Works where you were surprised to learn you were in the minority of viewers

[Ionathus]

I see no way this topic could go pear-shaped...

A few months ago, we watched Argyle on a spur-of-the-moment excursion during a vacation. We had seen scattered ads for it but knew nothing else going in. We enjoyed it, thought it was campy and charming nonsense fun. I didn't think further of it until weeks later, when I found out it apparently has a reputation as a critically-panned flop. I had a pretty distinct moment of thinking "huh." Fairly neutrally, because while I enjoyed the movie, I wasn't brimming with passion to defend it against its critics. The flaws were real, they just didn't bother me until others pointed them out.

I'd love to hear other peoples' "huh." moments! Specifically, creative works that either landed for you or didn't when you experienced them in a vacuum, but then when you encountered the established "public opinion" of them, you realized that you were in the significant minority of viewer opinion.

My goal isn't to start a debate thread (I know, I know, that's adorable of me to say ) -- my ideal would be for people to share their experiences, and what made them enjoy/dislike a work, and then what was surprising to you about what other people thought about it, without actually debating which perspective is "right." Discussion is still encouraged of course! I just really like the idea of dissecting what works for some people and not others -- and that weird sensation of realizing other people had a radically different viewing experience than you did.

[Mordar]

Does it count if I say I thought every Daenerys chapter in the books was a painful slog that brought nothing to the work, and eye-rolled at the on-screen portrayal (and not because of Emilia Clarke!).

She is apparently hugely popular and I would rank her maybe 5th most interesting Queen...at best. Stupid Mary Sue characters.

- M

[Ionathus]

Does it count if I say I thought every Daenerys chapter in the books was a painful slog that brought nothing to the work, and eye-rolled at the on-screen portrayal (and not because of Emilia Clarke!).

She is apparently hugely popular and I would rank her maybe 5th most interesting Queen...at best. Stupid Mary Sue characters.

- M

I think that counts! Both negative and positive examples are welcome. I've never read or seen ASoIaF but my impression was that Daenerys is quite popular. Also she gets dragons apparently, so that would logically amplify her coolness factor for a lot of people.

[Darth Credence]

I could spend the next year writing responses to this, but I will attempt to not do so.

Something I liked that others didn't, Solo. To this day, I do not understand why people don't like it. It was Han and Chewie: A Love Story, and that was exactly what I wanted out of that movie. Complaints about him taking the name Solo and the like just don't make sense to me - I didn't care about it, but if that annoyed a person, it was about five seconds of time in the movie. Compared to the speeder chase, the Kessel run, Lando, the heist, and Han and Chewie, I can't understand how people didn't just think, 'Hmm, that was awkward, wonder why they did that - oh, cool, we've got a land battle going on, this is fun!'

From the opposite direction, The Quiet Place. That movie was so incredibly boring and ultimately pointless. The only good thing about that movie was that it reminded me of the existence of Mars Attacks! and I went and watched that.

[Buufreak]

Let me paint a scene. It is summer. I'm in my late teens. The latest academy award bait is all that I've heard friends and news talk about, and it manages it's way onto network television. I'm fairly excited because all the great things I've heard. It has actors in it that I tend to enjoy just on principle.

So I sat and watched, as they stretched it for over 4 hours due to ads galore, No Country for Old Men. To this day, I want my money back that I didn't spend. I want my time back. I want the ability to throw a brick at every person who told me it was good.

It was very much not good. It was overly drawn out. It was boring. There was no climax. It simply drifted off with a dude stealing a bike, and Tommy Lee Jones waking up and, to my best recollection, explaining to his wife how the whole movie was a dream. Black screen. Roll credits.

There are expletives I want to use aimed at this piece of film, but I'm not allowed to. You can guess, however. And when you do guess, I hope you including insulting the film and it's entire ancestory.

[Ionathus]

Something I liked that others didn't, Solo. To this day, I do not understand why people don't like it. It was Han and Chewie: A Love Story, and that was exactly what I wanted out of that movie. Complaints about him taking the name Solo and the like just don't make sense to me - I didn't care about it, but if that annoyed a person, it was about five seconds of time in the movie. Compared to the speeder chase, the Kessel run, Lando, the heist, and Han and Chewie, I can't understand how people didn't just think, 'Hmm, that was awkward, wonder why they did that - oh, cool, we've got a land battle going on, this is fun!'

I've also never seen Solo! But my impression of public opinion is exactly as you said.

