Film series that should have been left alone.

Back to the future is special because the "sequels" answer the first film.

In the first film we have the journey of Marty 1.

The sequels are Marty 2 and possibly 3.

You can tell because the Jennifers are different.
 
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I'm fine with 'Raiders' as a trilogy. Each of the three had its own strengths.
To me, the "Indiana Jones trilogy" consists of two movies, and two movies only: Raiders of the lost Ark, and The Last Crusade. That's it: no intermediary prequel, and no sequel twenty years later.
No annoying dame, and no chilled monkey brains or multidimensional skulls.
 
To me, the "Indiana Jones trilogy" consists of two movies, and two movies only: Raiders of the lost Ark, and The Last Crusade. That's it: no intermediary prequel, and no sequel twenty years later.
No annoying dame, and no chilled monkey brains or multidimensional skulls.

IMO 'Temple' works better if you keep in mind that it takes place before 'Raiders.' It's only 1 year on paper but I think it would have worked better if they had bumped it back 5+ years. Indy is a bit younger & wilder & more mercenary. The world is decidedly before WW2 and still pretty colonial. The movie isn't as good as 'Raiders' but that would come later.


I've heard the urban legends about other Indy movies being made after 'Crusade'. We all know it's hogwash but the idea is just too interesting to stay dead. Lots of people also believe in alien abductions. The Loch Ness Monster. Bigfoot. Elvis is secretly alive and working at a Burger King.

The stories about later Indy sequels always sound like that. "Sure they exist. About ten years ago I saw a few copies in the $5 bin at a Walmart in Missouri. When I looked again a week later they were gone . . . " Umm, okay man. Whatever.
 
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The Addams Family, that first film was perfectly cast, well written, and mostly self contained. We were teased with a new baby Addams at the end as a sort of cliffhanger, but that visual could be written off as one of the many scenes which masterfully mimicked an Addams cartoon, something the subsequent films have not done as often.
 
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I've heard the urban legends about other Indy movies being made after 'Crusade'. We all know it's hogwash but the idea is just too interesting to stay dead. Lots of people also believe in alien abductions. The Loch Ness Monster. Bigfoot. Elvis is secretly alive and working at a Burger King.
People have probably just been confused by later video games with new storylines, thinking that they were tie-ins to movies or something. :rolleyes:
 
I'm going to offer the controversial opinion here, and that is Star Trek II should not have been made the way it was. Nick Meyer departed Gene Roddenberry's vision by militarizing things far more and turning them into more of an action element and less about exploration. Roddenberry was not happy with the direction Meyer took things, but was powerless to stop it.

Its success now means that Star Trek almost always requires a "villain" character. This moves it into the comic book realm, when it used to be a peer of films like 2001.

As time has gone on, I’ve become more focused on art and artists, rather than mindlessly consuming unending franchises. That being said, I can enjoy subsequent extrapolations of original works. I think it depends on how respectful they are of the original iteration, and what they bring to the table.

I recently rewatched THE TERMINATOR/T2, PREDATOR, and ALIEN/ALIENS. I contend that the first film in each series is still the best.

THE TERMINATOR is a lean and mean masterpiece. T2 is excellent, too—one of the best sequels ever made, and incredibly well-made. But, at the end of the day, it’s a big-budget remake of the first film, with some clever plot inversions. It hinges upon a key loophole: Reese didn’t know that a second Terminator was sent back to 1995, and that Skynet was fighting its temporal war on two fronts.

At the end of the day, it’s not essential to the story. The first film is a perfectly closed circle. T2 brings some interesting twists to the table, but it’s become lesser for me, over the years.

Same with ALIENS. ALIEN is a masterpiece. ALIENS is essentially a remake of ALIEN, with more action and some STARSHIP TROOPERS (the book) thrown in. The plot beats are fundamentally the same. It’s still a great film, but is it essential to the ALIEN story?

On the flipside, every subsequent TERMINATOR and ALIEN film after their first sequel has either knocked over the applecart (ALIEN 3), or tried to rehash and recapture past glory (TERMINATOR 3, GENISYS). And they’re all varying degrees of terrible.


