Bottom Twenty Worst Films of the Decade (1 of 2) (1/11/2020)
- Heather German
- Jun 26, 2020
- 5 min read
There’s a ton to say about the past decade, and the world at the beginning feels entirely different from the world now, both inside and outside of the film industry. There’s plenty of good to say, but as I did with my yearly retrospective, I want to focus on the bad first.
It’s easy to feel discouraged when looking at the film industry as a brief overview today. While there’s a lot of great stuff going on, a lot of the surface level has become corrupted. Disney is slowly taking over the industry, and Hollywood has given up on producing meaningful art along with its entertainment almost entirely. Stale, factory-assembled franchises rule the day, and it’s becoming clear that Hollywood is entering its death throes.
Here are the twenty movies I saw this past decade that truly exemplify that decline the most.
20. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is a perfect example of how corporate Hollywood refuses to let go of anything that could still make them a dime, no matter if there is any quality left to be had in it or not. The original Pirates of the Caribbean was a fun romp of a popcorn flick, but now that it’s over fifteen years since then and sequels are still being made, it’s lost a lot of its charm. There’s nowhere left for this series to go, yet Disney forces its characters to keep treading water, even as their limbs grow more and more weary, and all of the things that made them interesting and likeable are now nearly gone.
19. The Cloverfield Paradox
The Cloverfield Paradox is a failure of catastrophic proportions. While its marketing gimmick drew it a lot of attention, and the Cloverfield name had recently been injected with goodwill courtesy of 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Cloverfield Paradox is a confusing mish-mash of sci-fi horror cliches and bland mystery boxes. The acting and characters are bland, the story reads like a bad Doctor Who episode, and the visuals look like they were made for TV compared to the film’s predecessor. Overall, The Cloverfield Paradox is a mess of misguided franchise building - and still somehow the best of three films on this list with J.J. Abrams’ name on them.
18. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Sony wanted to keep the rights to Spider-Man so badly that they took a dump on theater screens across the world rather than give it up. The first Amazing Spider-Man wasn’t /that/ bad - it was decently entertaining and adapted certain aspects of the character that Sam Raimi’s trilogy didn’t. Overall, though, it was a soulless, cynical cash grab, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is even worse. With a remarkably overstuffed plot, a thoroughly unlikeable portrayal of Peter Parker and one of the worst superhero movie villains in recent memory (most ableist, too!) The Amazing Spider-Man is one long, exhausting train wreck to sit through from start to finish.
17. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
The Hobbit films could have been great, but studio interference and a misguided desire to tie everything in with The Lord of the Rings sent the finished product off the rails. I kind of like the first two films as dumb adventure movies, but they’re terrible adaptations of the source material and have their own fair share of problems. The Battle of the Five Armies is easily the worst of the bunch, though. Overly bloated and packed with bland action sequences and a grim atmosphere that feels nothing like the book its based on, The Battle of the Five Armies tries so hard to be this decades Return of the King and fails on nearly every level.
16. Star Trek Into Darkness
Ah, J. J. Abrams. Put in the lead of the Star Trek reboot movies even though he openly is not a fan of the series. The first Star Trek reboot in 2009 is a fun blockbuster epic, but this follow up is anything but. It starts off decently enough, but quickly devolves into loud, senseless action scenes and poor pacing. The worst part of it, though, is how it relies so much on previous Star Trek films and knowledge thereof to ratchet up its stakes, constantly making references to The Wrath of Khan (as well as stealing its entire plot) to the point that it basically makes up the backbone of the story. Add in an unhealthy dose of post-9/11 cynicism that fits nowhere in the Star Trek name, and you have a true failure of a film.
15. A Good Day to Die Hard
A Good Day to Die Hard is one of the most boring action films I’ve ever seen. The action scenes have little to no inspiration, the plot is boring and cliche, and Bruce Willis wanders around in Russia, a situation he knew would be a sticky one going in, complaining that he’s supposed to be on vacation. Everything good about the original Die Hard is gone now, and we need to let this franchise die.
14. The Giver
The Giver was one of the most poignant and eye opening books I read as a kid, with a unique concept and a somber, contemplative mood that’s absent from most young adult literature. While this film adaptation manages to use enough stylistic elements - the black and white, really - to successfully adapt some of the more interesting elements of the book, the rest of the film falls really, really flat. It’s far overpaced, completely ruining the contemplativeness, and the way it looks and feels renders it yet another disappointing generic post-Hunger Games YA adaptation.
13. Joker
DC had quite a rough decade, as they tried and failed to catch up in the wake of Marvel’s success. Since 2017’s Wonder Woman, however, they’ve been slowly regaining their footing. Joker looked poised to be the best of the bunch - but instead, it was a confused, mean-spirited mess of unlikeable characters and pointless misery. Easily one of the biggest disappointments of the decade, and one that’s likely to spawn countless of insufferable imitators.
12. The Fifth Estate
Biopics have been a big thing lately (haven’t they always, though?). Whenever a director feels like going for an easy Oscar, they pick an interesting historical figure and slap some scenes from their life together and then call it a day. Biopics are so hard to make genuinely interesting, and few of them this decade were as disappointingly boring as The Fifth Estate. Taking the fascinating and relevant story of Wikileaks, The Fifth Estate squanders its potential with a dull, uninteresting knock off of The Social Network. This is probably the only movie I saw this decade that actually put me to sleep.
11. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Star Wars is perhaps the biggest example of how Disney is increasingly getting into the business of exploiting our nostalgia for profit. While The Force Awakens was a fun and exciting romp and The Last Jedi promised to take the series to new places, The Rise of Skywalker reveals that there was no plan for this new trilogy at all and the only reason it exists is to generate fanbase for itself. It’s soulless, cynical filmmaking in its purest form.
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