Part 8 – The Failures
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 fails in identifiable ways. Prometheus requires experts to forget their expertise for every plot development, Crystal Skull breaks physical consequence once and never recovers it, and Geostorm destroys four cities full of people the audience met seconds earlier.
The bottom of the page is where the negatives sit. The Motion Picture spends its budget photographing a ship instead of the people aboard her, Contact makes its scientist abandon the epistemology she spent two hours defending, The Butterfly Effect retreats from its own conclusion, Predestination builds an airtight loop with nothing inside it to feel, and Avatar arrives at minus one hundred.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the last of eight parts.
Prometheus needs its experts to forget their jobs and Interstellar closes a loop with no origin. Build the mechanism properly in the Plot Handbook.
1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
RLR: 4 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"After the refrigerator, nothing in it can hurt anybody."
A hundred and eighty-five million dollars, nineteen years after the previous entry, with Spielberg directing, Lucas producing and David Koepp writing after several other screenwriters had been through the material across a decade of development. It took over seven hundred and ninety million. Cate Blanchett plays Spalko.
The 1957 setting is the right instinct and the film half-commits to it. Greasers, atomic testing, McCarthy hearings and Soviet antagonists replace the Nazis correctly, and the period texture works whenever the film remembers to use it instead of chasing set pieces. Shia LaBeouf plays Mutt.
The refrigerator is the moment the audience stopped believing. A nuclear test, a lead-lined door and a man thrown several hundred yards inside it, and the sequence establishes early that nothing in this film carries physical consequences for anybody. Janusz Kaminski shot it. John Williams scored it.
The digital work is the visible difference from the earlier entries. Gophers, monkeys, waterfalls and vehicle interiors are all rendered, the earlier films were stunt work and miniatures, and the texture change is apparent in every action sequence in the picture. Karen Allen returns as Marion.
The aliens are the decision everybody objects to and they are defensible in principle. Fifties adventure serials were about flying saucers, the period demands it, and the problem is the execution instead of the choice, since the last act is a rendered sequence nobody in it can affect.
2. Prometheus (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Prometheus (2012)
RLR: 3 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Every plot development needs an expert to forget their job."
Ridley Scott returned to the world he built thirty-three years earlier with one of the most visually gifted crews working, and produced a film about scientists behaving in ways no scientist behaves. Fox spent around one hundred and thirty million dollars and it took over four hundred.
The design is extraordinary and nobody disputes it. The Engineer architecture, the orrery, the juggernaut interiors and the medical pod are all built at scale, and Dariusz Wolski shoots the Icelandic exteriors as genuinely alien without a single digital landscape. Noomi Rapace plays Shaw. Charlize Theron plays Vickers.
The crew are the problem and every scene contains an example. A biologist removes his helmet in an unknown atmosphere, then approaches a hostile organism making noises at it, and a geologist mapping the structure gets lost inside the structure he mapped that morning. Idris Elba plays the captain.
Michael Fassbender’s David is the film’s only success and carries most of what works. He models himself on Peter O’Toole, he is contemptuous of the crew, and his motives are deliberately unreadable in a way nothing else in the picture manages. Marc Streitenfeld scored it.
The questions are raised and never answered, and the sequel then handled badly. Who the Engineers were, why they made humanity, why they changed their minds, and the film gestures at all three while committing to nothing and leaving Covenant to supply worse answers later.
3. Geostorm (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of Geostorm (2017)
RLR: 3 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.3/10
"Four cities destroyed, full of people you met seconds ago."
Dean Devlin directed his first film after decades of producing, the production went badly enough to require substantial reshoots under a different director, and Warner Bros. spent around one hundred and twenty million dollars. It took under a hundred and fifty worldwide. Jim Sturgess plays the brother.
The premise is a global weather control network that has been sabotaged, a workable disaster structure. A satellite array, an international treaty, a handover deadline and a conspiracy inside the programme, and the film has a functioning skeleton before it starts. Abbie Cornish appears in it.
