It’s been said by pundits, critics, and many discontents about the internet that Hollywood is experiencing a slump of creativity. It doesn’t take a very sophisticated observation mechanism to notice that the bulk of big-budget studio product consists of remakes of older movies, and adaptations of kid-friendly pop products. But it’s easy to see why the studios have been whopping this horse for so long: it’s working. Audiences are gathering in flocks to watch Hunger Games movies and Marvel movies, which are still making literally billions of dollars worldwide. Many are beginning to complain about the creative stagnation of the filmmaking higher-ups, but that didn’t stop a movie like Avengers: Age of Ultron from making about $190 million in just a few days.
And yet even though some people are longing for creativity, audiences seem to be rejecting a lot of the recent original movies to come from the big-budget machine. Some filmmakers are brave enough to present audiences with something new, based on original characters and possessed of original stories, but audiences appear to be ignoring them as a matter of principle. As such, a lot of perfectly decent (not to mention a few outright excellent) big-budget genre movies have been pushed aside, ignored, and dismissed by audiences who equate financial success with quality. Some of these films were technically based on an existing property, but not ones that were currently popular with young demographics, and for Hollywood that counts as “original” nowadays. (It’s close enough for government work.)
Well, we here at CraveOnline strive to fight prejudice in all of its forms (we are nothing if not warriors of justice), so we would like to stand up for some the unjustly maligned big-budget studio films of the last few years. Many of these movies are assumed to be terrible by the uninitiated, and most certainly deserve your attention. Here are nine in particular that are worth checking out.
Gallery: Nine Would-Be Blockbusters That Were Seriously Underrated
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
Nine Would-Be Blockbusters That Were Seriously Underrated
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Jupiter Ascending
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 25%
Budget: $176 million
Domestic Gross: $47.3 million
Released on Blu-ray just recently, Wachowski Starship's Jupiter Ascending is one of the most visually ambitious and narratively classical sci-fi films of the last decade. It is an enormous space opera that looks and feels like the cover of an old sci-fi pulp novel come to life. It contains a flying dog man, a race of people who bathe in human DNA to stay young, floating space orgies, nightmarish future bureaucracies, giant lizard men, a scenery-chewing Eddie Redmayne, fastidious robots... the works. Critics complained that the story was too simple, and audiences seemed to laugh derisively at the ambition of a giant movie that didn't include a Marvel character. It bombed enormously. It didn't deserve to. This is a striking, daring, and exciting movie that should not be ignored. Buy the Blu-ray and enjoy it, because it's immensely enjoyable.
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John Carter
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 51%
Budget: $250 million
Domestic Gross: $73 million
Based on the classic pulp novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter followed a military captain who was unexpectedly transported to Mars, where he became a key player in a war between two Martian factions. The film was enormous and expansive, just as its gigantic budget would imply. The John Carter novels aren't exactly a well-known pop property, though, typically only known by fans of old-timey adventure books. Maybe that, and a vague ad campaign, drove people away from this perfectly decent movie. John Carter has some exciting action set pieces, excellent special effects, and a slew of weird characters to root for. The success of their superhero films was, luckily, enough for Disney to recoup their giant losses on this one.
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Edge of Tomorrow, Oblivion and Jack Reacher
Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 90%, 54%, and 62%
Budgets: $178 million, $120 million, and $60 million
Domestic Grosses: $100 million, $89 million, and $80 million
Tom Cruise has always been very careful about what kinds of movies he stars in. He likes to produce his own movies, and typically has some sort of control over the film's content. In a weird way, Cruise is an underground auteur, even though he never directs. Three of his recent movies were all rather good, but were either underrated by critics, or underseen by audiences, or both. Edge of Tomorrow was praised endlessly by critics, but audiences still stayed away. Oblivion is a creative and ambitious post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie with a fun twist ending. Jack Reacher was only moderately praised by critics, and isn't talked about enough. At least the latter film was successful enough to warrant a sequel. The other two are worth seeing immediately. Edge of Tomorrow (frustratingly retitled Live, Die, Repeat), in fact, was one of the best films of 2012.
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Chappie
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 31%
Budget: $49 million
Domestic Gross: $31.5 million
Neill Blomkamp's Chappie is, I admit, a gigantic mess of a movie. It's a high-octane, super-sloppy mash-up of RoboCop and Short Circuit, featuring a sentient robot that thinks like a child, but who is trained to behave like a street tough by the ultra-filthy, super-baffling South African pop duo Die Antwoord. If you take it as a robot film, Chappie covers no new ground. But if you look at it as a vanity project from Die Antwoord and the South African tourism board, it becomes something excitingly strange. Given the opportunity to make any sort of film about themselves, Die Antwoord chose be homeless criminals (living in a disused nuclear power plant festooned with penis paintings) who raise a robot together. This is just bonkers enough to be fun.
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Pacific Rim
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 72%
Budget: $190 million
Domestic gross: $100 million
Guillermo Del Toro is a beloved cult figure thanks to movies like Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth. His passionate following, however, wasn't enough to drum up huge numbers (either critically or financially) for Pacific Rim, his love letter to kaiju films of old. Pacific Rim is an ambitious sci-fi flick about a future where giant Godzilla-like monsters are constantly attacking Earth, and the army of human giant-robot pilots that have to fight them off. Although the film is far too long and narratively clunky, there is certainly a geeky little boy enthusiasm from the director that's kind of infectious. This one has a growing following, so it may yet gain its recognition, and a sequel is on its way due to its financial success abroad. We admire this film enough to host a screening of it. (See Pacific Rim at The Nuart theater on July 10th, 2015, as sponsored by The B-Movies Podcast.)
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White House Down
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 51%
Budget: $150 million
Domestic Gross: $73 million
The Die Hard of Die Hard ripoffs, Roland Emmerich's White House Down is one of the most exciting, wonderful, pleasing action films to come out of the decade. It's an old-fashioned type of actioner that essentially takes a very familiar hostage/terrorist scenario, and sets it in the White House. The chases and escapes are first rate, and the film is undercut (and greatly aided) by an ineffable bright silliness that seems to be lacking from the bulk of dully self-serious shoot-'em-ups. White House Down behaves the way an action movie ought to, with fun characters, a lot of jokes, and a crisp, excellent pace. This is first-rate filmmaking. Yet audiences seem to prefer the hugely inferior Olympus Has Fallen as the better of the bad-guys-storm-the-White-House movies from that year. This is the better one. See it immediately.
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Tomorrowland
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 49%
Budget: $190 million
Domestic Gross: $64 million
To be honest, I was one of the 51% of critics who did not like Brad Bird's Tomorrowland. I found it to be preachy and I was uncomfortable with the vaguely fascistic message that seemed to lurk under the surface. I'm still going to list it as an underrated film, however, because there is a way to look at it as a sci-fi classic. This is a movie that is, at least on its surface, about optimism about the future and how technology can make the world better. Not just better, but Heaven-like. It's loaded with piles of retro-cool special effects, including ray guns, rocket ships, and bizarre steampunk elements (there is a secret about The Eiffel Tower I would dare not reveal). Just because I didn't like it doesn't mean there aren't small children (and some critics, like CraveOnline's own William Bibbiani) who will dig the positivity.
