Films With Great Beginnings That Fell Apart After Only Minutes

A great beginning is important, but it isn't everything—and that definitely applies to the movies. Plenty of films get off the starting block just fine, but those interesting opening acts are just a prelude to a series of stumbles that end in utter collapse. Here's our list of bad movies that initially looked like they could have been great.

The Last Airbender should've been good. It...wasn't. Eminent film scholar Roger Ebert called it "an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here." Tell us how you really feel, Mr. Ebert.

The names of the supporting cast in the opening credits almost make you think it could work. The producers got The Daily Show's Aasif Mondvi, Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel, and the woefully underappreciated man of a thousand faces Cliff Curtis—who appears as Fire Lord Ozai here and has played characters such as Lt. Cortez, Sheikh Fadlallah, FBI Deputy Director Miguel Bowman, and Pablo Escobar. Too bad they're given nothing to do but stand around rigidly and provide exposition, while director M. Night Shyamalan does nothing to help the miscast child actors in the starring roles.

The opening credits of The Last Airbender show people using tai chi to manipulate the elements, and that dimly lit 15-second demonstration is as good as this stupid movie ever gets. Ebert makes the point that the flick's child actors, whom Shyamalan expects to carry the film, are "bad" because, in all likelihood, they've not been given proper instruction by their director. After praising the anime series that The Last Airbender misrepresents and lamenting the big-budget animated movie that never was, Ebert "[closes] with the hope that the [movie's] title proves prophetic." Now that, Fire Lord Ozai, is a real burn.

Speaking to Charlie Rose about trying to get an adaptation of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's novel Battlefield Earth funded, John Travolta said, "I thought that, if done well, this could be one of the most entertaining science fiction movies ever, ever done." Certainly, Travolta's arduous campaign appears to have been a decades-long labor of love. Indeed, according to the Guardian, "The book, Battlefield Earth, was sporting a 'soon to be major motion picture' on its cover as long ago as 1984." By all accounts, the movie didn't turn out as Travolta hoped it would.

What's it about? J. Hoberman of the Village Voice tried in vain to untangle the plot: "Set a thousand years in the future, the movie posits a world conquered by extraterrestrial Psychlos who... have enslaved most of humanity and reduced the rest to a pathetic pagan tepee-and-buckskin lifestyle. The Psychlos, led by John Travolta and a Wookie-like Forest Whitaker, are big fellas with green eyes, dreadlocks, formidable paws, and mossy teeth...[who] hang around a windowless bar swilling tumblers of a chartreuse liquor with the baleful glow of radioactive urine." Not exactly our idea of top-shelf entertainment.

Counted among the worst movies ever made, Battlefield Earth drew criticism from ex-Scientologists—"suppressive persons," in the Church's lingo—who raised concerns about members of the Church dictating edits. If the whistleblowers are right, then Battlefield Earth should have been Scientology's Passion of the Christ—a would-be worldwide religious awakening in blockbuster form. According to Travolta, though, Battlefield Earth "absolutely has nothing to do with Scientology," aside from Hubbard. Whom should we believe?

In times of doubt, we turn to sage of the cinema, Roger Ebert. With characteristic irreverence, Ebert jokingly agreed with Travolta's claim. "The film contains no evidence of Scientology or any other system of thought; it is shapeless and senseless, without a compelling plot or characters we care for in the slightest." If there is an allegory at the heart of the movie, we can only presume it's there accidentally, and it symbolizes how not to make a compelling science fiction film.

Without Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, we wouldn't have Star War The Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West HD, that masterpiece of re-translated, redubbed, gibberish cinema. ("Good-good-good. Let us counter-attacking!") An English re-translation of a bootleg Chinese translation of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, the YouTube gem almost makes up for George Lucas's egregious indiscretions. As we must appreciate our in-laws for birthing our spouses, we appreciate the first of the prequels—but it isn't easy. The Phantom Menace makes Battlefield Earth look like A New Hope running on a crooked projector.

Much has been made of the fact that Jar-Jar and a number of new aliens come across as thinly disguised ethnic stereotypes. As Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune put it in his scathing review, Jar-Jar "sounds most like a prepubescent Mushmouth from 'Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,'" and "walks in an exaggerated pimp strut. He's not the only ethnic caricature, either; the Trade Federation officials sound like stock [East Asian] villains."

Remember how critics burned M. Night Shyamalan for glorifying himself as an artist and demonizing movie critics when he made The Lady in the Water? In that movie, Shyamalan cast himself as a heroic, misunderstood artist-writer and made his villain a "clueless film critic." The Phantom Menace is Lucas's Lady in the Water, with the greedy galactic tax-man in place of the critic. "The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute."

