Part 7 – The Flawed
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Flawed |
Part 8: The Failures
This tier is full of films with one idea they decline to use. Leviathan builds a creature wearing the faces of the dead and asks nothing about it, Fortress invents a punishment device that replaces an entire prison staff and then abandons it for corridors, and New Rose Hotel spends its last act replaying its first.
The other pattern is an ending that undoes the argument. Minority Report shows that its system works and then blames one official, the Matrix sequels replace a mystery with a specification, and I Am Legend swaps the reversal its own title depends on for a sacrifice.
Flawed is the right word, and it’s the word that frustrates me most. Almost every film on this page had a better film inside it and flinched. A movie that aims low and hits is easy to forgive. Watching somebody build a great idea and then walk past it is harder, and this tier does that over and over. A few of these carry big reputations, and I’ll say where I think the reputation outruns the picture.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the seventh of eight parts.
Logan’s Run builds a ceremony people walk into willingly and Fortress replaces a prison staff with one swallowed device. Build the system in the World Builder’s Handbook.
1. Gattaca (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of Gattaca (1997)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"He never saved anything for the swim back."
Andrew Niccol wrote and directed his first feature on around thirty-six million dollars and it took under thirteen. The title comes from the four DNA bases, the Marin County Civic Center stands in for the facility, and the film has been used in genetics teaching for nearly thirty years.
The design is the strongest element and it’s deliberately retro. Everybody wears mid-century tailoring, the cars are electric conversions of sixties bodies, and the future is presented as clean, formal and orderly instead of as anything visibly advanced or unfamiliar. Ethan Hawke plays Vincent.
The premise is a genetic caste system with no laws enforcing it. Discrimination is illegal and universal, employers test saliva from a handshake, and the film is precise that nobody needs a policy when the information is available and everybody acts on it anyway.
The swimming contests are the whole argument compressed. Two brothers race out to sea, the loser is whoever turns back first, and Vincent wins because he never saved anything for the swim back, and he explains in a single line at the end. Jude Law plays Jerome.
The film is slower than its reputation suggests and that’s the main criticism. The investigation plot is thin, the romance is underwritten, and the picture is considerably better as an argument and a design exercise than as a story with any momentum in it.
I want to like Gattaca more than I do. The swimming line at the end is perfect, and the handshake saliva test is the sharpest bit of worldbuilding in the tier.
But the investigation plot bores me and the romance barely registers. It’s an argument I agree with wrapped in a story I can’t make myself care much about.
2. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) [full review]
► Read the full review of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.7/10
"Levels in sequence. That is a game’s logic, not a film’s."
Simon West made the film that turned Angelina Jolie into a global star, on around eighty million dollars, and it took over two hundred and seventy. Jolie trained for months, did most of her own stunts, and her father appears as the dead father in the flashback material.
The action is well staged and mostly practical. The bungee ballet in the atrium, the Cambodian temple sequence and the raid on the manor are choreographed clearly, shot with legible geography, and executed with wire work instead of with digital substitution. Jon Voight plays her father.
The Illuminati plot is where the film loses interest in itself. A secret society, a planetary alignment, two halves of a triangle and a fixed deadline, and none of it generates a single decision the protagonist has to think about before acting on it. Daniel Craig plays Alex West. Jolie plays Lara as amused by everything, the correct choice for the material. She’s wealthy, bored, competent and uninterested in being explained to anybody, and the performance is the reason people remember the film and forget the plot. Peter Menzies Jr. shot it. The video game adaptation problem is visible throughout. Levels arrive in sequence, obstacles are solved with timed mechanisms, and the structure follows a game’s logic of discrete challenges instead of a film’s logic of escalating pressure on a person. Graeme Revell scored it. Iain Glen plays Powell.
3. Minority Report (2002) [full review]
► Read the full review of Minority Report (2002)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"It works, and the film blames one man anyway."
Spielberg convened a think tank of futurists for three days to design the world, and the gesture interface, the personalized advertising and the autonomous vehicles all came out of that process. It cost around one hundred and two million dollars and took over three hundred and fifty.
