Works where you were surprised to learn you were in the minority of viewers

[Metastachydium]

growing up I very much enjoyed SPAM.

Bet it won't be hard to guess where I am from...

…is it Nigeria? Yes, I know. I'll show myself out.

[Mordar]

…is it Nigeria? Yes, I know. I'll show myself out.

But before you go, please help fund my efforts to recover my $37M fortune! If you can provide me 2 dozen donuts and a blank check from your account I promise to share my recovered fortune with you!

On topic - Babylon 5 and Doctor Who. Saw a few episodes of each and thought "Well this is no good". Guess about a bijillion sci-fi fan people disagree with me. Which is probably almost all of them.

- M

[Tyndmyr]

Oh! Oh! I got a good one, on topic and everything.

Bright.

Had modern fantasy. Felt very shadow run going in. Starred an actor I like(d). Genuinely liked the design of orcs, who I've always had a soft spot for as a race. What wasn't to like? It wasn't a perfect movie, but I genuinely enjoyed it.

Then I check with friends and reviews. It is my understanding that people flat out hated this film, and I still can't see why.

I thought the movie was mediocre at best, but the world it depicted was a shadowrunesque sort of cool. I won't say I thought it was good, but I thought the idea at least had some strong potential. It just needed for the fantasy/cop story to be a little less generic, that's all.

In other opinions, Memento is overrated. It *only* has any cred because of the disjointed flow of the sequences, but if you put them in order, the movie would be insanely boring, and even as is, it certainly isn't rewatchable.

Also, I didn't like the original ghostbusters. Like, I know that everybody else apparently loves it, but I can't get through the darned thing. So, that was surprising, albeit more the show itself being surprising, as I knew the reactions in advance.

I did always feel that Solo would've been a lot more enjoyable if it just didn't star Han Solo. If it was just a Star Wars movie about just some new guy falling into doing this stuff, without any of the backstory elements, I think it might've been pretty great.

So, I absolutely hate the film, but I have to concede that the land battle segment of it does feel gloriously like the Imperium in W40k. The film itself was utterly pointless, but I truly wish the people who made it had continued to flesh out that bit of it, and just went full warhammer on it. If you're going to do a gritty version of space fantasy, well, uh, that's your franchise right there.

[Ionathus]

If folks looked at the Orcs and Elves in that film, and drew some kind of direct correllary to any particular modern world racial groups, they brought that correlation to the game with them, and it exists entirely inside their own minds. Which... you know... speaks volumes about those people that they would make that correlation in the first place.

I guess the moral is that no matter how fantastic your setting, and how completely and obviously disconnected it is from the "real world", some people just can't let go and just enjoy the fantasy (and you know, just take it at face value for what it is). Yes. There was racial conflict in the film (or maybe more correctly "species conflict"). But it included fantasy races that simply don't exist in our world. If folks applied their own real world stereotpes to that... it's on them.

Interesting. Every mention of the film I've seen focused on the social commentary being hamfisted and very blatantly a 1-for-1 real-world parallel to real world groups. It was such a universal opinion that I believed it was the creators' intention. If that's not the case and it's a more nuanced take, or just "playing with" those elements, that might tip me over the edge into checking it out.

Again, this is with the caveat of "this is just what I heard" since I never saw it. I apologize because I know that makes me a really frustrating conversation partner -- I can just retreat to the safety of "well I've never seen it, this is just what I've heard, so it's useless to argue with me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

On topic - Babylon 5 and Doctor Who. Saw a few episodes of each and thought "Well this is no good". Guess about a bijillion sci-fi fan people disagree with me. Which is probably almost all of them.

The difference there for me is that Doctor Who fans often feel like Star Trek fans: they have no illusions about other people liking it. In fact, they can sometimes even seem bashful about recommending it to people.

All I'm saying is, every time I've witnessed somebody say "I've never seen the original Star Wars trilogy", someone in the room yells at them like it's a moral failure. Star Trek or Doctor Who fans often seem more just pleased that anyone's giving their franchise the time of day

And yeah, I think I probably would lump Babylon 5 fans in with that group as well...if I'd ever met one in real life

[Mechalich]

On topic - Babylon 5 and Doctor Who. Saw a few episodes of each and thought "Well this is no good". Guess about a bijillion sci-fi fan people disagree with me. Which is probably almost all of them.

