Movies and Television Series That Had Interesting Concepts But Were Poorly Executed

The Blind Eternities forum

Posted on Sept. 25, 2016, 2:15 p.m. by DemonDragonJ

Many movies and television series have ideas that may seem interesting, but are executed in such a way that their interesting premise is lost. Sometimes, a poor director or poor script can hinder even the best of actors from saving a film, or the actors themselves lack the skill to make their performance believable and memorable. This thread is to discuss such media, and I shall cover my post with a spoiler tag, because of its great length.

Show

The first movie that I shall mention is League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The idea of gathering numerous characters from nineteenth -century literature to form a Victorian era equivalent of the Justice League/Avengers caught my attention, but the pacing was terrible and none of the characters, apart from Tom Sawyer and Allan Quatermain, had any significant development or depth. Captain Nemo barely had any screentime, and the portrayal of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was terrible; the film portrayed Mr. Hyde as a large muscular brute, akin to the Incredible Hulk. I know that the Hulk was inspired by Jekyll and Hyde, but the original tale is much more detailed than a mild-mannered man becoming a raging brute; for a much better portrayal of the characters, the 1931 film adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is still my favorite adaptation of the tale. The filmmakers were likely presuming that the audience would already be familiar with those characters from the original tales that featured them, but that is no excuse for not developing them in the film, since I believe that a film should be its own self-sustaining story that does not require its audience to consult external sources.

Second, the live-action film adaptations of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter from the 1990s may have been awesome to the fans of those franchises, but they pandered far too heavily to said fans, rather than to mainstream audiences. The films contained too many characters from their respective game series, which left them little room for depth or development, making their appearances basically glorified cameos. In the case of the Street Fighter film, the main character was Guile, rather than Ryu or Ken, who were demoted to secondary characters; clearly, the filmmakers wished to have an American character as the main hero, despite Guile being only secondary in the games, but this is still a fairly drastic change. However, the film did have some positive traits: Guile was played by Jean-Claude Van Damme, who, to his credit, is skilled at playing action heroes, making him a perfect candidate for that role; Chun-Li was a major character in that film, as she is in the games, and Raul Julia gave an excellent performance as M. Bison (his final film performance, in fact, and he certainly made it memorable). As for Mortal Kombat, Robin Sh was nearly perfect as Liu Kang and the actor who played Johnny Cage seemed to be very comfortable in that role, but I am not certain about Christopher Lambert playing Raiden.

The third movie that I shall mention is Pixels, because the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence creating beings based off old video games appealed to me greatly; as someone who was born in the late 1980s and raised in the 1990s, I felt a great sense of nostalgia from the promotional material of that movie, but was sorely disappointed by the final product. The films, first, but not biggest, mistake was casting Adam Sandler and Kevin James in the lead roles; I feel that using lesser-known actors would have been better for that. The film also contained far too many negative stereotypes about nerds, which is odd, considering that it was made in 2015. Most notably, Josh Gads character was also a major disappointment; it was very cool that he was fond of conspiracy theories, but his obsession with Lady Lisa was very offensive to gamers and other nerds everywhere.

Finally, I believe that The Big Bang Theory is a series that was interesting but not well-executed. When I first started following that series, I was very excited to see a series that focused on the lives of a group of geeks/nerds, since I could identify with them. However, the series has far too many negative stereotypes about nerds, and, in recent seasons, has been focused more on relationships than on nerdy subjects, which is very unfortunate, in my mind.

What does everyone else say about this? What are some movies and television series that you believe had interesting concepts but were poorly executed?

Epidilius says... #2

Revolution

The premise is that the power stops across he world. There is no more electricity. The world falls into chaos, and the show centers on the US, which has broken down into different militaristic factions.

I liked the idea of a post apocalypse world that wasn't caused by nuclear war or aliens or magic. Spoilers ahead, obviously.

The show did a decent job of explaining things too. At first, no one knows why the power is out. After a few episodes, the answer to the mystery comes to light. A group of people, while working for the government on making infinite clean energy, accidentally find a way to turn off the energy in an area. They also create portable pendants that shield a small area from this effect. The government demands they make the no-power zone larger, and make more pendants. Well, they turn off power to the world, and only a few people get these pendants. Each character has an interesting backstory that is revealed as the show goes on, and you get to watch the formation of the various factions that lead to the current state of the US. The characters are smart, have realistic motivations, and make decisions that make sense. They evolve and change as various things happen, and none of them ever feel like "extras". The characters use modern guns, but don't use things like diesel cars, pedal bicycles, or steam power.

All in all, a pretty solid show.

So what's the bad? Well, not every character is like what I describe. In fact, one character breaks that mold entirely. This would be okay if it wasn't the MAIN CHARACTER. This character is literally the reason the show happens (as in, she messes up in episode 1 and causes people to die, who leave clues behind, etc, etc). Every time she is faced with a decision, she makes the wrong choice, even if it obvious. Sometimes, her uncle (ex military, lone wolf, general badass, famous in this new world for being a wise badass, you get the point) will tell her "Do option A and people will die. Do option B and no one will die," to which she picks option A, and her friends die.

