It could be an album, movie, tv show, whatever.
I know I will get hate for this… Breaking Bad. Everyone I know was hyping it up as the best series ever and how much of a complete bad ass Walter turns into - “it starts slow, but give it a chance and it gets so good”. It really set my expectation for what the show would be to something… else entirely I guess? I watched the entire series thinking I was still in the “give it a chance” phase and any episode now it will get proper good and I’ll stop hating Walter. Then the end happened and I was left so confused.
For the record I loved Better Call Saul. And I think it’s possible that in an alternate timeline where someone just told me “you should watch it, it’s decent”, I’d might have really liked it. But it was built up so much, and Walter was built up to be such a “cool bad-ass”, which he basically never is, that it just ruined it for me.
I’m with you on it. And you can’t even have an honest discussion about Breaking Bad with anyone because if you say you didn’t like it you’re just dismissed out of hand.
The biggest fault was walt being built up to be a good guy. He’s the main character, but he’s definitely not a “good guy”. That’s kinda the whole point of the show. Most people who walk away thinking walt was a badass have a relatively immature take on the story.
Something I never hear people talk about with BB is how it hit differently when it was first being broadcast, than when it hit streaming.
The original show spooled out slowly, an episode a week, and then nearly a year before the next season, then they broke the final season in half, and dragged that way out. So between episodes and seasons, you remember the excitement, and you apply that to Walter, and sort of forget all the atrocities he’s committing. He’s just a cool anti-hero.
But when you binge it on streaming, your shock at his behavior doesn’t dissipate, it accumulates, and by the end, he’s just a bad guy who got a lot of people killed, and deserves his fate.
I watched it during its initial run, then binged it, and I can’t think of any other show that had such a different dynamic between the two.
I didn’t finish the show but I got the idea pretty early on; he’s like Captain Ahab, right? Not a good man, at least not anymore - a tragic character.
That’s a pretty good analogy.
Yeah, it’s very obvious from the start that he’s a mediocre person. Saying he becomes a badass is false advertising
I was also disappointed in the series not because it wasn’t good, but because people overhyped it. I’ve learnt my lesson to never listen to people’s hype for series I am interested in watching.
The first MCU Doctor Strange movie. To be fair, I collected the comics when I was a kid, so I had high expectations. I was bound to be disappointed. I saw it on Election Day in 2016, so an all-around shitty day.
The Korean Netflix adaptation of one of my favourite Japanese books called 終末のフール (shūmatsu no fūrū, roughly ‘translate to fools in the end of times’). The book was about a collection of stories told from the perspectives of different residents of an apartment building in a world that’s come to accept the fact that a planetoid is going to destroy the Earth in a few years. Some struggle to decide whether to have a child or not. Some question whether there’s even a point going to school. Everyone has hard decisions to make but they’re all oddly cool with the fact that their time on Earth is limited. They felt enlightened to me because I think most of us spend our days ignoring the finiteness of our lives.
On the other hand, the K-drama was a generic apocalypse survival show. Everyone just screaming and yelling. At least, that’s how it started off as and I lost interest immediately. Even the English title was stupid—Goodbye Earth. Ugh.
Dr Who after Peter Capaldi left.
The plots went to crap. The retconning destroyed decades of canon. I’ve nothing against the actors involved but the writers should be taken out and beaten.
I keep trying to give it a chance and don’t understand what the fuck happened, but I feel so bad for Jodi Whitaker and Ncuti Gatwa. The writing is so awful it’s like they don’t even get to play the same part.
The DnD movie. It’s just Marvel slop with a couple weak jokes/references.
Hard disagree from my end
I don’t disagree that it was using James Gunn’s formula for Guardians of the Galaxy, but I don’t see that as a downside.
Every TTRPG devolves into silly, campy jokes. From the trailers, the movie was setting itself up to be just that and lived up to it.
And this is coming from someone who’s moved on from D&D for other games years ago and wants to see WotC fall
Lost never delivered on its initial promise of cool science fiction mystery. It became increasing clear as the seasons went on that the writers had no fucking clue where they were going with any of this stuff and just gave up and everyone-was-dead-all-along was the only way out even though they promised early on that wasn’t the case. Fuck that show and Abrams in particular.
