# Movie You Looked Forward to Seeing, Then Was Totally Disappointed In? Spoilers Welcome **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [November 10, 2010, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239 "2010-11-10T22:52:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/21 "2010-11-11T02:41:22Z")
The Black Hole. Disney finally made an SF movie suitable for adults to enjoy … no sex, mind you, just not juvenile. The music and visuals of the opening credits were simple yet powerful … sweeping, strong, SO PROMISING … then the rest of the movie happened. Oh, suckitude of suckitudes! Kiddies stuff! BAD kiddies stuff! We’d been hosed by Disney marketing! The shame! The horror! The disappointment! ---
**Author:** ![Biggirl](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biggirl/32/3294_2.png) [@Biggirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biggirl)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/22 "2010-11-11T02:44:55Z")
> [@DrFidelius](#): > > Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The trailer was absolutely awesome, and evoked the exact sensawunda I got from classic pulp science fiction. > > The film didn’t. It had giant robots that shoot lasers from their eyes! This is gonna be the greatest movie EVER! Oh wait. All the lasers missed Gwenyth Paltrow. This is the suckiest movie EVER! ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/23 "2010-11-11T02:51:15Z")
_Star Trek: The Motion Picture_ Let’s set the scene. It’s 1979, so except for the Saturday morning cartoon version, all we’d had for a decade was the occasional rerun on some UHF station with bad reception. Then Paramount brings back Roddenberry, Shatner, Nimoy and the rest of the gang – and they give them the big budget that would finally eliminate the orginal series’ lapses into cheesiness. We sat there for two hours and twelve minutes and experienced the one emotion we had never, ever experienced with the original series. WE WERE BORED!!! There was the Enterprise battling a cloud. Not even a cool, hemoglobin-sucking cloud like in the original series, but an intellectual cloud. There were attractive female crewmembers in drab, unsexy uniforms. Kirk, Spock and McCoy interacted as if they’d all been filmed separately and then edited into their scenes. And at the end, [Rev. Camden from _Seventh Heaven_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Collins) ends up merging with the cloud and walking off into the sunset. And thus began the curse of the odd-numbered \*Star Trek \*movies. ---
**Author:** ![pope\_hentai](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ee59a6/32.png) [@pope\_hentai](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pope_hentai)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 2:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/24 "2010-11-11T02:57:30Z")
1. my friends all hyped it up on how violent and over the top it was. upon watching it ands seeing the lack of graphic violence… (like 6 lost limbs, and only 3 decapitations) i was horribly dissapointed. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 2:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/25 "2010-11-11T02:59:02Z")
> [@kunilou](#): > > And thus began the curse of the odd-numbered \*Star Trek \*movies. But to be fair, 3 was good. It just wasn’t as good as the the even-numbered movies. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 3:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/26 "2010-11-11T03:07:20Z")
Who watches the _Watchmen_? Week #2-nobody. Talk about a major crash and burn of expectations. ---
**Author:** ![Electric\_Warrior](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ee7513/32.png) [@Electric\_Warrior](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Electric_Warrior)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/27 "2010-11-11T03:36:40Z")
_V for Vendetta_. I guess it’s my own fault for having never read the comic, but my friends were hyping it up as some sort of really intellectual, complex plot that explored the dynamics between an anarchist and the totalitarian society he lived in. Instead what I got was a grossly oversimplified mock-up of _1984_ with black-and-white good vs. evil conflict, obnoxious ‘witty’ dialogue, and gratuitous violence. I didn’t last more than about 25 minutes into it. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 3:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/28 "2010-11-11T03:56:01Z")
For me, it was **2001: A Space Odyssey**. I saw it the first month it came out, on a special trip into New York City while it was only in one theater (things were different in those days). It was science fiction! It was by the director of **Dr. Strangelove**! Arthur C. Clarke was involved! I’d seen clips that looked damn good. The film wasn’t. The pace was slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooower than Heinz Ketchup. The first sequence (the apes) was silly, but short. The next sequence (in the space station) was info dump. The trip to Jupiter was still dull, but the subplot about Hal was at least entertaining. Hooray – an hour into the film and we actually see a story. But the final sequence was just a ridiculous psychedelic light show, sound and fury, but signifying nothing. I tried to tell my brother that it was some sort of philosophical meaning, but I soon realized there was nothing there – just some fancy colored lights. As time went by, I began to see it was the seed of a multitude of sins – movies that gave nothing but flash and cool special effects but no story or characters or anything worth seeing. I eventually saw it again and, with lower expectations, decided it was OK but nothing more. I also was disappointed in **Alien**. I expected a scary movie, not the Three Stooges in Space. **Tron** was also a big disappointment. All the talk about computer animated effects and they made up about five minutes of the entire film. But the characters were dull, the story cliched and dull – and with a deus ex machina showing up every few minutes. Feh. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 3:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/29 "2010-11-11T03:59:31Z")