The bleach bypass photography is the visual signature and Janusz Kaminski pushed it further than anybody had in a studio film. Highlights blow out, skin tones go cold, and the whole picture has a washed silver quality that dates it exactly to its own moment. It’s an interesting premise, and the film argues with itself about it. Precrime works, the murder rate is zero, and the objection isn’t that it fails but that a system punishing people for a future they haven’t yet chosen removes the choice it claims to be protecting. The eye replacement sequence is the most uncomfortable thing Spielberg has filmed. A back street surgeon, a bath, an infection risk, and the spider drones searching an apartment building room by room while Anderton lies in iced water trying not to breathe. Colin Farrell plays Witwer.
The ending undermines the argument and the film would be stronger without the last ten minutes. Precrime is dismantled, the prisoners are released, and a picture that spent two hours showing that the system worked resolves it with a conspiracy by one individual instead. Samantha Morton plays Agatha.
The eye surgery scene has a nerve Spielberg rarely shows, and it disturbs me. That ending sinks the film to a 6 for me. It builds a serious argument for two hours and then hands the blame to one bad man, and that’s a cheat I can’t forgive.
4. I Am Legend (2007) [full review]
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RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"The book ends on him being the monster. The film does not."
Francis Lawrence adapted Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel and produced the most expensive of four attempts at it. Will Smith carries close to an hour alone with a dog, the empty Manhattan work is impressive, and the film cost around one hundred and fifty million dollars. The first half is the best material and almost nothing happens in it. Neville’s routine, the mannequins he’s arranged and speaks to, the video store conversations, and a man maintaining a schedule that exists entirely to stop him noticing how long he’s been alone.
Sam is the film’s real subject and the sequence with the dog is the most affecting thing Smith has done. The infection, the decision and the grip on the collar are staged without music, at length, and the picture never returns to that tone afterward at any point.
The Darkseekers are the failure and the digital work has aged badly. The filmmakers built them as computer-generated figures after they abandoned practical makeup tests, they move in a way nothing physical could, and the film loses the credibility the empty city had established. Alice Braga appears late in the film.
The title means the opposite of what the film delivers. Matheson’s novel ends with Neville realizing he’s the monster in the new society’s mythology, and the theatrical version replaces that with a sacrifice and a cure while an alternate ending closer to the book exists on the disc.
I find the dog scene devastating, and the first hour is some of the best lonely-man filmmaking I know. Then the Darkseekers show up looking like a video game and the film deflates. The changed ending is the worst part. You can’t call a film I Am Legend and then throw away the one idea that gives the title its meaning.
Minority Report blames one man for a structural problem and the Matrix sequels replace a mystery with a specification. Structure the argument in the Plot Handbook.
5. Tenet (2020) [full review]
► Read the full review of Tenet (2020)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"He is called the Protagonist. That is all he is."
Nolan bought a real 747 to crash because it cost less than building the model, and then made a film considerably harder to follow than the stunt required. Warner Bros. spent around two hundred million dollars and released it into cinemas during a pandemic with predictable results.
The inversion premise is original and the staging of it is superb. Objects and people can be reversed through entropy, forward and backward participants occupy the same space, and the film choreographs the Oslo airport and Tallinn motorway sequences in both directions at once. John David Washington plays the lead.
The sound mix is the criticism everybody raised and Nolan has defended it repeatedly. The mix buries dialogue under Ludwig Goransson’s score and under ambient noise, characters deliver exposition through masks and radio, and a plot this dense becomes close to unfollowable in a cinema. Elizabeth Debicki plays Kat.
The characters are functions instead of people and the film is open about it. The lead is called the Protagonist, he has no history, no private life and no relationships outside the mission, and Robert Pattinson’s Neil is the only figure given anything resembling an interior. Kenneth Branagh’s Sator is the weakest element and the film needs him to work. A dying oligarch who intends to take the world with him, played at full volume, and the domestic abuse material occupies a great deal of a film that’s no room for it.
6. WandaVision (2021) [full review]
► Read the full review of WandaVision (2021)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"Three episodes of invention, then two beams in the sky."
Jac Schaeffer created the first Marvel streaming series and the first three episodes are inventive television. Each recreates a different sitcom decade completely, shot on period equipment in the correct aspect ratio, with a studio audience present for the earliest of them. Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany lead.
