It could be an album, movie, tv show, whatever.
Dragon Age 2 just that one at some point it was unbearable. 1 and 3 (inquisition) are awesome.
cant think of anything other atm (but probably incoming)
65 was such a missed opportunity. It’s about a guy who crash lands on Earth right before the asteroid that kills the dinosaurs. Spoiler alert: he escapes just in time to avoid the asteroid. It’s just a generic survival movie with generic monsters. Waste of a premise. It should have shown the beautiful side of the dinosaur world and made us sad when they died
I, Robot.
I’m a huge Asimov fan, and pretty much the only thing it shared with the story is the name and that robots exist.
pretty much the only thing it shared with the story is the name and that robots exist
Same with the Foundation show. Could probably have been a nice science fiction show with any other name and with different character names, but for some reason (probably marketing?) they just had to ruin it for Asimov fans.
Nitpicking a bit, though, I Robot (the boo) isn’t a story, it’s an anthology of short stories in which Asimov plays with the three laws, mostly to torture Powell and Donovan in entertaining ways (I’d kill for a good Powell and Donovan miniseries!) or to show how smart and unemotional Susan Calvin was, so it’s hard to see how it could be adapted except as an anthology series.
Same with Foundation, really, though at least that one has an overall storyline. Possibly even more difficult to adapt, though, because other than Sheldon’s hologram once an episode and possibly Eto Demerzel / R. Daneel Olivaw if you’re being excessive liberal with the adaptation there’s no characters to get attached to… (anthology series with no persistent characters have worked occasionally, though, so maybe just do that).
I watched 2 episodes of the foundation and was so frustrated on how completely different it was that I just can’t watch more. I also get mad when I think of it. Ugh…
Same. It’s doubly disappointing because there’s clearly material for an interesting science fiction show in there (what they did with the Cleon clones would have been quite interesting in another series), but it’s all ruined by the completely wrong Foundation references.
They managed to ruin what could have been a great adaptation of a great classic and what could have been an interesting original series at the same time, the bastards.
Ah, it’s been a hot minute since I read through all of his works, I the story/anthology backwards.
I haven’t watched Foundation yet, but I’ve said for years that a live adaptation would be almost impossible to pull off.
But an anthology series for I, Robot would have been amazing.
Star Citizen. I’m less disappointed in the tech demo than how Chris Roberts has handled the business end of it.
I grew up on Wing Commander, Privateer, Starlancer, and Freelancer. I still have all those games on physical media with original boxes. And the Wing Commander CIC is the one website I still visit daily since 1997-ish. So when Roberts pitched a new space game back around 2012 I was thrilled. Well, we all know how that turned out. I’ve given up waiting for any release of Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
Freelancer.
I know everyone hates games publishers but this was a perfect example of a publisher untangling a mess. Microsoft bought Roberts’ company and immediately dialed back the unworkable ambition, put Roberts in a consulting role where he didn’t have a final say over anything, and actually got the game finished and released.
Star Citizen is what happens when the same guy who made such an intractable mess of development discovers an infinite money glitch as long as he never stops developing and never releases a full game.
Moving away from physical buttons and physical media. I don’t mind touchscreens and I do enjoy downloading, but there’s nothing more satisfying than a good click of a button and actually holding something in your hand that you purchased.
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I know I will get hate for this… Breaking Bad. Everyone I know was hyping it up as the best series ever and how much of a complete bad ass Walter turns into - “it starts slow, but give it a chance and it gets so good”. It really set my expectation for what the show would be to something… else entirely I guess? I watched the entire series thinking I was still in the “give it a chance” phase and any episode now it will get proper good and I’ll stop hating Walter. Then the end happened and I was left so confused.
For the record I loved Better Call Saul. And I think it’s possible that in an alternate timeline where someone just told me “you should watch it, it’s decent”, I’d might have really liked it. But it was built up so much, and Walter was built up to be such a “cool bad-ass”, which he basically never is, that it just ruined it for me.
I was also disappointed in the series not because it wasn’t good, but because people overhyped it. I’ve learnt my lesson to never listen to people’s hype for series I am interested in watching.
I’m with you on it. And you can’t even have an honest discussion about Breaking Bad with anyone because if you say you didn’t like it you’re just dismissed out of hand.
The biggest fault was walt being built up to be a good guy. He’s the main character, but he’s definitely not a “good guy”. That’s kinda the whole point of the show. Most people who walk away thinking walt was a badass have a relatively immature take on the story.
Something I never hear people talk about with BB is how it hit differently when it was first being broadcast, than when it hit streaming.