My own experience in this realm, as will surprise nobody who's talked about Star Wars with me, was The Last Jedi. I didn't really get very excited about The Force Awakens -- it felt overly "safe" to me. So when TLJ made a lot of changes, that really got me excited about Star Wars again. I watched it twice in theatres and enjoyed it a lot. I only found out later that it was hated by a huge chunk of fans, and after hearing all their arguments, I can totally understand where they're coming from and my enthusiasm for the film has softened, but it still doesn't make my blood boil like it seems to for others.

It also can't help that a lot of people care very deeply about Star Wars, so anything they perceive as "cheapening" or "insulting" the things they care about is going to amplify that dislike a lot more. Star Wars is the most intense example of this that I've found, for reasons that aren't fully clear to me.

[Murk]

It is very rare nowadays that I watch a movie or read a book without knowing other people's opinions beforehand.
So, sadly, no "huh" moments.

The last time I remember a "huh" moment was with The Mummy (1999). I thought was a barely passable Indiana Jones knock-off, and I assumed that was the general opinion. Only much later did I find out people actually liked it. And general opinion only seems to have improved over the years. Huh.

Edit: Oh, no, actually, a far more recent one: Thor: Love and Thunder.
I disliked Ragnarok, had no intention of watching this one, so I didn't bother looking up reviews.
Then my brother convinced me into the theater anyway, and I actually quite enjoyed myself. I thought it was a vast improvement over Ragnarok.
Reading the reviews afterwards was a "huh" moment for sure.

[Tyndmyr]

A few months ago, we watched Argyle on a spur-of-the-moment excursion during a vacation. We had seen scattered ads for it but knew nothing else going in. We enjoyed it, thought it was campy and charming nonsense fun. I didn't think further of it until weeks later, when I found out it apparently has a reputation as a critically-panned flop. I had a pretty distinct moment of thinking "huh." Fairly neutrally, because while I enjoyed the movie, I wasn't brimming with passion to defend it against its critics. The flaws were real, they just didn't bother me until others pointed them out.

Yeah, fairly similar. It wasn't a terribly realistic film, but I never really expected it to be, so ice skating on oil was just funny. It's basically just another Kingsman movie, but somewhere between the glorious original and the okayish sequel in quality. The horrible, horrible prequel must not be spoken of.

A movie can be enjoyable without being a great film, I think. The reverse is also true. Consider the movie Vanilla Sky. Good movie? Yeah, probably. Well made. A financial success. Critically not hated. Do I want to see it again? No.

It's like food. Sometimes, even if you could have a fancy meal, you just want kraft mac and cheese from the box. I'm not gonna say that this makes this meal a great food, or healthy, or fancy...but sometimes it is exactly what you desire, and that's okay. Something doesn't have to be great in order to get enjoyment from it.

Sometimes there is great enjoyment to be found in movies that are objectively pretty rough. For instance, I saw Mad Heidi a bit ago, and...it was pretty fun for what it was. I can't honestly say that a Swissploitation film is anything other than a slightly weird mashup of half baked ideas and the occasional violent cheese pun, but I felt my ticket money was well spent. Totally wouldn't be shocked if others felt differently.

From the opposite direction, The Quiet Place. That movie was so incredibly boring and ultimately pointless. The only good thing about that movie was that it reminded me of the existence of Mars Attacks! and I went and watched that.

As a setting idea, it's kind of cool. The specifics really get to me, though. If the monsters can be straight up killed via shotgun, they most definitely do not rule the world. How would they take over, say, a warship? Ultimately, they die to bullets, and are not infinitely strong, and are frankly terrible at stealth and easy to bait. They get murdered off really fast if treated realistically.

There are other ways one could make that setting work, though, and get a really, really strong proper horror vibe from it. Say, a sci fi setting in which these things are discovered, and there simply is no military available for a time. Think this film crossed with Chronicles of Riddick.


Oh, Hazbin Hotel is this for me. I had a buddy tell me it was great, watched the first episode, hated it, and...apparently the rest of the world is really into it. I don't know why. The main character doesn't even make sense for the world she's in. The entire show is the example of thinking one is edgy for referencing adult topics, and expecting that to be inherently awesome. Because I watched one episode, which I regret, the entire internet now wants to advertise merch from it at me.

