For me if I had to pick a good contender it would be the UK version of The Office.
I know many tend to debate how Ricky Gervais really fell off and how he repugnantly acts like a whiny centrist edgelord but me personally IMO I actually don’t think he was ever funny not even a little.
His big break through television was just so painful to sit through it’s so charismatically boring the characters are completely generic at best (notably Tim) or straight up insufferably unlikable at worst (especially the protagonist David FUCKING Brent) and most importantly the humour is just embarrassing.
Always seemed like The Thick Of It but without the nuisance tongue in cheek and charming satire.
Mad Men. Everyone on that show is a fucking scumbag and not in a funny or interesting way.
Also Thor Ragnarok. I hate it for the reasons people say they hate the next one but it was the same people that said they liked Ragnarok so Idk what the fuck is going on there. I’m not watching the second one to find out.
I’ve got a good one: Andor. People can’t stop raving about it and I had to force myself to finish it. Deathly boring all the way through. I didn’t like anyone in it so I couldn’t root for anyone, and it was just a slog til the end. Crucify me star wars fans, I know you want to. 😇
I think it’s the Disney adults who fangirl over the newslop.
how is Andor supposed to appeal to “Disney adults”?
Andor is one of the best things Disney has done for Star wars, but it’s far from perfect. If you watched it between Obiwan and Ashoka it looked like a masterpiece.
Same, I tried to watch it twice but never made it through.
3 body problem. What a fucking terrible shit waste of paper.
Preach.
Oh my God, I thought it was just me. I usually consume a lot of sci-fi media in general and was like, “why can’t I like this highly acclaimed work?”
The worst part is that if you somehow drag yourself through the first book and rightly declare that it sucks, fans will all say “Oh, yeah, the first book is bad, but it gets sooooo much better after that!”
This is a fucking lie. The books actually get progressively worse at a genuinely shocking rate.
Do you like reading a series of Wikipedia articles about all these really cool ideas the author had? Do you like being slapped in the face with moments of truly egregious sexism? Do you like characters with zero defining traits? Do you like entire plotlines built around Death Note style “I know that you know that I know that you know that I know…” style bullshit that falls apart the moment you think about it for five seconds? Do you like like awful solutions to the Fermi Paradox? Oh boy do we have the book series for you!
You forgot the Deus Ex Machina explanation at the end that made literally everything before it a non sequitur.
And he had no new ideas. Anyone that reads that series and extolls the originality of the Dark Forest theory hasn’t read any science fiction to speak of, let along Saberhagen’s Berserker series from the better part of a century earlier. He had nothing new, he was a literature prof writing his first SF book and doing it way worse than any literature prof should ever be at writing.
Fucking garbage, I was angry and upset that I had wasted time reading that shit and wanted my money back. If anyone tells you that was great SF, you can safely turn your back and walk away, they have nothing useful to contribute to a conversation on the matter.
Death Note style “I know that you know that I know that you know that I know.…” style bullshit that falls apart
yeah if you didn’t like that part of death note (which i guess would be another of your responses to this question) you definitely wouldn’t like that plot line, which PSA to other commenters takes up about 1/4 of the second book. (i’m also curious to hear why you think it falls apart and debate it though i presume you wouldn’t be interested in debating this book lol. i liked the plotline partly because you also have to deduce what he’s going to do and going on through his mind)
awful solutions to the Fermi paradox
the Dark Forest Hypothesis has been around and proposed by physicists decades before the book popularized it, though not with that name; it is plausible that Liu independently thought of this. Stephen Hawking is a major proponent of this hypothesis.
Stephen Hawking is a major proponent of this hypothesis.
was
oops. just because he’s dead now and not because he changed his mind, right?
Not sure, you’d have to ask him.
OK, so, the most important thing to understand about the Dark Forest hypothesis is that Cixin Liu is not necessarily making a serious argument for it as a realistic model of how the universe works. The novels are works of fiction, and while I will trash Cixin’s prose to the ends of the Earth (it is dire, and absolutely none of my complaints have anything to do with translation; the shift from Chinese to English didn’t magically replace dialogue and character action with endless tracts of dry narration, that’s just how he writes, and it’s bad), I think his grasp of themes is actually really, really good. I’ve often commented that I would love to see Liu take all of his ideas and collaborate with a better writer on putting them into text.
