Movies that wasted their premise by making the charecters into idiots

Cafe Society
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Maybe I am just bad at picking movies tonight, but is it so much to ask to watch one movie where the main characters are not too stupid to live? I don’t ask much. I enjoy action movies as much as the next guy, but is it so much to ask that people act like a normal person would in certain circumstances? Shoot, I can suspend disbelief pretty far, but throw me a bone here. Dear writers, don’t portray your characters as reasonable or protagonists for a good chunk of the introduction if really you are just making shit up as you go along.

I started to watch 28 Weeks Later. There’s a predictable zombie outbreak. But surely the military, having quarantined an entire island with the highest security needed from any virus ever has multiple checkpoints to prevent any sort of contagion from crossing multiple checkpoints. Nope, it’s wide open from day one.

So I give up on that about halfway through, as my blood pressure can’t take the pure stupidity of the military in it. So I switch to Starship Troopers, which from my reading of the book, informs me it should be great about small squad tactics in a sci-fi war. Nope, we are going to have mobs of infantry invade a resource less planet in a ground war with useless small arms fire and no squad tactics against a melee-heavy enemy in their own territory. Predictably, it goes terribly. After yelling at my TV for awhile, I give up on this one as well.

One more shot at an action movie tonight I say. I settle on X-Men Last Stand, a movie I’ve waited several years to see on the premise it as the Juggernaut in it, played by one of my favorite actors from Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. Made it about 3/4 of the way through, until I realized the X-Men are fighting against the fella who is actively trying to stop the government from exterminating them, as proven by them weaponizing a serum that makes mutants stop being mutants.

I mean seriously, these are all clearly not based in reality movies. But what is so god damn hard about writing a reasonable scenario based on the above premises? I can’t be the only one who gets angry at really interesting setups that get squandered by the pure intentional written stupidity of the main characters.

It’s been a bad night at picking movies. Anyone else got any good examples that angered them to no end about wasting their good setup worlds with characters who were too stupid to live?

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I already know the irony that will be pointed out here. Feel free to rip on me regardless.

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The Star Wars prequel trilogy…

Or The Empire Strikes Back, where Yoda lies his green little ass off…

Unforgiven was a damn great movie, but, holy hannah, everyone in it was dumb as corks. A real-world crisis negotiator could probably have solved that whole movie, addressing every problem and arranging a peaceful outcome. Instead, everybody gets shot…

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The Alien prequel Prometheus springs to mind. We had a 13 page thread about it back when it was in theaters and I said my part then, but here’s the short version:

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I was just reminded of a comment a friend of mine made about the 4th Harry Potter movie, Goblet of Fire. Harry spends the first three movies being told by every single adult he meets, “You’re a kid, you’re not trained yet. You’re not ready to handle things like this, so let us know if you need any help.” He ignores all of this and nearly dies over and over, when he could have gone to wiser heads for help.

In the 4th movie, he realizes, “Hey, I’m just a kid. I’m not trained yet. I’m not ready to handle something like this…” so he goes to the adults for help and… they blow him off completely and make him compete in this lethal tournament for no damn reason.

I’m also reminded of a Cracked solution for a lot of Harry’s problems: He’s reading a book titled “He who most certainly had a name: Tom Riddle, the story of the most evil wizard who ever lived.”

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It’s not a movie but it stems from a pretty terrible one: I remember shouting “Quarantine! Why didn’t you establish a fucking quarantine” at my TV screen while I was watching the Stargate show. They were afraid some horrid disease had escaped into the research facility. But they never once quarantined the people who came out, and they had NO precautions - they were just allowed to mix into the general public of about 400 or so people.

Oh, yes, Harry Potter pissed me off too. What is the point of hiding anything from a moody teenager who you know has had and will have horrible things happen to him? Instead you should have been completely honest with him from day one. He may not be old enough to handle the bad things happening to him, but they are happening, so you don’t shield him, you help him through it!

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I always thought this was the difference between the first two Die Hard movies. In the first, McClain is the lone wolf hero because he’s trapped in a building with the bad guys. In the second he’s the lone wolf hero because all the other good guys are idiots.

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“This is your father’s light sabre. He killed 30 children with it.”

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“This is your father’s lightsabre. Your father had promise of being a good man, a great man, but he had many heartbreaks in his life and it broke him, too, making him fall to the Dark Side. This is at least partly my fault and the Jedi’s fault, but I believe you have good in you and I have faith in you. I will try to help you in any way I can.”

It is exactly like not telling teenagers sex education and hoping that they will never, ever engage in sex, rather than giving them any tools or prep to deal with what is almost inevitable.

