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Movies that Missed
On The Great Debate thread about superpowers (specifically the superpower of flight), a comment by Carey J reminded me of the not-so-great superhero movie Hancock. I thought Hancock had real potential. The basic premise is an alcoholic superhero — but not a mostly functional alcoholic like Tony Stark; a real Skid Row-type alcoholic with Superman-like powers, who can’t fly straight because he’s blind drunk. He causes damage just taking off to fly, not to mention all the havoc he creates while flying, stopping crime, or saving people. Then a PR guy comes along who wants to reform Hancock and rehabilitate his image. The publicist is a loser and schmuck who is also unsuccessfully trying to get a charity campaign off the ground. If you haven’t seen Hancock, what follows is a spoiler alert.
The PR guy’s wife is actually another super-powered immortal like Hancock and is really Hancock’s wife.When the two of them are together, they start to lose their powers and become vulnerable (she is his Kryptonite and vice versa). she left him back in 1931 after he had suffered serious brain trauma so that he would be invulnerable again and could recover and serve the world. The movie just sort of falls apart from there. It’s a mess. The story has more loose ends than knots that come together.
But it could have been a great movie. It’s like they had this one great image in the beginning, and couldn’t figure out what to do with it. They had the start of the story and a general them (redemption), but had no idea where to take it. Maybe it was the editing of the movie, the rewrites, or a thousand other things besides the original script, but the movie that should have been made did not come together. It’s a terrific example of a film that could have been great but wound up mediocre.
Are there movies that you think were unnecessary misses? Movies with great premises, but poor execution? What’s your favorite movie that could have been?
Published in General
Arahant
And don’t forget the bringing to life of stereotypes: The Trocharian, Jar-Jar Binks and co, etc.
You mean like the heartless, money-hungry pawnbroker with a big nose and a thick accent who sells Anakin’s mom into slavery out of the back room of the shop? Yeah, that did seem a little questionable.
You can take the boy out of Modesto, but you can’t take Modesto out of the boy…
But Jerry Abrams thought he had a big hit, so it does count as a miss. I can just picture the writers’ meetings…
“Mr. Abrams, I’m pretty sure that the critics will savage the gaping plot holes in this…”
“Shut Up! We’ve [expletive] got [expletive] Khan! He’s always brings in the nerds…”
I’ve actually seen all four versions. I wanted that much to like it. I agree that the director’s cut is probably the best, but that isn’t saying much. It’s a movie that can’t decide what it’s trying to be. It ends up being not much of anything.
Great battle scenes though.
Dang, I about spewed my drink on that one!
Sadly, “An American Carol” was a fail. Current liberal culture is so ripe for satire. (Mike Judge probably does it best.)
Tom Meyer and Skipsul – I enjoyed the first Abrams Star Trek reboot for the most part. What really ticked me off was they ended that film with the promise that it was a new timeline, a new universe, where they could take these beloved characters in any direction. And what did they do? They retold “Wrath of Khan” badly.
Watto was a Toydarian, so I got the alien race name slightly wrong, but yeah, like him.
The Last Airbender. The movie was based on the truly great childrens’ animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. So the story had already been told, spectacularly. Great premise, great characters, and a lot of humor.
And then M. Night Shymalan ruined it. The weird thing is, he didn’t ruin it by making a ton of story changes (some tweaks here and there; and unnecessarily changing the pronunciation of characters’ names). He just sucked all joy and fun out of the characters, directed flat performances out of the actors, made exposition in dialogue very awkward and repetitive, and horribly miscast the main villain, Admiral Zhao (he’s voiced by Jason Isaacs in the cartoon, and is appropriately intimidating; but the actor cast in the live-action film is not intimidating at all).
One more: Man of Steel. A new take on Superman was intriguing, and the visuals in the trailer (plus the Hans Zimmer music) was gorgeous.
But, again, like Airbender, all the joy was sucked out of the Superman story. Seriously, I think Nolan’s Batman films had more humor in them than this new Superman movie, and that should just not happen.
So much about the story bugged me as well (SPOILERS AHEAD):
– Pa Kent telling Clark he “maybe” should have just let a whole bus-full of his peers drown
– Pa Kent’s really stupid unnecessary death by tornado while Clark just watches; the original heart attack story is SO MUCH better.
– Pa Kent’s conflicting advice in general- “You’re destined for great things, Clark, making the world a better place. But don’t try to use your powers to do any good NOW. You know, just watch people you can save die for now and then do something great for the world at some undetermined time in the future.”
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– Superman seeming to not have any concern during his fisticuffs with Zodd that they’re demolishing half of Metropolis and killing thousands of innocent bystanders. Couldn’t he be shown as trying to move the fight away from Metropolis and not punching Zodd through skyscrapers.
– In general, the characters, despite having very good actors playing them, just felt bland.
