Random Visually Stunning Movies That Are Also Just Trash (18 items)

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  (#14) Watchmen

  • Billy Crudup, Malin Akerman, Jackie Earle Haley, Matthew Goode, Patrick Wilson, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Carla Gugino, Matt Frewer, Stephen McHattie, Laura Mennell, Rob LaBelle, Robert Wisden, Gary Houston, James M. Connor, Mary Ann Burger, Jerry Wasserman, Don Thompson, Frank Novak

  In hindsight, there's no way that Watchmen could have lived up to the expectations of every comic book nerd who fetishized Alan Moore's take on superheros. In a scant 12 issues, Moore's short series subverts the superhero mythos, salts the earth, then dares other comic book writers to outdo him.

  Zack Snyder's adaptation of the groundbreaking series feels like fanfiction. It's aesthetically pleasing, as so many of Snyder's films are, but it never reaches the heights of Moore's original vision. Many of the film's sequences are fun to watch, but upon closer examination, they're nothing more than copies of old, worn-out tropes. 

  It's interesting to revisit Watchmen after viewing Snyder's more recent work with Warner Bros. and DC. While it may be too conspiratorial to say that this film was a stepping stone Snyder exploited to get hooked into larger superhero properties, it's also hard to argue that much has changed about Snyder's work. The fight scenes are still messy, his musical cues are still on the nose, and he's never met a color correction effect that he hasn't loved (although DP Larry Fong might be to blame for this last one, since he's worked on most of Snyder's movies.) 

  There are some interesting visuals in Watchmen, but don't go into this movie with the intention of seeing anything other than a messy spectacle. 
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  (#5) Speed Racer

  • Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, Susan Sarandon, John Goodman, Matthew Fox, Roger Allam, Kick Gurry, Paulie Litt, Jeong Ji-hoon, Benno Fürmann, Hiroyuki Sanada, Richard Roundtree, Nicholas Elia, Ariel Winter, Scott Porter

  Speed Racer is a visual delight. Seriously, watching this movie is like tasting candy for the first time. It provides a sensory overload that you'll never forget, but it's chock-full of empty calories.

  At the end of the day, you'll be no better off for having watched Speed Racer, it'll just be another thing you did. Admittedly the Wachowski sisters' cinematic attempt to set your brain on fire has its champions, but almost all the film's praise involves how good it looks. This pro-Speed Racer position requires a lot of dancing around the fact that everything but the visuals were poorly executed. 

   
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  (#18) Star Trek Into Darkness

  • Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, Anton Yelchin, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alice Eve, Bruce Greenwood, Peter Weller

  Following up on the 2009 Star Trek quasi-reboot, director JJ Abrams and his frequent cinematographer Dan Mindel doubled down. Star Trek Into Darkness is colorful and frenetic, traipsing between alien worlds, cool starships, and a slick, sunny future Earth as the camera clips along, always swirling almost weightlessly in a high energy tarantellasmic sway. And, of course, abundant lens flares leave absolutely no doubt how bright this vision of the future is, contributing to the energetic visual ride.

  All that color and cinematic pizazz stand in stark contrast to the story, which is simultaneously stupid-simple and incoherent, lurching through a Starfleet conspiracy, an entirely unsurprising villainous reveal, and a jarringly destructive disaster movie climax. The plucky cast of familiar characters are stuck spinning their wheels in the middle of the slapdash story, which so desperately wants to be the Dark Knight of a new Trek trilogy that it forfeits most of what makes Star Trek fun in the first place.
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  (#9) Transcendence

  • Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Cillian Murphy, Kate Mara, Cole Hauser, Morgan Freeman, Clifton Collins, Cory Hardrict, Falk Hentschel, Josh Stewart, Luce Rains, Fernando Chien, Steven Liu, Xander Berkeley, Wallace Langham

  Based on his work as Christopher Nolan's go-to cinematographer, audiences naturally expected sharp visuals from Wally Pfister's feature directorial debut. he shot everything from Memento to The Dark Knight Rises, winning an Oscar for Inception along the way. And indeed, Transcendence is no slouch on the visual front, bringing a largely monochromatic sleekness and a pleasingly high tech symmetry to a slow-burn science fiction concept.

  No matter how pleasing it may be to watch nanobots swarm around a desert town or dewdrops hanging just so on leaves, though, it'll never make up for a story that might as well be developing bed sores. The story is as inert as Johnny Depp's performance, playing  Will Castle, a super-genius whose consciousness is uploaded into an increasingly dangerous AI program. The rest of the overqualified cast does the heavy lifting, but they practically break their backs in the process.
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  (#4) Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

  • Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Kris Wu, Rutger Hauer, Sam Spruell, Alain Chabat, Aymeline Valade, Elizabeth Debicki, John Goodman

  Wirter-director Luc Besson's 1997 adventure The Fifth Element set a high water mark for distinctly sci-fi weirdness, packing every frame with colorful designs inspired by '60s and '70s European comic books. So when Besson returned to the genre two decades later to adapt the beloved French comic Valerian et Laureline, fans expected him to once again bring the trippy, ambitious oddness. And he didn't disappoint: from the opening montage showing the International Space Station evolving into a hub for innumerable alien species to a shapeshifting Rihanna to dizzying action sequences dense with ludicrous detail.

  Unfortunately, most moviegoers agreed the visuals are the only reason to see Valerian And The City of a Thousand Planets. As spacefaring secret agents Valerian and Laureline, Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne are miscast enough to leave a black hole of charisma where the lead performances should be, and no amount of cosmic action can compensate for the lack of investment in these two characters. The story, meanwhile, is an excuse for spectacle, leaving little to no impression.
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  (#17) The Revenant

  • Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Forrest Goodluck, Paul Anderson, Kristoffer Joner, Joshua Burge, Duane Howard, Melaw Nakehk'o, Fabrice Adde, Arthur Redcloud, Christopher Rosamund, Robert Moloney, Lukas Haas, Brendan Fletcher, Tyson Wood, McCaleb Burnett, Grace Dove

  What do you remember about The Revenant? Aside from "that one scene with the bear," nothing. Maybe some snow? This Oscar-winning movie had so much hype behind it that it would have been impossible for the film to not win something. Leonardo Dicaprio had been nominated in the past for way better movies, but the American public likes to see their stars suffer, and in The Revenant, Dicaprio delivers in spades.

  He grows a beard, sticks some fake ice in it, then has a stunt double fall down a ravine. Yet somehow, the result is an absolutely beautiful movie. Director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki ensures that the rich landscapes of the film burst from the screen to envelope the audience, and many of the shots seem absolutely impossible to have captured. If you can watch this movie on silent you absolutely should.

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