What successful or popular movie that many loved you just HATE?
Rules: explain why
Ready player one.
That has to be one of the cringiest movies I've seen, is tries so hard, too hard with it's "WE LOVE YOU NERD, YOU'RE SO COOL FOR PLAYING GAMES AND GETTING THIS 80S REFERENCE" message and the whole "corporation bad, the people good" narrative seems written for toddlers... The fan service feels cheap and adds nothing to the story.
Finally, they trying to make the people believe that very attractive girl with a barely visible red tint spot on her face is "ugly"... Like wtf?
Yet it received decent reviews plus being one of the most successful movies of that year.
Oh I have another one. Thor Ragnarok. People loved it because they liked the Thor character and found his earlier films too dull or something, but I loved that they were unapologetically serious about themselves, using comedy in ways that felt very authentic to the characters.
But Ragnarok? It came out later the same year as this excellent essay about bathos, and it was dripping in it. I was hyper tuned to the problem with bathos, and it leaned even harder into that took than nearly any other MCU film did.
What sucks so much is that it had the bones of a really good dramatic story. The Bruce Banner/Hulk storyline had built up over multiple previous films, and come the climax of this film it's established that he's in Bruce form now and has enough control to stay that way, but if he transforms into Hulk it'll be a big deal and he may never be able to be himself again. So they arrive in Asgard at the climax of the film and it's pretty urgent. In a dramatic moment you can see him steel himself to make the sacrifice; he jumps out of their aircraft onto the rainbow bridge, clearly intending to transform into Hulk to fight Fenris.
…and he splats. Faceplants on the bridge. Still in human form. It's played for laughs. The ultimate conclusion of Hulk's story in this movie and probably the most important moment of his arc over the entire MCU to this point, and it's undercut by a joke. Not even a very funny one. A slapstick joke that would make Charlie Chaplin cringe.
And it means nothing, because the very next shit, he's transformed anyway and throwing Fenris around like a doll.
Not to mention it undermines the verisimilitude of the movie. I can suspend my disbelief in these movies pretty hard, but Bruce Banner, in human form, is meant to be painfully average, physically speaking. He should have died from that fall, given he didn't transform. That's certainly not the worst thing about the moment, but it is was the sprinkling of salt on top of the wound that just made it that little bit worse.
That moment was the worst bit, but the film as a whole was full of lazy humour and bathos, and it was really just the worst example of what was wrong with a lot of MCU movies at the time. I was shocked to hear so few people came away disliking it in the same way I did.
I also liked the slightly more serious Thor in the former movies, even though the second one was shit and I have watched it twice and don't remember anything from it....
Ragnarok was OK, good even but it was the first step into making Thor a comedic joke character that occasionally does hero stuff. I could live with Ragnarok, but Love and Thunder showed that they completely lost it and don't get what made Thor worth watching. There was some funny jokes in that movie, but apart from that the entire thing feels like a parody of Thor to me. It's all turned too unserious, which removes any weight from the moments in the movie. Feels like the IQ of everyone just keeps dropping every movie at this point.
On a vaguely similar note, God of War: Ragnarok was hot garbage that had shit gameplay and worse plot and was a Marvel wannabe (also I detest marvel shit)
The only God of War games I've played are the first two, on PS2, which is the only console I've ever had (well, apart from the Wii, which barely counts).
100% agree with you. There's a lot of stinker Marvel movies but Ragnarok is really where they started sucking pretty consistently (with a few exceptions like GOTG 3). I fucking hated that movie almost from the start and felt like I was taking crazy pills afterwards when I saw people's opinions on it. Fortunately I had a couple other dudes at work who agreed with me that I could vent to. Then the last Thor movie came out and everyone was saying the same shit about that one that I was saying about Ragnarok and I'm just confused.
Then the last Thor movie came out and everyone was saying the same shit about that one that I was saying about Ragnarok and I’m just confused
OMG YES. I just don't understand it. I didn't love the 4th Thor movie, but it seemed to me like it had all the same problems that Ragnarok did. If anything, I was happy that it walked back the Jane Foster erasure that Ragnarok had committed. But everyone thought it was terrible even though it did most of the same stuff as the movie they all loved.
Sorry, and you're entitled to enjoy what you enjoy, but it's just not good. Fundamentally undermining your own characters within your own story, let alone undermining arcs that have built up over multiple movies before you, at the climax of those characters' arcs, does not a good movie make.