The sitcom pastiche is the whole idea and it’s executed with real precision. The fifties episode is shot on a soundstage in black and white, the seventies episode uses the correct lenses and zooms, and the credit sequences are written and performed as real period themes.
The grief premise underneath is the strongest thing Marvel has attempted. Wanda has constructed a town-sized fantasy around a dead partner, the whole population is being held inside it, and the series is honest that what she’s doing to those people is unforgivable. Kathryn Hahn plays Agatha. The middle episodes lose the form and the series never recovers it. The investigation outside the anomaly is conventional in every respect, the agency material is procedural, and every minute spent there’s a minute away from the thing that made the show distinctive. Teyonah Parris plays Monica.
The finale is two energy beams in the sky, where almost every one of these series ends up. A formally adventurous show about mourning resolves into a conventional superhero confrontation, and the one line that works is delivered quietly in a kitchen instead. Disney released it in early 2021.
Those first three episodes delight me, and the grief underneath them is real. Then the show loses its nerve. Two energy beams in the sky is a lousy way to end a series about mourning, and the quiet kitchen line proves somebody in the room knew where the heart of it was.
7. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) [full review]
► Read the full review of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"HAL is the only character who wants anything."
Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke developed the film and the novel at the same time, with neither finished before the other. It cost around ten and a half million dollars, took four years, and Kubrick won his only competitive Academy Award for the visual effects on it. The technical achievement is real and almost nothing about it’s dated. Front projection, the rotating centrifuge built at Shepperton, slit-scan photography for the Stargate, and every effect achieved in camera at a standard nobody matched for another decade. Keir Dullea plays Bowman. Douglas Rain voices HAL.
The pacing is the argument against it and the film is deliberately glacial. Docking sequences run several minutes, the Blue Danube passage is unhurried, and Kubrick asks for a patience most viewers are unwilling to supply more than once in a lifetime. Geoffrey Unsworth shot it. HAL is the only character in the film with an interior and that’s the central problem. The humans are deliberately flat, Bowman and Poole speak in procedural exchanges, and the audience ends up on the side of the machine because it’s the one thing capable of wanting something.
The last act is unreadable without the novel. Clarke’s book explains the monolith, the transformation and the Star Child directly, and the film supplies images with no interpretive apparatus at all, either the achievement or the failure depending on the viewer. MGM released it in April 1968.
I know a 5 puts me against the consensus on this one. The craft astonishes me, and I’d put the effects against anything shot since. The film asks for more patience than I’ve got, though, and the humans are so flat that HAL ends up the only one I care about. A last act that needs Clarke’s book to make sense has handed its job to somebody else.
8. Leviathan (1989) [full review]
► Read the full review of Leviathan (1989)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.8/10
"The creature wears the faces of the crew and nobody asks why."
George Cosmatos made one of three underwater creature films released within months of each other in 1989, alongside The Abyss and DeepStar Six, and it’s the most nakedly derivative of the group. Stan Winston built the creature and the effects are the best thing in the picture.
The Alien structure is followed beat for beat and the film makes no attempt to conceal it. A commercial crew, a corporate employer who knew, a discovery on a wreck, an infection, a mounting body count and a survivor sequence that ends almost exactly where the 1979 film placed its own.
Peter Weller leads a cast that’s overqualified. Ernie Hudson, Richard Crenna, Daniel Stern and Amanda Pays are all doing professional work, and the film gives each of them a single characteristic to play and no room at all to develop any of it further than that.
The creature design is where Winston made something original. The thing assimilates its victims and keeps them recognizable, so the final form carries the faces of crew members the audience has spent an hour with, and the rest of the film has no interest in pursuing.
The corporate material is stated and then dropped, the film’s clearest failure. The company knew what was on the wreck, a manager says as much on a video call, and the picture treats the betrayal as a plot beat instead of as the subject it plainly wanted to be.
9. Fortress (1992) [full review]
► Read the full review of Fortress (1992)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.9/10
"One swallowed device replaces every guard in the building."
Stuart Gordon followed Re-Animator with a science fiction prison film made largely in Australia, and the commitment is considerably higher than the premise deserves. It cost around eight million dollars and Christopher Lambert plays a man imprisoned for a second pregnancy in a one-child society. The intestinator is the idea everybody remembers. A swallowed device that punishes infractions from inside the body, escalating from pain to detonation, and the film uses it as the entire security system so no guard ever has to be present in any part of the facility.
