With the year coming to a close, it's important to really take a look at the best parts of 2012; the things to be thankful for; the little moments that made the year special -- like our Top 10 Movies of 2012. But it's way more fun to just go to town on something you hated. So let's do that!! Yaaaay!
As we head into the new year, Movie Fanatic's own Micah Gordon and Joel Amos each discuss their least favorite movie of 2012.
MICAH:
This is going to be a very contentious pick, but there's a lot to consider when discussing the worst movie of the year. I'd say that beyond simply picking the movie you enjoyed watching the least, one must consider expectation vs. payoff, cultural context, and the taste a movie leaves in your mouth long after you've left the theater. Keeping all this in mind, I really have to go with The Dark Knight Rises as the worst film of 2012.
TDKR was supposed to be the end of an extremely well-respected series. It was supposed to wrap up what is possibly the greatest superhero movie ever, The Dark Knight (which recently made our list of the 100 Best Films of All Time). It was supposed to feature the coolest villain we've ever seen, and the one guy who could actually defeat Batman. Instead, what audiences got was a 3-hour narrative nightmare, with a silly villain who wore his Achilles' heel on his face (nobody thought to go after Bane's mask, if only to make him more intelligible?), some plot holes so canyonesque, I had to make up the word "canyonesque" to describe them, and one of the least believable, most unsatisfying, biggest cop-out movie endings I've ever seen.
Was TDKR a decent movie to sit and watch? Yes. But beyond being way too long, the moment I left the theater, doubts began to set in. Then, a close analysis of the plot revealed some truly unforgivable oversights, which ultimately concluded in flat-out hatred. So there you have it, America. I. Hated. The. Dark. Knight. Rises.
JOEL:
For my worst picture of 2012, we have to travel all the way back to January when an apocalyptic horror movie was nothing more than an absolute terror to watch. As I stated in my The Divide review, the film was supposed to be this big morality picture, masked in the horrors of what happens to humans after an all-out nuclear attack. Instead it was simply the most awful mix of what human evil can be inflicted on each other by each of us and a government-as-bad-guy story with neither ever being even remotely realized.
At one point in the film, one of the characters swims through a sewer and that is a perfect metaphor for how one feels after watching this stinker. It's terrible on so many levels, it's hard to know where to stop.
First of all, who is it that attacked New York City? Secondly, why did the government weld shut the door to the outside world that our handful of survivors are stuck behind? And lastly, would people really turn on each other in the way that is painted in The Divide? Sure, horrible things would happen, but there is no way that after surviving a nuclear attack, a group of strangers would act as filmmakers painted in this horror show.
If one has to watch violence porn, there are at least a dozen better examples (Saw) of how to achieve that sick feat in a more compelling manner.
Not only will you want to take a shower after witnessing The Divide, it may even make you swear off movies!