I felt utterly betrayed that they never explained the smoke monster!!!
I think this aimlessness is more common than people realize.
For instance, dare I say it: Half-Life. The games were made with questions never meant to be answered, and even the supposed “concluding episodes” have kind of landed with a thud. Even the release of Portal with Episode 2, tying Aperture Science into the world, didn’t end up making much sense or having direct effect on anything.
The last Divergent book. I want to like the Divergent series more. The authour was inspired by a lot of things I like. But I think she wrote the first two books without a thought-out plan for the third. They leave the city and you expect there to be some big purpose for divergents in the outside world and then we just get a lot of nothing. We get an explanation for the factions that make them make even less sense than before.
Her newer books are better.
FDR American Badass.
It’s a B-movie starring Barry Bostwick as Franklin D. Roosevelt, fighting against Nazi werewolves with a heavily weaponized wheelchair.
The trailer was hilarious. And then I actually watched it with a few friends for one of our monthly film nights.
You know when someone tries way too hard to be edgy and vulgar and it goes from funny to downright uncomfortable? This was like the film equivalent of that. Some scenes genuinely drag on way too long because Bostwick needs to crack another half-a-dozen sex jokes. He genuinely comes across as lecherous, creepy and giving me Chevy Chase vibes (not in a good way.)
We made it about 30 minutes through the film until we had to switch it off because it was just so bad. And I genuinely had to apologize to everyone for even nominating this movie.
You quit too early! It totally redeemed itself by the end!
Just kidding, I’ve never even heard of it, but your review of it made me want to check it out right away. It’s sounds like my kind of movie.
I, Robot.
I’m a huge Asimov fan, and pretty much the only thing it shared with the story is the name and that robots exist.
pretty much the only thing it shared with the story is the name and that robots exist
Same with the Foundation show. Could probably have been a nice science fiction show with any other name and with different character names, but for some reason (probably marketing?) they just had to ruin it for Asimov fans.
Nitpicking a bit, though, I Robot (the boo) isn’t a story, it’s an anthology of short stories in which Asimov plays with the three laws, mostly to torture Powell and Donovan in entertaining ways (I’d kill for a good Powell and Donovan miniseries!) or to show how smart and unemotional Susan Calvin was, so it’s hard to see how it could be adapted except as an anthology series.
Same with Foundation, really, though at least that one has an overall storyline. Possibly even more difficult to adapt, though, because other than Sheldon’s hologram once an episode and possibly Eto Demerzel / R. Daneel Olivaw if you’re being excessive liberal with the adaptation there’s no characters to get attached to… (anthology series with no persistent characters have worked occasionally, though, so maybe just do that).
I watched 2 episodes of the foundation and was so frustrated on how completely different it was that I just can’t watch more. I also get mad when I think of it. Ugh…
Same. It’s doubly disappointing because there’s clearly material for an interesting science fiction show in there (what they did with the Cleon clones would have been quite interesting in another series), but it’s all ruined by the completely wrong Foundation references.
They managed to ruin what could have been a great adaptation of a great classic and what could have been an interesting original series at the same time, the bastards.
Ah, it’s been a hot minute since I read through all of his works, I the story/anthology backwards.
I haven’t watched Foundation yet, but I’ve said for years that a live adaptation would be almost impossible to pull off.
But an anthology series for I, Robot would have been amazing.
Every Resident Evil movie.
You know whats funny? I was way too old before I realized that the movies had anything to do with the games.
2001; A Space Odyssey
I generally like older, slower paced movies. The Bridge over the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Guns of Navarone are all great movies, despite them being very dated in some regards. With that in mind, I decided to give the movie a try, it being a very famous classic and all. Despite that, my expectations weren’t unrealistically high, but the movie still fell very short.
So, it consists of four chapters/acts, basically. The first one (with the monkeys) was very “meh” and could have been shorter, but I didn’t mind it too much because, again, old movie. The second act on the moon was better, but honestly was “OK” in my books. The third act, now that was really good in my opinion. I though; “looks like the story is really taking off now!” And then came act 4…
I thought that, while the beginning wasn’t great, it was still perfectly salvagable if the ending was decent. Here is where it fell really short, in my opinion. It is, in essence, just a light show with music. Now sure, I bet that for the time that was all very advanced, so I want to give them credit. But it didn’t need to last for 15 fucking minutes! Even for that time, that is extremely long. I found myself starting to skip ahead to see if anything else was going to happen. And it did, I guess. Wasn’t exactly blown away though.
