5. Prometheus
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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