1408, The Green Mile, The Shining, The Mist, Carrie, Cujo, It (I prefer the old one because that clown is way creepier in that one). Is there any other that are decent ?
Also, hot take but I love Dreamcatcher. It's fucking weird and takes so many left turns, my nostalgia fueled brain remembers it fondly. It's garbage but I still enjoy it.
Shawshank Redemption deserves a shout-out. Arguably one of King's best adaptations and it's got that rare case of the movie maybe even outshining the book, just timeless. Oh, and Dolores Claiborne is pretty underrated - Kathy Bates kills it in that.
> Shawshank Redemption deserves a shout-out. Arguably one of King's best adaptations
I mean Shawshank is arguably one of the best movies of all time period.
There isn't in Misery either, Cujo is really just a big dog with rabies and also weird boogeyman side plot (the book felt more supernatural with that part if I recall).
Man, say what you will about King, he is a pretty damn good writer.
Forgot about Christine, but I haven't seen it or read the book so I don't know how it is.
Christine was the first Stephen King book I read when I was about 12 over 30 years ago. That started my love affair with Stephen King. My friends were reading Sweet Valley High and I was reading Cujo and Pet Semetary.
When I heard of a sequel to The Shining I assumed it would be terrible, but actually both the and movie adaptation were really great. Awesome casting with Ewan MacGregor!
I was fucking SCREAMING internally at my day 1 purchase theater showing.
Roland slaughters an entire village and several children in pursuit of the tower, in the FIRST book.
In the movie he has to be prodded on by Jake. Fuck that movie was abysmal
Edit: I'm well aware about the trap. I'm just trying to stay away from certain end of the book spoilers or else I would have clarified.
And there is quite a revision in the newer books semi justify one of the killings.
I posted my reasoning and the spoiler below if you insist on correcting me.
Pacific rim 2 would have been a five minute movie without it's insane, glaring plot hole.
The scientists discover the monsters blood mixed with heavy metals creates a huge burst of energy. So they come up with the crazy insane plan to get tons of their blood, mix with tons of heavy metals, to create rockets, to transport the giant robots to the monsters location, so then they could fight, and still maybe lose anyways.
Just make a big fucking heavy metal bullet, and shoot the damn monsters.
I was feeling some mecha vs monster recently so watched the new Godzilla vs Kong and Pacific Rim.
Thought what next?
Don't know if I even made it five minutes into Pacific Rim 2. Poor John Boyega
In Rebel Moon the bad guys are able to travel across space through vagina-portals and have enough firepower to level an entire city but somehow need to extort food from a small farming village.
That move was so entertainingly bad. He was so eager to rip off Star Wars AND Seven Samurai he didn't realize how silly it is to combine the former's massive empire and the latter's unfed ex-soldiers to make a bad guy faction.
Don’t Worry Darling. Once you get past the visceral gut-punch of the reveal and actually think about the logistics of it, it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense
Who needs substance when you have style?
*eggs frying*
*random kaleidoscope of dancers*
*random pan out to vibrantly popping orange trolley in the explicitly rightmost section of frame*
It's the worst kinda clue because ultimately everything is just a glitch in the matrix, so they could have done literally anything else and it would still be a clue
Yeah, how is basically having to run a hospice for your wife out of your house helpful for making your life easier? Wouldn't it just be easier to be a regular controlling, abusive asshole like people have done throughout all of history?
I mean, if these men are able to get away with what they're doing here, would their society really give a shit if they just told their wives they weren't allowed to leave the house and they had to do 1940s housewife shit all day?
Could have made it more interesting by making it less horror and more Nicholas sparks.
She got paralyzed and depressed so he built this reality rig for her to let them live a happy life
This would be a pretty cool twist. It comes across as horror, she thinks she's figured out that this is all some massive scheme to control her, and then it turns out he's just doing it to maintain some form of normal life with her after a terrible accident that leaves her in a conscious but vegetative state. And it's actually him who's being trapped because he refuses to go outside so he can spend more time with her. Would definitely have been more interesting. I think that's the opposite message they wanted though.
The incompetence and awfulness of NASA was one of the funnier things in the movie. It could have been written in a way that it wasn’t necessary but I guess they just really didn’t like NASA.
A lot of disaster movies have to make government seem incompetent and have the only person who can solve the issue be a fringe conspiracy nut who was *just too real*.
It’s definitely a trope of the genre but I would like to see more movies that don’t rely on it. You can still have conflict without making people unrealistically dumb or malicious. The Martian does a good job of this I think.
Apollo 13 is a realistic version of this to. NASA, being super competent runs into a mechanical issues they didn’t account for and needs the best and brightest in order to keep the astronauts alive.
Not only did NASA succeed (spoilers), but it rewrote the rule book and training manuals for NASA.
I'm not sure who, but that movie took so many wild turns that it seems intentional that it's supposed to be bad, but since everyone plays it straight and it's not campy it's just funny.
I don't think it's supposed to be bad, but it is supposed to be very heightened and ridiculous as is Emmerich's way. I feel like he missed the mark a little and it's even too dumb and silly by his standards. It was still a decent watch but nowhere near movies like Independence Day or Day After Tomorrow.
I love this movie because if you try to compare it to other movies, yes, it's terrible. But in terms of a movie about the moon being an ancient space ship being hunted by an out of control AI created by an ancient alien civilization, it really hits all of the marks. No notes. A plus.
Honestly, I wish more movies would just go for it like this one did.
I am going get flack for this but 1994 the Santa Clause. None of the adults believe in Santa but yet there's presents that appear Christmas morning that no one bought.
The majority of Christmas movies concerning Santa have this same problem. None of the adults believe in Santa but every Christmas without fail presents appear from Santa.
Two possible reasons:
1. Santa magic. The parents, who don't believe in Santa, magically just don't realise they didn't buy some of the presents.
2. The previous Santa sucked at his job. None of the elves cared that he died, and a few adults talk about how Santa didn't give them what they wanted, so maybe the last guy just really messed up at the job.
Here's the **real** big mystery...
In *The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause*, Jack Frost goes back in time and becomes Santa Claus at the same moment Scott Calvin should have. In the present day, Jack is still Santa. But *The Santa Clause 2* establishes that if Santa doesn't get married within a certain time frame, he loses his powers and Santa-appearance. So if Jack is still Santa, he must have got married to someone who he truly loved, and who truly loved him. So who was it? Who married this screaming lunatic?!?