[Zevox]

One that comes to mind for me is the game Shadow of the Colossus. Whenever you see people discuss it online, it's praised up and down as fantastic, sometimes as one of the greatest games ever made. When I finally picked it up and played it, I found it very underwhelming - a few good ideas for a boss fight spread far too thin over 16 of them, with very little else even there to speak of. I simply cannot see in it whatever it is that its fans do.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, I've generally liked post-Endgame Marvel movies. I haven't seen Antman or the Disney+ shows, but I absolutely loved Guardians 3 and would probably say it's my favorite Marvel film, and rate Multiverse of Madness and No Way Home quite highly among the series personally. The rest may not have been their best work ever, but I still largely enjoyed seeing them - Black Widow less so than the rest (I only even went to see that one because some friends invited me), but even it had its moments. Don't understand the doom and gloom people who talk like the whole thing has been terrible since Endgame. I wish it felt like they were building towards something again - the lack of any Avengers movie or much setup for one for so long is quite noticeable - but individual films have remained worth seeing to me.

Oh, back on video games and a more positive note: Marvel's Midnight Suns. It seems to have underperformed, but I absolutely loved it. The combat system is a blast to play, with the card game element making for surprisingly engaging gameplay that's never quite the same twice, even when replaying the same level. The way all of the abilities interact and the kinds of things you're able to pull off with them was just great. And while the story was nothing special, it was perfectly fine, and got in some cool moments at times. The big finale, while a touch long, was a very satisfying capstone fight that forced you to use everything you had quite well to pull through too. It's not flawless - I don't enjoy scouring the grounds for crafting ingredients when you need/want those - but it was a great time, and I'm disappointed it didn't fare better. I'd love to see the sequel it teased at the end.

[gbaji]

Yeah. I never got the hate for Solo either. I enjoyed it. At the end of the day, it's a one shot film, and does exactly what it needed to do (tell the origin bits for Han Solo). It checked every single box it needed to check: His signature pistol? Check. Millenium Falcon? Check. Chewie? Check. Kessel Run? Check. Why he's a smuggler? Check. It had good dialogue and well written characters (and lets face it, the whole "robot rebellion" bit was hillarious). Harrelson's character made sense and fit in. Han's introduction into the criminal world worked and made sense. There were no glaring plot holes (which is a huge plus for me). And they snuck in a few easter eggs and character references/tie-ins along the way. What the heck did people actually expect from the film that they didn't get?

I think that there are three broad groups who rate films.


1. experts/critics. These people are usually insane people who think they know more about art than other people, but are usually complete imbecils whose opinions only seems to actually matter within their own bubble. Unfortunately, they share that bubble with every other expert/critic and have filled the various awards groups with their own crazy members. Which is unfortunately why "award winning show" and "show I want to watch" rarely intersects.

2. fans. Also crazy people. Also convinced that they know better about the subject matter than anyone else. While they don't have the insider pull that the first group has, they can be ridiculously vocal and loud about their opinions and thus influence things (usually in crazy ways). There is also only rare intersections of "what the fans want" and what I consider to be good ideas/stories/whatever.

3. "real people". You know. People who just want a film to tell them a good story with good characters and a good balance of "things" in it (depending on genre of course) and do so in a way that makes sense, doesn't offend them, doesn't preach to them, and has reasonable production value and thought and competance in the production itself.


So sometimes, it's hard to tell which opinion is the "minority" one in the first place. And I really suspect that many times, folks think they are in the minority when they really aren't. You hear everyone on the interwebs telling you "this film sucked!" or "this is the greatest film ever!", odds are those super strong hyperbolic opinions are coming from one of the first two groups, which rarely actually represents a majority of anything. They just happen to have the largest and loudest platforms for their opinions.


I distinctly remember one summer long ago, two "war films" came out. At the time, one of my friends was well into film school and he was raving about one of them. It was directed by some famous director, who had come out of retirement to do the film, and it had hollywood A-listers lined up to be in the film, and it was going to be fantastic, and the work was amazing, etc, etc. So we went with him to a showing of the film. It was "The Thin Red Line". I honestly invite folks to watch this film just to see how bad a film can be made. I could write whole essays on all of the horrible aspects of this film, but I think I can sum it up by simply observing that when the film finally ended (like for real this time, and it's not just another slow fade to black fake out, and there are credits rolling), I actually heard someone a couple rows back say "Oh thank god!".

The other film was "Saving Private Ryan". So yeah... that happened.

[Trixie_One]

No Country for Old Men.

High five. I genuinely despise that film.

You didn't even mention how awful the villain was who I'll never understand why people thought he was so neat and/or cool.

For my own, the UK version of the Office. I remember being trapped at a house party/sleepover that turned into an unending binge of the series from which there was no escape. I drank alot while there to numb the pain but alas acohol can only do so much.

