As reported on Wired.
BY WIRED STAFF
The Battleship That Sunk Itself
Look. It’s not like I was expecting Battleship to be great – no one was really betting the farm on a movie based on a board game being epic or anything – but as a pretty big fan of schlock, I thought it might at least be, you know, fun. Not to mention the one-two-three punch of eye candy served up by Taylor Kitsch, Rihanna, and Alexander Skarsgård showed promise.
Sadly, Battleship turned out to be flatter than an aircraft carrier – chocked full of whack dialogue, lacking in fleshed-out characters and a watered-down plot about alien invasions at sea that was just a face-palm in cinematic form. The shape-shifting alien ships were kind of cool and the big battle scenes were nice and all, but six months after seeing it I can remember very few highlights and I’m pretty sure Battleshipwas battles and ships, and not much else.
Considering the source material, it’s possible Battleship is the best movie that could’ve been made about a strategy game that seems fun once a year when stuck at an elderly relative’s house. But even though I love a big blow-’em-up popcorn flick, Battleship just didn’t float my boat. —Angela Watercutter
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Humorless Hatchet Man
How can a movie with this title be no fun at all?
It sounded good on paper. Producer Tim Burton and talented Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov, who directed the exciting Wanted, would team with clever writer Seth Grahame-Smith to make a rollicking summer movie popcorn entertainment.
If only.
As it turns out, nobody in the the drab Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter says anything interesting, nothing new is revealed about either vampires or the man who ended slavery in America, and the novelty of seeing an iconic President taking an axe to blood-sucking demons wears off by the second act.
The weird thing is, Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis’ historically accurate Lincoln is at times witty, funny, and far more entertaining than the one-note version presented by Benjamin Walker in this unnecessarily somber fantasy. As for the vampires, they dress in 19th century garb but otherwise don’t do much in the way of carnage that can’t be seen every week on True Blood. —Hugh Hart
Flame On: Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
I felt totally burned by Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. After getting a first fiery glimpse of the movie at last summer’s Comic-Con International, I waited impatiently all winter to be blasted by the flames emanating from the possessed biker’s skull.
But while all that fire and bubbling tar still looked great on the big screen, the “making of” bits revealed at Comic-Con turned out to be far more intriguing than the Spirit of Vengeance storyline. Crank directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor nailed the charred look of the Rider — and delivered some awesome chain-whipping, motorcycle-flogging action shots — but failed on almost every other front.
Even Nicolas Cage, who can crank up the crazy with the best of them, seemed strangely subdued in this slow-moving film that was ultimately about as exciting as firing up a can of Sterno. Spirit of Vengeance was still better than the original Ghost Rider, scoring points for the insane look of the Marvel Comics character and the sequel’s darker tone, but not by much. —Lewis Wallace
The Lights Never Came on for Revolution
Set 15 years after a worldwide blackout, Revolution lifted off with a premise that had so much promise that the handsome pilot episode seemed like it could be the start of a beautiful, brainy mythology. But since the series’ September launch, what could have been a thought-provoking thrill ride turned week by week into episodic dollops of cardboard characters, wooden acting, cliché dialogue, boring bad guys and routine action sequences.
Many TV viewers beg to differ. Revolution does well in the ratings. But creatively, it’s a flop. The pilot episode’s haunting vistas picturing a post-technological future America has largely given way to straight-ahead shots of forest and fields.
The cross-bow shooting survivalist Charlie Matheson (Tracy Spiridakos), briefly the show’s driving force, has now become one of many players, and she rarely gets to do much except widen her eyes in fear, run, and ask questions. The swordplay from Charlie’s uncle Miles (Billy Burke) seems rote while Capt. Tom Neville, played by Giancarlo Esposito, get very little to work with. Chemistry between cast members? Nada.
Here’s hoping Revolution, which has been renewed for a full season, starts digging deeper and gets stranger. Prime time can use a show that dramatizes big questions in fresh ways. So far, Revolution is not that show. —Hugh Hart
I Am The Lorax, I Speak for the Thneeds
One of the more egregious hacks of a source text ever committed to pop culture, Illumination Entertainment’s adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ environmental and economic fable The Lorax was heresy on screen but not at the box office, where it domestically chopped down over $200 million.
It’s hard to know where to start, when it comes to how bad Seuss’ activist original got mauled. Perhaps it was how one of the few times the legendary author’s whimsical text made it into the film, a character played by Disney heartthrob Zac Efron, said, “What does that even mean?” and the other, played by pop starlet Taylor Swift reply, “I know, right?” (Shudder.)