This is somewhat more nuanced. Doctor Who is a series with a fair amount of mixed opinions. There are people who are really, really into it, but there are also a lot of science fiction fans who are of the 'this isn't for me' variety. The series is also known to vary wildly in tone and quality from run to run and even episode to episode, so it's absolutely possible to be exposed to a bad batch of Doctor Who and bounce off the franchise. Babylon 5 takes a while to build its characters and setting, and many of the first season's episodes are quite weak compared to later offerings (IMO the first really good episode is S1E9 'Deathwalker').

Interesting. Every mention of the film I've seen focused on the social commentary being hamfisted and very blatantly a 1-for-1 real-world parallel to real world groups. It was such a universal opinion that I believed it was the creators' intention. If that's not the case and it's a more nuanced take, or just "playing with" those elements, that might tip me over the edge into checking it out.

Again, this is with the caveat of "this is just what I heard" since I never saw it. I apologize because I know that makes me a really frustrating conversation partner -- I can just retreat to the safety of "well I've never seen it, this is just what I've heard, so it's useless to argue with me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

I've seen Bright, and I'll speak for the conventional wisdom on this: that film has perhaps the worst urban fantasy worldbuilding I have ever seen, which is saying something. This is a film so lazy that Will Smith makes an extended riff based on the Shrek franchise to the face of a bunch of orc gang members, in a world where orcs have supposedly lived alongside other species for a thousand years and therefore the very idea of 'Shrek' as a thing is preposterous. It's also a film whose central commentary is about integrating an orc into the police force, but randomly shows a Centaur cop - which would be about ten times more challenging - in one scene with no explanation whatsoever.

The film actually works better if you broadly treat all the fantasy elements as a weird skin someone put over the footage and just envision it as a Bad Boys spin-off in which Will Smith's character gets a new partner.

[Errorname]

I guess the moral is that no matter how fantastic your setting, and how completely and obviously disconnected it is from the "real world"

The film does everything in it's power to connect the fantastic elements of the setting to the real world, that's the foundational premise of the movie, the "real world" elements are the hook.

Interesting. Every mention of the film I've seen focused on the social commentary being hamfisted and very blatantly a 1-for-1 real-world parallel to real world groups. It was such a universal opinion that I believed it was the creators' intention.

Even if it wasn't the creators' intent (which I really strongly doubt, I don't think this sort of thing happens accidentally), there are very good reasons that people reading it as sloppy shallow and thoughtless social commentary was a very common reaction to it.

[Tyndmyr]

But before you go, please help fund my efforts to recover my $37M fortune! If you can provide me 2 dozen donuts and a blank check from your account I promise to share my recovered fortune with you!

On topic - Babylon 5 and Doctor Who. Saw a few episodes of each and thought "Well this is no good". Guess about a bijillion sci-fi fan people disagree with me. Which is probably almost all of them.

- M

Who is a really mixed bag, I think even its fans will admit that. For every glorious episode, there is a *lot* of half baked ideas executed with a leftover prop budget of perhaps ten dollars and the worst CGI that money can buy.

There are some ideas and episodes that really do work, but if you're into wild and crazy sci fi without a strong need for continuity or realism, Rick and Morty largely just does it better on average.

The film actually works better if you broadly treat all the fantasy elements as a weird skin someone put over the footage and just envision it as a Bad Boys spin-off in which Will Smith's character gets a new partner.

That already exists, and is Men in Black.

Not a complaint, the MIB films were fun enough, just...it's amusing how similar Will Smith's character is in all of them.

[Ionathus]

Who is a really mixed bag, I think even its fans will admit that. For every glorious episode, there is a *lot* of half baked ideas executed with a leftover prop budget of perhaps ten dollars and the worst CGI that money can buy.

There are some ideas and episodes that really do work, but if you're into wild and crazy sci fi without a strong need for continuity or realism, Rick and Morty largely just does it better on average.

Yep. Doctor Who is the campiest of the camp, and you really do have to go in knowing that. It does occasionally produce some real gems, but you have to sift for them.