It's more mixed in terms of how much they're loved but also the works of Kevin Smith. He made one good film in Clerks and that's very much it. I'm sure that Dogma is only good if this is the very first time if you've been exposed to the ideas and if not it comes off as a crappy sub-par Vertigo comic.

Worst of all though is Chasing Amy which might be one of the very few films that I hate more than No Country. If I could reach through a screen and throttle someone he'd never have survived when he popped up to explain the plot and explain how it related to his own life.

[Mordar]

It's more mixed in terms of how much they're loved but also the works of Kevin Smith. He made one good film in Clerks and that's very much it. I'm sure that Dogma is only good if this is the very first time if you've been exposed to the ideas and if not it comes off as a crappy sub-par Vertigo comic.

Worst of all though is Chasing Amy which might be one of the very few films that I hate more than No Country. If I could reach through a screen and throttle someone he'd never have survived when he popped up to explain the plot and explain how it related to his own life.

Clerks was overrated. Jersey Girl is his best movie. Mallrats next, but well down the line. Fight me.

- M

[Trixie_One]

Clerks was overrated. Jersey Girl is his best movie. Mallrats next, but well down the line. Fight me.

Not seen Jersey Girl, but Mallrats was telling crap jokes about comics the movie that 80s/90s geeky kids only liked cause they were the exact same crap jokes they made with their friends.

Last Kevin Smith film I saw was Zack and Miri where I was grumbling loud enough about how much it sucked in every concievable way that by mutual agreement it was turned off after 15 minutes. Only time that's ever happened when I've been in a group watching something by the way. On the rare other occasions where I've really not been on board like the Office I'd either been over ruled or just suffered in silence.

Also dang looked up Jersey Girl on letterboxd out of interest, and wow, this sentence from one of the popular reviews:

Poor guy - he put his heart on a slab for the world to see, and the world decided that his heart was corny and hollow. No wonder he's making Clerks III now.

I can't stand Kevin Smith, and even I think that's decidedly brutal.

[Ionathus]

It is very rare nowadays that I watch a movie or read a book without knowing other people's opinions beforehand.
So, sadly, no "huh" moments.

I've been lucky to mostly experience the opposite. Part of this is because I've trained my friends over many years to not give me any spoilers or even many vibes about something they think I'd like to see, because they know I like experiencing most works totally blind. But also probably because I'm not plugged into a lot of "standard" advertising venues that would fill me in.

The last time I remember a "huh" moment was with The Mummy (1999). I thought was a barely passable Indiana Jones knock-off, and I assumed that was the general opinion. Only much later did I find out people actually liked it. And general opinion only seems to have improved over the years. Huh.

Oh, it's absolutely a fairly cheap Indiana Jones knockoff, and I feel like even people at the time (at least the adults -- I was a dumb kid ) knew it. But charm can do wonders for an otherwise mediocre movie. If the cast is good, or there are decent jokes, or if it even feels like the people involved had fun making it, that can really amplify the good aspects and make me overlook lazy writing or crummy special effects.

Edit: Oh, no, actually, a far more recent one: Thor: Love and Thunder.
I disliked Ragnarok, had no intention of watching this one, so I didn't bother looking up reviews.
Then my brother convinced me into the theater anyway, and I actually quite enjoyed myself. I thought it was a vast improvement over Ragnarok.
Reading the reviews afterwards was a "huh" moment for sure.

Interesting, I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone disliking Ragnarok but liking Love & Thunder! I never saw L&T myself as I was warned off it by someone who I trusted. Had you seen many other Marvel works recently? The overwhelming critique I heard about L&T was that it was way too "Marvel", and featured a lot of recurring tropes that had been overused in the MCU up till then. So one possibility is that those elements hadn't been played out for you.

Then again, maybe not -- I didn't see it myself so can't know for sure.

Oh, Hazbin Hotel is this for me. I had a buddy tell me it was great, watched the first episode, hated it, and...apparently the rest of the world is really into it.

Great example of how the perception of "popular opinion" can differ wildly: everything I've seen about Hazbin Hotel is that people don't like it. But it's possible I'm only getting that from niche sources that share my (and seemingly your) tastes.

I think that there are three broad groups who rate films.

1. experts/critics. These people are usually insane people who think they know more about art than other people, but are usually complete imbecils whose opinions only seems to actually matter within their own bubble. Unfortunately, they share that bubble with every other expert/critic and have filled the various awards groups with their own crazy members. Which is unfortunately why "award winning show" and "show I want to watch" rarely intersects.