Writing in 2016, amid another tax-related quandary involving Lucas, Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune points out, "Is it lost on everyone that Episode I of George Lucas' own greatest narrative, the Star Wars series, ostensibly begins with a pushback on taxes, for crying out loud?" It's a prescient point. In the 16 Earth years between Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace, Lucas amassed billions of dollars from merchandising—and suddenly, the biggest evil in the galaxy is no longer the mysterious Dark Side of the Force but "the greedy Galactic Trade Federation."

All things considered, though, the movie opens on a high note. The screen is black and the comforting mantra, "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." appears onscreen, accompanied by silence, then epic fanfare. The first sentence of that old, familiar Star Wars crawl is pretty enticing: "Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic." Turmoil, you say? What sort of turmoil, Mr. Lucas? We're awful excited to learn the specifics. We've been waiting for 16 years to learn how the whole Skywalker/Darth Vader thing started. It's...space taxes? What next, a Star Trek movie about Tort Reform?

While the Wahlbergian Age of Extinction gets a lot of hate and Dark of the Moon isn't exactly a work of art, we consider Revenge of the Fallen to be the ugliest of the subpar Transformers sequels—and not just for its dizzying, chromed-out, nonsensical visuals. As the folks at CinemaSins point out, in the opening montage, "The movie uses primitive hunters as an example of the brutality of humanity." In fact, there is a racist robo-thread running through the entirety of this itchy CGI sweater of cinematic apostasy that, if pulled, causes Bay's movie to completely collapse.

As Sonny Bunch of the Washington Times relates (quote can be found after the in-article jump), "Autobots Mudflap and Skids, a pair of twin robots voiced by Tom Kenny, sport noticeable inner-city accents and are adorned with gold caps on their teeth. At one point, they're asked if they can read some ancient runes that keep popping up. 'Nah, we don't really do much reading,' one of them replies, much to the chagrin of the black portion of Monday evening's preview audience; there were audible boos after that line." From the African characteristics of its stereotypical (and explicitly "brutal," in the opinion of Optimus Prime) primitive tribesmen to the minstrelsy of the Twins, to the pervasive racially tinged one-liners, Revenge of the Fallen retrofits a beloved sci-fi franchise with deplorable racist tropes.

In his review of "Fight Club," Roger Ebert called David Fincher's debut feature, "Alien 3," "one of the best-looking bad movies I have ever seen." And for all its faults, the critically-maligned "Alien" sequel sure is pretty to look at. Fincher's mastery of visual storytelling is on full display from the film's opening moments, when an escape pod carrying a cryo-sleeping Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) crash lands on a remote planet populated entirely by violent prisoners, who help clear her from the wreckage. The moody cinematography and art direction highlight the meticulous attention to detail that later became the director's signature in such titles as "Se7en," "Zodiac," and "The Social Network."

Yet the visual style can only do so much to make up for the film's story issues. You can't place too much of the blame on Fincher, a then-hot shot music video director who began production without a finished script and feuded bitterly with the studio over every creative detail. Although a home video released "Assembly Cut" (reportedly done without Fincher's involvement) attempts to restore his original vision, the scars are visible on whatever version you see. Fincher went so far as to publicly disown the movie, even as a growing number of critics have sought to reclaim it.

One can only imagine how "Alien 3" would have turned out if 20th Century Fox had entrusted more creative control to the filmmaker who eventually earned three Oscar nominations. The potential was certainly there, even in the very beginning.

The myriad production problems that beset "The Bonfire of the Vanities" were recounted in Julie Salamon's book "The Devil's Candy," later turned into a podcast for the TCM series "The Plot Thickens." Anticipation couldn't have been higher for the Brian DePalma-directed film, which was adapted from Tom Wolfe's massive bestseller. But from the moment critics got a glimpse of the finished product, there was no saving the would-be Oscar player from becoming a box office flop.

Tom Hanks plays Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street broker whose life goes awry when a wrong turn takes him and his mistress, Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith), into the Bronx. Maria runs the car over a young black man she suspects is about to rob them, and rather than tell the truth, Sherman takes the blame. A media circus ensues, as everyone wants to use Sherman's case as a means for their own political or financial advancements. Bruce Willis plays Peter Fallow, a drunken journalist who splashes the tabloids with the trial's every detail.

The film opens one year later, with Fallow drunkenly staggering out of a limo and making his way to a banquet in honor of a book he's written about the trial. It's at this moment that DePalma shows off his distinctive visual flair with an unbroken Steadicam shot that follows Willis from the first location to the last. Yet even though the director is in full control of the movie's style, he's less sure of its tone.

