Amph Best/Worst Sci Fi Movies 2012

Everyone should see Chronicle. I'm kind of surprised at the lack of enthusiasm for it....I really enjoyed it. Also it has Wallace from The Wire!

 

I can tell you what I loved about Chronicle. For a movie about superpowers, it offers a pretty realistic appraisal of the effect of continual domestic trauma on a person's psyche. There's no silly comic book explanation for why someone does bad things. The main character can't handle the responsibility of his powers for the same reason he's a loner at school: his personality has been too scarred by all the trauma in his home life. This isn't some cliche, and bad acts are almost never presented in movies this way, but this is how things play out for kids in real life. Abusive situations at home traumatize children over and over again, leading to unhealable mental scarring that makes people ineffective at dealing with their own lives. It's not that the main character evolves into a villain; he simply doesn't have any healthy life skills for dealing with his own destiny. Bleak but realistic, another facet of the movie like the found footage gimmick that helps anchor the characters and the world against the absurdity of suddenly acquired superpowers.

 

I liked The Avengers (though the plot was incredibly thin, just seeing some of my favourite characters on screen together made up for it, I can see how it wouldn't for D_G) and thought Looper was excellent.

Lockout was mentally damaging but a good way to send me to sleep on my international flight.

I haven't seen any of the others.

 

It didn't for me 'cause I'm not a big Marvel (or comics in general) fan. I liked Iron Man only because he's played by RDJ playing RDJ. Thor was okay, but all I have to go by is his film and it was so-so at best. Captain America is less charismatic and probably had the weakest of the financially successful films. I dug up my review of the movie just to remind me of what I didn't like.

 

My God, suddenly Prometheus is awesome!

 

I really liked Hunger Games, and I loved Avengers. I think the superheroes are much more fun together than they are separately (not sure how much of that is Wheaton).

 

I just can't get get behind MiB 3 < Avengers. I've been trying to figure that one out for a couple days, and it just doesn't work for me.

 

Whedon. Wheaton had nothing to do with it.

 

MIB 3 is a strange one because the first 20 minutes or so is nearly unwatchable garbage, but once Josh Brolin appears the film really takes off. Still nowhere near as good as the original.

 

Eh, it's still not very good after that. MiB 3 is probably better than MiB 2, but no where near as good as the original.

 

I expected MIB 3 to be a lot worse, so I was happy with how it turned out. But yeah it's not as good as the first movie.

 

The movies that really bother me are not the ones that outright suck - the Birdemics of the world - but the ones that had flashes of brilliance and were just so very maddeningly close to being really good movies. To me, Cloud Atlas was a glaring example of exactly that sort of movie. It showed great potential, and had great moments, but it just never managed to equal the sum of its parts.

Prometheus is polarizing, and for understandable reasons. I'm in the pro-Prometheus camp.

John Carter was a pretty good movie. The problem with it was that it was too ambitious and expensive. You could have made a version of it that would have been just as good on a third of the budget, and it would have been a financial success.

 

Too much Big Bang Theory lately

 

WHEATON!!!!!!!

 

I'm going to go with Healer_Leona when I rank this and include Cabin in the Woods as I think the movie can be justified as such... but this would be my best to worst for sci-fi this year.

Best:
Cabin in the Woods - I did not expect to enjoy this movie, but I started having so many people say I should see it that I checked it out, and was very glad I did.

Good:
The Avengers - Very fun, very enjoyable, nad very interesting, I thought
John Carter - Movie was done a terrible disservice, I avoided it and the trailers until I'd had a friend explaining to me what the story is based on and gave it a shot, while a lot of it seems familiar, that comes from the story being where so many tropes came from in the first place

Neutral/disappointing:
Hunger Games - There's no way they can make a decent sequel of this because they've gutted the book. It just simply didn't seem to work without having the internal monologue element. It ended up very bland
Amazing Spiderman - Nothing standout

Bad:
Chronicle - Awkward and uninteresting, generally.
Prometheus - There are so many problems I have with this movie that I'm just going to leave it at that.

 

I think Dredd and John Carter were fantastic. Calling Dredd a remake is just a daft insult... I actually found JC one of the best films of the year - the way it dealt with the (human) romance story was beautiful.

I really liked Prometheus, too. It has a few classic horror film moments with supposedly intelligent characters suffering plot-dependant moments of stupidity, but you don't need to remove your brain to enjoy the whole film. It's not trying to be Hard SF.

I found some of the 3d in TPM a bit distracting, but not in a sickening overuse of depth kind of way. At times the 3d accentuated some of the problems TPM has with the framing of shots and the artificial placement of actors, etc.

 

I'm reading Dredd grossed under 40 million world wide at the box office. It cost 45 mil to make. I'm hoping it makes enough otherwise to spawn a sequel.

 

This probably doesn't count but i am choosing End of Watch as the worst movie for 2012

 

Wow, Quest, you saw a lot of movies!