The original show spooled out slowly, an episode a week, and then nearly a year before the next season, then they broke the final season in half, and dragged that way out. So between episodes and seasons, you remember the excitement, and you apply that to Walter, and sort of forget all the atrocities he’s committing. He’s just a cool anti-hero.
But when you binge it on streaming, your shock at his behavior doesn’t dissipate, it accumulates, and by the end, he’s just a bad guy who got a lot of people killed, and deserves his fate.
I watched it during its initial run, then binged it, and I can’t think of any other show that had such a different dynamic between the two.
I didn’t finish the show but I got the idea pretty early on; he’s like Captain Ahab, right? Not a good man, at least not anymore - a tragic character.
That’s a pretty good analogy.
Yeah, it’s very obvious from the start that he’s a mediocre person. Saying he becomes a badass is false advertising
The last Divergent book. I want to like the Divergent series more. The authour was inspired by a lot of things I like. But I think she wrote the first two books without a thought-out plan for the third. They leave the city and you expect there to be some big purpose for divergents in the outside world and then we just get a lot of nothing. We get an explanation for the factions that make them make even less sense than before.
Her newer books are better.
2001; A Space Odyssey
I generally like older, slower paced movies. The Bridge over the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Guns of Navarone are all great movies, despite them being very dated in some regards. With that in mind, I decided to give the movie a try, it being a very famous classic and all. Despite that, my expectations weren’t unrealistically high, but the movie still fell very short.
So, it consists of four chapters/acts, basically. The first one (with the monkeys) was very “meh” and could have been shorter, but I didn’t mind it too much because, again, old movie. The second act on the moon was better, but honestly was “OK” in my books. The third act, now that was really good in my opinion. I though; “looks like the story is really taking off now!” And then came act 4…
I thought that, while the beginning wasn’t great, it was still perfectly salvagable if the ending was decent. Here is where it fell really short, in my opinion. It is, in essence, just a light show with music. Now sure, I bet that for the time that was all very advanced, so I want to give them credit. But it didn’t need to last for 15 fucking minutes! Even for that time, that is extremely long. I found myself starting to skip ahead to see if anything else was going to happen. And it did, I guess. Wasn’t exactly blown away though.
Now what I think they were trying to achieve was what we now typically describe as eldritch horror, to see something we simply cannot fathom. And I think they did that very well with the tools that they had. But it was just way too long, and that thoroughly put the nail in the coffin for me.
It’s weird they spent so much time on act 1 since it was a single chapter in the book. Act 4 was multiple chapters of the book (and just as terrible as the movie).
Act 3 is iconic and just plain good, but act 4 just ruins the entire story for me
2001; A Space Odyssey
And then came act 4…
I completely agree. You also never hear anyone talk about the fourth act. It’s basically a weird post-credits scene.
I’ve always felt the structure and pacing of 2002 to be musical, literally a symphony in four movements. The classical music soundtrack really sells that concept.
The light show at the the end has to be taken in context. It was 1968, the peak of the hippie movement, and one of the most explosively creative moments in popular art in history, partially fueled by hallucinogenics like weed, but also LSD, which was making it’s way across the country. It was already widely available in California, where it was being distributed by associates of the Grateful Dead in San Francisco.
In LA, Kubrick would have been quite familiar with the trend, everyone was, it was being talked about in the media constantly. Would it be that surprising if Kubrick tried what everyone was talking about, and was as blown away as everyone always is, and had to reference it in his movie?
Light shows of various kinds were becoming a standard addition to concerts, using colors, lasers, projections, blobs of colored fluids, etc. Kubrick knew that people would be coming into this movie to trip, and he wanted to give them a big light show to entertain them. If they dropped their tab at the beginning of the movie, they’d probably be reaching a nice peak right around when the light show started, or at least tripping enough to enjoy it.
I’ve always figured that was the reason. If it was any other era, I would doubt it, but this was made in California in 1968, when EVERYTHING was about drugs or the Vietnam War, and this wasn’t about the war.
That would make some sense, yeah. Still, if you are sober and watching something that is considered a classic, it falls short. Either way, it is some nice historical context, so thank you for sharing!
I love the 2001 book (and its sequels) but the movie is outright boring, technically amazing for its time, but its so slow and borders on masturbatory in its execution
OK, I thought I was missing something, but cause I’ve tried to watch it so many times and its just blah
I read the novelization by Arthur C. Clark and it made way more sense than the movie. I never understood why HAL went crazy, but the book explains that it was given orders to be honest with the crew, but not reveal the purpose of the mission. HAL naturally concluded that he couldn’t lie to a dead crew.
