Opinion Piece - 2018: The Year of Cinematic Disappointments

Going into 2018, I said it didn't look like as great a year for films as 2016 and 17 and while I've seen plenty of delights (The Night Comes For Us, Suspiria, Bad Times at the El Royale), I've sadly been proved right. Essentially, where this post has come from is that as the year starts to wind down (I know it's November but I like to stay on top of my lists) I was looking at a list I made at the start of the year of the films I was most excited about. Of the 12 films that have come out from that list (and including the top two films on the list), four have been bad. That doesn't sound like a lot but it's a third of the films that have come out from that list and maybe says something about the year in film we've had. Obviously, every year there are bad films, genuinely awful films and most years, I see a bunch of them but it's felt like the bad films have stung really hard this year. I'll talk about the films I didn't really expect to be good and weren't but as the title of this post implies, it's the big let downs I want to get to first.

The elephant in the room then is The Predator. At the start of the year, it was the film I was the most excited for. A follow up to one of the best action movies ever made, directed by one of my favourite directors and with an all star cast. What could go wrong? Yeah, everything as it turned out. It was a sad, boring and strangely misogynistic film that just ruined my cinematic week and let me tell you, that was also the House with a Clock in it's Walls week. Maybe it's just because I enjoy a film that sneaks up on me (a recent example being the surprisingly heartfelt Blockers) but waiting all year for The Predator only to be let down like that was one of the worse experiences I've had in a cinema. The other big letdown that I was distraught about was Mute. Again, a favourite director of mine in Douglas Jones but this time a film I had waited about a year for since announcement. Netflix finally came through with it, a longtime passion project in the same universe as Jones' first film Moon and... I wish they hadn't done it really. It's tarnished my love for Jones, taken away a bit of the magic of Moon and further called into question if we should let Netflix make films. So yeah, let down.

Even films that I was slowly excited about managed to disappoint, one of which was Bohemian Rhapsody, whose poster may have been the reason you angrily clicked this. BECAUSE YES, BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY IS A BAD FILM. I wasn't hugely interested in the film before the first trailer but once that trailer did come out, I was really interested. It was a great trailer and Queen have so many incredible songs that I thought it would at least be a solid film. Hell, even after seeing the trailer about twenty times over the last two months I was kind of excited. Sadly no, it's a bad film about some of the greatest songs ever written and having that realisation over a painful 140 minutes was yet another miserable time at the cinema. Plenty of other films have managed to blunder too. The new Jurassic World was never going to be amazing but I like the first one and the trailer for the new one looked stupid enough to be fun. Seriously, it was advertised as a film about dinosaurs running away from an island that was exploding, all it had to be was stupid fun and it couldn't even do that. I don't always want high art but Hollywood still keeps finding new ways to disappoint me.

We've also had plenty of awful films that I expected to be awful this year (like Johnny English Strikes Again or Venom) but those didn't really have promise so they didn't sting. As I close this piece out though, the question is: is there hope? I don't want to hate going to the cinema, it's one of my few joys in life. Sadly, hope dwindles constantly and looking at the upcoming release schedule is a bit of a bummer. There's a new Robin Hood film, that Aquaman film, yet another unnecessary Harry Potter spin off (don't @ me). It just says a lot about Hollywood as it stands right now that the safest looking bet for the rest of the year is a new Transformers film. Here's to 2019 then, can't get worse, right?