In the case of Remembrance of Earth’s Past, the core themes of the series as a whole are all about altruism and cooperation, and the Dark Forest Hypothesis exists as a juxtaposition and foil to those ideas. He’s not necessarily advocating for it, it just works for what his story is trying to say about the human condition. The Dark Forest is, in a sense, the ultimate villain of the series.
I also want to note that while earlier versions of the theory existed, there are subtle but important differences in how they’re expressed. Hawking et al are/were proponents of the idea that aliens may be hiding, but The Dark Forest specifically presents the argument that no only is everyone hiding from Space Hitler, but that everyone is Space Hitler, as non-genocidal civilizations are inevitably wiped out. That’s what I take issue with.
As for why I think the theory is - removed from it’s context as a dark backdrop against which to write a story of hope - a crock of shit…
Well, OK, I don’t think it’s a crock of shit in the sense that it’s utterly impossible. But it’s presented, especially by fans, as a kind of inevitable logical assertion, a fait-a-complit that cannot be challenged because it’s so utterly self-evident. This is nonsense. While the theory is technically possible, all of our available evidence suggests that it’s extremely unlikely.
First, at a really basic level, 100% of our observations of intelligent species refute it. Humans constantly and enthusiastically blast our position into space, and the apparently irrefutable logic of the Dark Forest hypothesis hasn’t slowed our enthusiasm for doing so by one iota.
“But humans are an outlier!”
Based on what evidence? We have zero empirical observations to base that claim on. And no, I’m not claiming that one (1) species constitutes a statistically significant observation for my argument; rather I’m pointing to the fact that our empirical observations arguing for dark forest are zero (0), and our empirical observations against are > 0, and at some point proponents of the theory kind of have to deal with that fact. It’s just as absurd to claim that humans are an outlier as it is to claim that every species in the universe must inherently be like us.
What we do know that is all life on Earth with any degree of intelligence demonstrates curiosity. Curiosity is, as best we can tell, an essential component of applied intelligence. An incurious species will never smash a stick with a rock and learn the concept of a hammer. Curiosity compels us to want to learn about the unknown. Liu presents this idea that inter-species cooperation will always be an unbridgeable gap because truly alien creatures from truly alien environments will never be able to comprehend each other’s goals and motivations, and that’s frankly ludicrous. The drive to understand the unknown is what made the first ape pick up a burning stick and realise it could keep their tribe warm.
(Am I arguing that Project Hail Mary is basically a sufficient revocation of the Dark Forest Hypothesis entirely on its own? Broadly, yes.)
Further to the lack of evidence is the lack of any observable evidence of the ongoing galactic genocide that we are apparently endlessly surrounded by. We know when stars should die - we’re actually pretty good at it - so spotting when stars are being blown up by civilisation destroying weaponry wouldn’t be that hard.
Then we get to the fundamental flaws in the game theory. Liu proposes a forest full of hunters with rifles shooting each other from the darkness, but never once contemplates what happens if the hunter you fire at has a friend. Given the nature of the weaponry employed in the story, which is never shown to be capable of destroying more than one star system at a time, that friend doesn’t even have to be an allied civilisation, it can just be an extra-solar colony. The entire logic of the “Always strike first” conclusion falls apart at this point. You detect a star system that contains a nascent alien civilisation, you blow it up with a photoid. Turns out you detected one of that species first extra-solar colonies, and their homeworld immediately conceals itself, builds photoids, finds you and kills you. Hard to do, but entirely worth the effort now that you’ve made it essential to their survival.
The hunters gun reveals him when he fires, and why shouldn’t it? There’s no reason to believe that methods of interstellar destruction are entirely undetectable to observers. Logically, opening fire is a terrible decision; you have declared to everyone around you that you operate on a first strike principle, making yourself an immediate target for destruction, potentially by a group of altruistic civilisations who will immediately choose to cooperate against you. It’s really not hard to formulate the logic of the dark forest in such a way that, rather than only paranoid, genocidal civilisations surviving, it is the exact opposite; that cooperators have an inherent advantage that would lead to only cooperators surviving. The theory as presented just relies on assuming that all of its suppositions are correct while ignoring alternative possibilities.
