Five movies that are worse than 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'

Before we get started today, I thought I'd make one thing clear: I fucking love The Last Jedi. Sure, Canto Bight feels really out of place tonally, Captain Phasma was yet again a complete waste, and the scene where Rose kisses Finn at the end feels super awkward and forced considering they lack believable chemistry, but overall, I thought it was a brilliant entry in the Star Wars franchise that tried different things and took the story into new directions rather than just retreading what we've seen before in previous films. Heck, I consider it my third favourite film in the series so far below Empire and A New Hope and just above The Force Awakens (yes, I prefer them both to Return of the Jedi).

However, some people don't seem to share my enjoyment of The Last Jedi for various reasons. Be it that it contradicted their fan theories or felt the film had a so called 'feminist agenda'. Don't get me wrong, I understand people have legitimate reasons for disliking the film, and everyone is entitled to their opinions, but what I disagree with is people hating the film because it features women in prominent roles or other nitpicking nonsense. There's also people who proclaim The Last Jedi as 'the worst movie of all time' and that it 'ruined Star Wars'. I wholeheartedly disagree with both these statements, so I thought I'd list five movies that I feel are worse than The Last Jedi, no matter what your thoughts are on it. There are probably films that are worse than the films I'm listing here, but these are just films that spring to my mind.

5. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)

I feel it's worth starting off by saying that The Last Jedi isn't the worst movie ever, and isn't even the worst Star Wars movie, either. That title has belonged to Attack of the Clones for the past 17 years.

Sure, there is definitely stuff to be enjoyed in Attack of the Clones; Christopher Lee as Count Dooku is great, both Ewan McGregor and Ian McDirmand continue to be the best things about the prequels in their respective roles as Obi Wan Kenobi and Palpatine/Sideous, and it's pretty cool seeing loads of Jedi in action during the battle in the Geonosis arena. However, overall this movie is not an engaging watch. A fair chunk of the movie is spent watching Hayden Christensen's Anakin Skywalker trying to woo Natalie Portman's Padme Amedala, and both leads have no chemistry on screen together and spout some of the worst dialogue ever written, including this rather infamous line:

You can't blame the actors for trying, though, as even Samuel L Jackson can't make the clunky dialogue in this film work, and being made to act against a green screen for most the film rather than physical sets is much more challenging. Speaking of the CGI, not only has it not aged all that well, but it also gives the film a cheap and sterile feeling. Even the climactic battle is ruined by Yoda's use of a lightsaber, which not only goes against his character that we saw in the original trilogy, it looks incredibly dumb and stupid with him bouncing around like a ping pong ball. 

4. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

It's incredibly easy for me to list everything that's wrong with Indiana Jones' fourth outing. Indiana Jones somehow surviving a nuclear explosion by climbing into a fridge, Shia LaBeouf being incredibly insufferable as Mutt Williams, Ray Winstone constantly switching sides, the Soviet villains being incredibly forgettable and underwhelming, an overabundance of CGI, and of course, the appearance of aliens at the film's end. Sure, the previous three Indiana Jones films haven't been 100% grounded in reality and have had their fair share of ridiculousness, but at least those films are fun and enjoyable to watch. Crystal Skull is just a boring slog of a film that fails to be either engaging or enjoyable.

3. Alien: Resurrection (1997)

Some might argue that Alien 3 belongs on this list instead. However, given the amount of production issues that Alien 3 ended up having, that film can be forgiven to a certain extent. Sure, it's not on the level of Alien or Aliens, but it has enough redeeming features to make it watchable. Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said for it's sequel, Alien Resurrection.

Alien 3 provided Ripley's character with a perfect end. Sure, the film itself has plenty of flaws, but it gave the character closure with her sacrificing herself to prevent an Xenomorph queen being born and preventing the sinister Weyland Yutani from acquiring the creature to utilise for their own sinister agenda. There was no need for a follow up to that film. But of course, film executives like making money, and with the Alien franchise being relatively lucrative, they shat out this complete mess of a film.

How do they deal with Ripley being dead? They decide to clone her in order for a sinister company to also clone the egg inside her and produce their own Xenomorphs. There's literally no other purpose for them to do this other than because they wanted to make another Alien film. The film then goes on to not only suck any sense of menace out of the once terrifying Xenomorphs, but introduces The Newborn, an incredibly shit looking hybrid of Xenomorph and human that isn't the least bit scary and who's appearance is nothing but laughable.

2. Thunderbirds (2004)

What happens when you take a beloved franchise with an excellent premise and formula and try to tweak that formula in order to attract a different audience? Well, you get something like 2004's live action adaptation of Gerry Anderson's 60's puppet sci fi classic Thunderbirds. 

The original Thunderbirds series has a brilliant format; Billionaire ex-astronaut Jeff Tracy and his five sons are part of a futuristic rescue organisation that pilot cool vehicles to save people from catastrophic disasters. Despite the film originally being written to follow that format, film executives didn't feel this version would do well in America, so that was thrown aside and the film lingered in development hell for years until Spy Kids came along and it was decided 'we're making this film for kids, lets make this film about kids'.

The end result is a film targeted squarely at kids with not much to appeal to general audiences. The International Rescue organisation are barely in it, spending most of the film trapped aboard space station Thunderbird 5. Instead, we're stuck with an insufferable 15 year old Alan Tracy and his friends Tin Tin and Fermat (the latter being a character created for this film) being chased around the island by minions of The Hood (played by Ben Kingsley, who gives a laughably bad performance but given the material he's given, who can really blame him for hamming it up?) for most of the film. Sure, Lady Penelope, Parker and John Tracy were portrayed pretty well by Sophia Myles, Ron Cook and Lex Shrapnel respectively, but they aren't enough to save this sinking ship of a film made slightly worse by the song Busted wrote for the end credits which was only redeemed through Charlie Simpson going on to form Fightstar (disclaimer: I'm aware that Busted have their fans, but on a subjective level, I'm really not a fan of their music and find the song from this film in particular irritating).

1. The Last Airbender (2010)

What happens when you take a show with an excellent story and characters but forget to include anything that made the show great to begin with? Well, you get M Night Shamylan's attempt to adapt the brilliant Nickelodeon cartoon series 'Avatar: The Last Airbender'.

For some bizarre reason, Shamylan decided to attempt to squeeze a whole 20 episode season into a 90 minute movie. What this means is we get a movie that is full of a lot of exposition telling us about things that have happened instead of just showing us. On top of this, it makes some incredibly bizarre alterations to the story which make no sense. One key example is the episode of the show where all the Earthbenders are being held hostage on a prison barge with no earth at all for them to use to fight back and escape. In the movie, the Earthbenders are imprisoned in an area surrounded by Earth so they could have escaped at any time, but for some reason they didn't think to do that until Aang came along and gave a rousing speech (even though it was Katara who gave said speech in the TV show). Another example is that Shamylan seemed to go out of his way to ensure that every character's name was pronounced incorrectly.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. The show had a diverse cast and had a distinctly Asian feel, but the film decided to have all the heroes be Caucasian and all the villains be Asian. As for the actors themselves, they all give incredibly poor performances, but given that the characterisation of the characters in this film is incredibly two dimensional, I can't imagine they had much to work with. Even though the show had an excellent mix of both drama and comedy, this film mostly forgoes the comedy so we're left with an incredibly po faced and overly serious film with lacklustre action sequences that falls flat on it's face. The only saving grace of this film is that it got such a bad critical reception that we were spared the mercy of having a sequel to this mess.