2. fans. Also crazy people. Also convinced that they know better about the subject matter than anyone else. While they don't have the insider pull that the first group has, they can be ridiculously vocal and loud about their opinions and thus influence things (usually in crazy ways). There is also only rare intersections of "what the fans want" and what I consider to be good ideas/stories/whatever.

3. "real people". You know. People who just want a film to tell them a good story with good characters and a good balance of "things" in it (depending on genre of course) and do so in a way that makes sense, doesn't offend them, doesn't preach to them, and has reasonable production value and thought and competance in the production itself.

This reminds me of a great bit of advice from a writing workshop: "Any old schmuck can tell you what isn't working in your story. Nobody in the world can tell you how you should fix it."

Meaning: You have to meet the audience where they are. People don't need to be storytelling experts to have a valid opinion about the stories they consume -- the average person will pick up on the symptoms of bad writing, bad acting, bad editing...though they may not be able to articulate the source problem. In fact, you should always be wary of people who claim to know why something you made doesn't work, because they're usually wrong. I think that applies to both critics and fans (more egregiously with fans), and almost never with your "real people" third category: they don't bring preconceptions to the story, either about how to tell a "good" story (critics) or how to handle this story with the proper respect (fans). They're just there to have a good time.

That's not to say critics don't have their place. They're useful for pointing out trends. They're useful for industry knowledge and historical context. They're useful on a technical level, where they can point out the reason you didn't like something but couldn't find the words to articulate the weird filming trick that was being overused. But they're only a subset of the audience -- one that consumes orders of magnitude more content than the average audience member, and is thus much more likely to overreact to "clichéd" writing -- and it is definitely a mistake to treat their reviews as the definitive opinion on the work. The best critics approach their reviews as "here's what worked and didn't work for me."

[Batcathat]

Back when some friends and I did a podcast about sci-fi and fantasy (no, you haven't heard of it, I think it barely broke triple digits of listeners per episode) we had one episode where the topic was basically the same as this thread and I started out by saying that I didn't really see why people thought either Star Wars and Star Trek were that great (don't get me wrong, they're both entertaining enough, I've just never understood why they've reached the point of geek religions) and of course the reactions to that took up the rest of the episode. Though I suppose that doesn't really count, as I was well aware I was in the minority.

Since it feels too easy to bash on popular stuff, I've been racking my brain trying to think of something where I was surprised people didn't like it as much as I did, but I'm having trouble coming up with anything. There are certainly works that I think should be more appreciated (my goto is usually "Person of Interest", I genuinely think that the latter half of that is one of the best sci-fi shows out there) but I'm not sure if any of those qualify.

I guess I might've been surprised that so few prefer Legend of Korra over the Last Airbender?

[Trixie_One]

Great example of how the perception of "popular opinion" can differ wildly: everything I've seen about Hazbin Hotel is that people don't like it. But it's possible I'm only getting that from niche sources that share my (and seemingly your) tastes.

It's definitely mixed depending on where you look. I've seen places where it's loved, places where people hate it and think it's the worst thing ever. Then there's the more naunced take that it's flawed but worth giving a go if you like musicals, as it really does have some decent songs, and it helps to not mind too much how incredibly rushed the plot and character arcs are. I'm in that last camp.

[Mechalich]

Yeah. I never got the hate for Solo either. I enjoyed it. At the end of the day, it's a one shot film, and does exactly what it needed to do (tell the origin bits for Han Solo). It checked every single box it needed to check: His signature pistol? Check. Millenium Falcon? Check. Chewie? Check. Kessel Run? Check. Why he's a smuggler? Check. It had good dialogue and well written characters (and lets face it, the whole "robot rebellion" bit was hillarious). Harrelson's character made sense and fit in. Han's introduction into the criminal world worked and made sense. There were no glaring plot holes (which is a huge plus for me). And they snuck in a few easter eggs and character references/tie-ins along the way. What the heck did people actually expect from the film that they didn't get?

Solo had really bad press and an immense burden associated with being the Star Wars film that came out after The Last Jedi. The single group of people who were most likely to rush out to see it and then talk about it were also the people most eager to hate it as part of the backlash to TLJ. The film itself is decidedly fine, but it's not good enough and especially not tightly crafted enough to avoid being picked apart brutally by an audience motivated to do so.

Additionally, Solo was burdened by not being a commercial success, which was a first for the franchise, and among the very large number of people who didn't see it this became a self-fulfilling assessment. If it lost money, in an environment where TLJ made money, it must have been terrible. The reality was of course much more complicated, but rarely has a film been painted with such a giant 'hate me!' bullseye in the popular consciousness.