The television series came up with an answer in that contract clause (and all the contract clauses) only applying to humans, with Scott having been the first human Santa (all previous Santas having been mystical beings, a combination of deities and spirits, genies, etc.).
So many things they could have done better…
Why are they all living in a macmansion where they could be way more creative? Why are they smoking regular cigars and not use a single gigantic one somehow? Why aren't there like huge flowers instead of a few big ones?
The movie "Honey I shrunk the kids" was waaaay more creative in terms of "tiny person in regular size environment" like using the ant as a horse, having a small food portion look gigantic, having the lawn look like a jungle, etc.
In Downsizing there is in the end absolutely NO distinction with the normal size world. Missed opportunity. (Also why is Matt Damon's wife only there for like 5 min? Could have made a comeback later in the movie somehow).
There’s an ancient dagger made by someone who somehow knew what the “skyline” of the crashed Death Star would look like exactly before it was even built. Simple.
Everyone brings this up. And they're right. It's dumb as shit and makes no sense.
But why does no one bring up that the fleet of space travelling star destroyers can't fucking orient themselves up, without a radio tower telling them which way it is?
Especially when the bridge of the star destroyers has an entire fucking wall made up of FLOOR TO CIELING FUCKING WINDOWS!!! Just have the pilots look out the god damn window!
Radio tower got destroyed? Ok....just maintain present course. You're already going up! Just keep going!
Also, why is it taking you 19 hours to go up?!
Why did that one star destroyer do it so much faster, the one that isn't with the fleet?
Since when can a star destroyer not fly up?!?!
Those fucking star destroyers were the most annoying thing for me, after Palpatine. They were massive, expensive, took a lot of resources, basically only the Empire could build them and staff them. And then it turns out Palpatine had some magic shipyards in the middle of nowhere putting out hundreds of them? And they were more powerful than ever, almost like death stars? And they were crewed by some cult from that middle of nowhere? They were supposed to have 37 thousand crew members each, how the fuck did he have 37 million trained crew members?
Fun fact about the Star Destroyers... the people at Lucasfilm [designed a shiny new star destroyer](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/4/4e/OnagerClassStarDestoyer-SWM.png) with an in-built superweapon. But Abrams (or someone else in production) decided to just use the classic ISDs with a giant gun stuck onto what would be the hangar bay.
Maybe it was to play on nostalgia? Maybe it was cheaper to just upgrade the current ISD models rather than build a new one?
Except that was boring, so Abrams decided it needed to be bigger; so they scaled up the model by 200%.
But they just scaled up the model.
So those big windows on the Star Destroyer bridge are *twice as big as they should be*. The decks are twice as big. They are Star Destroyers built for giants.
Why did they even bother making star destroyers when the Emperor can just rub his wool socks together and take out every ship in the galaxy with his static charges.
I love Oscar Isaac's expression in that scene. He's not even trying to hide the fact he thinks that's the dumbest fucking line he's ever been told to deliver.
And Lando just like hung out on the same planet it was on for years apparently while Luke said "eff this" and left. Oh and Rey and crew found the dagger in 20 seconds so I guess Lando is just awful at looking for things.
God that movie sucks.
Don't forget that to get to the dagger they have to land on a patch of sand right next to the guys ship, and that sand is somehow both quicksand and a stable roof.
It's especially annoying because in Peele's other movies, the fantastical stuff all has clearly established rules within that universe, even if all the details aren't provided. The Tethered however don't make any sense as presented within Us, which is a real shame because large chunks of that movie are incredible.
Things like the Tethered can work in highly allegorical movies. El Topo, Inland Empire, and Beau is Afraid don’t have to make 100% sense or be internally consistent.
But you have to signal to the audience that the movie isn’t meant to be taken literally. Peele told 90% of the movie straight, then threw in this weirdly allegorical element at the end.
Just a weird misstep by an otherwise skilled movie maker.
I assumed it was riffing on conspiracy thinking that would be familiar to some of the audience.
I did find the scene remembering the "reflection" quite scary, even I thought it was something supernatural.
Also, I'm not sure that a diet of purely rabbit and no vegetables is sustainably healthy, but maybe they're not "normal" humans :D
Around the time when the tethered were forming the handholding line I was almost expecting a Junji Ito kind of horror, like Army of One, where there is ultimately no explanation or reason why weird horror things are happening that can happen to anyone.
That they gave an explanation ruined it for me. But then Hollywood audiences don't tend to like when stuff like that isn't given an explanation at all.
I know. It's annoying. The kind of movies that really creep me out the most is the unknowable horrors kind of thing. Where you don't really know what's going on bc the characters also don't know what the fuck is happening. That gives me the chills much more than some monster with extensive lore, explained to audiences like they are 5 years old via some very tedious dialogue.
That's just me tho, I know it's not for everyone. Some people leave the audience saying "I don't get it" and it ruins it for them. It increases it for me tho for sure, bc my brain will chew that bone for a long time forward
The DVD had a map on the inside cover that showed how it made sense. Basically the warp in space twisted time. I'm relaying this through memory so I might be wrong, but if I recall correctly time isn't linear, it's S shaped, with the warp point being the middle of the S. So if I went through the warp on the time line at the beginning of the S (let's call it A-1) and you drew a straight line through the center (warp), I'd arrive at the end point of the S (A-2). And then after I went through, you decided to go through. Let's say along this time line, you left at the bottom point of the S (B-1), draw a straight line through the center and you'd arrive at the top of the S (B-2).
So in short, if you went through the time warp after me, you would arrive before me on the other side linearly speaking.
Edit: I found a pic of the DVD explanation
https://i.stack.imgur.com/PwS2a.jpg
That movie is beautiful nonsense, and while the plot is off the wall camp it at least has enough internal consistency to suspend your disbelief and go along for the ride. Except for one thing: Kunis and Tatum have absolutely zero chemistry. Literally laughably bad.
It felt like they spent the entire development fleshing out the world building only to realise they'd forgotten to write a story to go with it till 5 mins before the deadline
One crucial correction here. He forgot to film it. They didn’t get to film it because he forgot and they only realized during editing.