I never got into Rick and Morty. "Ugly, abrasive, cynical adult cartoon" has never been my cup of tea. It's genuinely interesting to see it compared to Who, and especially weird to see someone say "Rick and Morty is a better execution of Doctor Who", given how wildly different their aesthetics are.

[Tyndmyr]

Yep. Doctor Who is the campiest of the camp, and you really do have to go in knowing that. It does occasionally produce some real gems, but you have to sift for them.

I never got into Rick and Morty. "Ugly, abrasive, cynical adult cartoon" has never been my cup of tea. It's genuinely interesting to see it compared to Who, and especially weird to see someone say "Rick and Morty is a better execution of Doctor Who", given how wildly different their aesthetics are.

That's fair, they have a significant style difference. Rick and Morty is far cruder. However, the basic episodic space adventure insanity between the elder traveller and his young companion visiting various sci fi tropes is so very Dr Who that Rick has literally called himself Dr Who, and heck, even the theme music is pretty darned close. Play them back to back.

[Errorname]

That's fair, they have a significant style difference. Rick and Morty is far cruder. However, the basic episodic space adventure insanity between the elder traveller and his young companion visiting various sci fi tropes is so very Dr Who that Rick has literally called himself Dr Who, and heck, even the theme music is pretty darned close. Play them back to back.

I can see it, but still even if the broad structure is the same the actual feel of the show is so different that I struggle to imagine Rick and Morty as a proper substitute.

[Morgaln]

Batman Begins: I just didn't like that movie at all. The plot was a convoluted mess and the villain destroyed his own credibility halfway through the movie. I disliked the movie so much that I could never bring myself to watch the sequels.

I also have a few video game examples:

Xenogears: for some reason this game is often celebrated as one of Squaresoft's masterpieces, and I never understood why. The game's graphics were ugly even at the time of release (the character models looked worse than FFVII, which is a feat in itself). The story was weird and worse, about halfway through the game it just stops being a game and becomes basically a visual novel (as far as I know, they run out of budget to create the second half). It took me three tries to finally stick with it and finish the game, and I'm still not sure it was worth the time.

Memoria: This is a weird one, as it is a disconnect between which I consider the "good" ending and what others seem to think. Major spoilers for the game ahead:

Spoiler

Show

Memoria is a point&click game set in the Dark Eye universe. it's the sequel to Chains of Satinav; CoS ends with the female lead (Nuri) being transformed into a raven by the magical energies set free by the villain. In Memoria, the B plot is trying to find a cure for that transformation. During the whole game, Nuri is a raven; she can still speak, but it is obvious that she is successively losing her "human" side (she's not actually human but that is irrelevant here); she's also turning into a raven mentally, and she is losing her memories as she does.
By the end of the game, she barely remembers anything. She doesn't remember Geron (the character you play and male lead) and she doesn't have any memories of the adventures they had together. Some of it comes back when prompted, but only vaguely, and it clearly distresses her as it makes her realize that she has lost memories and that there is something missing. On the other hand, multiple times during the game she has expressed how much she loves the freedom and lack of responsibilities in live as a raven.
At that point, you do find a cure, but you have to decide whether to actually apply it or whether to let her be a raven forever. For me, the choice was obvious. Even if I applied the cure, Nuri wouldn't remember anything. She'd not be the person Geron fell in love with, and she would always know there was something missing. So I decided to let her go, to have her live a happy live as a raven

Cue my surprise when I found out that is very much a minority opinion. Most people think turning her back is the right choice, claiming that missing memories aren't a big deal and you can just make new memories after all. Never mind how creepy it is to basically wake up with no memories at all and some guy being there telling you he's your boyfriend and to just trust him.

[Mordar]

Batman Begins: I just didn't like that movie at all. The plot was a convoluted mess and the villain destroyed his own credibility halfway through the movie. I disliked the movie so much that I could never bring myself to watch the sequels.

To me, interesting ideas, so-so execution. Dark Knight was a bad movie with a great performance. Rises proved Nolan didn't use the version of Batman that matters to me, and can commit the sin of smashing together multiple big comic storylines in a way that sucks the good from each of them. And he again made Bane a chump...just not as bad a chump as we saw in previous films.

I suspect two of those are minority, but I think not such a big gap.

- M

[KorvinStarmast]

Dr Who never did anything for me. So I ignored it. Didn't care for the Simpsons either.

