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!
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!
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 ends up merging with the cloud and walking off into the sunset.
And thus began the curse of the odd-numbered *Star Trek *movies.
- 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.
But to be fair, 3 was good. It just wasn’t as good as the the even-numbered movies.
Who watches the Watchmen?
Week #2-nobody. Talk about a major crash and burn of expectations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You have only been really let down by a film once? Have you seen more than two films? 
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.
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.
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.
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?!?
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.
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.
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…