FirstPerson Shooter’s 10 Worst Nerd Movies of the 2010s

I wish that this list wasn’t as difficult as my Top Fave Movies or Top Fave Anime of the past decade lists. But there was so much garbage released as nerd-focused movies in the past 10 years, it was still a challenge to keep it to just 10 films. Not only that, but I only included movies I had the misfortune to see, so no Emoji Movie, Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight, The Last Airbender … like I said, a lot of garbage.

Here is my list of the 10 worst nerd movies of the past decade, presented in no particular order, and solely representing my opinion, not some definitive list.

Passengers (2016)

Everything about Passengers is solid, bordering on good — except for that one thing. It has good performances, an interesting if ultimately logically flawed story and excellent production design. But all of that is ruined by the central concept — Chris Pratt’s Jim wakes up Jennifer Lawrence’s Aurora from her suspended animation knowing that her is dooming her to dying years before she was supposed to even wake up. All because he, as the only person accidentally awake on a ship carrying sleeping colonists to a new world, was horny and lonely. And — spoiler alert — after some time she forgives him for lying about the fact he deliberately woke her up and accepts that she will live her life with the man who condemned her to death. That might have even worked if this movie was filmed and edited as a sort of psychological horror tale, but it’s not. It’s a straight up space adventure that happens to have at its heart a truly misogynistic, abusive story that plays out like a love story with a lover’s spat that they get over because of shared danger. Thematically, it’s one of the worst films ever made.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

The Transformers franchise started out as dumb fun. By the time it had reached the third film, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, it had moved almost completely down the spectrum to just dumb. Not even the amazing voice of Leonard Nimoy as the big bad, Sentinel Prime, could lift this movie out of the trash bin. Shia LaBeouf portrays Sam Witwicky, suffering from some mental overload from his connection to the Autobots, as so annoyingly twitchy as to be unwatchable for about half the movie. And Megan Fox went from a tough gal in the first movie, to a damsel in distress in the second to being replaced by the model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in this one. What little chemistry had developed between LaBeouf and Fox completely disappeared with her replacement.

Justice League (2017)

I usually have no problem trashing Zack Snyder movies, but it is a bit tough to do that with Justice League, since it is only a Snyder movie in part — some of it is one of the worst Joss Whedon movies ever made. That said, Justice League seems to have been on the path to be about as bad as Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Stupid Justice before Whedon came in and basically became the living avatar of studio interference. And yes, the reason Whedon came in was because Snyder had to leave due to a family tragedy, making dumping on Justice League seem a bit like kicking someone when they are down. But then there’s the Henry Cavill mustache controversy. OK, so circumstances conspired to give this movie incredible challenges, but handling those challenges badly is what makes Justice League the absolute mess it is.

Fantastic Four (2014)

Josh Trank ended 2012 as one of the hottest filmmakers around, riding on the success of his first movie Chronicle — also the only movie with a Dane DeHaan performance I like. That movie was about young people getting powers and the problems those powers brought. So it made sense for Fox to give the reins to the reboot of Fantastic Four to Trank — who proceeded to create an almost unwatchable, incoherent slog. The cast wasn’t the problem, since Fantastic Four had a roster of some of the best young actors working in film. The problem was the terrible production design, and Trank’s awful script and complete failure to make his own script into something like a coherent movie as the director. And, again, studio interference (that is a recurring problem in this list).

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

Speaking of Dane DeHaan … how about a movie with a Green Goblin looking like a Joker cosplayer that stopped 3 minutes into applying makeup and just put on a power suit from Edge of Tomorrow? That’s what we got in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, along with a version of the villain Electro that not even Jamie Foxx could pull off. Sure, the chemistry between Emma Stone’s Gwen and Andrew Garfield’s Peter was fun to watch and believable, because it was real. But not even those “aren’t they cute” moments made up for a movie too bloated with villains to make any kind of sense. It took the Sam Raimi-Tobey Maguire franchise three movies to get to that point, so Marc Webb doing it in two movies is something, I guess.

Jonah Hex (2010)

If I told you a movie with Josh Brolin as the lead, John Malkovich as the main villain and Michael Fassbender as his top killer was absolute garbage, you wouldn’t believe it was possible. I present to you Jonah Hex. Oh, oh, I forgot Will Arnett, Michael Shannon and a cameo by Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Yep, still about as exciting as lawn clippings. Which seems almost impossible knowing Jonah Hex was written mainly by the two guys that wrote and directed the spastic energy fests that were Crank and Crank: High Voltage, Neveldine and Taylor. I guess when you hand that to Jimmy Hayward, a director who until then was apparently a good animator, that’s what you get. Even that many Academy Award nominees couldn’t save this movie.

Gods of Egypt (2016)

This is the only movie on the list I forced myself to watch, knowing in advance how god-awful it was. And the controversy about casting a bunch of really white European actors to play Egyptian gods wasn’t even needed to make Gods of Egypt a dumpster fire, but it sure threw gasoline on the flame. The production design makes ancient Egypt look like bad anime, and the story was an idiotic retelling of the legend of Horus with the added element of a human thief to, I guess, make it more relatable? Well, at least Osiris was cast with a black actor … and they killed him off in the first few minutes.

After Earth (2011)

I really wanted to like After Earth. It has Will Smith, an interesting science fiction setting and the production design of Nova Prime was beautiful and a great example of Afrofuturism. But Will Smith, who wrote the story of After Earth, decided for some reason to hire M. Night Shyamalan to make his story into a movie. A completely off-tone performance by Jaden Smith as Will Smith’s character’s son (seemingly a role he could play) and more continuity and plot problems than usual in a Shyamalan film, and you’ve got a mess of a movie. Watch the first act to see the incredible design of Nova Prime. Then stop.

Green Lantern (2011)

The first trailer for Green Lantern should have been a red flag — Blake Lively’s few seconds of interaction with her own real life husband Ryan Reynolds were so wooden and dull I wondered if this was the same woman who was so spot-on in The Town. Reynolds, for his part was fun when he was allowed to go full Ryan Reynolds, but missed completely the nobility of Hal Jordan during the rest of his performance. The CG Lantern uniforms were just the sour icing on this lumpy fruitcake of a film. Apparently Green Lantern didn’t learn the lesson from Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer that having a giant space cloud as your bad guy mostly looks really stupid.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

I admit I am an historical realism snob, so when I saw the trailer for King Macklemore: Legend of the Thrift Shop Plot … err, I mean King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, I was immediately turned off. I can see taking liberties with the historical setting (retelling Shakespeare in a  modern setting works surprisingly well), but turning a semi-historical legend into a full-on magic fantasy tale that looks more like Krull than Excalibur is just too much. Oh, and I despised the addition of anachronisms like Macklemore coats and, what, late Brythonic ninjas, I guess? I love director Guy Ritchie when he is on (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels; Snatch; Sherlock Holmes) but when he’s off, like this or Revolver, he’s waaaay off.

Other movies were on this list in its initial, overlong form, including I, Frankenstein and Dracula Untold and Battleship and … but they were mostly just boring misses. The movies above were either big swings that missed completely, or so ludicrous they could never have been good in the first place (a Scotsman and a Dane as Egyptian gods … sure, why not).

I’ll leave you with a clip of the most Guy Ritchie scene put to film since Snatch. If it wasn’t supposed to be in a story about Arthur, it would have been a hell of an entertaining bit in an anachronistic fantasy movie.