The disaster sequences are disconnected from anybody the audience knows. Hong Kong fractures, Rio freezes, Dubai floods and Tokyo is struck by hail, and each is a rendered vignette featuring strangers introduced seconds before the event destroys them. Roberto Schaefer shot it. Lorne Balfe scored it.
The brothers plot is the intended emotional content and it never arrives. One built the system, one runs the programme, they have a grievance neither articulates, and the reconciliation happens because the running time requires it instead of because anything changed. Ed Harris appears late.
4. The Dark Tower (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Dark Tower (2017)
RLR: 3 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.6/10
"Eight novels, thirty-four years, ninety-five minutes."
Eight novels written across thirty-four years were compressed into ninety-five minutes, the whole problem stated as arithmetic. Sony spent around sixty million dollars after a decade of failed attempts by several directors, and the released film is a sequel-adjacent compression nobody could follow. Nikolaj Arcel directed it.
The adaptation approach is defensible in theory and impossible in practice. King’s series ends with a loop implying a next cycle, the film positions itself as that cycle, and an audience with no knowledge of eight novels has no way of registering the choice at all.
Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey are both well cast and given nothing. Roland is a man who has lost everything and the film has no room to establish what he lost, and the Man in Black is an entity whose power is stated instead of demonstrated in any scene.
The gunslinger ritual is the one piece of the source that survives. The creed, the reloading, and the shooting with the mind instead of the hand are present and staged properly, and they are the only moments that suggest the world the books actually contain.
The ninety-five minute running time is the decision everything else follows from. A series about crossing a decaying reality becomes a portal chase between two locations, and every element that made the source distinctive is removed for pace. Rasmus Videbaek shot it. Junkie XL scored it.
Phantom Menace gives the Force a blood count and Crystal Skull breaks physical consequence once and forever. Hold the rules in the World Builder’s Handbook.
5. Moonfall (2022) [full review]
► Read the full review of Moonfall (2022)
RLR: 3 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.1/10
"A hollow moon with a sun inside it, attached to a divorce subplot."
Roland Emmerich spent around one hundred and forty million dollars of independent money, the largest independently financed film ever made, and it took under sixty. The failure was substantial enough to affect the financing structures that had made it possible in the first place. Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson lead.
The premise is that the moon is an artificial megastructure, an enormous swing and the best thing in the film. A hollow construction with an internal sun, built by an ancestor civilization, containing a rogue artificial intelligence that consumes technology. John Bradley plays the theorist.
The conspiracy theorist is right, and the film places its sympathy there. A man ridiculed for years turns out to have been correct about everything, the institutions ignored him, and the picture treats institutional dismissal as the actual antagonist for most of its length. Donald Sutherland delivers it.
The orbital mechanics are decoration instead of constraint. The moon spirals inward on a schedule the plot requires, gravity behaves differently in each sequence, and a shuttle retrieved from a museum reaches lunar orbit in an afternoon without anybody remarking on it. Robby Baumgartner shot it.
The last act is the most unrestrained thing Emmerich has filmed. A nuclear device, an artificial intelligence swarm, a sacrifice inside the hollow moon, and an ending establishing that the ancestors uploaded themselves, delivered at a pace that allows no time to object. Harald Kloser scored it.
6. Armageddon (1998) [full review]
► Read the full review of Armageddon (1998)
RLR: 2 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"Two-second shots, so you never learn where anybody is standing."
Michael Bay made the loudest film of the decade and it took over five hundred and fifty million dollars. Nine credited writers worked on it including an uncredited pass by Robert Towne, and Ben Affleck has described asking Bay why they did not train astronauts instead of drillers.
The editing is the defining quality and it is relentless. Average shot length is around two seconds, almost nothing is held, and the film cuts away from its own establishing information before an audience can locate anybody in any of the spaces being shown. Bruce Willis leads the crew.