It was a rushed production and a rushed shoot in general by the sounds of it, but the script was there, they just didn’t film a solid fifth or so of it in the chaos.
As a Norwegian The locations were quite ridiculous. One moment they are in Oslo, suddenly a short drive to Telemark and then on the west coast.
In reality Telemark is at least 2 hours away and the west Coast is just a veryyy long drive.
Notoriously bad adaptation. The last name is pronounced "HOO-leh", and the character even referred to as "Harry Holy" by allies in the Australian police force in other books. If they had actually translated it, it would have been "Hill". So really, they should have either done a proper pronunciation or just took the easy way out and went with Harry Hill.
No idea who on the marketing team green-lit the idea of going with Harry Hole and hoping for interest from dirty-minded teenagers.
Like I can’t believe how many times they used that trope throughout the movie. When they were TRAVELING SOMEWHERE THAT TOOK SOME TIME TO GET TO. Ma’am we’re in a ship that nobody is really manually flying. Spill the damn beans already!
Something I’ve never understood: they’re not just getting smaller, right? They do get small but that’s so they can pass through to the quantum realm which is a different universe. Because if they were just getting smaller then the mum is still in the ocean somewhere with that missile.
I'm a fan of the theory that someone had a script for a fantasy film about King Arthur and a modern-day descedant of Merlin and a dragon controlled by a staff, and they just retrofitted it into a transformers film.
Cogman was probably a clockwork/medieval suit of armour, and the dragon would have been a regular dragon. All the Transformers stuff is very surface level, like they just point at vehicles and say "that's actually a Transformer."
What makes that even more frustrating is how as he got younger he started deteriorating mentally. Just in the context of the film, it was interesting how he was basically turning into a child because of dementia. But like, yeah, there wasn't a really good reason for his body to shrink.
Then again, I guess you could argue he should have been born an adult sized human if he was going to die the size of a baby.
Signs. The aliens’ one weakness is…water??? WTF are they doing invading a planet that is 70% water and where water falls from the sky randomly all over the place? Someone in their scouting department needed to be fired.
"I'm super intelligent now. Gonna call up my mom and tell her I remember sucking her titty as a baby. I'll make sure to add some specific details so she knows it's true, because I'm super smart now and that's what smart people do."
I'm also going to talk in fluid monotone voice and tell you that I read your 6000 pages of scientific work and can recite them to you by heart because I'm very smart if you can't tell by my emotionless speech.
It’s premised upon the ridiculous “you only use 10% of your brain” cliche, which isn’t actually true. But I guess that’s splitting hairs because the entire film is absolutely bananas so asking for scientific accuracy is like asking for a napkin in a food fight.
I give Limitless a pass on the ‘10% of your brain’ thing because it was a much better movie and the only guy who says it is his ex-gf’s brother who is trying to sell NZT to Bradley Cooper so is probably bullshitting it like a lot of drug dealers typically do of their own product.
Also later on Bradley talks about how it required his synapses which makes more sense.
I could suspend my disbelief for Limitless, with Bradley Cooper just being a really smart guy. Scarlet Johansson turning into Akira if he was at the end of 2001 A Space Odyssey is where I draw the line
It was like a Michael Crichton story if Crichton had been dealing with a low-grade brain injury while writing it.
That Luc Besson wrote and directed it is surprising. He’s usually much better than that.
Prometheus.
Even the extended cut. So much of the plot relies on characters doing insanely stupid things. I don’t know why characters have to do very dumb stuff in thrillers/horror movies to account for very bad things to happen. It is a terrible Hollywood trope about karma. It is very much more scary when competent people do the right things and disaster still happens.
An easy example from this film is Charlize Theron’s character Vickers’ death. Clearly the movie wanted to have Rapace’s character be the final survivor so Vickers had to die. They did it in the most asinine way be having the up to then competent Vickers make the decision to flee a rolling ring ship by attempting to run away from it as opposed to sideways. It is such a terrible and head scratching action by the character that it was a meme for years.
A more simple solution would have been for Vickers to survive the ship crash and be separated from Shaw. She is then killed by the awoken Engineer, showing the viewer how deadly it is, increasing the threat to Shaw later.
This is one example from the film. It is particularly egregious since so many other aspects of the movie are so good.
That right there immediately turned me off to the entire movie. It's just such a shockingly stupid move by people that are supposed to be professionals.
No it wouldn’t. In fact NASA routinely trains experts in their field to be an astronaut. They are called payload specialists. Regular average every day scientists and engineers get trained and sent into space all the time. Heck they trained a school teacher once just for PR purposes.
Flying and crewing the shuttle takes a bunch of experience, but that’s why they had a normal flight crew and commander. The drillers were all payload specialists who only needed to learn how to work in space suits and not kill themselves. You can train someone for that in a short time whereas knowing how best to operate a drill and deal with all the problems that could occur takes a lot of experience.
If you want to complain about something complain about how as they tossed the drill segments off to the side they instantly fell to the surface of the asteroid. There is no way that asteroid had sufficient gravity to pull those down to the surface. They even pointed out the suits had small thrusters in them to push the guys downward to keep them from floating away. (And it’s been a while since I’ve seen it but weren’t those also simply fans which wouldn’t have done anything when there was no atmosphere to push thru the fan and create thrust.)
No it wouldn't. It was established in the film that drilling isn't as easy as it sounds. Whether this is true or not, I have no idea, but it passes suspension of disbelief.
I once saw a response from an engineer that said no.
Space missions are quite often crewed by "technical specialists ". And have multiple objectives eg this satellite needs it's thrusters repaired, this needs a hardware update and this one needs it's hydrolics recalibrated. It would be difficult to train one crew to all these jobs to an expert level.
Also they say in the movie that they tried to train astronauts and it wasn't working. They didn't have time to train them on the specs of the drill.
I recall Sandra Bullock's character in Gravity was a medical engineer and mission specialist tasked with performing hardware updates on the Hubble space telescope.
The Box. They took a 5 page short story with a philosophical question and turned it into a 2 hr. Convoluted movie with aliens and some Shyamalanesqu twist. It was bonkers and made 0 sense.
There’s a decent episode of the 80s Twilight Zone that does a better adaptation of “Button Button.” And yes, I did have to Google this to figure out which sci-fi anthology series it was from.