[Mordar]

Not seen Jersey Girl, but Mallrats was telling crap jokes about comics the movie that 80s/90s geeky kids only liked cause they were the exact same crap jokes they made with their friends.

Also dang looked up Jersey Girl on letterboxd out of interest, and wow, this sentence from one of the popular reviews:

I can't stand Kevin Smith, and even I think that's decidedly brutal.

(1) Know your audience;
(2) KS, the guy people love to hate. And I don't like him so much either.

Back when some friends and I did a podcast about sci-fi and fantasy (no, you haven't heard of it, I think it barely broke triple digits of listeners per episode) we had one episode where the topic was basically the same as this thread and I started out by saying that I didn't really see why people thought either Star Wars and Star Trek were that great (don't get me wrong, they're both entertaining enough, I've just never understood why they've reached the point of geek religions) and of course the reactions to that took up the rest of the episode. Though I suppose that doesn't really count, as I was well aware I was in the minority.

Yeah, you probably don't get why the Macintosh was such a big deal, or why 1939 Oldsmobiles are so important either. "Tesla? I didn't know that crappy electric car company was Serbian." Go mow my lawn, kid.

Solo had really bad press and an immense burden associated with being the Star Wars film that came out after The Last Jedi. The single group of people who were most likely to rush out to see it and then talk about it were also the people most eager to hate it as part of the backlash to TLJ. The film itself is decidedly fine, but it's not good enough and especially not tightly crafted enough to avoid being picked apart brutally by an audience motivated to do so.

Additionally, Solo was burdened by not being a commercial success, which was a first for the franchise, and among the very large number of people who didn't see it this became a self-fulfilling assessment. If it lost money, in an environment where TLJ made money, it must have been terrible. The reality was of course much more complicated, but rarely has a film been painted with such a giant 'hate me!' bullseye in the popular consciousness.

Agree Solo took heat for TLJ (probably deserved) and the acting classes rumors didn't help things. Frankly, if I got to cut 10 more minutes out of it (sprinkled across the film) I think I would have liked it a lot...instead of just thinking it was good.

- M

[JNAProductions]

I thought The Fabulous Emancipation Of Harley Quinn was okay. Not great, but I had a nice time when I took my aunt to see it. (She gave me a haircut, so I took her to the theater as thanks.)

It helped that I didn't have high expectations going in-and even then it's for sure flawed. But, as a way to spend two hours or so? It filled the time.

[Errorname]

3. "real people". You know. People who just want a film to tell them a good with good characters and a good balance of "things" in it (depending on genre of course) and do so in a way that makes sense, doesn't offend them, doesn't preach to them, and has reasonable production value and thought and competance in the production itself.

While there's definitely extreme ends of the scale between 'fan' and 'real person', there's a lot of space in between "guy who has encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek" and "guy who thinks Star Wars and Star Trek are the same thing" and I've never seen a good dividing line, and whenever I've seen somebody try it ends up feeling less like a sound taxonomy and more "how much do I agree with this person".

Most people are fans, to some extent, and plenty of not chronically online people have brain-breakingly strange film opinions that you just don't see them posting about.

[Ionathus]

Most people are fans, to some extent, and plenty of not chronically online people have brain-breakingly strange film opinions that you just don't see them posting about.

I had a friend who genuinely preferred the Shyamalan Avatar film to the original cartoon. Wasn't even defensive about it: just good-naturedly thought "oh, I liked the film more." We tried to interrogate him about this and convince him otherwise, and he just sort of shrugged off all our comments and questions. And no, I don't think he's the type to troll us about this.

There's all types in this great big beautiful world of ours, I guess.

[Buufreak]

I had a friend who genuinely preferred the Shyamalan Avatar film to the original cartoon. Wasn't even defensive about it: just good-naturedly thought "oh, I liked the film more." We tried to interrogate him about this and convince him otherwise, and he just sort of shrugged off all our comments and questions. And no, I don't think he's the type to troll us about this.

There's all types in this great big beautiful world of ours, I guess.

I guess someone had to like it.

[DavidSh]

Tricky question. While I don't always agree with popular opinion of movies and tv shows, I'm not surprised about it. For example, I actually liked Cats (the movie with CGI augmentations), but I didn't for a moment expect that to be a common view.

