Alita: Battle Angel. The setting is fascinating (Earth is wrecked due to one elite faction taking an opportunity to destroy the other elite factions, but enough time has passed that the world has mostly recovered but is still controlled by the 1 elite faction), but the plot (winning a sportsball game) is abysmally mundane.
Daybreakers
Jupiter Ascending
The Matrix: Resurrections
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
Or really any manga/comic adaptation where they strip all the interesting stuff to make a paint by numbers plot. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen probably qualifies too
Agreed on Valerian. It wasn't bad, but the world around it looked more interesting than the plot it had. Jupiter Ascending had some potential as well, but the plot just felt disjointed and chaotic.
Agreed on both parts.
I always thought Jupiter Ascending would have made a far better book than movie.
But I love dogs!
Have I got a job for you US FBI!
I never saw it but John Carter is probably in that camp too
John Carter pulled off the story and setting being very well intertwined.
The protagonist was the generic white savior type, but all of the world building came through the supporting cast.
In Time.
Brilliant critique of capitalism, the commodification of time, pay to live dynamics and overall obsession with living forever.
And the plot? They just gonna do a bunch of robberies to fix the system.
Oh, nice catch! I remember it, a wonderful idea and the whole thing, yet I remember the movie being too shallow and not up to my expectations.
I remember watching that and really liking it. I rewatched it relatively recently and it seemed pretty dull.
The idea is great though.
The OG Bladerunner. The plot is basically guy hunting replicant, but the setting is really driving a lot of the interest.
Avatar (the James Cameron one)
Star Wars.
Idiocracy.
It's painfully funny (and gets more so every year) but the logistics of that world are mind blowing to think about. The adaptations to serve a society that dumb... Like, how do they still have electricity? Or manage to switch the irrigation from Brawndo to toilet water?
Great movie but when you think about how a world like that might survive, it gets really fun.
Bright for sure. I love the Shadow Run setting but oof.
Bright had me questioning everything about the setting to the point that I didn't care about the answers and really disliked the movie in the end.
BUT... I had those questions, and not everyone disliked it, so you have a decent point.
(So, we have elves and orcs, the elves run Hollywood and the orcs have gangs... but we still had WWII and slavery, so even other species actually existing we were still wildly racist on skin color? That deserved a lot more attention, but felt so lazy to me that I decided the justifications weren't likely to be interesting.)
Mortal Engines.
I just wanted a lore dump of that universe. It's so interesting. European cities that have turned into mobile machines and the bigger ones attack and gobble up the smaller cities for resources.
Downsizing.
Tron: Ares
Hopefully they learn that humans doing cool computer things in computer is always going to be cooler than computer doing cool computer things in human
Also Tron: Legacy to a lesser extent, but that story was just corny and oddly paced, while doing a solid job of respecting the spirit of the original
Also Tron: Legacy to a lesser extent, but that story was just corny and oddly paced, while doing a solid job of respecting the spirit of the original
I don't know if I agree with that. The hero of the original was turned into a brainwashed lackey of the sequel's villain, and had something like two lines in the whole movie.
Remember, I’m just talking Plot v setting, i consider Legacy more respectful of the setting of the computer world
Also, TRON had how many lines in the original? 😂 (I consider TRON having almost no agency in Legacy to be a funny nod to the original)
And also Ares omitted every character in the first two films except for Flynn, so shrugs
Anyway, I’m not trying to influence your enjoyment of any piece of media in the franchise,
I hope you have a nice day and ample opportunity in life to revel in the media you enjoy
Hackers
I don't really remember what happens in the movie but i loved the aesthetic. HACK THE PLANET!
He's in the system!
The City of Lost Children.
It drops you into a world with no explanation and trusts you to keep up.
The story is fascinating enough, but at the end you never really get many answers about the setting and why things are the way they are.
The whole story is just a thing that happens in that world.
It's kind of like a sci-fi fairytale.
It's set in Columbus, Indiana, a city known for its architecture. The basic plot of the film revolves the son of an architect and a young local woman spending time together in and around all the famous buildings, gardens and museums as they get to know each other and discuss the problems of their lives. It's a very small scale story about the everyday lives of two people, so the architectural setting really stands out and dominates the film - particularly due to the beautiful cinematography which showcases it superbly. I think that was the point, too, as you'd expect from a film set in an architectural city that is literally named after that same city.
Any recent live action movie by Wes Anderson?
I think the last time I was genuinely engaged with the plot of a WA movie was… maybe The Grand Budapest Hotel, it's been a while. Moonrise Kingdom for sure was an engaging plot
I really enjoyed Asteroid City , but I like that kind of meta storytelling.
Oh I like them, I just think the staging and setting are more interesting than the story lol
The Twilight Saga
The world building is quite good.
But it was all wrapped around the dumbest story.
elysium, most Alien movies
Snowpiercer.
Miss me with the disgust scene over bug farming.
Stupid ass train.
I'm not mad.
Me: uh oh, they are being mysterious about the food source
Also me: ok they are definitely cannibalizing the dead poor people
Movie: reveals they're actually eating bugs
Me: oh... uh... ok? That seems like a practical protein source... Guess they're entomophobic
Exactly! Well said!
Apparently it was originally human waste, but they decided that was too much and edited the bugs over it.
That makes so much more sense!
John Wick. I enjoyed all the movies, but the plots are meh. But the world is one where there's a lot of unanswered questions.
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