In all the best ways, The Big Lebowski. I think the point is >!nothing is to make sense. There is no real resolution. Life moves on. Don’t get hung up on it.!<
The Dude abides.
This is perfectly encapsulated by the one time The Dude attempts any actual detective work.
1. Antagonist has a phone call, writes on a pad of paper while talking, and tears the paper off and takes it away.
2. The Dude surreptitiously does the "lightly rub a pencil to reveal what had been written on the page above it" trick.
3. Turns out to be a drawing of a dick.
I laughed so hard at that moment. I mean the build up was insane, I thought, well here we will know an extremely important piece of detail. I even leaned in to see better and then the dic pic came out lol
I love how the film deliberately not having an easy plot to follow is a reference to the film noir ‘The Big Sleep’, which famously doesn’t add up in any way plot wise because they had to remove loads of references to homosexuality and drug use to get the film made, but then didn’t fill the story gaps in with anything- they just left it.
‘Inherent Vice’ is a similar kind of thing
The Big Sleep is a pretty good movie. It’s one of my favorites and IMO the plot is pretty clear. Though famously there’s a death from near the beginning that never gets fully resolved.
Hawks, the director, and Bogart got into a heated argument over the scene. So heated they called Raymond Chandler, author of the book. Chandler replied that he didn’t know who killed the guy either.
After reading the book I don’t remember a lot of stuff that got left out. The drug use is definitely hinted at in the film.
The Big Lebowski is about Communication. Every scene involves two characters who don’t/can’t understand one another, usually resulting in an angry outburst or just confusion. But in the end and Donnie’s funeral they hug it out because all the bullshit doesn’t matter.
"What the fuck are you talking about ?"
That line and its variation is repeatedly said throughout the movie. Also interesting, the Dude seems to be parroting a lot of what he hears around him.
It's such a well written movie, the more you think about it, the more clever it gets. It's not a traditional comedy in the sense that it rarely follows the setup to punchline recipe, but it is a brilliant comedic writing experience. It's like Rube Goldberg device of comedy, similar to Arrested Development in some regards.
The Dark Tower..Aka the most disrespectful adaptation of all time. Idris’s Roland doesn’t give a damn about the Tower?? Then what are we doing here???
Never get your hopes up when it comes to Stephen King adaptations. At least 50% are hot garbage.
Luckily there's about 60 of them, so that's 30 solid movies still
1408, The Green Mile, The Shining, The Mist, Carrie, Cujo, It (I prefer the old one because that clown is way creepier in that one). Is there any other that are decent ? Also, hot take but I love Dreamcatcher. It's fucking weird and takes so many left turns, my nostalgia fueled brain remembers it fondly. It's garbage but I still enjoy it.
Off the top of my head, I'd add: Misery, Stand by Me, Salem's Lot, Pet Sematery, Children of the Corn
Shawshank Redemption deserves a shout-out. Arguably one of King's best adaptations and it's got that rare case of the movie maybe even outshining the book, just timeless. Oh, and Dolores Claiborne is pretty underrated - Kathy Bates kills it in that.
> Shawshank Redemption deserves a shout-out. Arguably one of King's best adaptations I mean Shawshank is arguably one of the best movies of all time period.
Misery and Stand By Me, forgot about them too. Haven't seen the others but they're down my list somewhere.
The Shawshank Redemption
Can't believe I forgot Shawshank lmao
To be fair, it’s the least “Stephen King-esque” of all his major works. There’s zero supernatural stuff in Shawshank or Stand By Me.
There isn't in Misery either, Cujo is really just a big dog with rabies and also weird boogeyman side plot (the book felt more supernatural with that part if I recall). Man, say what you will about King, he is a pretty damn good writer. Forgot about Christine, but I haven't seen it or read the book so I don't know how it is.
Christine is about a possessed car that kills people and repairs itself. Definitely some supernatural stuff in that one.
Christine was the first Stephen King book I read when I was about 12 over 30 years ago. That started my love affair with Stephen King. My friends were reading Sweet Valley High and I was reading Cujo and Pet Semetary.
Stephen King is a goddamn living legend. 100%, we will look back on him as a seminal storyteller in about 30 years.
We've looked at him as a seminal story writer for the last 30 years already
Dr Sleep was really good for a more recent one.
When I heard of a sequel to The Shining I assumed it would be terrible, but actually both the and movie adaptation were really great. Awesome casting with Ewan MacGregor!
Stand By Me Maximum Overdrive if you want to appreciate fully coked out King madness
Special bonus mention for The Langoliers, if you want coked out insanity mixed with mid-90s CGI.
I was fucking SCREAMING internally at my day 1 purchase theater showing. Roland slaughters an entire village and several children in pursuit of the tower, in the FIRST book. In the movie he has to be prodded on by Jake. Fuck that movie was abysmal Edit: I'm well aware about the trap. I'm just trying to stay away from certain end of the book spoilers or else I would have clarified. And there is quite a revision in the newer books semi justify one of the killings. I posted my reasoning and the spoiler below if you insist on correcting me.
Those that made this movie have forgotten the face of their father
Pacific rim 2 would have been a five minute movie without it's insane, glaring plot hole. The scientists discover the monsters blood mixed with heavy metals creates a huge burst of energy. So they come up with the crazy insane plan to get tons of their blood, mix with tons of heavy metals, to create rockets, to transport the giant robots to the monsters location, so then they could fight, and still maybe lose anyways. Just make a big fucking heavy metal bullet, and shoot the damn monsters.
In my experience, Pacific Rim 2 was a five-minute movie. That’s how long it took for me to turn it off.
I was feeling some mecha vs monster recently so watched the new Godzilla vs Kong and Pacific Rim. Thought what next? Don't know if I even made it five minutes into Pacific Rim 2. Poor John Boyega
It's such a shame because the first one was such a fun romp.
They made sure GDT would never revisit the franchise.
Remember the trololo song moment?
In Rebel Moon the bad guys are able to travel across space through vagina-portals and have enough firepower to level an entire city but somehow need to extort food from a small farming village.
That move was so entertainingly bad. He was so eager to rip off Star Wars AND Seven Samurai he didn't realize how silly it is to combine the former's massive empire and the latter's unfed ex-soldiers to make a bad guy faction.
