James Cameron’s Avatar series.

Then again… Does anyone actually like it? It seems to have all this online hype when it’s such a boring visual spectacle.

It’s like the opposite of the other Avatar franchise, which wasn’t a commercial hit, and seems less popular on paper, but seems to have a massive cultural impact.

Lord of the Rings.

I understand and respect the seminal role LotR (Book) has as a fantasy work. I have to, as a fantasy nerd myself.

I also believe that those three movies that everyone loves could be edited down into one and not much would be lost.

God DAMN do those films drag ON and ON and ON.

The books, too, drag on like Tolkien was being paid by the individual word. Thankfully with books I can set the pace at which things go.

Oh I have another one. Thor Ragnarok. People loved it because they liked the Thor character and found his earlier films too dull or something, but I loved that they were unapologetically serious about themselves, using comedy in ways that felt very authentic to the characters.

But Ragnarok? It came out later the same year as this excellent essay about bathos, and it was dripping in it. I was hyper tuned to the problem with bathos, and it leaned even harder into that took than nearly any other MCU film did.

What sucks so much is that it had the bones of a really good dramatic story. The Bruce Banner/Hulk storyline had built up over multiple previous films, and come the climax of this film it’s established that he’s in Bruce form now and has enough control to stay that way, but if he transforms into Hulk it’ll be a big deal and he may never be able to be himself again. So they arrive in Asgard at the climax of the film and it’s pretty urgent. In a dramatic moment you can see him steel himself to make the sacrifice; he jumps out of their aircraft onto the rainbow bridge, clearly intending to transform into Hulk to fight Fenris.

…and he splats. Faceplants on the bridge. Still in human form. It’s played for laughs. The ultimate conclusion of Hulk’s story in this movie and probably the most important moment of his arc over the entire MCU to this point, and it’s undercut by a joke. Not even a very funny one. A slapstick joke that would make Charlie Chaplin cringe.

And it means nothing, because the very next shit, he’s transformed anyway and throwing Fenris around like a doll.

Not to mention it undermines the verisimilitude of the movie. I can suspend my disbelief in these movies pretty hard, but Bruce Banner, in human form, is meant to be painfully average, physically speaking. He should have died from that fall, given he didn’t transform. That’s certainly not the worst thing about the moment, but it is was the sprinkling of salt on top of the wound that just made it that little bit worse.

That moment was the worst bit, but the film as a whole was full of lazy humour and bathos, and it was really just the worst example of what was wrong with a lot of MCU movies at the time. I was shocked to hear so few people came away disliking it in the same way I did.

Donnie Darko.

It was so overhyped back when it came out because the OG hipster crowd of the early 90s thought it was cool, as did younger people who valued things that were “indie” as if that inherently adds value.

Tolkein.

I tried watching the new tolkein Rohirrim movie. There were clues I would hate it already, but they started with one of those ‘tolkein songs’ like by elves or whatever ~one of the ones where he’s like modeling the dialect on some euro language and being a nerd with glasses in the library holding up a schematic of what he just made and being like, “it’s music”. So it started with that and I was done. did not get past opening song.