The prison design is properly worked out. Cells stacked around a vertical shaft, a dream-monitoring system that reports on inmates while they sleep, and an administrative intelligence that manages the population without needing more than a handful of human staff anywhere. Loryn Locklin plays the wife. Kurtwood Smith plays the warden as a corporate manager instead of a sadist, the smartest casting decision in it. He’s polite, he’s running a facility to a budget, and the cruelty is procedural and documented instead of personal in any way. David Eggby shot it.
In the last act, it becomes a standard escape film and the invention stops. Everything distinctive about the premise is abandoned for corridors, gunfire and a vehicle chase, and the picture ends as something that could have been set anywhere with any premise at all. Frederic Talgorn scored it.
I’m fond of this film for the intestinator and for Kurtwood Smith’s polite warden, who’s scarier than any sadist would’ve been. Then the last act throws both away for gunfire in corridors, and it infuriates me. Gordon had a premise that could’ve carried the whole picture, and he spent the finale on a vehicle chase.
The Running Man finds its best villain by casting a real game show host, and Gattaca stages its thesis as a swimming race. Work the form in the Genre Mastery Handbook.
10. The Postman (1997) [full review]
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RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.1/10
"The novel is about a liar. The film is about a believer."
Kevin Costner turned David Brin’s satirical novel about a con man into a three-hour sincere epic about American institutions. Warner Bros. spent around eighty million dollars, it took under eighteen, and it won every Razzie available in the year it was released. Olivia Williams plays Abby. The novel is about a lie, and the premise is strong. A drifter finds a dead postman’s uniform, invents a restored United States government to get a meal, and the lie spreads because people need it to be true considerably more than they need it to be verified.
Costner plays it entirely without irony, the central decision and the central error. Brin’s protagonist knows he’s a fraud throughout, and the film’s version becomes sincere within about twenty minutes and stays that way for the remaining two and a half hours. Stephen F. Windon shot it. The Holnists are a functional antagonist and Will Patton does real work as Bethlehem. A self-improvement obsessive running a militia on borrowed philosophy, he’s specific, coherent and considerably more interesting than the film around him has any use for. James Newton Howard scored it. The length is the practical problem. Three hours is a long time for a premise that’s one idea, the Bridge City material stops the picture entirely, and the final statue sequence commits to a tone nobody in 1997 was prepared to accept from anybody.
11. New Rose Hotel (1998) [full review]
► Read the full review of New Rose Hotel (1998)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.0/10
"The last twenty minutes are the first ninety, recut."
Abel Ferrara adapted a William Gibson short story with Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe as corporate headhunters, and the result is closer to an art film than to anything cyberpunk. It was shot fast, cost almost nothing, and disappeared without a theatrical release in most territories. Corporate espionage conducted as seduction is the premise. Two men are hired to extract a scientist from one conglomerate to another, they use a woman to do it, and they negotiate the entire operation in hotel rooms and bars without a single scene of technology anywhere. Walken and Dafoe are improvising heavily and the film is built around letting them. Long takes, overlapping dialogue, drinks being poured, and conversations that circle the deal without ever stating the terms of it directly to each other or to the audience. Asia Argento plays Sandii. Ferrara has never filmed anything more divisive than the last twenty minutes. The entire final act is repeated footage from earlier in the picture, recut and replayed as Dafoe’s character reconstructs what happened, and almost no new material appears at all. Ken Kelsch shot it.
12. The Time Machine (2002) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Time Machine (2002)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.9/10
"Curiosity replaced with a goal, and every door closes."
Simon Wells directed his own great-grandfather’s novel, collapsed from exhaustion eighteen weeks into production, and Gore Verbinski completed the final stretch uncredited. It cost around eighty million dollars and took just over one hundred and twenty. Guy Pearce plays Alexander. Samantha Mumba plays Mara. Donald McAlpine shot it. The added motivation is the central change and it damages the structure. Wells’s traveler goes forward out of curiosity, and the film gives him a murdered fiancee and a wish to prevent her death, converting an exploration into a grief plot with a stated objective. The time-lapse sequences are the best material in it. Glaciers advancing over Manhattan, the moon fragmenting, buildings rising and collapsing around a stationary machine, and the geological passage of time is handled considerably better than the human one. Klaus Badelt scored it. Alan Young appears in a cameo.