I might be in the minority, but I enjoy every minute of that movie. Yea, it’s masturbatory pleasure, but uuh… Yea I’ll take it.
Enter the Void, kept hearing “so deep” and “a journey” and “perfect stoner movie”
It was self-important navelgazing - the movie - one of the only movies I stopped watching cause it just pissed me off
And I’ve watched Nazis at the Center of the Earth, and Postal
The Fifth Element.
I first heard about it in the late nineties or early noughties, and I wanted to see it ever since, because liked its aesthetics and science-fiction in general, but for whatever reason, I didn’t end up seeing it until last year. But wow, what a terrible film.
What made it terrible for you?
If I had to describe it in terms of individual issues:
- The big problem that needs to be solved is this hackneyed blob of pure evil that appears for no reason other than, it just something that happens every 6000 years, and the way to solve it is to follow an instruction manual.
- The way almost all the male characters interact with Leeloo is pretty icky, even when considering the time it was made.
- I didn’t feel the motivations of the characters were always that convincing.
- The acting is generally pretty poor.
- Most of the attempts at humour, which were mostly the usual 90s saucy jokes, fell flat.
I’m a bit wary of critiquing things like this, though, because when I like something, I’m also a lot more forgiving of its flaws, so when I don’t like something, it feels like a rationalisation to convey it like this. But it’s the best I got without resorting to onomatopoeia.
On the positive side, I did quite like the look of the film and the fact that the protagonist and the antagonist never actually meet or have much awareness of each other tickled me. Also, for some reason I just couldn’t hate Ruby.
Those are all very valid critiques. Particularly male behaviours around Leeloo, lol.
YouTube channel ‘Pop Culture Detective’ produced a brilliant piece abpyt the “Born Sexy Yesterday” trope.
Definitely worth a watch if anyone hasn’t seen it: https://youtu.be/0thpEyEwi80
Ruby Rhod stole that show, but you’re right that the concept art is the best creative aspect of the production.
The script is more style than substance, but in fairness you’d need a lot of substance to balance that equation. All of that is basically thanks to Moebius.
The icky stuff makes sense in retrospect, Luc Besson has allegations.
Oppenheimer. Nolan movies are my favorites, but that was boring as fuck.
The liam neeson wolf depression movie. " The grey" Boring circuitous meaningless misery porn
The best thing we got from that film was Harmon’s Neeson impression.
I think the Eurovision Song Contest has lost the innocent magic it once possessed.
Yeah it sucks since around 1994
Yep ,go back to 80s
…of its own choice.
The TV adaptation of Preacher. The comics were more like a western but with a dark sense of humour that popped up when the moment called for it. The tv show was ‘wow, this is so wacky and wild!’ I get the impression Seth Rogan liked the comics but didn’t actually understand them at all.
The Netflix version of Cowboy Bebop.
The cast was great but the script was just horrible and really ruined the show.
On a related note, I was really underwhelmed and disappointed by last year’s new Shinichiro Watanabe anime series, Lazarus.
As a huge fan of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo (and to a lesser extent Space Dandy) I was really looking forward to another serious anime helmed by Watanabe. What we got was, for various reasons, not the least of which being the untimely death of Bebop writer Keiko Nobumoto, really boring and subpar at best.
I struggled to finish it, and I probably wouldn’t have bothered it it wasn’t by a creator that I like and respect.
it was genuinely baffling how superficial and shallow the writing was, how underwhelming the direction was and how uninteresting the character designs were (I genuinely can’t remember a single one). The animation and music were great but overall it basically felt like a painfully average Netflix flick rather than a Watanabe.
Yes, I agree. To me it is almost like they ignored the original storytelling and the story and instead wanted to make something more “hollywood”.
It is the deep background and how the stories are told along with the awsome music, that makes Bebop so good. Not flashy one-liners
If that cast and production crew had made an original show about a dark funky future and bounty hunters and whatever, clearly inspired by Bebop but not trying to be it, they could have knocked it out of the park so hard.
They would, of course, have had to get some decent writers instead of just feeding the original anime scripts to crack-smoking monkeys and then smearing their poops onto script paper.
Perhaps controversial but I don’t think animated shows should ever be translated to live action, at least where fantasy, sci-fi, and exaggerated action are pivotal to the story or art style.
One Piece turned out okay.
Especially when they try to make it available and shoe-horn it to a wide general audience that probably haven’t seen the original show.
I have zero hope that there will ever be any good live-action remakes of anime. I remember how everyone was excited that the Ghost in the Shell live-action was just mediocre.
I can’t think of a better example of disconnect between source material and output. Just… What happened? It’s like it was written by a focus group.
