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The 10 Worst Films Of 2012

Earlier this week, I published my countdown of the Top 10 Films of 2012. As I said then, this has been a really great year for film, filled top to bottom with creative and memorable cinematic efforts. But that does not mean there weren’t plenty of stinkers in the mix as well, and I am sad to say I saw many if not most of them. Like its Top 10 counterpart, this Worst 10 Films of 2012 list was made from a competitive field; I hated more than enough movies this year to make a thoroughly bitter and resentful retrospective on the year in crap, one without room to spare for perennial Worst 10 favorites like Twilight.
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5. Prometheus

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I have said my peace on this one, in a podcast, a big feature article, and another podcast. There is little need to abuse the film any more. I will just say that I was, initially, dazzled by certain elements Prometheus seemed to offer, but diving deeper into the film only reveals greater and greater flaws, and due to the film’s absolutely horrendous narrative construction, subsequent viewings are painful experiences. The more I watch and think about Prometheus, the more I realize this is not just a disappointing effort, but an absolutely terrible film, one that is, after three ill-advised viewings, unwatchably bad. 

4. Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos

Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist is one of my absolute favorite stories of all time, but The Sacred Star of Milos, the latest film based on the anime adaptation, is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad train-wreck, a giant middle finger to devoted fans of Arakawa’s work and one of the more thoroughly painful cinematic experiences of 2012.

The film has many problems – the animation is atrociously lazy on every possible level, just for starters – but the core issue is that Milos is, in essence, one-hundred uninterrupted minutes of exposition. Of characters explaining, in excruciatingly precise detail, every single minute facet of the story, most of it entirely irrelevant because even with such mountains of exposition, the plot still makes precious little sense. The ‘story,’ such as it is, involves three nations, a town, and a great big valley, but figuring out where all the characters fit in, who they work for, or what they’re trying to accomplish is a fool’s errand, because what may be true one minute could be entirely false once the next plot contrivance arrives. The new characters, of which there are many, are wildly inconsistent, and the old characters we know and love are barely featured. In the last act, the film’s last vestiges of coherency are torn asunder by a number of twists that make so little sense it is a wonder they do not rupture tears in the space-time continuum.

I have never before seen a movie that was both largely incomprehensible and fetishistically devoted to clarifying its own story. Usually, it’s one or the other. With Milos, it’s both, and at the very least, you have to give the movie props for establishing a brand new level of anime awfulness.

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Jonathan R. Lack
With ten years of experience writing about movies and television, including an ongoing weekly column in The Denver Post's YourHub section, Jonathan R. Lack is a passionate voice in the field of film criticism. Writing is his favorite hobby, closely followed by watching movies and TV (which makes this his ideal gig), and is working on his first film-focused book.