Jeremy Irons plays the Uber-Morlock for one sequence and explains the entire premise in dialogue. A telepathic overseer who articulates the ecology, the caste arrangement and the protagonist’s own paradox aloud, removing every question the film had accumulated up to that point. Orlando Jones appears as a hologram.
The Eloi are rewritten into a functioning society with language and architecture, a defensible change and removes Wells’s argument entirely. His Eloi are the end point of leisure, and making them capable turns a thesis about class into a plain rescue narrative. Phyllida Law appears in it.
13. The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"A mystery replaced with a specification nobody asked for."
Shot back to back and released six months apart, the two sequels answer questions the first film was stronger for leaving open. Warner Bros. spent around three hundred million dollars on the pair, and together they took over a billion while satisfying almost nobody who loved the original.
The Architect scene is the moment the trilogy loses the audience. A lengthy explanation delivered in deliberately opaque vocabulary, establishing that Neo is the sixth iteration of a designed system, replacing a mystery with a specification nobody had asked for. Bill Pope shot both films.
The freeway chase in Reloaded is extraordinary and worth the whole production. A mile and a half of highway built at a decommissioned naval base, fourteen minutes of continuous action, and practical vehicle work that holds up against anything made since. Don Davis scored them.
The Zion material is where the films lose their subject. The first picture was about a man discovering the nature of his reality, and the sequels become a siege story about a physical city with a council, a dock and a defensive infrastructure to explain.
The Burly Brawl is where the digital work fails visibly. A hundred Agent Smiths in a courtyard, rendered instead of photographed, and the sequence arrives at exactly the moment the trilogy most needs the audience to still believe what it’s being shown. Jada Pinkett Smith plays Niobe.
The freeway chase is worth sitting through both films for. I lost interest at the Architect scene. Nobody who loved the first film wanted Neo explained as version six of a software release, and the Burly Brawl looks like a cartoon at exactly the moment the trilogy can least afford it.
Tenet calls its lead the Protagonist and gives him nothing, while 2001 hands the only interior in the film to a machine. Two failures worth studying, in the Deep Character Handbook.
14. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"The best scene is an argument about which books to burn."
Roland Emmerich froze the northern hemisphere in about a week of screen time, and none of that is how any of it works, and the film is considerably better than its physics. Fox spent around one hundred and twenty-five million dollars and it took over five hundred and fifty. The set pieces are the reason to watch it and they’re staged with real scale. The Los Angeles tornado sequence, the New York storm surge arriving up the avenues, and the cargo ship drifting through Manhattan streets are all built and composited with real care. The library sequence is the best material in it. A group sheltering in the New York Public Library burning books for warmth, an argument about which volumes are worth saving, and the film treats that debate seriously for several minutes without resolving it. Dennis Quaid plays Jack.
The father and son structure is functional and the walk from Philadelphia to New York is the film’s spine. It’s a simple walk with a stated destination and a deadline, and the picture never complicates it with anything the audience has to track. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Sam.
The wolves are the sequence everybody names and they’re the one real mistake. Escaped zoo animals pursuing characters through a frozen ship, rendered digitally and poorly, in a film that’s otherwise been careful to keep its threats meteorological. Ueli Steiger shot it. Harald Kloser scored it.
15. Southland Tales (2006) [full review]
► Read the full review of Southland Tales (2006)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.4/10
"It starts at chapter four. Chapters one to three were sold separately."
Richard Kelly took an unfinished cut to Cannes because nobody turns down a competition slot, and the reception was the worst of the decade. He then cut roughly twenty minutes and the shorter version is harder to follow, since the removed material contained most of the connective explanation.
Kelly’s film requires three graphic novels to be comprehensible. Kelly wrote them as chapters one through three, the film is chapters four through six, and the picture opens partway into a story the audience has no access to unless they bought separate books. Steven Poster shot it. Its cast comes from people nobody would put together. Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore and a major number of Saturday Night Live alumni, all playing against the tone they were known for. Moby scored it. Wallace Shawn appears in it.