The argument the theory presents against the likelihood of cooperation is the notion that we exist in a universe of finite resources, but increasingly our observations of the universe show that there is a LOT more matter than there is life, and at a certain level of technology all matter is usable resources. Basically once we can start printing carbon atoms we’re close enough to Star Trek replicators as makes no odds. Carbon is literally the fourth most abundant element in the universe. The Trisolarans can turn protons into multidimensional computers but they can’t fabricate food from the carbon in asteroids? That is an absolutely demented proposal. In the first Culture novel Ian Banks lays out how the Culture is basically undefeatable in conventional warfare because they’ve completely transcended the need for territory. Planets don’t matter when you can build spaceships the size of continents. The idea that advanced space-faring civilisations would be coming to blows over resources beggars belief. The Trisolarans have already demonstrated the technology required to just become a completely space-faring civilization.
Hell, if the entire driver of a lack of cooperation is scarcity of resources, why the fuck would we be blowing up each other’s star systems with all those valuable life-supporting planets? If the existence of advanced life is somehow utterly dependent on life-supporting planets in a way that is fundamentally unsolvable, you’d be insane to go around destroying them.
None of this is fundamentally dispositive to the theory. That’s not what I’m trying to claim. If it has a 0.0001% chance of being true then it’s still plausible. My point is simply that in order for it to be meaningful there are so many specific assumptions that would first have to be proven, and which, frankly, fly in the face of what available evidence we have. Essentially, we would have to be entirely wrong in many of our current observations of the state of the universe. You might as well assert that the moon is actually made of cheese, it’s just buried deep beneath all the bits we’ve studied. It’s a theory that seems entirely logical, as long as you ignore the vast majority of what we know about the universe.
And I do want to reiterate what I said at the top; the Dark Forest Hypothesis is almost certainly a bad theory because it’s not meant to stand up as a theory. It’s more than likely just meant to be a piece of sufficiently plausible sci-fi technobabble - just like warp drive - that it can support what the story is trying to say, not an actual theory that stands up to scrutiny. I just dislike that a) it really does rely on a LOT of bad assumptions, to the point where I was questioning it throughout the story, and b) people act like it is some kind of irrefutable masterstroke of game theory.
this is the definitive review. 10/10, no notes.
fans will all say "Oh, yeah, the first book is bad
i don’t think that’s how it goes. the fans i know all say both books one and two are really good (second one being better than the first of course, but no the first book is still awesome) while the third one is controversial. i personally agree with that except i also like the third book though i agree that one did nothing to dissuade misogynist interpretations and there are little if any strong femm characters in the series
I think I’ve read (or at least started reading) the book like three times and watched the show twice and I remember none of it
at least, I think it’s that one. might have it mixed up with something else.
The only answer I can’t understand. A great novel. I Chinese context was very fresh and interesting for me. Sometimes it seems amature, like fan fiction, like author is not a professional writer. But it makes it even better.
I mean, I think you explain the reasoning in your own comment, the writing (at least in the English translation for me) was so rough that I couldn’t get into it. I can’t say I hated it, I just never got far into it because it couldn’t keep my attention.
I’m surprised to hear someone say the poor writing was a plus for them. Why did that make you enjoy it more?
As I explained - it feeled fresh. I can’t explain why, but I can’t put it down while reading.
I don’t try to convince people, who read this book, that it’s great. I address people who haven’t - you should give it a chance.
I have seen so much praise for Kingdom of Heaven and all I did was laugh or yell at it, usually both. It’s so bad. So, so bad.
I’m sorry, you’re telling me they built siege towers in the middle of the desert. Where did they get the wood??? And there’s like 12 of them? And you aimed a Ballista and that took down every single one of them in one swoop? ALSO YOU ARE A SMITH APPRENTICE BUT YOU KNOW SIEGE TACTICS? AND YOU KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT DESERT IRRIGATION WHEN YOU ARE FROM FUCKING ENGLAND? AND
I’m yelling again
And that’s not to mention how deeply historically inaccurate it is at moments, like even besides all the general Hollywood of it all. Like sure they get some moments right but generally, holy shit it’s bad lol
Though I will say watching Will Turner learn sword fighting from Qui-Gon only to be interrupted by Jaime Lannister was pretty funny
I’ve seen it noted by better critics than me that when people criticize movies by fixating on hyper-specific inaccuracies or contradictions (the Cinema Sins method) they’re usually expressing the fact that there were deeper underlying flaws in the movie itself that meant it failed to give them a reason to overlook those hyper-specific complaints.
After all, if the things you’ve listed here were reason enough to hate a film, on their own, you’re basically just saying that you shouldn’t watch movies. If you know enough about where and when a movie is set, you’re guaranteed to be able to find those kinds of inaccuracies in any movie you watch, with very few exceptions.