_Even Cowgirls Get the Blues_. Tom Robbins writes some crazy-wonderful novels, but they don’t translate to the screen well at all. Well, that one didn’t, anyway. I don’t know if anybody’s ever going to try to do another one. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/30 "2010-11-11T04:06:27Z")
> [@kunilou](#): > > _Star Trek: The Motion Picture_… Absolutely! This is one over very very few movies I stood in line for (for _4 fucking hours_) to see on opening night. What a downer – as disappointing as the 1980 presidential election! I’m going to throw in Tim Burton’s remake of _Planet of the Apes_. There were scenes that were jaw droppingly bad. ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 4:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/31 "2010-11-11T04:25:35Z")
> [@Quimby](#): > > Is The Phantom Menace just assumed to be the winner of this thread so no one mentioned it? No other film made me disappointed in not only the film itself, but the films that preceded it decades before. It took a dump on my childhood memories and made me look back at my school-age fantasies with a cynical, jaundiced eye. It’s in a class of its own, that’s for sure. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 4:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/32 "2010-11-11T04:29:39Z")
Probably no one else will say this one – **The Phantom of the Opera** , a re-release of the 1925 silent film with a new score by Rick Wakeman. I’m a big Wakeman fan. What’s more, at the time there hadn’t been a decent release of the silent film with a score at all appropriate. I’d been gathering tracks to use as background music for the film, and one of the works I planned to use was “Judas Iscariot” from _Rick Wakeman’s Criminal Record_. It _sounds_ like the work of a psychotic organist. Much more so than anything from Andrew Lloyd webber’s score. So when I saw that Wakeman was doing the score for the entire film, I was hyped. I went to see it at the local arts cinema. Good opening, with Christopher Lee in the actual Paris Opera House. Then the film started… …And the score was _terrible_. I KNOW that Wakeman can score a film – I have his other soundtracks. But this one was absolutely hopeless. The one time I felt really let down by a film. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 4:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/33 "2010-11-11T04:32:59Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > … The one time I felt really let down by a film. You have only been really let down by a film _once_? Have you seen more than two films? 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/34 "2010-11-11T04:36:38Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Probably no one else will say this one – > > **The Phantom of the Opera** , a re-release of the 1925 silent film with a new score by Rick Wakeman. Every Halloween, the local university would have a screening with accompanyment by a _live_ pipe organist. Some years it was awesome, some years it would drag. I was never _totally_ disappointed, but it was a bit of a crapshoot. ---
**Author:** ![Don\_Draper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b2d939/32.png) [@Don\_Draper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Don_Draper)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/35 "2010-11-11T04:49:21Z")
**the Simpsons Movie** - I knew that it was coming out at least a decade after the show’s moment had passed, but I still soooooo badly wanted to love this movie. Not the worst I’ve ever seen, but just a two-hour long episode from one of the more humdrum late-run seasons. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/36 "2010-11-11T04:51:49Z")
_On the Waterfront_ and _The Sting_. They’re classics so I expected them to live up to their reputations. But when I finally watched them I was not impressed. ---
**Author:** ![FriarTed](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/friarted/32/1052_2.png) [@FriarTed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FriarTed)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/37 "2010-11-11T05:19:31Z")
Hanging Up- Walter Matthau’s last film, starring Diane Keaton, Meg Ryan, Lisa Kudrow- this had got to be great! The Avengers- Ralph Fiennes & Uma Thurman as John Steed & Emma Peel? Perfect! Sean Connery as the weather-controlling Super-Villian with the wonderful name of August DeWinter? Awesome! How can this go wrong?!? ---
**Author:** ![Cumberdale](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8c91f0/32.png) [@Cumberdale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cumberdale)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 5:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/38 "2010-11-11T05:25:45Z")
**Office Space** I’ve heard many talk about how great it was, and to be honest it did sound like something I would love. I wanted to like it but just found it unfunny. ---
**Author:** ![AClockworkMelon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aclockworkmelon/32/10803_2.png) [@AClockworkMelon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AClockworkMelon)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 5:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/39 "2010-11-11T05:40:16Z")
_The Phantom Menace_ _The Matrix_ sequels _Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the [del]Monkey King[/del] Crystal Skull_ My top picks have already been mentioned. ---
**Author:** ![gone2thedogs](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c67d28/32.png) [@gone2thedogs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gone2thedogs)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239/40 "2010-11-11T05:47:46Z")
The Sixth Sense - really looking forward to it. Figured it out less than half way through the movie. What a rip off that movie was… [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-you-looked-forward-to-seeing-then-was-totally-disappointed-in-spoilers-welcome/560239.md?page=3)