Say what you will about "Fast & Furious" — the critically maligned fourth entry in the long-running franchise — but it features a banger of an opening chase scene. A bit of a retcon reset after "Tokyo Drift," it begins in the Dominican Republic, where Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) is still hiding out after the events of the first film caused him to flee LA. With the help of his girlfriend Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez) and his pal Han Lue (Sung Kang), Dom hijacks a couple of fuel tankers by racing alongside them in his muscle car. It's a bravura sequence that shows off director Justin Lin's talent for staging the kind of elaborate action set pieces that became the series' trademark.

But things fall apart quickly when Dom returns to Los Angeles to avenge Letty's (supposed) death. Although it's fun to see Diesel reunite with Paul Walker as former cop Brian O'Conner, the duo's plot to take down drug kingpin Arturo Braga (John Ortiz) inspires few fireworks. Admittedly, the "Fast & Furious" series had yet to find its footing by the time this film came along: It wasn't until the next installment, "Fast Five," that they ditched the formula and shifted the focus towards a found family of globe-trotting crime fighters. You can see elements of the direction the franchise would take in parts of this movie (for better and for worse), but nothing Lin and company come up with can top the hair-raising heist scene that kicks things off.

While leagues above the recent "Jurassic World" series, "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" was nevertheless seen as a major comedown from its predecessor. It's easy to understand why Steven Spielberg would want to make a sequel to his monster 1993 hit (released the same year as his Oscar-winning "Schindler's List"), and individual sequences remind us of his skills both as a visual storyteller and as an action filmmaker. The film's opening is particularly strong: A vacationing British family decides to dock their yacht on the remote island of Isla Sorna, not knowing it's home to some of those genetically-engineered dinosaurs. Their daughter wanders off and is greeted by what appears to be a friendly Compsognathus, but their interaction turns dangerous when an entire flock of the tiny predators attacks her (she survives, thankfully).

But once Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) travels to the island at the behest of Dr. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), "The Lost World" proves that there's really no good way to make a "Jurassic Park" sequel (even though we got four more attempts at doing just that). While the dinosaurs inspired awe and wonder in the first film, here they're seen only as monsters to run away from. Given Spielberg's directorial talent, those chase sequences are thrilling. Yet as critics pointed out, the people doing the running away are little more than dino food, aside from Pete Posthlethwaite's entertaining turn as a big-game hunter who's come to the island in search of exciting new prey.  

Stop-motion director Henry Selick created eye-popping worlds in his animated films "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "Coraline," and the same is true of "Monkeybone." Unfortunately, the characters he creates in this live-action/animation hybrid aren't nearly as compelling as their surroundings. Part of the problem is Monkeybone himself: As voiced by John Turturro, he's a cartoon creation of animator Stu Miley (Brendan Fraser), who finds himself tormented by the claymation primate when a car accident puts him in a coma. While trapped in the bizarro realm of his imagination, Stu links up with Monkeybone to try and get back to his fiancee (Bridget Fonda), only to find out the little stinker plans to use his body as a way to enter the human world.

Before Stu's accident, we're treated to a glimpse of "Monkeybone" as an animated series, which is set to make him a very rich man. Although the raunchy cartoon is funny in short form, we soon realize that a little bit of Monkeybone goes a long way, especially when he inhabits Fraser's body. Things liven up a little when Stu, in an attempt to reclaim his life, jumps into the body of a recently deceased organ donor (Chris Kattan), who keeps spilling his parts all over town. If the middle section were as good as the beginning and the end, "Monkeybone" might've turned out to be some kind of gonzo masterpiece. As it stands, however, it's an ambitious curio, one that appalled critics and scared away audiences.

Tim Burton had firmly established himself as one of Hollywood's most visually inventive filmmakers by the time he took a crack at remaking "Planet of the Apes." Unlike the most recent trilogy, which employed motion capture CGI to turn humans into apes, the director used practical makeup effects courtesy of Rick Baker. And this being a Tim Burton film, you know the art direction is going to be similarly dazzling. If the screenplay were up to that same level of craft, there might have really been something here.

Hope springs eternal when the film opens, as astronaut Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) crash lands on a mysterious planet where humans are enslaved and apes reign supreme. There's a goofy charm to Wahlberg's performance as a spaceman who goes into orbit to save his partner, a chimpanzee named Pericles, only to find himself captured by intellectually advanced primates. The ape performances by Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, and Paul Giamatti are fully committed despite being hidden under pounds of makeup. And not for nothing, but there are also some impressive action sequences.

Yet as the film progresses, you get the sinking feeling that the three credited screenwriters (William Broyles Jr., Lawrence Konner, and Mark Rosenthal) didn't know exactly what tone to strike. Worst of all, the customary twist ending raises more questions than it answers. The finished product was a critical disaster that failed to relaunch a franchise.