The real problem here, I suspect, is that Kingdom of Heaven, as released is a bad movie. The director’s cut, on the other hand, is incredible. Ridley envisioned this as a sprawling Lawrence of Arabia style historical epic, and that’s the film he made. That film was then butchered to fit what the studio thought would make a good theatrical release.
The director’s cut will not, to the best of my recollection, solve any of your specific complaints, but it is a far, far better movie.
Of course, it is possible that the version you saw was the director’s cut, in which case I’m very sorry, movies set in any version of the real world just might not be for you.
I watched the Director’s cut. It is a ridiculous movie lol
Sorry but the Hollywoodisms and bad history aside, it is also just orientalist as all hell and I will hold the movie’s pretense of being a historical movie against it when it is so deeply revisionist
A movie I did really enjoy was Waterloo for example. There are plenty of movies where I can forgive some artistic license. Hell, I like Chernobyl even though yes, that is also revisionist, but I understand the choices that were made. For Kingdom of Heaven though, it’s clear Ridley Scott did what he is known for: putting a hatchet to real stories and chopping them down until there’s nothing left.
See, those are all really interesting and meaningful criticisms, and for the life of me I cannot understand why you didn’t lead with that instead of trying to nitpick how they got access to wood in a region known as the fertile crescent :-P
I’m a pedant! I’ll admit it!
Fair. If we’re being pedantic though, come on dude, they had wood in Jerusalem. Like, a lot of it. There are contemporaneous depictions of siege towers being used in the first siege of Jerusalem.
That’s fair!
A big part of why many of the things in this thread haven’t aged well, is because a lot of what made these shoes original and unique was copied to death following the fame of the original.
If you weren’t there for the original release of a piece of media, there’s a good chance you’re not necessarily seeing it in the context where the accolades make sense.
Seinfeld basically invented the 3 camera sitcom and a lot of the key tropes in the format. If you go back today having not watched it before, the vast majority of it just comes across as a boring sitcom, because every sitcom to follow took notes from the way they did Seinfeld.
It’s the same with the UK office, it basically invented the modern mockumentary format as well as the cringe comedy era that followed (and gave us things like peep show). If you look back now without that context, it just looks like a generic combination of both those things.
I believe “I Love Lucy” is credited with inventing or popularizing the three camera sitcom. Not to dampen’s "Seinfeld"s contributions or the point of your comment, but I just wanted to add that small correction.
Just to mention it, this is literally named the Seinfeld is Unfunny effect on TVTropes
I think the bigger issue is that most of the show isn’t that good. Less than half the seasons are good, and the lows from the bad seasons are really low. Watching it on a streaming scenario exposes this a lot more than reruns of the good parts.
I actually still enjoyed it for the most part last time I went through. Jerry’s standup is terrible and I have no clue how he ever got an audience, but the actual show I enjoyed most of, even if nowadays pretty much all the plots would be solved because everyone would have a cell phone.
The Office (US) pretty much killed laugh tracks in US sitcoms.
Seinfeld didn’t invent the three camera sitcom, but it was important in creating modern sitcoms that didn’t have a lesson to learn at the end of redeeming protagonists.
Ahh so THAT’S what they meant with the whole “It’s about nothing!” thing…
Star Wars, Marvel movies, basically film in general. Goes for TV shows too.
It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I concluded that video is just not an entertainment medium that works for me. I tried really, really hard to like it, and I gave all of the really popular films or TV shows or even YouTube videos a fair shot.
The James Cameron Avatar movies.
We will never get along
Utter snoozefest I didn’t get the hype at all
The first time I saw the first one in the theater I was blown away. Then I went and saw it again with someone else and paid more attention to the plot the second time and …yeah.
The plot sucks and the characters are forgettable, but that’s not the point. The point is the graphics, the locations, the crazy wildlife and eywa. The neural queues and the floating islands. Its a masterclass in world building, and has been an endless source of inspiration.
When did you watch it? When it came out, it was technically impressive for the computer-generated graphics, which included a lot of highly-detailed and expansive “organic” stuff like forests.