[Mx.Silver]

No, I call this collection of posts contrarianism!

Touché

Oof, big agree, don't get me started. I have like five people total in my real life that I trust enough to talk about anime without A) them getting weird or B) them thinking I'm weird. It's got so much cultural baggage that you have to slog through to discuss anything, and you can never know if that person's only conception of anime is some truly heinous garbage...and worse, you can never know for sure if they like that heinous garbage or not. It's such a can of worms that I usually avoid it.

Yeah, pretty much. It also doesn't help that talking about it online in English-language spaces inevitably means running into that subset of Americans who seem to struggle with fully conceptualising non-American things and people¹, more of whom watch anime than you might expect. Unsurprisingly they tend to be pretty bad about it, but that'd be getting off-topic for the thread. Also I don't want to have to remember a bunch of terribly conversations I've been stuck in over the years



I've been trying to think of anything I have that's actually on topic. I guess, maybe that I'm less fond of Oppenheimer than people generally seemed to be? Like, I think it's an okay film, I just didn't expect the 'classic' and 'Nolan's best work' that a fair number of people were throwing around at the time. Although, I don't know if mine's really that much of a minority opinion a year after the fact, now that the 'back to the cinemas' hype's died-off.



¹not all Americans are like that, obviously. Nor is this kind of behaviour unique to them (especially when talking about things related to Japan), but it is something you see more from Americans than you do from other parts of the online Anglosphere, likely for a variety of reasons it's not really worth getting into at the moment.

[halfeye]

The Girl from Uncle.

Thr series showed up here after the Man from Uncle ended, and I liked it.

I guess a person's got to do what feels right to them, but I thought Hart to Hart made her too much of a doormat.

[warty goblin]

To me, interesting ideas, so-so execution. Dark Knight was a bad movie with a great performance. Rises proved Nolan didn't use the version of Batman that matters to me, and can commit the sin of smashing together multiple big comic storylines in a way that sucks the good from each of them. And he again made Bane a chump...just not as bad a chump as we saw in previous films.

I suspect two of those are minority, but I think not such a big gap.

- M

I just don't find Batman interesting, like, even for a superhero he's boring. I liked the Matt Reeves/Robert Pattinson Batman pretty well, because it had fantastic style and a lot of it wasn't very Batman-centric, but it would have been substantially improved with zero Batman content. Would have fixed the thing where all the functioning adults were standing around talking about serious things while studiously ignoring the dude in fetish gear gate-crashing the whole thing.


Because I didn't watch it until years after it came out, I wasn't surprised that I'm the only human on the planet who likes the John Carter movie, I just don't get why.

Ditto the Jason Momoa Conan movie. It's got everything a barbarian movie should have, biceps, boobs, blades and blood.

I remain deeply confused by the fact that most people apparently hate the Architect scene in Matrix Reloaded when it's the best scene in the movie.

That said, Cloud Atlas is the best piece of sci-fi this century. Fight me.

[Ionathus]

Ooh! I remember one!

I watched Hancock, the bizarre superhero film, in theaters on a random day while trying to kill time until my mom finished her errands. It was just “what was playing” that day so I watched it.

I remember thinking it was weird, but okay enough. Interesting in some parts but the ending kinda petered out. But overall I liked it. Come to find out that people have very strong negative opinions on it.

For good reason, to be fair. It really is a weird, WEIRD movie.

[GloatingSwine]

I think Hancock is one of those movies that's been reassessed over time now that people have figured out what it actually is as a movie and are judging it by that, not any expectations attached to "superhero movie" or "Will Smith movie". (And also pretty much everything Will Smith did since has shown how much worse it could have been).

[Mechalich]

Because I didn't watch it until years after it came out, I wasn't surprised that I'm the only human on the planet who likes the John Carter movie, I just don't get why.

Nah, appreciation for John Carter has increased over time, to the point that it qualifies as 'officially underrated.' John Carter, like Solo, is another case of marketing failures overwhelming basically everything about the film itself. Disney basically strangled the marketing push for the film and also couldn't find it in themselves to title the movie 'John Carter of Mars' for inexplicable reasons. The movie failed catastrophically at the box office as a result and was considered in the general consciousness to be a failure until enough time passed for revisionist criticism to occur and permeate the internet.

