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.
This is the page in the series I care about most, because nearly every film on it had a way out and missed it. Most had serious money and a core idea worth building on.
Interstellar and Contact sit on plenty of favorite lists, and I understand why people love them, but I think both cheat their audiences at the finish, and I rank cheating below plain incompetence. A dumb movie only wastes my evening, while a smart one that lies to me in the last act leaves me angry.
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 detail 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 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’re 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.
I wanted this one to work, and the 1957 material shows how close it came. Greasers and atomic tests make a better playground for Indy than one more Nazi dig, and I’d have happily watched a whole film built on that period. Then the refrigerator scene arrives, and from that point I stopped worrying about anybody on screen. I gave it a four for the setting and for Karen Allen coming back, and that’s generous for a picture that throws away its own hero’s mortality.
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 a crew that ranked among the most visually gifted 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 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’s 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.
Films like this one are maddening.
Ridley Scott had sets as good as anything in the genre and filled them with people I wouldn’t trust to run a fire drill. A biologist who pulls his helmet off on an alien world tells me the script has no respect for the job, and once I know that, I stop caring whether he lives. The design and Fassbender are the only reasons I gave it three points.
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 real 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’s been sabotaged, a workable disaster structure. A satellite array, an international treaty, a handover deadline and a conspiracy inside the program, 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 program, 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 showed 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’re the only moments that suggest the world the books 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.
This one disappoints me because the casting was right.
Elba as Roland and McConaughey as the Man in Black is a pairing I’d gladly have followed across several long films, and Sony handed them ninety-five minutes and a portal. King’s readers deserved a studio willing to spend the time the story needed, and I’d have taken a miniseries or a two-parter without complaint. What they got instead feels like a trailer for books most of the audience never read.
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 serious enough to affect the financing structures that had made it possible in the first place. Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson lead.
That the moon is an artificial megastructure is the premise, 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 didn’t train astronauts instead of drillers.
The editing is the defining quality and it’s 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 it shows. Bruce Willis leads the crew.
Its 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 isn’t a criticism worth making at length, since the film isn’t 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.
The Deep Impact comparison settles it for me. Both films had an asteroid and the same summer, and only one of them treated the end of the world as something that happens to people.
Armageddon treats it as a music video with a countdown, and I find the whole damn thing exhausting, cut so fast you never get a quiet second to notice nothing’s there. Affleck asking why they didn’t train astronauts is the smartest line connected to this production, and nobody put it in the film.
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.
It’s 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 built lunar city with a working geography, the production constructed the vehicles and interiors instead of compositing them, and the film doesn’t use any of it for a single joke. Randy Quaid plays an obsolete robot bodyguard and gets the only functioning material. He’s 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 can’t 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 opening minutes abandon the premise established by the ending of Fallen Kingdom. 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. The film reunites Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum after twenty-nine years, gives them a corporate infiltration subplot, and stages the reunion 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’s 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 real 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’s gills, he’s a mutant, he’s 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’s broad, he’s 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 can’t have, and Geostorm destroys cities full of strangers. Build stakes that work 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’s convinced a large number of people it’s 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 accurate in places and decorative in others. The film renders Gargantua from actual equations, calculates the time dilation on Miller’s planet correctly, and 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’d 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 isn’t the place to make that particular argument. Anne Hathaway plays Brand.
I know how many people count this as a favorite, and I don’t think they’re foolish for it. The images are gorgeous, and Gargantua deserves every bit of its reputation. What I can’t forgive is the bookshelf. Nolan spends the whole film insisting he respects physics, then saves the species with a loop that came from nowhere and leans on that speech about love to cover the gap. That’s a con, and I give a con a one.
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, Lucasfilm refused it, and he 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’s 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 tone. 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.
Technology and magic combine in the premise, 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 fresh element the series contains. Dominique Thorne plays Riri. Anthony Ramos plays the antagonist.