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Not a movie but “Lost”…how long did it take for you guys to decide to walk around the island? You’re ignorant of all the ‘supernatural’ trappings so there quite easily could be a resort on the other side.

“Walking Dead”?? Don’t get me started. Sure. Of course the logical leap from zombie apocalypse is cannibalism! Sure!!! It should be The Stand with noisy shamblers who should cant climb a fucking ladder…but nahhh.Lets start eating people.

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People who know me on this board know what movie I’d mention – a particular movie that only works because not only everyone involved is an utter moron, but everyone in the entire society is too stupid to live.

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…and then I hacked his arm off. That’s why I can hand you this sabre now, because I took it from him after I hacked his arm off. He’s still alive, you understand; I just thought you should grow up without a dad, just like I thought he should stop having an arm."

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But unfortunately he was played by two incompetent and non talented actors who couldn’t impart that slow, slippage into utmost evil.

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I seem to recall yelling at the screen while watching Silence of the Lambs. Jodie Foster is supposed to be some kind of super special agent, who does every thing exactly right. That is, right up till the end of the movie, where she seems to forget any training she may have had and runs around like an idiot.

Stupid, stupid movie.

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The Invention of Lying didn’t understand what a lie actually was and squandered a great premise to some limp drivel.

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The other week’s Doctor Who had an awful one. For non-fans, there’s an elite military intelligence outfit called UNIT, who are tasked with dealing with alien incursions: they’re frequently out-weaponed, but have always been shown as tough, resourceful, and well-led. That is, until they were faced with shape-shifting aliens able to take human form, and whom they knew had these abilities. They were specifically briefed on it for this mission. Seriously, they have a forty year history of fighting these shape-shifters. The scene went something like this:

{heavily armed UNIT squad surrounds alien headquarters on the far side of the world} - OK, disgusting alien weirdoes, come out with your pseudopods in the air!

{sweet old lady emerges} - Hi, Johnny, I’m your Mum! You wouldn’t shoot your Mum, would you?

{squad leader baffled} - Why would my Mum be in an shape-shifting alien compound on the far side of the world?

{sweet old lady} - Oh, they were holding us prisoner. Or something.

{squad leader} You’re not, a, uh, filthy shape-shifter pretending to be my dear old Mum, are you?

{sweet old lady} Perish the thought!

{squad leader} - Uh, OK, tell me something only I would know, like the name of my dog when I was a kid.

{sweet old lady} - Well, I can’t recall offhand, but if you and your men lay down your guns and walk into this obvious trap, all will be explained.

{squad leader} Sounds good to me! Let’s go, lads! {walks into compound}

:: sound of screams as squad are massacred to a man, sound of TV remotes being thrown at screen by disgruntled fans ::

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I don’t remember whether this was explained in the movie, but in the book at least it’s stated that once a name is selected for the tournament that person is magically bound to participate. IIRC even the book didn’t get into the details of this, but there were presumably dire consequences if Harry refused to compete.

This is admittedly not a dramatically satisfying reason, not just because it’s literally “A wizard did it”, but because Harry didn’t throw his name into the ring in the first place. It seems obviously unjust that he was compelled to honor what was essentially a contract he’d never signed. But within the context of the story, the problem here is stupid rules and not stupid characters. Dumbledore was powerless to get Harry out of the tournament.

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The movie Alien Nation has to be the poster-child for films with wasted premises. The idea behind it is one of the most unique and interesting ideas in science fiction: a large population of aliens are marooned on planet Earth and attempt to assimilate into Earth (well, North American) society, but face the same type of xenophobic, racist, outcast treatment every new ethnic group faces as they attempt to blend in.

But after about five minutes of establishing that premise, the movie becomes a run-of-the-mill, cliché, 80s buddy cop movie, complete with cornball jokes like naming a character “Sam Francisco” and a predictable drug-smuggling plotline.

I’ve heard the TV series that spun off from it was more interesting, but I’ve never seen it.

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“If we ignore it, maybe it will go away.”

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I’d second Prometheus. What a lot of goodwill (and studio millions!) that turkey wasted.

Reluctantly, because I’m a big fan of both Inception and Memento, I’d have to nominate Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar as a premise-waster-due-to-character-idiocy.

The great virtue of the former two movies is that they were, clearly, meticulously planned. In my view these plot-heavy films are remarkably free of contrivances and plot holes. Interstellar, by contrast, seems to have been made from a screenplay dashed off over a weekend. It’s beautiful to look at…but so much of what happens, happens only because the characters are dim-witted and/or fail to take basic precautions and/or don’t see the grindingly obvious ‘until it’s too late.’