By Peter Odeyemi, Junior Reporter
Some films stay with you for a lifetime, with touches of nostalgia from the good production and the lessons we learnt from them; others drop so hard they stick in your memory for all the wrong reasons and make you wonder why you wasted 75 minutes of your life on a flop piece of work. Come with me to analyze the worst movies I've watched. (P.S.: The last paragraph is critical!)
Midsommar: I watched this movie recently because of the hype it's gotten all over TikTok in the past year, and it was absolutely HORRIBLE and totally undeserving of its high level of critical acclaim. It started off strong with a good insight into the main character, Dani, but later it was just a bunch of gruesome scenes and totally random clip-ins that made absolutely no sense at all. I was trying so hard to piece it all together. There was very little explanation of the cult's history and traditions, and also very poor dialogue between the characters. There's also very little ambiguity in people's intentions or motivations, meaning that the entire course of events within the story feels cut and dry from the start. It felt like there were missing scenes, which is the only way I could try to explain the plot holes. For a “horror” movie, this was a huge disappointment in general. A NO from me and a horrible and disappointing watch.
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey: The first mistake was making a kids' movie a horror parody years after its original release; totally uncalled for. Nothing is good. The acting, the writing, the plot, the complete and utter lack of even so much as an ATTEMPT at character development, was a complete mess. Everyone involved should just quit the movie industry. I'm not even gonna talk about the terrible acting, the bad editing and the lazy, boring plot.
Time Cut: Don’t get me started on this one. The most predictable ending ever, underdeveloped characters, and the frail dialogue just cut it out for me. Going back in time, you'd hope for a nostalgic feel to the setting or some subtle references to the time you’re back to - not in this movie, which just made it a discouraging watch. It was more or less like a teenage drama spinoff of “Timeline”. The only 4 deaths in the entire movie are almost off screen deaths, the "chase" scenes are neither tense nor thrilling, the "big reveal" of the killer isn't surprising and it makes no sense at all, the killer's motives for becoming a killer is genuinely one of the stupidest I've ever heard, and the ending left me wishing I could also go back in time to “unwatch” it.
The Dark Tower: This movie had a lot of potential, good casting, and a fairly good idea, but a very poor execution. It felt like filming started before the script and ending were done. For a book-to-movie adaptation, I expected more from the movie. Idris Elba as Roland and Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black were wonderful casting choices, but even the combined star power couldn’t overcome a script that felt like it had commitment issues. And not to mention the bad lighting throughout the movie and the build-up to almost nothing.
Tomorrowland: Despite the hype surrounding this movie, it really fell short of my expectations. They had a fairly good casting, beautiful sets and a good fantasy/sci-fi setup, but the story felt so detached, it lacked the moral educational value of the old Disney stories. The storyline also felt patched-up, almost like they were trying to squeeze in a lot of plotlines into one story, and in return, you get a mess. About an hour into watching the movie, nothing had really happened, and the story plot was still unclear. As a meticulous sci-fi watcher who focuses on storyline, script writing, and cinematography, this was a huge miss by the producers.
Everything Everywhere All at Once: Worst movie I've seen, after Midsommar. It was overwhelming, too much going on at once. It took me three days to finish up this movie because I kept on sleeping off each time I opened up my iPad to watch it. The acting by the main cast was so horrible. It was not even visually appealing, with countless and tiresome cuts all over the place, which just made it increasingly depressing. It's too far-fetched even from an artistic point of view. It was basically a product of the director’s random thoughts, badly edited, with way overstretched scenes and ideas which repeat throughout the film over and over at random intervals.
Spaceman: I'm sorry, I just had to add this one onto the list cause ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!! The film did a good job expressing the emotions and inner thoughts of loneliness and despair of our main character, but how do you flop a good movie one hour in? Let's go ahead and ask the producers of this movie. Really just a bunch of slow motion, slow dialogue, monotone deliveries. The English-speaking Alien spider, too?? Wasn’t there any other possible design to give it? At some point, I was really hoping he was hallucinating the entire thing, because what other explanation could possibly explain the mess that was on my screen?
The list goes on and on. I’m writing this in hopes that the directors of these movies read it and have a rethink on their “creative” skills for future movies they have in the works, so they don’t make the same mistakes. Perhaps take some lessons from Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Love and Light.