Here’s some quotes from the Roger Ebert review from the time:
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/avatar-2009
Like “Star Wars” and “LOTR,” “Avatar” employs a new generation of special effects. Cameron said it would, and many doubted him. It does. Pandora is very largely CGI. The Na’vi are embodied through motion capture techniques, convincingly. They look like specific, persuasive individuals, yet sidestep the eerie Uncanny Valley effect. And Cameron and his artists succeed at the difficult challenge of making Neytiri a blue-skinned giantess with golden eyes and a long, supple tail, and yet–I’ll be damned. Sexy.
Cameron promised he’d unveil the next generation of 3-D in “Avatar.” I’m a notorious skeptic about this process, a needless distraction from the perfect realism of movies in 2-D. Cameron’s iteration is the best I’ve seen — and more importantly, one of the most carefully-employed. The film never uses 3-D simply because it has it, and doesn’t promiscuously violate the fourth wall.
I mean, I remember being underwhelmed after I went to watch Avatar with a friend who was deeply impressed, but it did show off a lot of render capability for the time. I’d call it more impressive as a tech demo.
I watched it in 3D too and was blown away
Didn’t expect this is how I found out Roger Ebert was a furry
It’s way beyond a tech demo. Each Avatar movie invented dozens of new techniques. They actually film using cameras. They do a CGI movie with cameras, filming real actors acting. And they become huge blue aliens, while being filmed on a camera. It’s truly insane. I don’t like the movies themselves, but the BTS for them is crazy.
And that sort of thing totally DOES permeate throughout the industry. Whenever Pixar or Weta(RIP?) or Cameron or DreamWorks or whoever invent something REALLY COOL. . .
. . .At some point we eventually get it in Blender, and I think that’s neat.
I’m pretty sure that’s Cameron’s goal. He saw the direction movies were going and wanted to guarantee a niche for artists will keep existing within it 🤷♂️
@MonkeMischief you’re into animation ?
I lost all respect for the movie and the entire franchise after hearing “unobtainium” as the name of the super rare space mineral. Nearly walked out of the theater.
I can’t remember if they ever refer to it as anything else in that movie but I actually appreciated this scene in the first movie for two reasons:
Info dumps irritate me in sci fi. He’s like the main guy in charge talking to one of his lead scientists. They both absolutely fucking know why they’re there. They know what it’s called and what it’s for. He’s spelling it out for our benefit without breaking in-world character. If, in-world, someone started pedantically outlining what the rocks were for to their lead scientists, it would be the equivalent of calling them an idiot. Calling it “unobtainium” is like saying “we’ve had this argument before, I remember everything you said last time, you know everything I’m about to tell you, and nothing you or I do will change what’s happening because you cant get it anywhere else and oh yeah it’s worth a fuck load of money”.
I can’t remember if they later retcon that into being the actual name, but in that moment, it didn’t sound like the actual name, it sounded like slang being used informally during a semi heated discussion.
Whether or not that was the original intent I LOVE this interpretation. I like to be entertained and err on the side of “Maybe this is a deliberate choice these very smart and passionate people made to smooth out a story.”
Sometimes I feel like people get mad that they aren’t just dropped into a completely fleshed out imaginary world.
It’s entertainment delivered to them as they relax in a chair, requiring zero effort on their part, and they make it a goal to nitpick whatever reminds them this slice of imagination was designed by humans, and isn’t actually a fully functional parallel universe they can literally isekai into to escape the mundanity of modern existence.
Critic culture is overrated, and I wish people would exercise their suspension of disbelief, basically. Hahaha
They’re so bad.
…well the first one was. Didn’t bother with any after that…
The first 2 are pretty much the same plot so you’re not missing much. Not sure about the 3rd one not interested in it.
It also has basically the same plot with the same enemies. Except they added a red lady villain that is weirdly sexualized and a kid gets magic powers - because nature.
I thought the wecond one was way better and more intereating than the first one. It even made me genuinely sad at one point. I watched like 15 or 20min of the third one and found unwatchable. I’m not saying you should watch the second one, because it’s a masterpiece or something, but i thought that if they keep that pace, maybe the third one will be good are something. It’s still a technical marvel, at least the first one at the time and the second one for the insane water scenes and water physics and time and effot that went into it. The third one looks a lot more like a greenscreen movie.
I’ve never seen them, probably not going to either
Great example of; just because it was a technical masterpiece, that doesn’t make a movie good. The special effects were outstanding for the time, and still hold up very well. That is something I will always praise it for, but it is the only thing worth praising about it. It really is a very polished turd, in that sense.
