3

Flaws In Beloved Niche Genre Movies

I'm a huge fan of monster movies. There are few things I love more than watching an atomic abomination slither through a major metropolis. And aside from the 1998 Godzilla misfire and Peter Jackson's cool but unwieldy King Kong remake, we didn't get a lot of those for a bit. So when Pacific Rim came out guns a-blazing with its "It's gonna be like your old action figure battles, BUT IN A MOVIE" attitude, I was ready to go door to door telling people the good news about Guillermo del Toro.

So I say this as a fan: Pacific Rim ain't that good, especially when you compare it to stuff like Chronos and Blade II and The Shape Of Water. (one of those got nominated for 13 Academy Awards -- I'll let you guess which.) The film has sloppy and/or ridiculous character work, inconsistent acting, and yes, underwhelming monster/robot combat. Sure, they fight a bunch, but there's never any tension or any sense that these monsters/robots are actually massive. You can knock the 2014 Godzilla all you want for having a cast that was mostly made out of stale bread, but at least the monsters in there felt majestic and powerful. Pacific Rim never managed to create anything with the scale and power of the first time we see Godzilla reveal his fire breath attack:

Warner Bros. Pictures"Dude, breath mint."

Not that I said any of this at the time. I was willing to rationalize away every dumb thing in the film. I was going on this misguided notion that if we just vote with our dollars, then more movies like this will get made, and maybe those will be good. But the message we wind up sending is instead "These nerds will watch any goddamned thing as long as it's in their favorite genre! It's like free money!"

Tell me this isn't exactly what happened with The Walking Dead. After the amazing first episode, we jumped over each other trying to convince ourselves that the rest of Season 1 was still good. "A zombie thing was thoughtful for 90 minutes? That doesn't happen much. We better latch onto this one, because otherwise the genre is just direct-to-video garbage."

We didn't want to go with The Walking Dead or Pacific Rim to the prom, but we got scared that no one else would ask us. And here we are, eight seasons of Walking Dead later, thumbing through our high school yearbooks, wondering where it all went wrong.

2

Bad Child Actors

Children aren't very good at much. And that's cool. If your hand/eye coordination can barely handle shoe-tying, I don't expect you to be able to crack a bank vault; I just need you to watch out for the cops. But that doesn't mean we can't point out when their acting ruins otherwise good movies. Even the kids in the audience hate this. They want to pretend they're the cool grownups in the story, not the lame eight-year-old tagging along.

After Jurassic Park got passable performances from Lex and Tim, it was apparently decided that every film in the franchise needs some terrified kids to up the stakes. It never works. Ian Malcolm's daughter in The Lost World isn't given much to do but whine and then dropkick a velociraptor. The kid in Jurassic Park 3 is pretty forgettable, but it's in Jurassic World that the desperate need to find a storytelling device other than "Put Kids In Danger" becomes very apparent. Does Universal think that we won't make fun of the actors just because they are children? Because we fucking will.

Our standards for what makes a good piece of cinema shouldn't go down because some mop-topped kid says his lines as if the slightest hint of emotion will cause the hostage-takers to murder his parents. If they ruin a movie, we should say that they ruined the movie. Maybe then studios would learn that the Act 2 in a Jurassic Park flick doesn't absolutely have to include a third-grader screaming at CGI.

And when the story is entirely about kids, the whole franchise will sink or swim on the filmmakers' ability to coax good performances out of them. There are a few reasons the Harry Potter films got better as they went along, but the biggest one is that the kids just got better at their jobs. Rupert Grint and Emma Watson are OK from the start, but Daniel Radcliffe spends the first four hours of that franchise with a blank stare. None of the Harry Potter flicks are unwatchable, but it's fine to say, "This would've been a better movie if Harry didn't constantly act like he was being slowly lobotomized between takes."

1

Bad Decisions Made In The Name Of Staying True To A Comic

If you're a comic book fan, it's nice to know that the makers of superhero movies are at least aware of the source material, and that they're not just a group of old Hollywood executives sitting around a table saying "OK, so Hulk. Is that, like, a body spray?" And we currently seem to be living in the Golden Age of, if not Superhero Movies, then Directors Admitting That They At Least Like Superhero Movies. We've come a long way from Tim Burton revealing that comic books burn a cross into his flesh every time he comes within ten feet of one.