For me the first thing that comes to mind is Tales from Earthsea. I don’t think it’s excellent or anything and has plenty of problems but people act like it killed their dog. While it has its problems that have been covered extensively, I think it has a beautiful atmosphere and art.
IMO it would have been better received if it wasn’t advertised as an Earthsea adaptation and was just its own thing.
Here’s the flipside of this phenomenon:
The Little Mermaid (2023)
Absolutely awful, atrocious, lazy cinema. It had a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. When they do the whole under the sea scene, none of the sounds align with anything happening on screen. The plot was garbo. They’ve got a whole song dedicated to the cruelty of eating fish as if fish never eat any fish, and then that’s still not as bad as the fucking “scuttlebutt” song.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills regarding The Fifth Element for this exact same phenomena. I watched it for the first time a few years back and it…just isn’t good? But people absolutely rave about it. I don’t know if I’m missing something or if people are just too blinded by nostalgia glasses. But the CGI doesn’t hold up, I found all the characters annoying, and the plot felt really basic and random. Someone’s probably mailing me anthrax now just for saying this.
Counterpoint, nobody watched it for the CGI. The characters only seem annoying now because they were over the top then and moved the goal posts for that over the course of a generation of being repeatedly aired on broadcast television and cable. The plot seems basic now because so many sci-fi movies afterwards we’re influenced in some way by it. The 5th Element is a fun bombastic sci-fi romp and you’re taking it way to seriously to enjoy it the way everyone that does enjoy it will do. But, you do you. I’m not telling you you’re wrong. Sometimes entertainment endeavors fail us, sometimes we fail to enjoy entertainment on its terms because of our predispositions.
That’s how I feel about 2001 a space Odyssey. I’m sure it was amazing for it’s time, but it’s so dry and boring. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to torture themselves watching it. I know tons of people love it, I just don’t get it.
Yup I watched this for the first time recently as well, it’s in the top 50 films ever made yet I don’t know a single person that actually thinks it’s a good film.
Yeah, I can see how watching The Fifth Element now compared to 1997 would be a pretty bad experience. At the time a lot of the concepts in the film were new and edgy to the wider audience, but now that we’ve got the internet we see way more obscene stuff on the daily.
It’s kind of like how the Rocky Horror Picture Show was a musical about being deathly afraid of satanist transvestites in 1973, but nowadays it plays off as more of a parody.
It was pretty uniformly popular in France, but elsewhere it did rather split opinion. Critics were not kind to it then either, but considering it was originally a teenage pet project of Besson’s but later got concept art from Mézières and Moebius explains a lot.
Wait, really? I thought it was pretty universally hated. I wonder if critics gave it good scores for fear of being lumped in with the idiots who were pissed with Ariel being played by a black woman.
The 94% is an “audience score”. The only way I can rationalize it is they used a bot network, but I’ve got no proof. Maybe just a bunch of parents who took their kids rated it highly? 10,000 of them.
Ever considered you weren’t the target demographic?
I bet tons of little kids loved the movie. It became like a frozen to them.