Now what I think they were trying to achieve was what we now typically describe as eldritch horror, to see something we simply cannot fathom. And I think they did that very well with the tools that they had. But it was just way too long, and that thoroughly put the nail in the coffin for me.
I might be in the minority, but I enjoy every minute of that movie. Yea, it’s masturbatory pleasure, but uuh… Yea I’ll take it.
I’ve always felt the structure and pacing of 2002 to be musical, literally a symphony in four movements. The classical music soundtrack really sells that concept.
The light show at the the end has to be taken in context. It was 1968, the peak of the hippie movement, and one of the most explosively creative moments in popular art in history, partially fueled by hallucinogenics like weed, but also LSD, which was making it’s way across the country. It was already widely available in California, where it was being distributed by associates of the Grateful Dead in San Francisco.
In LA, Kubrick would have been quite familiar with the trend, everyone was, it was being talked about in the media constantly. Would it be that surprising if Kubrick tried what everyone was talking about, and was as blown away as everyone always is, and had to reference it in his movie?
Light shows of various kinds were becoming a standard addition to concerts, using colors, lasers, projections, blobs of colored fluids, etc. Kubrick knew that people would be coming into this movie to trip, and he wanted to give them a big light show to entertain them. If they dropped their tab at the beginning of the movie, they’d probably be reaching a nice peak right around when the light show started, or at least tripping enough to enjoy it.
I’ve always figured that was the reason. If it was any other era, I would doubt it, but this was made in California in 1968, when EVERYTHING was about drugs or the Vietnam War, and this wasn’t about the war.
That would make some sense, yeah. Still, if you are sober and watching something that is considered a classic, it falls short. Either way, it is some nice historical context, so thank you for sharing!
It’s weird they spent so much time on act 1 since it was a single chapter in the book. Act 4 was multiple chapters of the book (and just as terrible as the movie).
Act 3 is iconic and just plain good, but act 4 just ruins the entire story for me
I love the 2001 book (and its sequels) but the movie is outright boring, technically amazing for its time, but its so slow and borders on masturbatory in its execution
OK, I thought I was missing something, but cause I’ve tried to watch it so many times and its just blah
2001; A Space Odyssey
And then came act 4…
I completely agree. You also never hear anyone talk about the fourth act. It’s basically a weird post-credits scene.
I read the novelization by Arthur C. Clark and it made way more sense than the movie. I never understood why HAL went crazy, but the book explains that it was given orders to be honest with the crew, but not reveal the purpose of the mission. HAL naturally concluded that he couldn’t lie to a dead crew.
65 was such a missed opportunity. It’s about a guy who crash lands on Earth right before the asteroid that kills the dinosaurs. Spoiler alert: he escapes just in time to avoid the asteroid. It’s just a generic survival movie with generic monsters. Waste of a premise. It should have shown the beautiful side of the dinosaur world and made us sad when they died
Star Citizen. I’m less disappointed in the tech demo than how Chris Roberts has handled the business end of it.
I grew up on Wing Commander, Privateer, Starlancer, and Freelancer. I still have all those games on physical media with original boxes. And the Wing Commander CIC is the one website I still visit daily since 1997-ish. So when Roberts pitched a new space game back around 2012 I was thrilled. Well, we all know how that turned out. I’ve given up waiting for any release of Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
Freelancer.
I know everyone hates games publishers but this was a perfect example of a publisher untangling a mess. Microsoft bought Roberts’ company and immediately dialed back the unworkable ambition, put Roberts in a consulting role where he didn’t have a final say over anything, and actually got the game finished and released.
Star Citizen is what happens when the same guy who made such an intractable mess of development discovers an infinite money glitch as long as he never stops developing and never releases a full game.
Season 3 of Forever Knight. An embarrassing, cartoonish end to a good show with a great premise.
Moving away from physical buttons and physical media. I don’t mind touchscreens and I do enjoy downloading, but there’s nothing more satisfying than a good click of a button and actually holding something in your hand that you purchased.
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