Argh, why are you forcing me to acknowledge that movie's existence? I am much happier living in my own little world where Batman Forever and Batman & Robin never happened.

And what's not to like about The Lost Boys? Wonderfully absurd vampire fun. And Kiefer Sutherland sports the most serious mullet since Brian Bosworth.

-- Ben

Fixed that for you.

I picked Highlander 2. It was terrible, and I watched them in quick succession around the same age. It wasn't just a letdown, it was an entirely different experience and movie and world. And it was awful.

The Source was terrible because the prize was so stupid and the everything about it was goofy and it was like every element of a comic book that I hate without any of the redeeming qualities. There was a team up, there was a bad guy, there was a fight through some metaphysical realm, and it was all just awful and bad and zero fun and at the end, it still also felt that the same mistake as H2 had been made: they had completely rewritten the world without changing the characters in the middle.

I haven't seen a lot of the other ones, but I'll give my input onto the SW franchise:

I saw the original trilogy when I was a teenager in the 2000s and I was unimpressed. The acting was not terrible, but not bad, some of the characters made criminally stupid decisions in my mind, and I couldn't get behind Luke at all because he was a cry baby and then things just kind of worked out for him. But I can see the appeal and think overall they're fun. Then I saw the prequels and I thought they had some really terrible plots and even worse wooden acting but the special effects and world they made was better because technology allowed it to be (and the heavy weapon tank could move it's guns more than 30 degrees). About TPM, I thought podracing and Darth Maul were awesome and Qui Gon is still my favorite Jedi. That being said, it wasn't a great movie, but I think the hate is an over-reaction on missed opportunities and lost expectations.

re: Gungans vs Ewoks:

They're both terrible and they both pander to children and one sells better and gives you warm fuzzies because (1) it is warm and fuzzy and that is inherently better to most people and (2) the rose colored glasses of nostalgia that you cannot remove. Ewoks fighting against the Stormtroopers wasn't at all inspirational to me because they won too much. The Stormtroopers were just shown up, and made EVEN LESS of a threat than they were previously with their terrible aim and ease of evasion. Now they were defeated by teddy bears. Gungans aren't a racial stereotype, it's just that's what the voice acting was - they're portrayed as having a rich and deep history and culture just under the water and as having territorial battles against the land dwelling people, which makes them a more rich and interesting fictional culture to me because they actually have conflict and motives vs living as happy teddy bear smurf people in tree forts. And the Gungans, who have good tech but not awesome tech, get wrecked by this invading force because it's a legitimate threat, not something that (if you want to put in racial stuff, you can put in all kinds of class or imperialist dogma of white people coming in to help the natives out of a jam and blah blah blah that's not interesting because this is a fictional world) can basically be easily handled by the upset natives.



tl;dr: Highlander 2 was a worse offender because it acts like it belongs in another series. TPM wasn't that bad overall but it certaintly isn't good and will only last forever because of marketing and being sold with the others because they are a cultural phenom. Gungans are bad and gimmicky but they have more substance than Ewoks, which are a complete Smurf-level toy cash grab. IMHO, obvs.

I'll admit to never having watched it. My sister was so voracious about its awesomeness when going through her vampire phase that I refused to sit and watch it because she overhyped it to the point where unless every scene was like Salma Hayek's debut in From Dusk til Dawn, I would walk away disappointed.

Was this the one with the protagonist who was a poet by vocation, which contained a long series of insipid solutions that betrayed a complete lack of nuance?

I don't... think so? But I only stayed with it for one major arc, so it's possible a different arc had that aspect. When I was reading it, the team consisted of Midnighter (who was a Batman pastiche with some Wolverine thrown in), Apollo (Superman without Kryptonite), some bird-woman who managed to be the leader despite being the weakest of the group, a nano-cyborg who could dominate or fuse with advanced machinery as well as go full-robo herself, and a shaman who was pretty much more powerful than any of the rest, when he wasn't stoned out of his gourd. Oh, and this guy whose power was to be the soul of cities, which meant he was really strong in urban settings, and pretty much worthless in the wilderness.

I just double checked it, and it looks like I was thinking of RIsing Stars. Though I would still classify all of my comments other than the one about the main character being a poet as safe guesses.

Well, yes, comic book. They don't handle nuance all that well, even in the best of times, and political nuance is several times harder to manage. That said, the series did legitimately examine the issues that arise with a 'might takes right' approach. I did find it interesting that they never tried to use the shaman and the nanoborg's abilities to simply achieve a more perfect distribution of the truth, and otherwise let people decide how to go forward from there, rather than imposing solutions from on high.

It's because they recognized that people in large groups have minimal intelligence. Also, giving access to the needed information doesn't mean they'll read it, or understand what it is they're reading. See: The Internet.

That, and they were frequently defending the planet from threats that required superpowered intervention to stop.

The fact that the Authority stepped in and said Benevolent Dictatorship was the best thing about it.