The premise inverts the sensible version and the film knows it. NASA needs a hole drilled, the decision is that training drillers to be astronauts is faster than training astronauts to drill, and the picture presents this as a reasonable conclusion reached by professionals. Billy Bob Thornton runs mission control.
The science is not a criticism worth making at length, since the film is not attempting it. An asteroid the size of Texas, a splitting charge at a stated depth, and a timeline that would be impossible even with perfect information about everything involved. John Schwartzman shot it.
The Deep Impact comparison is instructive and both were released the same summer. One film gives its catastrophe a lottery and a president telling people the truth, and the other gives it an animal cracker sequence and a rock ballad over a montage. Trevor Rabin scored it.
7. The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002)
RLR: 2 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 3.8/10
"He wants to keep his club and nothing stops him."
A hundred million dollars was spent on a lunar nightclub comedy that took under five, one of the largest proportional losses in studio history. It sat on a shelf for two years after completion, was released without press screenings, and Eddie Murphy has joked about it publicly since.
The premise is a comedy with no situation inside it. A man owns a nightclub on the moon, criminals want to buy it, he refuses, and the entire film is a chase that generates no misunderstanding, no reversal and no scene that could only happen on the moon.
The production design is the only money visible on the screen. Little America is a genuinely built lunar city with a working geography, the vehicles and interiors are constructed instead of composited, and none of it is used for a single joke in the whole film.
Randy Quaid plays an obsolete robot bodyguard and gets the only functioning material. He is outdated, literal, protective and slow to reboot, and every one of his scenes has an actual comic mechanism underneath it that the rest of the picture lacks entirely. Rosario Dawson plays the singer.
The failure is structural instead of a matter of jokes landing badly. A comedy needs somebody who wants something they cannot have, and the protagonist wants to keep his club and is entirely capable throughout, so no scene contains pressure of any kind. Joe Pantoliano appears in it.
8. Jurassic World Dominion (2022) [full review]
► Read the full review of Jurassic World Dominion (2022)
RLR: 2 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.6/10
"Dinosaurs loose in the world, undone inside twenty minutes."
The previous film ended with dinosaurs released into the world, the most interesting position the franchise ever reached, and this one is about locusts. Universal spent around one hundred and sixty-five million dollars and it took over a billion regardless. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard return.
The premise established by the ending of Fallen Kingdom is abandoned in the opening minutes. Dinosaurs are living among humans and the picture relocates almost immediately to a remote facility so the old structure can run again. John Schwartzman shot it. Michael Giacchino scored it.
The locust plot is the actual subject and nobody wanted it. Genetically engineered insects threatening the global food supply is a legitimate thriller premise and has almost nothing to do with the reason anybody bought a ticket for this particular film. Colin Trevorrow directed it.
The original cast return and the film has no use for them. Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum are reunited after twenty-nine years, given a corporate infiltration subplot, and the reunion is staged as fan service instead of as anything the story required. DeWanda Wise plays the pilot.
The Malta sequence is the best material and it suggests the film that was available. Trained raptors pursuing a motorcycle through narrow streets, a black market in engineered animals, and a world that has genuinely absorbed the arrival of these creatures into its economy. It was shot partly in Malta.
9. Waterworld (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of Waterworld (1995)
RLR: 1 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"It raises the question of what he is and then drops it."
Waterworld had one genuine asset, a production design concept that was visually distinct from anything in the genre, and it drowned under the most publicized budget overrun of the decade. It cost around one hundred and seventy-five million dollars and the atoll set sank during production.
The design concept is excellent and largely unexamined by the film itself. A world of salvaged hulls, hand-built trimarans and floating settlements assembled from wreckage, with dirt as a currency and paper as a luxury, none of which generates a single scene. Jeanne Tripplehorn plays Helen.