Efron and Swift’s love story alone was a mass distraction, as it similarly stomped all over Seuss’ ecological original, which had everything to do with mindless consumption and nothing to do with tween romance.
But the majority of The Lorax‘s sad damage came from the film’s marketing, which hilariously hawked Mazda SUVs, disposable diapers, HP printers — which print on dead trees, for Truffula’s sake! — and other utterly unrelated products from Illumination’s 70 “launch partners.” (Try not to hurl chowing down the pink icing on IHOP’s Truffula Chip Pancakes.)
The fact that The Lorax killed at the box office while mind-wiping environmental dystopias like the must-see Chasing Ice have to struggle for swimming room is worse than an injustice. —Scott Thill
Please Help Me Forget Total Recall
In the future, there will be no uninspired remakes of classic sci-fi films. Movies will be plucked from the brains of inherently creative filmmakers; we will all fly around using jetpacks, and the workweek will be only five hours long (and not because our employers are trying to avoid paying health benefits).
Yeah, right.
Unfortunately, soulless rehashes like 2012’s Total Recall look like a permanent part of the dreary dystopia known as Hollywood. Sleek-looking yet lifeless aside from a few flashy scenes, Len Wiseman’s retread pales in comparison to Paul Verhoeven’s energetic original from two decades ago. Most of the memories I have of this year’s model are simply dull and depressing — even the three-breasted hookerwas a bore this time around. —Lewis Wallace
Money Pit John Carter
Studio executives usually get pegged as the villains when they second-guess a filmmaker’s creative vision, but in the case of Walt Disney Pictures’ costly sci-fi flop John Carter, a little blowback from studio suits might have been useful.
Then again, former Disney boss Rich Ross, who left the company a few weeks after John Carterbombed, had reason to remain hands off. John Carter writer-director Andrew Stanton includes Wall*Eand Toy Story among his credits. Further box office insurance: the movie was being overseen by Pixar, famous for its freakishly stellar track record since producing Toy Story in 1995.
Who would know better than Stanton / Pixar about what it takes to make a crowd-pleasing smash? ButJohn Carter, shot for a reported $250 million, failed to connect with audiences. Scenarios that probably felt original when Carter creator Edgar Rice Burroughs fantasized about Mars in the 1940’s had now been seen hundreds of times on the big screen.
Critics hammered the movie for slow pacing and overly familiar story points despite an army of technically impressive CGI creatures. Fair warning to animation auteurs: live-action’s not as easy as it looks. —Hugh Hart
Before Watchmen Was Better the First Time
Watchmen, writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons’s epochal ’80s deconstruction of superheroes, power and perversion greatly helped sequence the genes of our current comics-based takeover of pop culture. Its towering influence was so prodigious that even director Zack Snyder’s (mostly) faithful 2009 film adaptation (mostly) got the gas face from comics geeks, and did nothing to narrow the wideningdissension between DC Comics and Moore.
That volcanic beef added extratextual intrigue to DC Comics’ decision to go ahead and rebootWatchmen‘s legend without Moore’s approval this year as the sprawling Before Watchmen miniseries. But despite a thumbs-up (but no participation) from Gibbons, and a pretty stable writer and artist roster spearheaded by Ozymandias artist Jae Lee, Before Watchmen stalled right out of the gate.
From a Minutemen opener that aped Moore’s style while metafictionally asserting “this is terrible” to laughable character arcs for The Comedian (he didn’t take JFK’s assassination well) and rerun explorations into Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach’s already well-established backstories and psyches,Before Watchmen drove us somewhere we’ve already been before in a more convincing hellride. In the end, the whole thing was a better vehicle for controversy and perhaps even sales (although we won’t know until 2012 is up) than comics ambition. A missed opportunity all around. —Scott Thill
What’s Bad for Mitt Romney Is Good for the Internet
In the annals of history, Mitt Romney should be known as the Face the Launched a Thousand Reblogs.
As a presidential candidate Romney always looked so polished and put-together (I swear that hair nevermoved), but in the gladiator pits known as the presidential debates he seemed totally unable to open his mouth without sticking his foot in it. From his comment about “binders full of women” to his slight against Big Bird in saying he’d defund PBS, Romney just seemed to say all the wrong things (even if they were accurate to his policy positions). And then there was that time he got fact-checked live by moderator Candy Crowley.
But what Romney giveth, the internet taketh and turn into memes galore. Tumblrs exploded overnight,Twitter parody accounts showed up in a matter of minutes, and nerds everywhere had a field day – turning Romney’s #Fail into the web’s #Win. — Angela Watercutter
What about you? How about you? What were your favorite — or rather, least favorite — flops of 2012?