Q:What are the films that you'd say are overrated? Or films that everyone loves but you don't really? Mine would be The Princess Bride. I've tried so hard to like that movie, but I just don't. I think it's ok, but sadly I don't see what everyone sees when they say it's perfect and wonderful. :( Oh, well. To each their own, right? :)

Anonymous

Definitely to each his/her own, but I have to say I disagree about The Princess Bride. It’s one of my favorite films! I think it’s hilarious and a great subversion of the fairy tale genre. To answer your first question, though, here are a few films I find overrated:

Inception, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Django Unchained, Black Swan, Zero Dark Thirty, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Donnie Darko, The Dark Knight Rises, Moonrise Kingdom, Alice in Wonderland (the Tim Burton film), Sweeney Todd, Crash, Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, Dredd 3D, The Hangover, Scott Pilgrim vs the World and Drive.

Sorry Tumblr.  

STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS (2013) Full disclosure: I’m more of a Star Wars fan than a Trekkie, so with that in mind, you know that this review is from someone who doesn’t know much about Starfleet, Klingons or phasers. I thought the 2009 film from sci-fi staple JJ Abrams was a fun watch, although it wasn’t anything I considered particularly groundbreaking or impressive. The 2013 sequel Into Darkness was pretty much a rehash of the same standard fare, albeit with much more explosions. The film follows Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and the crew of the USS Enterprise as they hunt down a terrorist named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) who wreaks havoc at Starfleet HQ. Their pursuit leads them to Klingon territory, where it gets dicy and interesting as they find out that things are not what they seem.  I enjoyed Into Darkness just fine like any other science fiction movie. It offered a few laughs and some cool visual effects, but (and to paraphrase a line from 10 Things I Hate About You) I was neither underwhelmed nor overwhelmed. I was sort of just…whelmed. I didn’t feel like it offered anything really new or exciting that the first film didn’t deliver. It certainly didn’t capitalize on the limitless, original storylines that the first film allowed. I don’t really have much else to say about it save that it was entertaining enough and featured some solid performances from Pine and Cumberbatch (and Simon Pegg was quite the scene-stealer, too). I also liked that Karl Urban’s Bones was central to a lot of the comedy in the film.  I have a few gripes with the film, but one that stuck out to me was the portrayal of Alice Eve’s character. I felt that the way her character was written, it seemed like she was just there to flash the gratuitous hot bod in the movie and for nothing else. While she demonstrated some prowess as a science officer on board the ship, the writers didn’t seem too concerned with showing her character’s substance despite her obvious skills. While I enjoyed Kirk and Spock’s character arcs, I didn’t feel like they were well-developed enough. Their arcs seemed sort of clumsily told and felt more like afterthoughts. There was a lot of cheesiness in the way their relationship was also developed, and I thought there were a lot of missed opportunities to really say something new and different about this unlikely friendship. I also felt like the pacing in this film seemed off. It had a strange, rushed ending that didn’t seem to bother with any sort of climactic build-up. Because of this, I felt it lacked the emotional punch that the film was going for. There were moments in the film that were supposed to be tension-filled, and yet I didn’t feel like the characters earned any sort of climax. The first half of the film is well done in that there’s a real sense of storytelling there, whereas the second half seemed too preoccupied with making sure there were blatant references for fans of the franchise to latch onto.    (Spoilers under the cut) [[MORE]] I mentioned in the opening paragraph that I am not a big Star Trek fan, however the little I do know about the series and its characters includes the infamous villain Khan, who just so happens to have one of the big revelations in the new film. In the original series and the 1982 film, Khan was portrayed by Ricardo Montalbán. His back story entailed not only being of Indian descent, but also being a member of a genetically engineered race that considers themselves superior to everyone else. In the 2013 film, everything about the character save for his original ethnic descent is maintained, something that bothers me despite Cumberbatch’s excellent performance. Cumberbatch certainly fits the role of a cold-blooded killer with a superiority complex, and man does he play a great villain, however we have yet again an issue of whitewashing. There are so very few major characters in Star Trek universe (let alone the whole science fiction universe) who aren’t white, and it’s a shame that one of the best villains (or characters) in science fiction history couldn’t have been given to a minority actor who fits Khan. I love Benedict Cumberbatch, but for me it would have been much more interesting had a minority actor played the role of a cunning, “genetically perfect” race supremacist.  I’ve read a few reviews about the film that mention plot holes in the story, and although I saw plenty of flaws, I wouldn’t consider plot holes one of them. It was more of an issue of an uninteresting second half that didn’t really capitalize on the momentum of the first film (or first half of the second film for that matter). One alleged plot hole that people keep mentioning is why Khan needed to be taken in alive so that Kirk could be revived using Khan’s special regenerative blood. Some keep pointing out that Khan’s other crew members were available to draw blood from so they didn’t really need Khan, but if I’m not mistaken, you can’t really conduct a blood transfusion on a body that has been cryogenically frozen. Since the majority of Kirk’s cells were apparently too irradiated to repair, they need a blood transfusion, hence the necessity of keeping Khan alive. But there were certainly other things in the film that didn’t make sense, such as Khan threatening the Enterprise by attacking their life support systems when he wouldn’t have been able to do so with their shields up. There was also the weird phenomenon of Starfleet being completely incapacitated by Khan crashing his ship in their HQ. One would think that there are other ships besides the Enterprise that would be there to defend Earth in the advent of a falling object, let alone a hostile ship (unless of course there was no response due to the assumption that Admiral Marcus was commandeering the ship instead of Khan). Anyway, I won’t really get into more of the inconsistencies in the film, but I thought that they would have been easy to overlook had the movie’s second half been better written and not rushed. It was an enjoyable film, but it didn’t quite transcend the promise of the 2009 movie. There was an opportunity to tell an original story while still referencing things that fans of the franchise could appreciate, but instead there seemed to be more concern adhering to stories that have already been told before. There was enough comedy and action in the film for it to be entertaining, but overall it wasn’t something I’d write home about.
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STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS (2013)