The Mariner is an interesting idea handled without interest. He has gills, he is a mutant, he is treated as subhuman by the settlements, and the film raises his status as a question and then drops it entirely in favor of a chase for a child with a map.
Dennis Hopper’s Deacon is doing a different film from everybody else. He is broad, he is enjoying himself, he runs a society aboard the Exxon Valdez, and the film around him is playing the material completely straight without any of that energy. Tina Majorino plays Enola.
The production problems became the story and the film never escaped them. The sinking set, the schedule, the director departure and the reshoots were all public during production, and the picture was reviewed against its budget instead of against what was on screen. Dean Semler shot it.
Pluto Nash gives its hero nothing he cannot have, and Geostorm destroys cities full of strangers. Build stakes that land in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
10. Interstellar (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of Interstellar (2014)
RLR: 1 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.7/10
"The loop closes and nothing ever entered it."
Nolan made a film that has convinced a large number of people it is a deep work about love and relativity. Kip Thorne consulted on the physics, the black hole rendering produced published research, and the picture cost around one hundred and sixty-five million dollars.
The physics are genuinely accurate in places and decorative in others. Gargantua is rendered from actual equations, the time dilation on Miller’s planet is correctly calculated, and the film then places a habitable planet in orbit close enough to a black hole to produce that dilation.
The dialogue is the weakest thing Nolan has written. Characters explain concepts to each other that they would all already know, Brand delivers a speech about love as a measurable force, and the film treats that speech as an argument instead of as a character’s error.
The tesseract resolution is where the structure collapses. Future humans build a five-dimensional library so a father can send coordinates backward through a bookshelf, so the species was saved by a mechanism the species only built because it was already saved. Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper.
The sound mix buries dialogue under the organ score repeatedly and Nolan has defended it as a deliberate choice. Several key exchanges are close to inaudible in a cinema, and a film this dependent on explanation is not the place to make that particular argument. Anne Hathaway plays Brand.
11. Rebel Moon (2023) [full review]
► Read the full review of Rebel Moon (2023)
RLR: 1 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.6/10
"Everybody agrees to join because the roster needs filling."
Zack Snyder pitched it to Lucasfilm as a Star Wars film, was refused, and made it at Netflix instead with the serial numbers filed off. Two versions exist, a theatrical-length cut and a longer rated one, and the longer version is generally considered the stronger.
The structure is Seven Samurai and the film makes no attempt to disguise it. A farming settlement under threat, a recruitment tour assembling specialists, a defense of the harvest, and every beat arrives exactly where Kurosawa placed it seventy years earlier. Sofia Boutella plays Kora.
The recruitment sequence is where a film like this lives and here it is rushed. Each specialist gets a brief introduction, a demonstration and an agreement, and almost none of them are given a reason to accept beyond the plot requiring a full roster. Djimon Hounsou appears in it.
The visual language is Snyder at maximum and the slow motion is close to constant. Speed ramps in almost every action beat, heavy grain, anamorphic flares and a color palette drained to ash, and the accumulation flattens every sequence into the same register. Snyder shot it himself.
The world implies considerably more than it delivers. A fallen realm, a regicide, a religious order and a network of colonies are all referenced, and none of it is developed past the level of a name mentioned in passing during a briefing. Tom Holkenborg scored it.
12. Ironheart (2025) [full review]
► Read the full review of Ironheart (2025)
RLR: 1 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 4.2/10
"Everybody says she is brilliant and nobody shows it."
The series closing Phase 5 arrived three years after its protagonist was introduced in a film, a long gap for a character nobody had time to become attached to. It was shot in 2022, held, and released into an audience that had largely stopped following the sequence.
The premise combines technology and magic, the most interesting structural idea in it. A suit builder against an antagonist working with something considerably older, and the collision between the two systems is the only genuinely fresh element the series contains. Dominique Thorne plays Riri. Anthony Ramos plays the antagonist.