John Carter isn't a great film - it has significant story, pacing, and acting problems (Dominic West, in particular, seems to have no idea what he's doing in the film at all) - but it's a fun film with some genuinely great visuals and set pieces that deserved better treatment.

[The Glyphstone]

Ooh! I remember one!

I watched Hancock, the bizarre superhero film, in theaters on a random day while trying to kill time until my mom finished her errands. It was just “what was playing” that day so I watched it.

I remember thinking it was weird, but okay enough. Interesting in some parts but the ending kinda petered out. But overall I liked it. Come to find out that people have very strong negative opinions on it.

For good reason, to be fair. It really is a weird, WEIRD movie.

Hancock could have been so much better if they hadn't hamfisted a romance subplot into the middle of it.

[Peelee]

In other opinions, Memento is overrated. It *only* has any cred because of the disjointed flow of the sequences, but if you put them in order, the movie would be insanely boring, and even as is, it certainly isn't rewatchable.

I don't think "if you completely change the structure of the movie then it's not a good movie" is really the criticism you think it is.

[Sermil]

I think that there are three broad groups who rate films.

1. experts/critics. These people are usually insane people who think they know more about art than other people, but are usually complete imbecils whose opinions only seems to actually matter within their own bubble. Unfortunately, they share that bubble with every other expert/critic and have filled the various awards groups with their own crazy members. Which is unfortunately why "award winning show" and "show I want to watch" rarely intersects.

One thing I've heard about professional movie critics -- I think I once heard a professional movie critic actually say this -- is that they watch a lot more movies than you or I do. A lot more. A professional critic might watch a movie every day of the week, or at least one every other day. Most of them also probably watched an unusually high number of movies when growing up, that's why they became critics.

The end result is that professional movie critics tend to be more excited by something new, something different than the average person. An average person, seeing a somewhat-clichéd-but-well-done bit, might say that it's well done. The professional critic, on the other hand, has seen that cliché over and over and over and over and is so sick of it that they only see how clichéd it is. So a movie that finally does something different or just doesn't fall into the same-old-tropes is going to automatically get bonus points from many critics just because they don't have that "oh, God, this again" reaction.

[MarkVIIIMarc]

Bright with Will Smith.

I heard it was rhe worst movie ever and turned it on one night near midnight

Well darn it. They cuss in the most booring way possible and there are some plot holes but it was way better than worst movie ever. I actually enjoyed it.

[llama-hedge]

My whole family really liked Pacific Heat, even though it was widely panned as a bad Archer ripoff. I've only seen a few episodes of Archer, but other than art style and genre I don't think they're that similar beyond the really superficial comparisons. The only reason I found this out was that I looked it up to find out when the next season was coming out, only to discover the chance of that ever happening was practically nil.

[GloatingSwine]

Hancock could have been so much better if they hadn't hamfisted a romance subplot into the middle of it.

I think this is a perfect encapsulation of what I was talking about when I said people brought expectations to Hancock that stopped them seeing what it was.

That "subplot"? That's the plot. It's who the characters are, why they are where they are, and what decisions they need to make to change their situation.

The problem is that it has a really jarring transition into that out of the misanthrope comedy setup.

[Rodin]

I think this is a perfect encapsulation of what I was talking about when I said people brought expectations to Hancock that stopped them seeing what it was.

That "subplot"? That's the plot. It's who the characters are, why they are where they are, and what decisions they need to make to change their situation.

The problem is that it has a really jarring transition into that out of the misanthrope comedy setup.

It almost feels like it was meant to be two movies. The first movie being where Hancock learns not to be a misanthrope and actually be a hero, and a second movie where his long lost love returns. Both halves are decent on their own, but as part of the same movie the plots don't mesh well.

[BloodSquirrel]

Something I liked that others didn't, Solo. To this day, I do not understand why people don't like it. It was Han and Chewie: A Love Story, and that was exactly what I wanted out of that movie. Complaints about him taking the name Solo and the like just don't make sense to me - I didn't care about it, but if that annoyed a person, it was about five seconds of time in the movie.