Full disclosure: I’m more of a Star Wars fan than a Trekkie, so with that in mind, you know that this review is from someone who doesn’t know much about Starfleet, Klingons or phasers. I thought the 2009 film from sci-fi staple JJ Abrams was a fun watch, although it wasn’t anything I considered particularly groundbreaking or impressive. The 2013 sequel Into Darkness was pretty much a rehash of the same standard fare, albeit with much more explosions. The film follows Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and the crew of the USS Enterprise as they hunt down a terrorist named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) who wreaks havoc at Starfleet HQ. Their pursuit leads them to Klingon territory, where it gets dicy and interesting as they find out that things are not what they seem. 

I enjoyed Into Darkness just fine like any other science fiction movie. It offered a few laughs and some cool visual effects, but (and to paraphrase a line from 10 Things I Hate About You) I was neither underwhelmed nor overwhelmed. I was sort of just…whelmed. I didn’t feel like it offered anything really new or exciting that the first film didn’t deliver. It certainly didn’t capitalize on the limitless, original storylines that the first film allowed. I don’t really have much else to say about it save that it was entertaining enough and featured some solid performances from Pine and Cumberbatch (and Simon Pegg was quite the scene-stealer, too). I also liked that Karl Urban’s Bones was central to a lot of the comedy in the film.  I have a few gripes with the film, but one that stuck out to me was the portrayal of Alice Eve’s character. I felt that the way her character was written, it seemed like she was just there to flash the gratuitous hot bod in the movie and for nothing else. While she demonstrated some prowess as a science officer on board the ship, the writers didn’t seem too concerned with showing her character’s substance despite her obvious skills.

While I enjoyed Kirk and Spock’s character arcs, I didn’t feel like they were well-developed enough. Their arcs seemed sort of clumsily told and felt more like afterthoughts. There was a lot of cheesiness in the way their relationship was also developed, and I thought there were a lot of missed opportunities to really say something new and different about this unlikely friendship. I also felt like the pacing in this film seemed off. It had a strange, rushed ending that didn’t seem to bother with any sort of climactic build-up. Because of this, I felt it lacked the emotional punch that the film was going for. There were moments in the film that were supposed to be tension-filled, and yet I didn’t feel like the characters earned any sort of climax. The first half of the film is well done in that there’s a real sense of storytelling there, whereas the second half seemed too preoccupied with making sure there were blatant references for fans of the franchise to latch onto.   

(Spoilers under the cut)

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The title of this François Truffaut classic comes from the French idiom “faire les quatre cents coups”, meaning “to raise hell” (x). The English title is a straight translation of the French but misses its meaning. On the first American prints, subtitler and dubber Noelle Gilmore gave the film the title Wild Oats, but the distributor did not like that title and reverted it to The 400 Blows, which led some to think the film covered the topic of corporal punishment (x).
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The title of this François Truffaut classic comes from the French idiom “faire les quatre cents coups”, meaning “to raise hell” (x). The English title is a straight translation of the French but misses its meaning. On the first American prints, subtitler and dubber Noelle Gilmore gave the film the title Wild Oats, but the distributor did not like that title and reverted it to The 400 Blows, which led some to think the film covered the topic of corporal punishment (x).