Dominique Thorne is good and the writing does not support her. Riri is meant to be brilliant and reckless, the brilliance is stated instead of demonstrated, and the recklessness produces consequences the series resolves within an episode every time. Chinaka Hodge created the series. Six episodes were produced.
The Chicago setting is used well in the early episodes and then abandoned. A specific neighborhood, a specific community and a specific loss are established carefully, and the back half relocates into generic interiors where none of that context applies to anything happening. Alden Ehrenreich appears in it.
The finale introduces a considerably larger figure and the series stops instead of ends. A bargain is struck, an entity arrives, and the season concludes on a setup for something that had not been commissioned, leaving the whole run as a prologue to nothing. Marvel has not announced a second season.
13. Battlefield Earth (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of Battlefield Earth (2000)
RLR: 0 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 2.5/10
"A week of practice and a thousand-year-old Harrier."
The most completely failed film in science fiction and the failure is total instead of partial. John Travolta spent years getting it made, Franchise Pictures was later sued for inflating the budget, and it swept the Razzies in a way no film had before or since.
Every frame is shot at a canted angle and the choice is never explained by anybody involved. Roger Christian tilts the camera in almost every setup, the technique signifies nothing, and after two hours the effect is physically uncomfortable instead of expressive. Barry Pepper plays Jonnie.
The Psychlos negotiate corporate takeovers and discuss quarterly returns, genuinely strange material for an alien conquest film. The species conquered Earth for mineral rights, the dialogue is corporate throughout, and none of it is played as satire at any point. Forest Whitaker plays Ker. Giles Nuttgens shot it.
The teaching machine sequence is the plot hole everybody names. A thousand-year-old captive human is given alien knowledge directly, learns to read, and the film then has him fly a Harrier jump jet that has sat in a hangar for a millennium after a week of practice.
Travolta’s performance is committed in a way the film cannot support. He is enjoying himself, the laugh is enormous, the prosthetics and platform boots are worn with total conviction, and nothing around him is operating at a level that could use any of it. Elia Cmiral scored it.
Ironheart states brilliance instead of showing it, and Rebel Moon recruits a team that agrees for no reason. Build people in the Deep Character Handbook.
14. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) [full review]
► Read the full review of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
RLR: -10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
"The ship is the star and the crew are the supporting cast."
Paramount handed Robert Wise a budget that dwarfed the entire television series, after a planned return to television was converted into a feature in response to Star Wars. The effects were rebuilt from scratch when the first vendor failed, and the picture was still being cut days before its release date.
The money went onto the screen and almost none of it went into the story. Wise spends the budget on photography of the refitted Enterprise from every angle a camera can occupy, and the film treats the vessel as its subject while the people who crew her wait offscreen for something to do.
The drydock sequence runs about ten minutes and contains no story at all. Scotty ferries Kirk out by inspection pod, the camera documents every detail of the redesign, Goldsmith’s theme swells underneath, and nothing develops, progresses or changes across the entire passage. Persis Khambatta plays Ilia.
The inversion is the specific failure. The Enterprise is iconic because of what happens aboard her and who commands her, and a film that gives ten minutes to her exterior and about five to the relationship between Kirk and Spock has confused the container with the contents.
What survives is Goldsmith and the V’Ger reveal. The theme became the franchise’s for decades, the Blaster Beam gives the intruder a sound before it has a shape, and the idea of a probe that has learned enough to ask why it exists deserved a film that was interested in asking it.
15. Contact (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of Contact (1997)
RLR: -10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"It makes her abandon the position the whole film was built on."
Robert Zemeckis adapted Carl Sagan’s novel and Sagan died during production, having worked on the screenplay across several abandoned versions for years. The film is unusually patient about procedure and spends its first hour on funding, politics and a signal nobody can independently verify. Matthew McConaughey plays Palmer Joss.
Jodie Foster’s Arroway is among the better scientist protagonists in the genre and the film builds her carefully. The father who died young, the radio telescope that became a substitute for connection, and a career built on the conviction that humanity is not alone are all specific instead of symbolic.