Yeah I saw it in IMAX 3D and it was certainly a spectacle. The visuals were phenomenal, but the film itself was otherwise completely forgettable.
The Office
Napoleon Dynamite
Grease
Reservoir Dogs
Big Bang Theory (or any popular laugh-track sitcom post 2000)
(Nevermind, you said highly extolled, not just popular)
Chicago, Rent, and Cats
Harry Potter (even before JKR went full terf, probably just a generational thing, honestly)
Taylor Swift (again, nothing personal, just not my jam)
Sideways, Marriage Story, Whiplash (intense interpersonal drama, particularly dealing with infidelity or power disparity)Not quite what you’re asking for, because this one I can at least stand to watch, but Futurama was one of the biggest “I’m not impressed but know people who adore it” pieces of media for me.
I’ve liked past Matt Groening stuff. I liked Life is Hell. I liked (earlier) The Simpsons stuff.
I’ve sat next to people who crack up while watching Futurama.
But I don’t think I’ve ever chuckled at the humor in Futurama. It throws out a series of jokes that just don’t make me chuckle at all.
That being said, I haven’t watched it for some time, so I haven’t seen the newer stuff.
If you didnt laugh at futurama you didnt laugh at the simpsons. Even the early ones. You may have been a child that was giggling at the colors or that a catoon was on at night but you werent listenting to the punch lines at the time.
That’s funny, I’m the exact opposite. I grew up never getting why people liked the Simpsons, but Futurama is one of the funniest, most entertaining, and most moving shows I’ve seen.
Same. I used to watch Futurama a lot and I usually found it amusing, but I never made any audible noises of enjoyment.
It’s very much a Gen-X nostalgia bucket.
I do agree that it’s full of cultural references and that lacking it would probably detract from it, but even so, I just don’t see how someone having that context makes the jokes funny.
One example I had in mind was when I brought up the fact that I just didn’t really find the jokes funny even through some people really did laugh. At the time, the show was showing some robots trying to pack boxes and they kept failing, because when they put them together, they’d eliminate them, in an allusion to Tetris. That is, indeed, a Gen-X reference. The guy I was watching it with was chortling. I remember asking him about it and him saying “it’s hilarious!”
I mean…I get the reference there. I’ve owned a couple versions of Tetris. I played it back when the game was young. But…even having the cultural context, it’s just…there’s none of the stuff that make something funny for me there. I just look at it and say “yeah, they’re alluding to Tetris.” Maybe it’s that there’s not enough buildup or something.
I remember some episode when a bunch of hippies are protesting outside Professor Farnsworth’s house. The Professor tells them to get off his property. A hippie says “You can’t own property, man!” The Professor says, “You can’t, because you’re a penniless hippie!” I mean…I’m not offended by it poking fun at communism, but…I see the political conflict there, but it just doesn’t make me laugh. Or the Dr. Zoidberg humor, which in significant part is him acting inappropriately…I dunno. It’s hard to figure out precisely what makes humor work for people — if we did, we could probably produce it a lot more mechanically — but whatever the writing team did just…consistently didn’t tickle it for me.
The Game of Thrones TV series.
I really enjoyed the George R. R. Martin novels that they were based on, but the TV series just didn’t do it for me.
I did enjoy the Lord of the Rings movies, so I know that it’s possible to do film adaptations of fantasy novels that do click with me.
I feel like most people that read ASOIAF beforehand are disappointed with how it turned out. The first season is practically a perfect adaptation of the first book, except Tyrion now spends his time having sex with whores and getting drunk instead of spending his nights in the library reading as much as he can.
And that was the beginning of it going to shit
Boobies equal ratings!
I thought all four seasons were pretty good, though they lean on discovering the plot and lose a lot of rewatchability for it.
Heh, too bad they never continued the series past there :P
Blade Runner
2001: A Space Odyssey
Citizen KaneThese movies are so well regarded and spoken so highly of (ok - maybe not Blade Runner); their champions are so passionate and enthusiastic, every time I hear folks go off on how great they are I get, once again, excited to watch them. But every time I try, I just can’t get into them. 2001 is a particular slog with its ~30 minute intro of no dialogue. It almost inevitably puts me to sleep before even the first word is spoken.
I hate that they’re so well regarded and I really want to enjoy them but I just can’t get into them.
For blade runner the original film is awful. I didn’t get the hype until I watched the directors cut which I personally thought was excellent.
2001 definitely overrated.