And then there’s STAR TREK. I enjoy all six TOS films to varying degrees. TMP has grown and grown on me, over the years. It’s arguably among the purest representations of Roddenberry’s vision—a serious, smart, philosophical sci-fi procedural. TWOK was absolutely a correction for TPM’s mixed reception—more action, more character, more humor. Both films are excellent representations of different facets of the TV series, and scratch different itches. And I love them both. The TV show covered a wide spectrum of subjects and tones, and the movies are no different.

TMP is the first pilot—cerebral, gray, and little action. TWOK is the second pilot—action, color, character. TSFS and TVH are good second season episodes. TFF is a third season episode. And TUC wraps everything up in a respectful way.

Interestingly, the movies confronted the problem that many long-term franchises inevitably deal with: Do you have growth and change, or the mere illusion of change? TSFS began the process of backpeddling and restoring the status quo, and I can’t bring myself to say that it wasn’t the wrong choice. Yeah, it would have been more mature to evolve the franchise, by losing old characters and bringing in new ones. But I think sometimes we need to keep our iconic heroes alive and together in out hearts forever, to heck with “realism”. Was Kirk’s lame deathin GENERATIONS really a step up from simply leaving his final fate unknown, as it had been during TNG?

Which brings us to perhaps the biggest IP failure ever, Disney’s STAR WARS. I’m not some whiny Gen-Xer a la RedLetterMedia, who thinks that the prequels “ruined” the franchise simply because the films weren’t what they’d been expecting for 16 years. Like it or not, there are six STAR WARS films, and they represent the overall vision of their creator, as seen over a 28-year span.

As far as I’m concerned, STAR WARS comes in three flavors: The original, standalone, 1977 film, the Original Trilogy, and the six-film Saga. And all three have entertainment and artistic value.

Ironically, the Disney Trilogy actually DID ruin the franchise, but not merely because the films weren’t what fans had been expecting. Rather, it was the well-documented lack of a plan, the sociopolitical agenda seeping into everything, and the complete lack of logical and consistent characterization/organic storytelling based on the established lore. The Disney Trilogy utterly destroyed the character, themes, and plot points of the six Lucas films. Nothing makes sense. Nothing matters. For all the claims of TLJ being “bold” and “different”, all three films badly rehash the tropes and plot points of the original trilogy. They ruined what came before in order to badly copy them. It’s proven to be a horrific, franchise-killing disaster. This is what can happen when a beloved IP is handed over to people who don’t understand it, merely try to copy its surface traits, and/or use it as a “platform”.

At least we still have BACK TO THE FUTURE, because pretty much everything else has been sullied by awful reboots/remakes/sequels/prequels, many of which were made decades too late, and by people who don’t understand or respect the source material.
 
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Frankly I could do without Enterprise as well.

A wasted opportunity. Should have been THE RIGHT STUFF meets TOS, and instead it was a warmed-over TNG/DS9/VGR prequel with “phase pistols” instead of phasers.

Mistake Number One was establishing an Enterprise a century before Kirk’s, which happened to do a bunch of Really Important Stuff, and even stole a few “first” from Kirk and Picard.

Until TNG, the Enterprise was just another starship. Not a flagship, not the Greatest Ship Ever. As with Anakin/Luke’s lightsaber nonsensically showing up in THE FORCE AWAKENS, this is an example of fannish thinking, where things that are important to the audience suddenly become important in-universe.
 
Well, the success of WOK DID give the franchise “The Khan Problem” where the producers of every subsequent film requested “a Khan character” (with the notable exception being Star Trek IV)…

I am really surprised that the Star Trek cinematic universe never "brought back" V'Ger in some form.

Heck, the Borg have been been run through the wringer so many times, in every conceivable way.
 
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I am really surprised that the Star Trek cinematic universe never "brought back" V'Ger in some form.

Heck, the Borg have been been run through the wringer so many times, in every conceivable way.

V'Ger transcended this universe and is gone forever. He's out chillin' with the Vorlons.
 
I don't see an obvious path forward with V'ger. It wipes out the dramatic stakes to have any character that powerful. Whether they are good or evil, nobody else can do anything about it.

The first movie worked because V'ger didn't have a moral compass yet. And it got one by the end of the movie.
 
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