Her position is stated clearly and repeatedly across the whole first two acts. She believes in evidence, she says so to a room, she declines to accept anything she cannot verify, and the film treats that as her defining quality until the moment it needs her to stop.
Then she has a transcendent experience, returns with no physical record of it, and is asked to go on believing it anyway. The film requires her to adopt the exact epistemological position she spent two hours arguing against, and presents the reversal as growth. James Woods plays the security adviser.
The eighteen seconds of static is the detail that could have saved it. Her recorder captured nothing and ran for eighteen hours, delivered in a single line at a hearing she has already lost, and the film hands the audience a proof while asking its protagonist to proceed without one.
16. The Butterfly Effect (2004) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Butterfly Effect (2004)
RLR: -10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"A real premise, and then it retreats from its own conclusion."
Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber wrote and directed it, and New Line replaced the ending after test screenings. The director’s cut restores a considerably bleaker resolution, and the two versions together are a clear demonstration of what a softened ending removes from a premise.
The core idea is genuinely good and worth stating properly. The causal chains connecting a group of childhood friends are so entangled that repairing one person’s trauma always produces equivalent trauma somewhere else, making the damage structural instead of contingent. Ashton Kutcher plays Evan. Amy Smart plays Kayleigh.
The mechanics are arbitrary in a way the premise cannot afford. Evan returns through blackouts he read about in journals, the rules shift when the plot needs them to, and a story about strict causal consequence runs on a device whose own limits are never held consistent.
The darkness is deployed for shock instead of for meaning. Each timeline reaches for the most upsetting available outcome, the escalation is competitive instead of argued, and the film keeps finding new cruelties without examining what any of them say about the idea underneath. Eric Stoltz plays the father.
The theatrical ending is the retreat. Evan walks past her in the street and the film calls it a resolution, while the director’s cut takes the premise to the only honest place it leads. The damage predates every event he is able to reach. New Line released it in January 2004.
Avatar makes its outsider better at a culture than anybody born into it, and Waterworld drops its own question. Work the form in the Genre Mastery Handbook.
17. Predestination (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of Predestination (2014)
RLR: -10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Airtight mechanics, and nothing underneath them to feel."
The Spierig brothers adapted Robert Heinlein’s short story All You Zombies, about nine pages long, containing one of the tightest closed loops anybody has written. They made it in Australia for around five million dollars and kept almost every beat of the source intact. Ethan Hawke plays the agent.
The loop is logically airtight and the achievement is real. John is born as Jane, is seduced by a temporal agent, gives birth to a daughter who is stolen and deposited in the past as that same Jane, and every element in the story generates every other element with no external input anywhere.
Sarah Snook plays both halves of the central character and the transition is the best work in the film. She performs one person at two stages of a life, the prosthetic work is by Steve Boyd, and the audience is meant to take the two for separate people for most of the running time.
The problem is that the mechanism is everything the film has. Once the loop is admired there is nothing else to do with it, nobody in the story wants anything the structure has not already determined, and the picture is a crossword that is satisfying to complete and impossible to carry.
The Fizzle Bomber subplot exists because the film needed a plot. Heinlein’s story is only the loop, the bomber is an addition, and every scene devoted to the chase is a scene taken from the one element the adaptation actually had. Ben Nott shot it.
18. Avatar (2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of Avatar (2009)
RLR: -100 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"He is better at their culture than anybody born into it."
Cameron spent over a decade waiting for the technology, built a performance capture pipeline that did not previously exist, and produced the highest-grossing film ever made twice over. The 3D presentation reshaped exhibition economics across the industry for the following decade. Sam Worthington plays Jake.
The technical achievement is not in dispute and the Pandora work is extraordinary. The bioluminescent forest, the floating mountains and the creature design are rendered at a level nothing had approached, and the facial capture was a genuine advance on everything preceding it. Zoe Saldana plays Neytiri.