I enjoyed Citizen Kane though I completely understand why you wouldn’t like it.
They are worshipped because they were the first in their particular area (neon cyberpunk, Space FX, non-linear storytelling). Each has been improved on by so many other films that the originals pale in comparison.
They are classics, but not timeless.
Citizen Kane is generally considered the origin of the “innovative media that’s considered boring because everyone copied it so now it seems cliche” trope. It was a masterpiece when it came out, but it pioneered so much stuff that became commonplace. When a modern audience looks back at it, you just see the cliches, without realizing that they’re only cliches because they were endlessly repeated afterward.
Citizen Kane
@9point6@lemmy.world has a comment below stating that some of these are examples where a piece of media did something new and innovative that was so compelling that many subsequent pieces of media copied it, and thus whatever it was that the piece of media did failed to impress later audiences. For them, it was just the new normal. So the work was very influential…but maybe no longer stands out.
I’ve often seen Citizen Kane cited as being the poster child for this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_Kane
The film’s narrative structure, cinematography and themes have influenced countless filmmakers and films worldwide, asserting its place as a cornerstone in the history of cinema
Definitely true. I’ve heard the same and it’s another one of the reasons I want to appreciate it.
A other example of this that’s frequently cited and happened in my own life time which makes it easy to see first hand and understand is The Matrix/bullet-time.
Blade Runner is sooo boring. I’ve tried watching it a few times and it just doesn’t click for me.
2001: A Space Odyssey is so insanely boring and pretentious, I’m still glad I watched it though because it’s very influential, you even see it in the Project Hail Mary movie, and it’s satisfying to have context to art but unless you’re really into watching films I wouldn’t suggest it to anyone
2001: A Space Odyssey
I like behind the scenes footage far more than the movie. I can appreciate how it’s made but I absolutely can’t stand to actually watch the resulting movie.
This post made me angry because I’m one of the people that love this 3 movie and go passionate about them.
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Star Trek in general.
TNG was OK when it was on TV, and everything else on TV sucked more.
The fourth movie was actually funny and enjoyable.
But I don’t get the appeal that sparked such a huge fandom.I liked STNG at the time, but I tried watching them again recently and it didn’t age well. I’m not even talking about the special effects or anything, I don’t really care. I’ve gotten used to shorter serialized seasons rather than long episodic seasons.
For clarification: serialized = plot continues through episodes - vs- episodic = each episode is a self-contained plot
My mother is a huge star trek fan from the era where it was biggest. The thing that really did it for her was that it’s one of the few good outcomes in the future. They’re out on space exploring for altruism and the novelty of it, not colonialism, not for the destruction of earth’s enemies, not to find a home became we destroyed ours, almost every other space media uses it as a for-warning of the outcome of the poor choice we currently make. Star trek is the future we want. No money because all needs are met. Alien contact because they believe we have potential to be equals, stuff like that.
The shows actually do a terrible job conveying this and a worse job using the tools at hand, but I honestly don’t know any other media with such a hopefully fiew.
So.
Star Trek was genuinely groundbreaking when it aired. First was that basically no other sci-fi story had a hopeful vision of the future, so it was instantly different. Star trek was a meritocracy, it was post-scarcity, characters where hailed for being competent moral people, instead of morally bankrupt nepo-babies.
Second was that the show treated people like adults, a lot of the storytelling involved significant moral conundrums, and included scenarios with no easy answer.
Finally, the shows sci-fi setting let it tackle ideas that otherwise would be untouchable. Racism was shown to be absurd not by having black people and white people, but you could see a whole planet where people half-white and half-black would oppress (and be horribly racist) towards exactly the same people, but who had the white part on the other side of the body.
Finally, the casting for the show, and the characterization was amazing. Kirk is (imo) a boring character, but the dynamic of Kirk Spock and Scotty made for genuinely interesting interpersonal dialog.
Granted, its been done again and again, and done better (Notably, TNG is better in almost every way IMO), and so the formula got stale, and you cant help but compare Star Trek to the copies, several of whom inevitably did certain parts better.
It’s really easy to rank the Star Trek TV series for me. The earlier it came out, the better.
Project hail marry. Are you for real this unfunny af mediocre movie is well liked? I was incredibly close to walking out of the movie, thankfuly it got less awful after the ships dock
I was also really disappointed by the adaptation, especially compared to the Martian. I’ll see if I can find the comment where I talked about why and I’ll come back and copy paste it.