[gbaji]

my goto is usually "Person of Interest", I genuinely think that the latter half of that is one of the best sci-fi shows out there

I actually really liked that show too! It managed to balance out "action adventure" with "cop(ish)/spy(ish) show", and "just enough sci-fi to tickle my fancy" pretty much perfectly. And yeah, one of the rare shows like this that managed to actually maintain a reasonable balance all the way thorugh to the end. Most just jump the shark at some point, and you get this kind of "it was great, until X season, then it went downhill". Which is a pain, since I like re-watching series' sometimes, and I'm a bit of a completionist, so I end up having to force myself to slog through the crappy later seasons of some shows as a result. POI managed to change course and add new things here and there, but still stayed "on target" the whole way. Great show. And had a pretty broad appeal (or at least it seemed to me it should). No one aspect of the show really took over and dominated the others, so if you liked that part, the others wouldn't likely turn you off.

And for completenesses sake, guess which war film came out in 1998 that Jim Caviezel appeared in? (hint: It *wasn't* "Saving Private Ryan"). Sigh...

[KorvinStarmast]

Solo was almost good.
Hit a lot of good notes, but had these complete "we mailed it in" moments that took the shine off of the gem.

No Country For Old Men
Another almost good movie that had some great scenes, and then you went 'wait, what?'

The Exorcist:
I walked out of it after they had a 14 year old girl do torture sit ups on her own bed.
Not entertaining, at all. I was 16 at the time.

[DaedalusMkV]

So I sat and watched, as they stretched it for over 4 hours due to ads galore, No Country for Old Men. To this day, I want my money back that I didn't spend. I want my time back. I want the ability to throw a brick at every person who told me it was good.

I'll back this to the end. No Country for Old Men is probably the best example of a movie that might be technically brilliant, but just isn't any fun to actually watch. I do appreciate the villain for being intense and conceptually interesting, but basically everything else about that film is just not enjoyable at all. By the end I was upset and tired and generally unhappy about everything, and I genuinely think I'd have been better off never having watched it at all. I guess I sat through the whole thing, so it was better than Jurassic World 2, but that's not a high bar to clear. And considering I watched it at home, the fact that the ending of No Country for Old Men made me want to throw my drink at the screen should probably tell you a lot about how much I appreciated it.

Oh, back on video games and a more positive note: Marvel's Midnight Suns. It seems to have underperformed, but I absolutely loved it. The combat system is a blast to play, with the card game element making for surprisingly engaging gameplay that's never quite the same twice, even when replaying the same level. The way all of the abilities interact and the kinds of things you're able to pull off with them was just great. And while the story was nothing special, it was perfectly fine, and got in some cool moments at times. The big finale, while a touch long, was a very satisfying capstone fight that forced you to use everything you had quite well to pull through too. It's not flawless - I don't enjoy scouring the grounds for crafting ingredients when you need/want those - but it was a great time, and I'm disappointed it didn't fare better. I'd love to see the sequel it teased at the end.

Midnight Suns was probably the best X-com styled small squad tactics game I've played since X-com 2, and that's reasonably high praise. I genuinely liked pretty much every element of it, including exploring and solving mysteries in the spooky haunted grove, though the payoff for that specific gameplay element really wasn't great. The card-based tactical combat worked shockingly well and allowed some great customization, team compositions were diverse and bringing different heroes really felt new and exciting, and the characters were by and large endearing and well-written enough that the 'hanging out with superheroes' part of the game never felt like a drag. I will very likely go back for a second go-around with the DLCs at some point, and that's something I only do for games I really like.



For myself, I thought Iron Man 3 (or perhaps more appropriately Tony Stark: The Movie) was the single worst Marvel movie prior to Endgame. I absolutely hated it, and its unreasonably smug villain, and its painfully stupid plot, and especially the fact that there's basically no Iron Man in the Iron Man movie. Most people seemed to rate it somewhere between 'decent' and 'good', and I pretty much never see it on those 'worst Marvel movies' lists that float around on a regular basis. I was genuinely surprised that the vast majority of the people walking out of the theatre were so positive about it at the time. I also thought Captain America 2 was a bit overrated - it wasn't terrible, but I found its central threat hard to stomach and just generally didn't understand why so many people were treating it like a masterpiece. I still think it's pretty weak overall, and kind of total nonsense within the context of the MCU as a whole. On the flipside, most people hate on Ant-man 2, while I actually really enjoyed it. It had one of my favorite MCU villains in Ghost, a rare case of an MCU villain I can actually sympathize with and who had actually interesting powers that were used in creative ways, and a pretty good balance of action, spectacle and drama. I tend to rate it in my top 10 MCU movies, something that I suspect almost nobody else would.