The Timberlake musical sequence is the one passage that works completely. A scarred veteran lip-syncing a Killers song in an arcade while nurses move around him, and it’s beautiful, coherent and entirely disconnected from everything surrounding it. Kevin Smith is unrecognizable in makeup. Cannes screened it in competition.
The ambition is real and that’s what makes it painful. Kelly is attempting a satire about surveillance, energy policy, celebrity and apocalypse at once, and the picture has something to say about all four while being unable to finish a sentence about any of them.
16. Blade Runner 2049 (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"Two hours of investment, and he turns out not to be the child."
Denis Villeneuve made a film that ranks among the most beautiful of the century and among the least propulsive. Roger Deakins finally won an Academy Award for it after thirteen nominations, and the picture cost around one hundred and fifty million dollars and lost a heavy amount of it. The photography is the achievement and it’s not in dispute. The orange Las Vegas sequence, the seawall, the rain on the Los Angeles streets and the interrogation rooms are as controlled as anything ever shot, and Deakins works almost entirely with single practical sources.
The pacing is the problem and the film is close to three hours. Scenes are held long past their information, characters walk through spaces at length, and the deliberate slowness is a stylistic position the film commits to without justifying the patience it asks for.
The central reveal deflates what it’s built on. K spends two hours believing he might be the child, the audience invests in that, and the answer is that he’s not and the actual child is somebody encountered in passing, thematically defensible and dramatically inert. Jared Leto’s Wallace is the weakest element and the film keeps returning to him. He speaks in pronouncements, he appears in three scenes that stop the picture entirely, and every one of them exists to explain a philosophy nobody in the story needed explained. Ryan Gosling plays K.
Deakins deserved that Oscar, and I could look at the Las Vegas sequence for an hour. I just wish the story moved.
Close to three hours of held shots and a reveal that tells K he doesn’t matter left me admiring the frames and checking the clock. Leto’s scenes are the worst of it, and every one of them stops the film dead.
The Day After Tomorrow gets its best scene from an argument about which books to burn. Put people in a room with one resource, using the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
17. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)
RLR: 4 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"It gave the Force a blood count."
Lucas hadn’t directed in twenty-two years, owned the company outright and answered to nobody, and the result shows what happens when a filmmaker has no colleague able to say the word no. It cost around one hundred and fifteen million dollars and took over a billion. The trade dispute is the opening and it’s the wrong subject. A taxation disagreement over shipping routes, a blockade, a senate procedural vote, and the film opens a mythological sequence with an administrative argument no child and few adults could be made to care about.
The podrace is the best sequence and it works because the geography is clear. A stated circuit, three laps, established hazards, a rival with a visible method, and the audience can follow every position change without anybody explaining what’s happening. Liam Neeson plays Qui-Gon. The midichlorians are the most damaging single decision. The Force was three lines and unmeasurable in 1977, and giving it a blood count converts a mystery into a diagnosable quantity that can be tested for, ranked and optimized by anybody with a laboratory. Ewan McGregor plays Obi-Wan.
Duel of the Fates is the one element nobody argues about. Ray Park’s fight choreography, Ian McDiarmid’s expanding role and John Williams’s choral piece combine into a final sequence that belongs to a considerably better film than the one containing it. David Tattersall shot it.
This is the one that makes me angriest, because the talent was there.
The podrace and Duel of the Fates show what the film could have been. Everything else is trade disputes and speeches, and giving the Force a damn blood count is the worst idea anybody ever bolted onto Star Wars. A director needs somebody in the room who can say no, and Lucas made sure he didn’t have one.
18. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) [full review]
► Read the full review of A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
RLR: 4 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"A permanent condition set by a checkbox in a kitchen."
Kubrick developed the project for years, decided Spielberg was better suited to it, and died before either made it. Spielberg wrote the screenplay himself from Kubrick’s materials, the only time he’s taken sole writing credit on a film since Close Encounters. Frances O’Connor plays Monica.
Excellent as the first two thirds are, they get forgotten in the argument about the ending. The Swinton household, the imprinting protocol, the return of the biological son, and the abandonment in the woods are among the cruellest things in Spielberg’s whole filmography. Janusz Kaminski shot it.