Dominique Thorne is good and the writing doesn’t support her. Riri is meant to be brilliant and reckless, the series states the brilliance instead of showing it, and the recklessness produces consequences the series resolves within an episode every time. Chinaka Hodge created the series. Six episodes were produced.
The series uses the Chicago setting well in the early episodes and then abandons it. It carefully establishes a neighborhood, a community and a loss, 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 hadn’t been commissioned, leaving the whole run as a prologue to nothing. Marvel hasn’t 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, 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’s sat in a hangar for a millennium after a week of practice.
Travolta’s performance is committed in a way the film can’t support. He’s enjoying himself, the laugh is enormous, he wears the prosthetics and platform boots with total conviction, and nothing around him is operating at a level that could use any of it. Elia Cmiral scored it.
I’d almost admire the consistency if it didn’t hurt to look at. Every creative choice here is wrong, and they’re all wrong in the same direction, from a camera tilted for two hours to a captive human flying a Harrier after a week of practice. I can’t point to the scene where it went off the rails, because it was never on them. Zero is the only fair score, since anything higher would suggest some part of it worked.
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 it converted a planned return to television 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 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’s a shape, and the idea of a probe that’s learned enough to ask why it exists deserved a film that was interested in asking it.
I expect this rating to annoy Trek fans, and I get it, since Goldsmith’s theme alone would earn most films a pass. I rank it this low because it betrays the thing I value most in Star Trek, the people on that bridge. Kirk and Spock get about five minutes together and the hull gets ten. The drydock passage plays like a car commercial with a great score, and spending a budget that size to photograph a model while the crew waits offscreen strikes me as an insult to everybody who loved the show.
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 isn’t alone are all concrete 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 can’t verify, and the film treats that as her defining quality until the moment it needs her to stop.
Then she’s 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’s already lost, and the film gives the audience a proof while asking its protagonist to proceed without one.
This one is a bigger letdown than most on the page, because Arroway is a character I’d have followed anywhere.
Foster plays her as somebody who’d choose loneliness over believing something false, and that’s rare on screen and worth protecting. Then the script wants a transcendent finish, makes her surrender the one conviction that defined her, and asks me to applaud it as growth. I won’t. Building a heroine that carefully and then breaking her to win an argument is about the worst thing a film can do to its lead.
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 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 can’t 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’s 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’s 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’s nothing else to do with it, nobody in the story wants anything the structure hasn’t already determined, and the picture is a crossword that’s 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 had. Ben Nott shot it.
The construction impresses me, and I still felt nothing for it.
Sarah Snook gives the film everything she has, and the script hands her a character who can’t want anything the loop hasn’t already decided for her. I’ll take a sloppy film with somebody in it I worry about over a flawless machine with nobody home. A puzzle this perfect and this empty is the reason it sits down here with a minus ten, and the Fizzle Bomber padding only makes me more impatient with 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 didn’t 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 isn’t 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 real 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 film states its environmental position repeatedly and the structure argues against it. A human defends the Na’vi, 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.
Unobtanium tells me everything about how Cameron treated this story.
Cameron spent over a decade waiting for the technology and apparently never spent an afternoon renaming the substance the whole war is about. I admire the forest, because it’s gorgeous. The story under it is Dances with Wolves in blue paint, and watching it become the highest-grossing film ever made twice over makes me grumpy every time it comes up. I think the industry took the wrong lesson from that money and decided spectacle could stand in for a story.
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, canceled 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’s 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 won’t 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 tone that defined the source, reshot considerably under a second director, with a cast visibly working against material nobody committed to.
Madame Web (2024)
A precognition premise with real 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 considerable portions of the action aren’t 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.
If you’re asking me, Moonfall and Crystal Skull are the two I’d try to save, since both had a premise worth keeping and lost it through carelessness. The ones at the very bottom bother me far more. People with the budgets and reputations to take the harder path made Contact, The Butterfly Effect and Avatar, and each of them reached for the comfortable resolution and let the audience applaud it. That’s the failure I take personally, and it’s why they sit below Battlefield Earth.
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