[Zevox]

Another one that came to mind for me: Portal 2. Both Portal games tend to get nothing but praise from anyone who talks about them, and I was late to the party on both, so I came to them expecting to like them as well. And I did I like the first one when I played it, so you'd figure I'd like the second as well, right? But nope, I did not. I can't even recall why at this point, but I do remember feeling like the game wore out its welcome pretty quickly, and more or less forcing myself to finish it even though I wasn't having much fun because I knew it wasn't long and I wanted to at least be able to say that I'd completed the game.

(I have a much harder time coming up with movies, or especially TV shows, for this than video games because I watch those a lot less than I play video games. I can think of maybe two new shows I've watched in the last decade+, and the last time I watched a non-Marvel movie was probably Solo. Which I'd also agree was a pretty decent movie, I just wasn't surprised by the situation there.)

Midnight Suns was probably the best X-com styled small squad tactics game I've played since X-com 2, and that's reasonably high praise. I genuinely liked pretty much every element of it, including exploring and solving mysteries in the spooky haunted grove, though the payoff for that specific gameplay element really wasn't great. The card-based tactical combat worked shockingly well and allowed some great customization, team compositions were diverse and bringing different heroes really felt new and exciting, and the characters were by and large endearing and well-written enough that the 'hanging out with superheroes' part of the game never felt like a drag. I will very likely go back for a second go-around with the DLCs at some point, and that's something I only do for games I really like.

I would definitely recommend it. I went back and replayed with the DLC after the last one came out, and they were a lot of fun. Deadpool is particularly well-realized, as his unique mechanics heavily reward him for being a glory-hog who gets all of the kills, while punishing him for getting hit (making characters who can taunt, like Wolverine for example, his BFFs). Storm and Venom are quite good too; Morbius is the only "eh" one, but at least him being a second character with the Bleed mechanic gives him unique synergy with Blade.

[The_Snark]

Another one that came to mind for me: Portal 2. Both Portal games tend to get nothing but praise from anyone who talks about them, and I was late to the party on both, so I came to them expecting to like them as well. And I did I like the first one when I played it, so you'd figure I'd like the second as well, right? But nope, I did not. I can't even recall why at this point, but I do remember feeling like the game wore out its welcome pretty quickly, and more or less forcing myself to finish it even though I wasn't having much fun because I knew it wasn't long and I wanted to at least be able to say that I'd completed the game.

My guess is length. Portal 2 is about 3 or 4 times longer than the first game, and I remember the middle segment in particular having a number of puzzles that boil down to "there is exactly 1 square foot of portal-compatible wall in this huge, poorly-lit chamber, find it". I didn't dislike the game on the whole, but its pacing was not as tight as the first game.

[Saph]

Solo had really bad press and an immense burden associated with being the Star Wars film that came out after The Last Jedi. The single group of people who were most likely to rush out to see it and then talk about it were also the people most eager to hate it as part of the backlash to TLJ. The film itself is decidedly fine, but it's not good enough and especially not tightly crafted enough to avoid being picked apart brutally by an audience motivated to do so.

Well . . . it's not really fine. You're right that the backlash to TLJ was the biggest reason for why Solo got so much hate, but it's not actually a very good movie on its own terms. The action sequences are mediocre, the characters range from pretty good to very bad, the story is uninspired, but it could still have worked if it had done the one thing that a backstory movie needs to do . . . and it botched that one thing completely. So I think it deserved the roasting that it got.

On a more positive note, one movie that I'm constantly surprised doesn't get more praise/recognition is Margin Call. It was a moderate commercial/critical success, but it never made many waves and even more than 10 years after its release very few people know about it – I only found out about it because I happened to see a clip on Youtube one day. But the cinematography, dialogue, and the performances by the cast are all amazing. It's way, way better than the Wall Street movie and its sequel, but those are the ones that everyone seems to think of when they hear 'finance movie'.

[Eldan]

My problem with Love and thunder personally was that it was way too flip-floppy with tone, even more than other Marvel movies. And Ragnarok could play over that with some really high high points, whereas L&T just had "I'm really slowly dying of cancer. Anyway, here's a **** joke. Oh no, the gods destroyed my whole civilization, I will mope about it in black an white. Anyway, here's Russel Crowe with a silly accent."

Eh, you know what? I'll just throw this one out for a big one:
All of Star Wars. I've never seen a Star Wars movie all the way through. They are all of the uninteresting. I like them neither as lighthearted action movies, nor as serious fantasy, nor even as light pulp, nor as SciFi. They are just dull stacks of tropes with nothing to recommend them. Yes, even that Star Wars movie. Yes, even all the spin-offs. No, I don't like the games either. Not even the "good" games. The entire franchise is just unbearably dull.