High-hyped movies that made you go "Meh"

Cafe Society
#1

So finally I get around to watching Alien, thanks to Netflix. Five stars! Super-duper sci-fi thriller! Must-see movie! And so…

By the time the baby alien explodes into bloody view, I’m so bored I turn it off. Yawn. Tedious, dumb waste of time. I waited through almost half an hour of character development slowly developing characters I didn’t give a shit for, for this? I sat there muttering, “Why are you doing that, you stupid git?” again and again, for this? For a slick little colon with teeth?

I mean, come on! Dumb move after dumb move to get the monster on board: Why the entire crew down to an unknown planet’s deadly surface? Why stick a hand into the egg pod when it shows signs of life, when all indications are something dreadful happened? Why break quarantine to bring aboard a freaking lifeform that’s attacked one crew member already? Why… And on and on and on. “Oh, good grief! :rolleyes:” is not a reaction conducive to the willing suspension of disbelief.

Not to mention, the explorers are wearing bubble helmets. They’re in a toxic stew of unbreathable atmosphere, so they’re sealed tight against it. Monster version 1.0 gloms itself onto the outside of the head bubble. So how did it make it from there inside the helmet onto victim number one’s face?

And then there’s – aw, screw it. Suffice it to say, this movie sure as hell didn’t move me. I haven’t been so disappointed by a sci-fi movie since I stumbled out of Close Encounters ranting about all the stupid stuff in that one. I love a good sci-fi film, don’t get me wrong, but all the groovy special effects in the world won’t make me overlook nonsense.

So! Now that I’ve got that rant off my chest, let me ask you: What uber-hyped movies did you see that disappointed you so thoroughly?

#2

The Simpsons movie got near universal above-average or excellent reviews here and it is a steaming pile of a film.
I found American Beauty to be stylish but empty and soulless.

#3

To be fair, Alien must have been a lot more terrifying when it first came out in 1979. Since then, we’ve seen a lot scarier stuff, and much of it probably owed a lot to Alien as an influence. Personally, I think the more action-oriented sequel, James Cameron’s Aliens from 1986, is a lot more fun, and overall the better movie.

I hated Napoleon Dynamite, and don’t quite get why it became an oft-quoted cult hit. Not funny at all; mostly just awkward, sad, and stupid. I felt the same about the Austin Powers trilogy, but at least the first one was a creative parody of spy movies. The latter two were just unnecessary, pointless, unfunny dreck.

#4

I can speak to this, at least. 70s films are simply slower paced. If you watch almost any classic 70s movie - Taxi Driver, Rocky, etc. - there’s a lot of lull. That’s how they let you get invested in the characters in that era (not saying it always worked!). These days, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence get a cup of coffee together, trade one-liners, and five minutes into the film, it’s time for shit to start blowing up. :slight_smile:

#5

The Matrix and its sequels. Pretentious stupid storyline smashed together with nice special effects. I didn’t even watch the third one, because the first two pissed me off so much.

#6

It’s so funny because it’s awkward, sad and stupid. Just like real life. :wink:

#7

Gladiator. It was on the level of a 1970s made-for-TV movie. All that was missing was Richard Chamberlain in the lead.

#8

That.

And the LotR films. I still haven’t gotten around to watching the third one, despite owning it on DVD.

Aaaand the Pirates of the Caribbean series, to be honest. I’ve never understood their attraction (including from Mr. Johnny Depp). Where’s my Pirates of Dark Water movie?

#9

A lot of the charm of Alien was in it’s atmoshpere: the gothic decaying industrial ship. It’s the last of the atmospheric SF films, at least until Sunshine. It was a movie with a split personality, part moody SF along the lines of Silent Running and 2001, part scary monster flick.

It also helped to see the movie on the big screen. When you’re sitting at home it’s easier to spot the flaws.

#10

2001: A Space Odyssey.

Yuk.

#11

Came in here to mention this too. There are many others, but the hype that surrounded The Matrix is just unbelievable considering how utterly mediocre it is. Bah.

#12

I’ll see you American Beauty and Lord of the Rings and raise you Donnie Darko. Pretentious crap that made no sense and that no one gets but that is still “great”? Blech.

#13

Batman.

The last three Star Wars or is it the first three?

The ones with that idiot Jar-Jar

#14

Was there a lot of hype around the (first) Matrix? One of the reasons I enjoyed it was that I hadn’t really heard anything about it when I first saw it. In fact, I think the only reason I saw it in theaters was that we got to the theater too late to see whatever film we had originally intended.

#15

Well, here in Denmark at least. It probably didn’t open here until a year after the US release, so I might have been late for the surprise. When I was finally persuaded to see it, it seemed that just about everybody here had seen it - and loved it. Magazines had articles on the “clever” plot, books were written explaining all the intellecutal references to cool french philosophers and “exotic” buddhist theology - there were even courses on the film at the university. Suffice to say that I wasn’t impressed.

#16

The android Ash overrode Ripley’s correct refusal to break quarantine, as he had been programmed to do by the Mother Company. Did you watch the film long enought to discover that the whole thing was a set-up and the crew are expendable?

Acid. You watched far enough to see that the alien has incredibly powerful molecular acid for blood, right? It melted right though the helmet onto his face. And 1) we actually see them cutting the helmet in two to removed it from around the face-hugger. 2) Ash, or someone, comments that the face-hugger is feeding him oxygen.

C’mon, it’s a film . You want to take up extra running time and expense showing people remaining behind on the main ship which are only going to get killed later, and with no character build up or sympathy 'cos they’ve had hardly any screen time?? Doesn’t make sense.

He’s an engineer, not a xenobiologist.

#17

I came in to mention this one. I can’t believe it won an Oscar. What a load of pointless crap.

Hey, don’t be dissing Richard Chamberlain! He was in The Thorn Birds and Shogun, two of my favorite miniseries. Take it back!

#18

Thing is, though, that I hardly ever watch action movies, in fact unless you consider LotR a threesome of action movies I haven’t gone to any since, oh, probably since Terminator (the original), so my sense of pacing isn’t affected by that. The '70s were a decade when I did a lot of my movie watching, and I liked a lot of the films I saw then.

Larry, I very much liked Blade Runner, and loved the atmospherics of it, all the way to the brooding dying Rutger Hauer’s replicant at the end. Scary monster flicks don’t do much for me, though. Ha! Maybe that’s it – if I’d gone into Alien for a Blade Runner experience it might not have been so disappointing.

I will concede the point about wide screen versus at home on the small screen. I was blown away by Kurosawa’s Ran when I saw it at the Coolidge Corner on its release. I’ve got the video of it, but it just doesn’t pack the same wallop on the small screen.

#19

When I saw this thread title, I immediately thought of “Bridges of Madison County.” Yeah, Oprah had everyone reading the book (that should have told me something, right there). I actually forced myself to sit through the entire film, in a theater, hoping against hope that an asteroid would annihilate the earth and everything that made this movie possible. How they got Eastwood and Streep to do this piece of shit is beyond me.

#20

I hope I don’t make any enemies for this: A Clockwork Orange.

In fact, a lot of Kubrick’s stuff makes me kind of bored and irritated. The only thing I’ve ever seen by him that has merit is The Shining, and even that gets pretentious and masturbatory at times.

To the OP: While I enjoyed Alien overall, the first several minutes reminded me a lot of a Kubrick film. It didn’t get very interesting to me until the dinner party. I wonder if you’d hung in there, how you would feel about the rest of the film.