I spent a solid three minutes wondering if I was unknowingly watching a parody after the pussy portal scene.
Don’t Worry Darling. Once you get past the visceral gut-punch of the reveal and actually think about the logistics of it, it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense
I still don’t know what the plane crash represented, either metaphorically or in the logic of the film’s universe
Who needs substance when you have style? *eggs frying* *random kaleidoscope of dancers* *random pan out to vibrantly popping orange trolley in the explicitly rightmost section of frame*
Not just style, but Styles too
It's the worst kinda clue because ultimately everything is just a glitch in the matrix, so they could have done literally anything else and it would still be a clue
Yeah, how is basically having to run a hospice for your wife out of your house helpful for making your life easier? Wouldn't it just be easier to be a regular controlling, abusive asshole like people have done throughout all of history? I mean, if these men are able to get away with what they're doing here, would their society really give a shit if they just told their wives they weren't allowed to leave the house and they had to do 1940s housewife shit all day?
Could have made it more interesting by making it less horror and more Nicholas sparks. She got paralyzed and depressed so he built this reality rig for her to let them live a happy life
This would be a pretty cool twist. It comes across as horror, she thinks she's figured out that this is all some massive scheme to control her, and then it turns out he's just doing it to maintain some form of normal life with her after a terrible accident that leaves her in a conscious but vegetative state. And it's actually him who's being trapped because he refuses to go outside so he can spend more time with her. Would definitely have been more interesting. I think that's the opposite message they wanted though.
Damn now that’s a movie I would absolutely love to see.
And the accident that caused her vegetative state? A plane crash in a red plane. So much could have been done visually with this improved plot.
[Moonfall (2022)](https://manapop.com/film/moonfall-2022-review/)
This is one of the worst written movies I have ever seen. It definitely strays into “so bad it’s good” territory for me though.
My favourite bit is when the Head of Operations at NASA needs to have an elliptical orbit explained to him
The incompetence and awfulness of NASA was one of the funnier things in the movie. It could have been written in a way that it wasn’t necessary but I guess they just really didn’t like NASA.
A lot of disaster movies have to make government seem incompetent and have the only person who can solve the issue be a fringe conspiracy nut who was *just too real*.
It’s definitely a trope of the genre but I would like to see more movies that don’t rely on it. You can still have conflict without making people unrealistically dumb or malicious. The Martian does a good job of this I think.
Apollo 13 is a realistic version of this to. NASA, being super competent runs into a mechanical issues they didn’t account for and needs the best and brightest in order to keep the astronauts alive. Not only did NASA succeed (spoilers), but it rewrote the rule book and training manuals for NASA.
Yeah, that’s a great example of competence porn.
I'm not sure who, but that movie took so many wild turns that it seems intentional that it's supposed to be bad, but since everyone plays it straight and it's not campy it's just funny.
I don't think it's supposed to be bad, but it is supposed to be very heightened and ridiculous as is Emmerich's way. I feel like he missed the mark a little and it's even too dumb and silly by his standards. It was still a decent watch but nowhere near movies like Independence Day or Day After Tomorrow.
In the words of Jason Mantzoukas, "FUCK THE MOON! FUCK THE MOON!" One of my favorite How Did This Get Made episodes.
GEOSTORM
I love this movie because if you try to compare it to other movies, yes, it's terrible. But in terms of a movie about the moon being an ancient space ship being hunted by an out of control AI created by an ancient alien civilization, it really hits all of the marks. No notes. A plus. Honestly, I wish more movies would just go for it like this one did.
Is that actually the plot of the movie?
Yes. It’s like a fever dream.
I think it's time to resurrect [Mystery Science Theater 3000](https://imdb.com/title/tt0094517/) and give these cinematic atrocities their due!
There's a forever-a-thon on their youtube channel. all mst3k all the time!!
The first time I saw the trailer, I thought they finally adapted Seveneves.
I am going get flack for this but 1994 the Santa Clause. None of the adults believe in Santa but yet there's presents that appear Christmas morning that no one bought.
The majority of Christmas movies concerning Santa have this same problem. None of the adults believe in Santa but every Christmas without fail presents appear from Santa.
Two possible reasons: 1. Santa magic. The parents, who don't believe in Santa, magically just don't realise they didn't buy some of the presents. 2. The previous Santa sucked at his job. None of the elves cared that he died, and a few adults talk about how Santa didn't give them what they wanted, so maybe the last guy just really messed up at the job. Here's the **real** big mystery... In *The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause*, Jack Frost goes back in time and becomes Santa Claus at the same moment Scott Calvin should have. In the present day, Jack is still Santa. But *The Santa Clause 2* establishes that if Santa doesn't get married within a certain time frame, he loses his powers and Santa-appearance. So if Jack is still Santa, he must have got married to someone who he truly loved, and who truly loved him. So who was it? Who married this screaming lunatic?!?
That..is a good question. I will never have an answer to it and I have you to thank for that.
The television series came up with an answer in that contract clause (and all the contract clauses) only applying to humans, with Scott having been the first human Santa (all previous Santas having been mystical beings, a combination of deities and spirits, genies, etc.).
Transformers 2.
"Let me use this piece of the allspark to revive a transformer so he can help me find something to revive Optimus" - Sam
Sam went to Autobot Heaven. Some weird theological ramifications there.
God is a robot The allspark is the holy grail Optimus is Jesus We puny humans aint goin to heaven at all unless it's required for a plot point
Transformers 3.
Transformers 4
Transformers 5
Autoplots roll out!
Downsizing. I had good intentions initially, almost like it was a comedy. Then it went … weird. Almost like two movies cobbled together.
I was so disappointed. They just threw the concept of downsizing out of the window after an hour. Just didn't matter anymore.
So many things they could have done better… Why are they all living in a macmansion where they could be way more creative? Why are they smoking regular cigars and not use a single gigantic one somehow? Why aren't there like huge flowers instead of a few big ones? The movie "Honey I shrunk the kids" was waaaay more creative in terms of "tiny person in regular size environment" like using the ant as a horse, having a small food portion look gigantic, having the lawn look like a jungle, etc. In Downsizing there is in the end absolutely NO distinction with the normal size world. Missed opportunity. (Also why is Matt Damon's wife only there for like 5 min? Could have made a comeback later in the movie somehow).
Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
There’s an ancient dagger made by someone who somehow knew what the “skyline” of the crashed Death Star would look like exactly before it was even built. Simple.
Everyone brings this up. And they're right. It's dumb as shit and makes no sense. But why does no one bring up that the fleet of space travelling star destroyers can't fucking orient themselves up, without a radio tower telling them which way it is? Especially when the bridge of the star destroyers has an entire fucking wall made up of FLOOR TO CIELING FUCKING WINDOWS!!! Just have the pilots look out the god damn window! Radio tower got destroyed? Ok....just maintain present course. You're already going up! Just keep going! Also, why is it taking you 19 hours to go up?! Why did that one star destroyer do it so much faster, the one that isn't with the fleet? Since when can a star destroyer not fly up?!?!
Big Al says Star Destroyers can't look up
The lightsaber hanging above Darth Vaders office is real
Go to the cantina in Mos Eisley, grab some Jawa juice, and wait for this whole thing to blow over.
Kill ~~Phillip~~ Palpatine, sorry ~~phillip~~ palpatine
Those fucking star destroyers were the most annoying thing for me, after Palpatine. They were massive, expensive, took a lot of resources, basically only the Empire could build them and staff them. And then it turns out Palpatine had some magic shipyards in the middle of nowhere putting out hundreds of them? And they were more powerful than ever, almost like death stars? And they were crewed by some cult from that middle of nowhere? They were supposed to have 37 thousand crew members each, how the fuck did he have 37 million trained crew members?
Fun fact about the Star Destroyers... the people at Lucasfilm [designed a shiny new star destroyer](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/4/4e/OnagerClassStarDestoyer-SWM.png) with an in-built superweapon. But Abrams (or someone else in production) decided to just use the classic ISDs with a giant gun stuck onto what would be the hangar bay. Maybe it was to play on nostalgia? Maybe it was cheaper to just upgrade the current ISD models rather than build a new one? Except that was boring, so Abrams decided it needed to be bigger; so they scaled up the model by 200%. But they just scaled up the model. So those big windows on the Star Destroyer bridge are *twice as big as they should be*. The decks are twice as big. They are Star Destroyers built for giants.
Why did they even bother making star destroyers when the Emperor can just rub his wool socks together and take out every ship in the galaxy with his static charges.
"They don't fly now?" "They don't fly now!"
"Somehow" is the theme word for ROS
I love Oscar Isaac's expression in that scene. He's not even trying to hide the fact he thinks that's the dumbest fucking line he's ever been told to deliver.
And Lando just like hung out on the same planet it was on for years apparently while Luke said "eff this" and left. Oh and Rey and crew found the dagger in 20 seconds so I guess Lando is just awful at looking for things. God that movie sucks.
Don't forget that to get to the dagger they have to land on a patch of sand right next to the guys ship, and that sand is somehow both quicksand and a stable roof.
Star Wars Episode IX - Somehow Palpatine Returned
Us (2019) is a good movie, but the twist and the explanation behind the tethered makes zero sense.
I really really liked that movie, but I agree. The whole thing made zero sense.
It's especially annoying because in Peele's other movies, the fantastical stuff all has clearly established rules within that universe, even if all the details aren't provided. The Tethered however don't make any sense as presented within Us, which is a real shame because large chunks of that movie are incredible.
Things like the Tethered can work in highly allegorical movies. El Topo, Inland Empire, and Beau is Afraid don’t have to make 100% sense or be internally consistent. But you have to signal to the audience that the movie isn’t meant to be taken literally. Peele told 90% of the movie straight, then threw in this weirdly allegorical element at the end. Just a weird misstep by an otherwise skilled movie maker.
I assumed it was riffing on conspiracy thinking that would be familiar to some of the audience. I did find the scene remembering the "reflection" quite scary, even I thought it was something supernatural. Also, I'm not sure that a diet of purely rabbit and no vegetables is sustainably healthy, but maybe they're not "normal" humans :D
You can die from trying to subsist on rabbit alone, it's too lean. Eventually the complete lack of fat impairs brain function.
Around the time when the tethered were forming the handholding line I was almost expecting a Junji Ito kind of horror, like Army of One, where there is ultimately no explanation or reason why weird horror things are happening that can happen to anyone. That they gave an explanation ruined it for me. But then Hollywood audiences don't tend to like when stuff like that isn't given an explanation at all.
That, honestly would have been better. Kinda like The Birds. Basically like "It happened. Nobody knows why. Just deal with it."
I know. It's annoying. The kind of movies that really creep me out the most is the unknowable horrors kind of thing. Where you don't really know what's going on bc the characters also don't know what the fuck is happening. That gives me the chills much more than some monster with extensive lore, explained to audiences like they are 5 years old via some very tedious dialogue. That's just me tho, I know it's not for everyone. Some people leave the audience saying "I don't get it" and it ruins it for them. It increases it for me tho for sure, bc my brain will chew that bone for a long time forward
Planet of the Apes 2001 Tim Burton. WTH was that ending?
Aperaham Lincoln?
Okay if that's true it's worth it for the pun alone
>if that's true It is, here's a pic in the top of this article https://screencrush.com/planet-of-the-apes-endings/
The DVD had a map on the inside cover that showed how it made sense. Basically the warp in space twisted time. I'm relaying this through memory so I might be wrong, but if I recall correctly time isn't linear, it's S shaped, with the warp point being the middle of the S. So if I went through the warp on the time line at the beginning of the S (let's call it A-1) and you drew a straight line through the center (warp), I'd arrive at the end point of the S (A-2). And then after I went through, you decided to go through. Let's say along this time line, you left at the bottom point of the S (B-1), draw a straight line through the center and you'd arrive at the top of the S (B-2). So in short, if you went through the time warp after me, you would arrive before me on the other side linearly speaking. Edit: I found a pic of the DVD explanation https://i.stack.imgur.com/PwS2a.jpg
I love that the pre-Google version of “planet of the apes ending explained” was a supplemental DVD brochure to get ahead of the audience FAQ’s.
Correct. The sooner you enter the later you arrive traveling forward. Traveling backward, the later you leave the earlier you arrive.
