation of liberalism in a capitalist system. It’s about how municipal darwinism doesn’t work.
Jurassic World. Just give me 90 minutes of dino mutants fighting, I don’t give a shit about Chris Pratt nor some random kids.
+1 for I do not give a shit about Chris Pratt
He’ll never be my Mario.
Cabin in the woods
100% agree. It’s a fine twist on the subgenre, but the twist introduces an idea that begs to be expanded upon as part of a larger, cross-subgenre arc. And yet we only get a sliver and then it’s done.
My hot take is that Joss Whedon’s writing is like JJ Abrams’: perfect premises with bad sense of follow-thru, so all their work gets the Netflix “over before it’s satisfyingly concluded” treatment
I feel like everything was explained. I’m not left with any lingering questions about why or how any of it happened
you shut your bastard mouth!
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
nepo baby actresses
which ones
Eragon.
There is a reason that most fans pretend the film never happened
Reign of fire. Don’t know if that’s what you were referencing in the picture but it’s immediately what came to mind when I saw the drawing.
Dude yes, I was so hyped for it, but it really underdelivered
Bits of it were good. Seems like something went wrong in production or they ran out of money or something. Some of the effects were really good and there was a real mood to the post apocalypse world but it was very uneven especially the way the entire process of civilization ending was just a montage of newspaper headlines. It’s ok to be post apocalypse of you don’t want to show the apocalypse but that was just cheese. Also there were the odd shots that were of just such a lower standard than the rest of the film. Like this scene where a guy climbs up a watertower and stands atop it getting ready to throw a spear and for some reason after the effects extravaganza up until that point in the film it looked a cheap television blue screen that was super awkward. I guess they wanted it to look taller than in reality and show the desolate landscape but it’s so weird that after all the aerial dragon combat they’d pulled off pretty well for the most part that THAT was somehow difficult. I seem to recall storywise there was some very disappointing ending too but it’s been rather too long for me to recall it now anyway.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Amazing world building and visuals that was destroyed by terrible casting and wooden acting.
The box art put me off thisnone, but skimming the plot and it reads like an amazing visual spectacle. Might watch this one
The Cube.
Most people saw it as an average horror movie where a bunch of people try to get out of a giant torture box. But there was a pivotal scene that stuck with me where one of the prisoners realizes he helped build part of it. The whole thing wasn’t some intentional torture device but just a bunch of people doing their day jobs that were lost in a bureaucracy not ever questioning what their work was creating.
A stark reflection of society and the systems we create and the dangers of not ever looking at the bigger picture.Of course they proceeded to shit all over this idea in Cube2 where it ended up being just another evil government experiment.
I think the execution was amazingly well done. It’s one of the best character driven horror-thrillers I’ve ever seen, all the characters are memorable and well-rounded, the premise is explored as much as it needs to be, and it doesn’t really leave any loose ends. 9/10 movie for sure
Yeah it’s not a bad film at all really, but even just within the horror/scifi genre it can’t compete with higher budget films for popularity.
Just to ask, nobody understood the full picture of what they were making? Or was there someone who created the concept but intentional obfuscated it from everyone else via bureaucracy?
Granted it’s just the viewpoint of one of the prisoners but it’s the one I found most intriguing. To quote the movie: “Nobody knew what it was, nobody cared…there is no conspiracy, nobody is in charge. It’s a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan…somebody might have known sometime before they got fired, voted out, or sold it…this is an accident, a forgotten perpetual public works project. You think anybody asked questions? All they want is a clear conscience and a fat paycheck.”
Man in the High Castle tv show. The premise was interesting, Nazis taking over the US and the population figting back. However, the show quickly devolved into a confusing mess.
Nazis are in charge of the US government, yet there’s other Nazis on the run from the Nazis in charge? And they’re hiding bibles? I was left scratching my head wondering if there were any characters that weren’t Nazis. I guess it’s a story about how bad guys always turn on each other?
Also The Witcher season 1 tv show. I’ve never played the games before and knew nothing about it. I was hoping the tv series would be my introduction to the games, but… what in the actual fuck. Was the director drunk? Is this a show about medieval fantasy time travel and I’m just not getting it?
Man in the High Castle
Although I liked the series, the “supernatural” elements in it really threw me off. I would still recommend the series but be clear that it is science fiction and doesn’t always adhere to physical limitations as we know them, without getting any more specific than that.
Season 1 is based on the first book, which was made some a bunch of serials in a fiction magazine. It’s honestly pretty spot on with the book and the following books and seasons are fully linear.
Is this a show about medieval fantasy time travel and I’m just not getting it?
The three main perspectives it follows take place at different points in and over different amounts of time but each one is internally completely linear and then they all end the season at the same point as each other. Basically, the less you’re making an effort to follow the plot the easier it is to follow because keeping track of the interconnectedness distracts you from the straightforward character stories.
This isn’t me trying to convince you to go back, to be clear, I’m just hoping this will give you some closure.
1st season had 2-3 timelines going at once, no time travel (this time) just poorly executed non-linear story telling
Not a film, but a TV series? It’s called Jericho, and the synopsis in the Wikipedia reads:
Jericho is an American post-apocalyptic action drama television series, which centers on the residents of the fictional city of Jericho, Kansas, in the aftermath of a nuclear attack on 23 major cities in the contiguous United States.
But yeah, the execution is mediocre at best. Both the action and the drama are unbearably flimsy and cliche, even the argument flops as metal.
I love Jericho. On my third watch right now actually. Would agree that it’s frequently cliché, but overall I’d say it’s very good. Skeet Ulrich is transfixing.
Did you read the season 3 in comic books? I was surprised about the following they’ve got as I was reading that Wikipedia entry.
yeah but it’s been aaages, I forgot about what happened in those. I remember it was good.
Oh man I haven’t thought of Jericho in a minute. I used to watch that after The Unit.
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
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
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.
In time is absolutely an idea that I wish would get revisited for a TV show.
When I was a kid, for some reason, I loved the original West World movie, which is about 20% high concept and 80% “how do we copy terminator when all we have are a bunch of random Wild West, medieval and classical back lots?”
Obviously a few years ago HBO picked it up for a show, and that first season explores some of the richest philosophy I’ve seen on TV, in the way only Sci-Fi can; by building characters and technology directly around their philosophical takes and stress testing them. Also simultaneously it created an incredibly compelling story and characters. All of this stemmed from the idea “what if there was a wild west theme park manned by perfectly realistic animatronics?”
In Time may not have the cult classic reputation of the first Westworld but it’s got appeal and charm, while being basically only interesting in it’s high concept, and therefore perfect to pull apart and explore an HBO style branching plot. I bet you could get Justin Timberlake to appear in it again too, for added audience appeal. A show like this can also explore multiple characters in different classes, and those who interact with both. It’s just wasn’t that suited to a movie.
And Justin Timberlake is good at pop music
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.
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!
