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 really didn't see as many movies as I normally do and that's never all that many anyway. Best: Avengers I'm such a Whedonite and had high expectations to boot. Still just loved it. Good: The Phantom Menace 3D That made it 22 times in the theater. The Hunger Games: I'd only beforehand read the books and loved them Yes, the third as well. Movie was very nicely done. Men in Black: Brought back a nice snap after the very lame sequel. John Carter: Tried reading the book and felt it.. lackluster. Only saw the movie a couple months ago and very much enjoyed. It was quite enjoyable Spider-Man: Loved it. Superior to all before it, but then I loved that it felt so much more like Ultimate Spider-Man. Disappointing: Prometheus: Perhaps I should give it another go to appreciate it more. Just expected more somehow... maybe hoped for more? Haven't seen the rest, though I still mean to. Since it's scifi/fantasy I'm going to tack on horror and add Cabin in the Woods as the best of all of them for 2012.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My ranking of the 44 films of 2012 I saw in theaters, genre titles in italics: (keep in mind I always rank things not based on actual quality but rather the core question of "What would I rather watch?" Thus something like Ted or The Avengers will rank higher than Lincoln or Argo, etc) The Very Good: Marvel's The Avengers 3D x1, 2D x4 (Raiders of the Lost Ark IMAX) Cabin in the Woods Dredd The Dark Knight Rises x2 (Titanic 3D) Prometheus Skyfall 007 Looper Ted Lincoln The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 3D HFR x2 The Good: The Expendables 2 Argo Cloud Atlas The Amazing Spider-Man 3D x1, 2D x1 Django Unchained The Grey The Bourne Legacy Chronicle Brave Wreck-It-Ralph The Avergage: Jack Reacher Total Recall 21 Jump Street Underworld Awakening 3D (Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace 3D) Men in Black 3 3D Safe The Hunger Games The OK-To-Dissapointing: John Carter Paranormal Activity 4 Woman in Black Taken 2 Savages Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter Wrath of the Titans 3D Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance 3D Les Miserables Red Tails The Terrible: Snow White and the Huntsmen Resident Evil: Retribution 3D Battleship Lockout
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.
The response from people who bothered to see it was very favorable. I only acknowledge such a statistic because I also hope vid sales result in getting Judge Death.
I go almost once a week (on average- obviously some weeks don't have new releases I'm interested in while others have several). I saw more films last year than whats on that list, but many were late 2011 prestige films like Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, etc. I also generally don't rent/stream movies*, and I find the theater on opening weekend evenings to be the optimal viewing experience (the most crowded, more involved audience, fewer kids, newer trailers/best trailer arrangements, best screens being used, etc), so that's further motivation to catch stuff I'm interested in in such a manner while I can. *Although I eventually do intend to subscribe to Netflix in a couple years to pair with the list of missed films over the decades I've been amassing in my Retrospective thread. But I'll probably be marathoning through a lot of those.