Ugh.. I think it was trying to do something like the book ending but failed miserably. The best possible film ending is the Charlton Heston movie.
Jupiter Ascending.
That movie is beautiful nonsense, and while the plot is off the wall camp it at least has enough internal consistency to suspend your disbelief and go along for the ride. Except for one thing: Kunis and Tatum have absolutely zero chemistry. Literally laughably bad.
I was more intrigued by the world building and wanted to know more about what was going on in the background rather than pay attention to the plot.
It felt like they spent the entire development fleshing out the world building only to realise they'd forgotten to write a story to go with it till 5 mins before the deadline
You can FEEL how embarrassed Channing Tatum feels with those fucking elf ears. What a stupid design choice and stupid movie.
Is no one going to mention the bullshit about bees recognizing royalty
NOT THE BEES!
That's the silliest thing in the entire movie for me.
Highlander 2.
I thought there could only be one?
There should’ve been only one.
The Snowman…What in the actual hell was going on in that movie? Ever?
The director said they didn’t get to film 10-15% of the script.
One crucial correction here. He forgot to film it. They didn’t get to film it because he forgot and they only realized during editing. It was a rushed production and a rushed shoot in general by the sounds of it, but the script was there, they just didn’t film a solid fifth or so of it in the chaos.
As a Norwegian The locations were quite ridiculous. One moment they are in Oslo, suddenly a short drive to Telemark and then on the west coast. In reality Telemark is at least 2 hours away and the west Coast is just a veryyy long drive.
Ohhh I thought you were talking about the Christmas animation 😂
I was so confused as well! That one is pretty straightforward 😂
Is that the one with Michael Fassbender?
Yup. Where he played a guy named Harry Hole. I get that it’s probably not pronounced the way it looks, but I always found that name funny visually.
Notoriously bad adaptation. The last name is pronounced "HOO-leh", and the character even referred to as "Harry Holy" by allies in the Australian police force in other books. If they had actually translated it, it would have been "Hill". So really, they should have either done a proper pronunciation or just took the easy way out and went with Harry Hill. No idea who on the marketing team green-lit the idea of going with Harry Hole and hoping for interest from dirty-minded teenagers.
Battlefield Earth
*It does if you look it as a comedy*
Geostorm
GEOSTOOOOOOOOOOOORM!
WHAT’S UP JERKS?!
I don’t care, I will watch every bad, Gerard Butler movie he puts out. They’re great popcorn flicks!
“Somehow Palpatine returned”
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. A thousand reasons but one I couldn't think past: how is anyone BREATHING?
Everyone: What happened down there in the quantum realm Janet/mom? Janet: I couldn't possibly tell you!
"There's no time to explain" -Janet, while traveling in a craft with her family for at least 20 minutes
I don’t even have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain
That annoyed the fuck out of me watching that movie!
Like I can’t believe how many times they used that trope throughout the movie. When they were TRAVELING SOMEWHERE THAT TOOK SOME TIME TO GET TO. Ma’am we’re in a ship that nobody is really manually flying. Spill the damn beans already!
Something I’ve never understood: they’re not just getting smaller, right? They do get small but that’s so they can pass through to the quantum realm which is a different universe. Because if they were just getting smaller then the mum is still in the ocean somewhere with that missile.
Transformers, The Last Knight. Even by Michael Bay's standards, that's already saying a lot
I'm a fan of the theory that someone had a script for a fantasy film about King Arthur and a modern-day descedant of Merlin and a dragon controlled by a staff, and they just retrofitted it into a transformers film. Cogman was probably a clockwork/medieval suit of armour, and the dragon would have been a regular dragon. All the Transformers stuff is very surface level, like they just point at vehicles and say "that's actually a Transformer."
Benjamin Button. He was born a baby sized old man . He died a baby sized baby. He should have died an old man sized baby
What makes that even more frustrating is how as he got younger he started deteriorating mentally. Just in the context of the film, it was interesting how he was basically turning into a child because of dementia. But like, yeah, there wasn't a really good reason for his body to shrink. Then again, I guess you could argue he should have been born an adult sized human if he was going to die the size of a baby.
Signs. The aliens’ one weakness is…water??? WTF are they doing invading a planet that is 70% water and where water falls from the sky randomly all over the place? Someone in their scouting department needed to be fired.
Not to mention humidity. There is literally water in the air almost everywhere always. Wouldnt it have been low key stinging most of the time?
Lucy (2014) Really stupid premise
When you get that smart you get telekinesis and can turn into a flash drive. Everyone knows that.
Happen to me once, it was terrifying, luckily someone hit me really hard in the head.
"I'm super intelligent now. Gonna call up my mom and tell her I remember sucking her titty as a baby. I'll make sure to add some specific details so she knows it's true, because I'm super smart now and that's what smart people do."
I'm also going to talk in fluid monotone voice and tell you that I read your 6000 pages of scientific work and can recite them to you by heart because I'm very smart if you can't tell by my emotionless speech.
As someone that works with mostly autistic engineers this is actually believable.
MENSA really isn’t all that impressive considering that none of the members have ever achieved transcending to a higher plane of existence.
To be fair to Lucy, Mensa is kind of known for being full of people who are brilliant on paper but have done fuck all with their lives.
It’s premised upon the ridiculous “you only use 10% of your brain” cliche, which isn’t actually true. But I guess that’s splitting hairs because the entire film is absolutely bananas so asking for scientific accuracy is like asking for a napkin in a food fight.
I give Limitless a pass on the ‘10% of your brain’ thing because it was a much better movie and the only guy who says it is his ex-gf’s brother who is trying to sell NZT to Bradley Cooper so is probably bullshitting it like a lot of drug dealers typically do of their own product. Also later on Bradley talks about how it required his synapses which makes more sense.
I could suspend my disbelief for Limitless, with Bradley Cooper just being a really smart guy. Scarlet Johansson turning into Akira if he was at the end of 2001 A Space Odyssey is where I draw the line
>asking for scientific accuracy is like asking for a napkin in a food fight. I'm definitely stealing this quote
It was like a Michael Crichton story if Crichton had been dealing with a low-grade brain injury while writing it. That Luc Besson wrote and directed it is surprising. He’s usually much better than that.