Yeah, I was pretty disapopinted with the film
Oh, the exposition! I recently read a short story that was terribly written. It had a fun concept, but AUGH! the writing! At a point near the end, the guy is brought before a government official, who asks him to say out loud what they both know. So, who is it for? The audience. Pure exposition and very badly done.
One story I love about exposition is how Johnny Depp railed against doing it in the first Pirates movie. But they threw in a few really great phrases that were fun to say, so he did it.
I am much more a reader than a movie buff. The written word can let the reader develop so much more of the story in imagination. It is part of why readers are often disappointed in movies: they violate the expectations derived from the reader’s imagination.
I used to read at least a book per week. Some I liked, some I didn’t. 99%+ I finished even if I didn’t like them. Then I started writing seriously. I learned everything I could about writing. Now, I can identify every writing problem by name, and unless something is incredibly well-written, I have great difficulty getting through it. “This is _____ (Exposition or ‘show, don’t tell,’ etc.) Don’t you know how to write? Write better, consarn it!” I now might read two or three new books per year. I have tried to take up reading or rereading the classics, figuring that they would be better. Wrong. Jules Verne? Save me from that. Dafoe? Well, he created the genre in English, but a good modern editor would slap that boy upside the head repeatedly and use up a few red pens worth of ink. Twain? Funny and disturbing, but…
There is a book called The Two-Space War by Leo Frankowski and Dave Grossman. The characters are great fun, and how poetry is interwoven into the story and plot is a great thing by me. The problem is that the writing is just so bad. I once started going through it and marking the issues as if I were their editor. I was writing notes at least every other page. The main problem was repetitive exposition. Grossman’s day job is teaching warrior science. In teaching, the rule is that people learn after being exposed to information seven plus or minus two times. That means five to nine times. In a book, expose them to it once. They can re-read the book. But if you have the same exposition in the book nine times, you will bore the reader to tears.
So, The Last Airbender had repetitive exposition? I didn’t see the film, but trust me that I feel your pain.
Excellent example!
To be fair, is is a structural vulnerability in the Secret History subgenre of Alternate History. The big picture cannot change, so in the end the change that the story introduces is prevented from doing anything particularly big. Both His Majesty’s Dragon and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, although not secret histories, disappoint because in both cases, characters are introduced to help Wellington beat Napoleon, which (spoiler alert!) he managed to do in our time line as well, without the aid of dragons and/or magic.
David Weber is a space opera novelist who does that. I realized that it makes for easy listening when you’ve got the audio book playing in your car while you run errands. If the scenery distracts you, just wait; Webber’s gonna say everything three times, so if you miss something here and there–no problem!
That may be due to careless editing, or it may be by design. Somebody’s got to write the novels for the ADD readership, after all.
(I was listening to the Safehold series BTW, which has a great premise.)
Or maybe he is an audio book kind of guy and has experienced the same. Or he reads books piecemeal, so doesn’t mind a bit of repetition.
Between the fact that I tend to read a book in one sitting if I can and my excellent memory, I don’t need repetition, unless it is used as a red herring, an everyone knows which is not true. I also don’t appreciate 1,200 page novels due to my habit of just sitting down and reading them at one go. It took me 26 hours to get through one of the larger Harry Potter books. This is why I limit the fiction books I write to about 300 pages.
How about Matrix 2 & 3? Pretentious blather wrapped up in enigmatic twaddle. So disappointing after the first film.
Sequels: When the guys who made money on something great want to dip into the well for more money with little work.
Well, JS&MN sure didn’t disappoint me; it’s one of my all-time favorites.
Still waiting on that promised BBC series.
I never got the point of the Matrix. The nominal good guys wanted to deprive humanity of its generally benign false-consciousness in favor of a horrific reality.
Disappointed somewhat. The extended scene where the magician helps defeat Napoleon’s army seemed pretty pointless. But that was a sub-plot.
Sunshine: two-thirds of a fantastic and suspenseful science-fiction movie, one-third 28 Days Later on a spaceship. Talk about failing to stick the landing…also the premise is preposterous but it’s sci-fi so I’ll forgive it.
Fredosphere: “characters are introduced to help Wellington beat Napoleon, which (spoiler alert!) he managed to do in our time line as well, without the aid of dragons and/or magic.”
Were you there???? Hmmm??? How do you know Wellington didn’t have magic and dragons???
I was. There was no magic used on either side and no dragons. We have to guard against that sort of thing constantly.
I wanted to like the reboots. I really did. I hate the retcon of throwing everyone together at a younger age. Our heroes became who they were because of their age and experience. You can’t just make younger versions that behave the same. I hate that they made a young Kirk a car thieving snot nosed punk. I hate the bridge. I hate that engineering looks like sewer treatment plant. Who cast that guy as Khan? He couldn’t hold Montalban’s jock.
Metalhead, it’s funny that you should happen to describe the atmosphere and social currency of a Hollywood casting office with that particular metaphor…
Sheesh, when you put that way…
EPIC TAKEDOWN!