Haley Joel Osment plays David without blinking for most of the running time, and he trained to do, and the performance is the reason the early material works. He’s unsettling before he’s sympathetic, and the film never lets the audience settle on which one he is.
Rouge City and the Flesh Fair are Kubrick’s sensibility intact. A carnival where obsolete machines are destroyed for a paying crowd, presented as family entertainment, and Jude Law’s Gigolo Joe carries the section with a stylized mechanical charm nothing else matches. John Williams scored it. Everybody argues about the last twenty minutes. The advanced beings arrive, David gets one day with a reconstructed mother and the film supplies a resolution that reads as sentiment and is, on inspection, considerably bleaker than that. Brian Aldiss wrote the source story.
What makes the ending so maddening is that the first two thirds are cruel and excellent.
I can’t forgive those last twenty minutes. Whatever bleakness sits underneath David’s one day with a reconstructed mother, the scene plays as sentiment, and it drags everything before it down. That ending is why a film with this much in it gets a 4 from me.
Honorable Mentions: Science Fiction Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or close to it and each is on the list.
Dark Matter (2024)
Blake Crouch adapted his own novel about a man abducted by another version of himself, and the series takes the multiplication of selves considerably further than the book had room for.
The Peripheral (2022)
William Gibson’s novel became a series about telepresence across seventy years, where the future can reach back into a past it’s already lost and change nothing about its own.
Raised by Wolves (2020)
Ridley Scott produced and directed episodes of a series about two androids raising human children on a colony world, with a theology argument running under every decision anybody makes.
Colony (2016)
An occupation series set in a walled Los Angeles where the collaborators are the protagonists, and the aliens are almost never seen because the administration is entirely human.
Continuum (2012)
A Canadian series about a police officer from 2077 stranded in the present alongside the terrorists she was pursuing, and the show is honest that her side is the corporate one.
Altered Carbon (2018)
Richard Morgan’s novel became a series where consciousness is stored on a cortical stack and bodies are rented, and the production design works it through at considerable expense.
The 100 (2014)
Ninety-seven years after a nuclear war, a hundred juvenile prisoners are sent down to test whether the ground is survivable, and the series is consistently harder on its characters than the premise suggested.
Sense8 (2015)
The Wachowskis built a series about eight people sharing senses and skills across continents, shot on location in every one of them, with a structure that makes each episode a relay.
Kin (2018)
A crime film that turns out to have a science fiction premise attached, with a weapon of unexplained origin and two figures pursuing it who are never fully accounted for.
Occupation (2018)
An Australian invasion film made on a small budget that spends its length on a resistance cell instead of the arrival, and the country setting does most of the work.
Project Power (2020)
A pill grants five minutes of a randomly assigned ability, a strong rule, and the New Orleans setting and the practical powers are better than the plot around them.
IO (2019)
A young scientist stays behind on a poisoned Earth working on adaptation while the last shuttle prepares to leave, and almost the entire film is two people and a hillside.
Dishonorable Mentions: Science Fiction That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had the premise, the cast or the source material and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
Total Recall 2070 (1999)
A Canadian series borrowing from Dick and from Blade Runner, with a decent android partner premise, canceled after one season with most of its arcs left open.
The Island (2005)
Michael Bay built a good first act about clones who don’t know what they are, and then abandons the facility entirely for an hour of vehicle chases through Los Angeles.
Surrogates (2009)
Everybody lives through an idealized remote body, a premise with a hundred possible scenes in it, and the film uses it for a conventional murder investigation and a shutdown.
In Time (2011)
Niccol built a world where time is currency and stops working out the consequences after the first twenty minutes, resolving a systemic argument with a bank robbery.
Elysium (2013)
Blomkamp built a superb orbital habitat and an equally superb Johannesburg, and then resolved a question about universal healthcare by having one man push a button.
Upside Down (2012)
Twin worlds with opposing gravity is among the best visual premises anybody has had, attached to a romance that uses the rule for obstacles instead of for anything about the people.
What Do You Think?
Every film in this tier had a better version sitting inside it, and that frustrates me more than a clean failure ever could. A creature made of the dead and a device that replaces a prison were right there, and the films walked past both. I prefer a writer who overreaches and falls on a big idea to one who shrugs at it. Tell me which one you would have built the whole film around.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Flawed |
Part 8: The Failures