The story is Dances with Wolves and the film follows it closely. An outsider embeds with an indigenous population, learns their ways, is accepted, and then leads them against his own people, arriving at competence in their culture faster than anybody born into it manages.
The environmental position is stated repeatedly and the structure argues against it. The Na’vi are defended by a human, the victory requires him, and a story about a people with their own agency resolves through the intervention of somebody who arrived eight months earlier. Sigourney Weaver plays Grace.
Unobtanium is the detail that shows how little the material was worked. The substance driving an entire colonial operation is named as a placeholder, the placeholder survived into the finished film, and nobody involved found a reason to replace it before it reached an audience.
Honorable Mentions: Science Fiction Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each is better than anything on this page and each is on the list.
Foundation (2021)
Asimov’s unfilmable series became a television production that solved the time-span problem with cloned emperors and a mathematician preserved as a recording, and the design work is enormous.
Chernobyl (2019)
Not science fiction, and the best dramatization of a technical catastrophe ever made. Every episode is about people establishing what happened against institutions with reasons to prevent them.
The Creator (2023)
Gareth Edwards shot a war film about artificial intelligence on location across Asia with a small crew and added the effects afterward, producing scale at a fraction of the usual cost.
65 (2023)
Adam Driver crashes on prehistoric Earth with one survivor and a language barrier, and the film runs ninety-three minutes with almost no dialogue and no subplot at all.
Nightflyers (2018)
George R. R. Martin’s novella became a series about a ship traveling to meet an alien object, with a crew held together by a captain who exists only as a projection.
Almost Human (2013)
A near-future police series pairing a human detective with an obsolete android model, cancelled after thirteen episodes, and the procedural premises were consistently better than the format allowed.
Extant (2014)
Halle Berry returns from a solo mission pregnant, with a son at home who is an engineered android, and the two premises collide in ways the second season never resolved.
The Last Days on Mars (2013)
A crew on the final day of a Mars rotation discovers something bacterial in the soil, and the film is built entirely on the pressure of a departure window that will not move.
Finch (2021)
Tom Hanks builds a robot to care for his dog after he dies, and almost the whole film is three characters in a vehicle crossing a poisoned America.
Swan Song (2021)
A dying man consents to being replaced by a copy his family will never know about, and Mahershala Ali plays both while the film stays with the original through the handover.
ARQ (2016)
A loop film set almost entirely in one house with a machine in the basement, and the rules tighten with each repetition instead of resetting cleanly.
The Beast (2023)
Bertrand Bonello built a film across three time periods around a process for removing emotional risk, with Lea Seydoux playing the same consciousness in each of them.
Dishonorable Mentions: The Bottom of the Barrel
Also unreviewed here. Each of these belongs on this page and only the running time kept them off it.
Argylle (2024)
A spy premise built on a novelist whose books predict real events, buried under reveals stacked so densely that no individual one carries any weight by the time it arrives.
Borderlands (2024)
A game adaptation that removes the register that defined the source, reshot substantially under a second director, with a cast visibly working against material nobody committed to.
Madame Web (2024)
A precognition premise with genuine potential, assembled from footage that appears to have been rewritten after shooting, with dialogue looped over faces turned away from camera.
Death Note (2017)
An adaptation that removes the intelligence contest at the center of the source and replaces it with a teenage romance, compressing a long strategic duel into a single act.
Alien vs Predator: Requiem (2007)
Lit so darkly that substantial portions of the action are not visible at all, and the directors defended that as a stylistic choice about concealment.
Slumberland (2022)
An expensive adaptation of Little Nemo that replaces the strangeness of the source with a grief plot, and spends its budget on dream sequences with no rules holding them together.
What Do You Think?
The bottom of the ranking, and most of these failed by explaining something that worked better unexplained. Tell me which one you think could have been saved and what you would have cut.
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