Just to give you an example of that, there was one episode where she says something like "Let's sneak in through this tunnel," and her uncle says "That's a bad idea, people will die, I can get us in through this other, safer way." Long story short, she picks tunnels, the group enters, she steps on a mine, someone makes the ultimate sacrifice to save her. The mine exploding causes a cave in, which causes everyone to almost die, and lets the bad guys no where the good guys are, so of course the good guys get caught.

Honestly, this show would have been fine without this stupid teenage girl as the main character. She serves no purpose but to cause trouble for the rest of the cast. This is all she ever does. She makes decisions, get people hurt or killed, gets herself captured, gets everyone captured, and never helps anyone. With minor tweaks to the show she could have been removed, and the show would have been so much better.

Cool idea, bad execution.

September 25, 2016 3:28 p.m.

Atony1400 says... #3

The Walking Dead, The Hunger Games (more the 2nd and 3rd/4th ones, not so much the first)

September 25, 2016 3:37 p.m.

Ender666666 says... #4

The Dresden Files is a favourite book series that was pathetically executed as a TV show and made me very very sad.

September 25, 2016 3:49 p.m.

joecool1299 says... #5

The one that comes to mind is the movie Lucy. Now I really don't like the myth "We only use ten precent of our brain", It's been years since anyone truly believed that. But the idea of someone who's intelligence literally breaks reality played off in real life is really interesting. You could do a lot of creative things and interesting interactions with other people. But instead they have another boring Test subject escapes lab and helps destroy the evil conspiracy she was a part of and the government is evil. Only with a really, really, Really stupid ending.

The other one is rather obvious but I have to bring it up. Heroes. Normal people dealing with super powers in the real world. And what that means in their relationships, jobs, dreams, and normal lives. But sadly botched by a variety of factors. Writers strike. lack of ideas after season 1. Convoluted plot. Rehashes. I'm one of the weird people that actually liked season 3, But even I can't defend season 4 and whatever happened with that weird circus and Silas and Peter's bro times.

September 25, 2016 4:23 p.m.

Nobilior says... #6

Terra Nova.

September 25, 2016 5:10 p.m.

kanokarob says... #7

Seasons 2 and 3 of Heroes. Season 1 started off really strong, but I feel 2 and 3 lacked many... ingredients that made the first season interesting and unique. In my opinion, season 4 did relatively okay with redeeming the series, but many disagree with me. Heroes Reborn had a great plot idea, but a combination of mediocre actors, missing characters that should reasonably have been present, and complete disregard for the audience's suspension of disbelief made it more of an over-exaggerated fanfic.

Seasons 2-3 of the Following. Season 1 was so cool and dark and twisted, I was on the edge of my seat not from the horror that was being shown, but the horror of the minds of the cultists/killers, how they could think and feel such horrible things, etc. But, and maybe it was only because I became desensitized to the above, the last two seasons were completely boring. The twins were really the only gleam we had of the first season's insanity, everything else was more or less predictable and didn't evoke much emotion.

September 25, 2016 8:49 p.m.

Dredge4life says... #8

The Redwall TV series. I loved the books but the show disappointed me greatly. That could be the nature of the genre though.

September 25, 2016 9:19 p.m.

Holtzman says... #9

Quoting OP "The filmmakers were likely presuming that the audience would already be familiar with those characters from the original tales that featured them, but that is no excuse for not developing them in the film"

This is my problem with Batman Vs. Superman and Suicide Squad.

BVS was weird that it was a direct sequel to Superman but a prequel to Justice League. It would have helped to have the Wonder Woman movie before BVS as well.

Squad did give you some development but only to 2-3 of the characters and had horrible HORRIBLE pacing issues.

September 26, 2016 2:04 a.m.

GobboE says... #10

Dexter - a series concerning a serial killer who only targets serial killers - starts of strong, really strong. Up to season 4 it is awesome. Season 5 onwards is grdually declines...to an absolute low, with possibly one of the worst, badly executed endings to a series, of all times.

Agree with Batman vs Superman: they tried to cram together too many stuff in there, most of which wasn't thought through at all. And indeed, Wonder Woman certainly needed to have her own film prior to this movie.

September 26, 2016 5:38 a.m.

Didgeridooda says... #11

Eragon. Read the book, then try to watch the movie. It was tough.

September 26, 2016 1:25 p.m.

GobboE says... #12

I knew I forgot something: Gods of Egypt, nice visuals but abysmal storytelling (and I mean...ugh) and acting

September 27, 2016 6:10 a.m.

Ledian says... #13

SAO, need I say more?

September 29, 2016 10:50 p.m.

DemonDragonJ says... #14

Ledian, I am sorry that I need to ask, but what is SAO?

September 30, 2016 1:30 a.m.

Ledian says... #15

DemonDragonJ It was an anime that had an amazing pretense, but executed it horribly. The idea of it was that people got trapped in a video game and if you die in the game you die in real life.

September 30, 2016 1:37 a.m.

DemonDragonJ says... #16

Ledian, I am not familiar with that series, but I thank you for mentioning it.

September 30, 2016 1:59 a.m.