Edit: here it is:
NOTE: I’ve tried to keep this as spoiler-free as possible, but even so you may not want to read this until after you’ve seen the movie.
The movie was definitely good, but fell pretty short compared to the book, and especially when compared to The Martian’s adaptation.
For one, the movie felt way too much like a comedy, almost like a Taika Waititi Marvel adaptation of the much more serious (but still very funny) book, which felt tonally weird and didn’t really land for me. Even the weight of the reveal of
spoiler
Grace’s refusal to go
was completely undercut by a tonally inappropriate, almost zany
spoiler
chase sequence
that robbed the scene of most of the pathos it should have had. Reminds me of this excellent video about how modern blockbusters seem allergic to sincerity to their detriment.
We also didn’t like how much more useless the movie made Grace feel. The book went out of its way early to show that he was a resourceful, intelligent, excellent problem solver, and while there was certainly a bit of this in the movie, it still felt like Grace was pretty much useless, undeserving dead weight, and like he either completely lucked his way through or had to rely only on
spoiler
Rocky,
while in the book their partnership felt much more collaborative. All of this combined to make the reveal I mentioned earlier feel much darker/more depressing, because you get the impression that no, he really didn’t deserve to be there, and then what he says at the end of the movie completely falls flat, because it felt like almost none of it was the result of his choices or character. Feels like it completely undercuts one of the main themes of the book, which is that he did deserve to be there, and that he was the right person for the job, even if he didn’t think he was.
We also thought the movie omitted some of the book’s best lines. “You can hear light?” is an all-time great line that still gives me shivers, and it definitely should have been in the movie.
Things we liked: 1. The movie was visually stunning - everything it was going for in the looks department it completely nailed. 2. One of the most important characters in the movie was very well done, in both design and characterization. Maybe a bit too manic, but that’s a relatively small quibble in the larger context of just how well they did with him.
So yeah, very much an enjoyable two hours, but not as good as it should have been due to a few flawed adaptation decisions.
Ugh yes the adaptation made me feel meh, as it missed so many key beats that adds weight to learning amount Grace’s journey. Everything else you said was spot on too.
I skipped over most of your comment after the first line; I have the book requested from the library (#400 in line! Fortunately, they have about 150 copies). I’ve enjoyed Weir’s other books (and the Matt Damon in peril adaptation).
Should I take this as a cautionary tale? Is Project Hail Mary a departure from “the good stuff” in Weir’s previous work, or is it more like a case of a poor film adaptation in your book?
The book is excellent - about as good as his previous work in my opinion. It’s definitely a case of the adaptation falling short, so look forward to and enjoy the read!
Thanks! I’m looking forward to it.
I would never put the book as a comedy. Was the movie supposed to be funny?
The movie isn’t funny, having some light hearted scenes doesn’t make a movie a comedy.
It certainly tried, with trash tier “school of Marvel” jokes and timing
Such an interesting premise ruined by fourth-grade humor. I don’t mind having some dry humor moments, but it was the entire freakin’ thing.
The Big Lebowski. It’s not funny or entertaining in the slightest, and is almost physically painful to watch. I am legitimately confused as to how people can actually enjoy this movie.
Inb4 the “well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man” comments.
well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man
Personally, I think the plot of just wanting to achieve a task as little as getting your carpet reimbursed and then running into all these absurd situations as a ‘normal’ dude makes it so appealing. Also the meme-ability helps. If the former is not your thing, we’ll then this movie is not for you then (which is totally okay!)
I hated it the first time I watched it because it felt trite and asinine. I watched it again years later in a different headspace without the same expectations and it clicked for me.
Its a movie that mixes the deeply mundane with the deeply absurd on purpose, and it does it very well. It has a main charector that is boring as hell as a person but also an iconoclast that is immune from consequence, which the movie just amps up and up and up into mania, all while “the dude” just drifts through it. That conflict is where most of the humor lies, alongside just stunning acting from basically everyone in the movie.
The movie just moves from iconic moment to iconic moment between these insane people doing insane things in sometimes day to day ways, mixing up what normalicy is as a whole. Is it paying for half and half at a grocery store with a check you know will bounce in your bathrobe? Is it offering to blow strangers by your pool for 10k? Is it strapping yourself to a harness and screeching at a painting you fling yourself at to add a new layer of paint? Yes, it’s all normal and its all absurd, just like the rest of the human experience.