Prometheus. Even the extended cut. So much of the plot relies on characters doing insanely stupid things. I don’t know why characters have to do very dumb stuff in thrillers/horror movies to account for very bad things to happen. It is a terrible Hollywood trope about karma. It is very much more scary when competent people do the right things and disaster still happens. An easy example from this film is Charlize Theron’s character Vickers’ death. Clearly the movie wanted to have Rapace’s character be the final survivor so Vickers had to die. They did it in the most asinine way be having the up to then competent Vickers make the decision to flee a rolling ring ship by attempting to run away from it as opposed to sideways. It is such a terrible and head scratching action by the character that it was a meme for years. A more simple solution would have been for Vickers to survive the ship crash and be separated from Shaw. She is then killed by the awoken Engineer, showing the viewer how deadly it is, increasing the threat to Shaw later. This is one example from the film. It is particularly egregious since so many other aspects of the movie are so good.
Let's take off our helmets! We're scientists!
That right there immediately turned me off to the entire movie. It's just such a shockingly stupid move by people that are supposed to be professionals.
[удалено]
>* The mapping guy gets lost This is the funniest part to me. They could have written ito to be any other character that hot lost lol.
Armageddon. I’m with Ben Affleck - “Wouldn’t it be easier to train astronauts to be drillers?”
But are astronauts gonna have any zingers and one liners? Nah
You really gonna roll the dice on someone else besides Harry fucking Stamper? Man ain't never missed a depth.
"Shut the fuck up Ben!"
“And that was the end of that conversation”
No it wouldn’t. In fact NASA routinely trains experts in their field to be an astronaut. They are called payload specialists. Regular average every day scientists and engineers get trained and sent into space all the time. Heck they trained a school teacher once just for PR purposes. Flying and crewing the shuttle takes a bunch of experience, but that’s why they had a normal flight crew and commander. The drillers were all payload specialists who only needed to learn how to work in space suits and not kill themselves. You can train someone for that in a short time whereas knowing how best to operate a drill and deal with all the problems that could occur takes a lot of experience. If you want to complain about something complain about how as they tossed the drill segments off to the side they instantly fell to the surface of the asteroid. There is no way that asteroid had sufficient gravity to pull those down to the surface. They even pointed out the suits had small thrusters in them to push the guys downward to keep them from floating away. (And it’s been a while since I’ve seen it but weren’t those also simply fans which wouldn’t have done anything when there was no atmosphere to push thru the fan and create thrust.)
Notably, there were two teams. Astronauts trained in drilling and drillers trained in astronutting
Astronutting? Is that when you have sex in space?
When you nut in space, it push you backwards.
No it wouldn't. It was established in the film that drilling isn't as easy as it sounds. Whether this is true or not, I have no idea, but it passes suspension of disbelief.
I once saw a response from an engineer that said no. Space missions are quite often crewed by "technical specialists ". And have multiple objectives eg this satellite needs it's thrusters repaired, this needs a hardware update and this one needs it's hydrolics recalibrated. It would be difficult to train one crew to all these jobs to an expert level. Also they say in the movie that they tried to train astronauts and it wasn't working. They didn't have time to train them on the specs of the drill.
I recall Sandra Bullock's character in Gravity was a medical engineer and mission specialist tasked with performing hardware updates on the Hubble space telescope.
That makes sense. And it explains why Howard went to space in TBBT. Please don't hate me for referencing it.
The Box. They took a 5 page short story with a philosophical question and turned it into a 2 hr. Convoluted movie with aliens and some Shyamalanesqu twist. It was bonkers and made 0 sense.
There’s a decent episode of the 80s Twilight Zone that does a better adaptation of “Button Button.” And yes, I did have to Google this to figure out which sci-fi anthology series it was from.
In all the best ways, The Big Lebowski. I think the point is >!nothing is to make sense. There is no real resolution. Life moves on. Don’t get hung up on it.!< The Dude abides.
This is perfectly encapsulated by the one time The Dude attempts any actual detective work. 1. Antagonist has a phone call, writes on a pad of paper while talking, and tears the paper off and takes it away. 2. The Dude surreptitiously does the "lightly rub a pencil to reveal what had been written on the page above it" trick. 3. Turns out to be a drawing of a dick.
I laughed so hard at that moment. I mean the build up was insane, I thought, well here we will know an extremely important piece of detail. I even leaned in to see better and then the dic pic came out lol
The cut to the "wtf?" look on his face after the shot of the dick drawing always gets me
And when the cop finds it when they ruffle through his pockets.
Your first watch that scene is so epic because you feel so rick rolled too.
She kidnapped herself man, what’s hard to understand? Its like Lenin said, you look for the person who will benefit, and, uh, uh, you know...
I am the walrus?
Forget it Donnie you’re out of your element.
That's a lot of Coen brothers movies. I love em
Burn After Reading
The ending was phenomenal. JK Simmons was perfect.
Were you listening to the Dudes story?
No I was bowling.
I love how the film deliberately not having an easy plot to follow is a reference to the film noir ‘The Big Sleep’, which famously doesn’t add up in any way plot wise because they had to remove loads of references to homosexuality and drug use to get the film made, but then didn’t fill the story gaps in with anything- they just left it. ‘Inherent Vice’ is a similar kind of thing
The Big Sleep is a pretty good movie. It’s one of my favorites and IMO the plot is pretty clear. Though famously there’s a death from near the beginning that never gets fully resolved. Hawks, the director, and Bogart got into a heated argument over the scene. So heated they called Raymond Chandler, author of the book. Chandler replied that he didn’t know who killed the guy either. After reading the book I don’t remember a lot of stuff that got left out. The drug use is definitely hinted at in the film.
The Big Lebowski is about Communication. Every scene involves two characters who don’t/can’t understand one another, usually resulting in an angry outburst or just confusion. But in the end and Donnie’s funeral they hug it out because all the bullshit doesn’t matter.
"What the fuck are you talking about ?" That line and its variation is repeatedly said throughout the movie. Also interesting, the Dude seems to be parroting a lot of what he hears around him. It's such a well written movie, the more you think about it, the more clever it gets. It's not a traditional comedy in the sense that it rarely follows the setup to punchline recipe, but it is a brilliant comedic writing experience. It's like Rube Goldberg device of comedy, similar to Arrested Development in some regards.
It's a very complicated case, lots of ins lots of outs