From my experience, the general consensus on Solo was that it was an alright movie, but that it would have been improved if it wasn't trying to shoehorn itself into being a Han Solo backstory. The 'Solo' is a good example- it's annoying because it's trying too hard to explain something that we didn't need to have explained to us. We already understood the thematic purpose of Han's last name being "Solo". There's something very artificial in general about taking an established character and trying to cram an origin story for everything associated with him into one movie that covers a few days of his life.

But aside from that, there wasn't much particularly wrong with it, and the fact that it flopped had more to do with TLJ backlash than it being just that bad. I certainly liked it better than Rogue One, which I think would have flopped just as hard it if was coming after TLJ instead of coming during the post-TFA enthusiasm.

I think that there are three broad groups who rate films.

1. experts/critics. These people are usually insane people who think they know more about art than other people, but are usually complete imbecils whose opinions only seems to actually matter within their own bubble. Unfortunately, they share that bubble with every other expert/critic and have filled the various awards groups with their own crazy members. Which is unfortunately why "award winning show" and "show I want to watch" rarely intersects.

2. fans. Also crazy people. Also convinced that they know better about the subject matter than anyone else. While they don't have the insider pull that the first group has, they can be ridiculously vocal and loud about their opinions and thus influence things (usually in crazy ways). There is also only rare intersections of "what the fans want" and what I consider to be good ideas/stories/whatever.

3. "real people". You know. People who just want a film to tell them a good story with good characters and a good balance of "things" in it (depending on genre of course) and do so in a way that makes sense, doesn't offend them, doesn't preach to them, and has reasonable production value and thought and competance in the production itself.

I don't think this breakdown works at all. The "experts/critics" from establishment media outlets are known much more for being borderline marketing agents for major corporate franchises than the "film snobs" they used to be, while Youtube critics (who are probably far more influential at this point) are generally more in line with "casual fan" opinion.

Meanwhile, reviews from the general public are always going to be dominated by people who have a strong opinion, because people are more motivated to talk about things they loved or hated than things that were "okay", but this doesn't mean that those people are from any one general category of fan. Someone may be 'meh' on most of the MCU, but really like and really hate a few MCU movies.

The old "snotty pretentious critics vs. dumb slob mass audiences" dynamic, to whatever degree it existed, died when the internet stripped professional film critics of their monopoly of public discussion of films.

Common problem with Feast for Crows even for people who were really into the first three, it takes a lot of big swings with new characters and secondary characters promoted to PoVs while not featuring some of the most established PoVs while also being a deeply bleak book.

I definitely liked it the least on first read, although I appreciate it more nowadays.

I really enjoyed A Feast For Crows for what it was- a character study on Cersei Lannister. It helped that I had just started the series and wasn't waiting on it or waiting for Dance afterward for years.

The bigger problem with those two books is that the bloat started to set it, GRRM started to get lost in his own garden, and the overall plot doesn't seem like it's making any progress. Dance was the bigger offender of the two, but it hurts both books that there was a lack of follow-up to all of the various plots and arcs that were being explored. If I had gone into A Feast For Crows after years of anticipation, anxious to see resolutions or at least major developments to the long-running plot, I might have been far more frustrated with it. But after having powered through the first three books in relatively short order, the change of pace was actually kind of welcome.

[Lucat]

Probably got to be Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. I watched it and thought that it was deeply mediocre, and carried the themes of the original comic in a very shallow and unsubtle way. Then, I noticed that tons of people absolutely loved the series, and even like it more than the comics. To be fair, a lot of people who said that hadn’t actually read the comics before watching the series.

[Zevox]

Probably got to be Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.

Oh, that reminds me: one for me is Definitely Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Watched the movie after seeing everyone seemed to love it, including some friends of mine, and was not impressed at all. I recall feeling like it wanted to be funny, but didn't how to; and beyond that I guess you can say I found it forgettable, as I remember very little else of it at this point (granted it has been over a decade).

[Lucat]

Oh, that reminds me: one for me is Definitely Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Watched the movie after seeing everyone seemed to love it, including some friends of mine, and was not impressed at all. I recall feeling like it wanted to be funny, but didn't how to; and beyond that I guess you can say I found it forgettable, as I remember very little else of it at this point (granted it has been over a decade).

The comics are a lot better. The humor in the comics and movie is a bit hit-or-miss, I will say.