So here you have it. DestructoMaximo’s top 10 movies of all time. Ever. Without question.

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10. Labyrinth

About once every ten years, Bowie comes out of hiding to show everyone he is still the coolest man alive. In the 00’s, we had Zoolander, where Bowie walks into the underground walk-off like some god of hipness to offer his hand in judgment. In the 90’s he teamed up with Trent Reznor, at the height of his relevance, to collaborate on “I’m Afraid of Americans,” a sentiment held by the entire world and most Americans. But it was in the 1980’s that Bowie cemented himself as the epitomized cool of my generation’s youth. He sported a perfectly feathered and blow-dried Euro-Mullet and looked like some half-lion, half-drag queen. Bowie the goblin king kidnapped a baby and creepily juggled a glass orb while leading the kid’s sister through his Jim Henson created labyrinth of Muppets to prove she loves her baby-brother enough to earn him back. We don’t really know why Bowie wants to keep the baby so badly, but it’s strangely Jacksonesque to watch him dangle the little brat over the Escher staircases in full creepiness. I still break into a “Dance, Magic Dance” number every once in a while for my wife. IMHO, The coolest Bowie was the transgender goblin king, but I’ll let you judge for your selves.

9. Ghostbusters

When I was 5, my dad took me to my first movie. When I was 6, that movie came out on VHS, and I rented it every Friday night for about a year. That movie was Ghostbusters. I can’t really tell you why it was such a great movie. I never (even at 5) thought Sigourney Weaver was particularly hot. Rick Morranis as a supporting character was a dumb choice, but an 80’s comedy prerequisite. It may have been the idea that scientists could drop their boring research and become adventure heroes (this fantasy got stronger as I aged and became a scientist). It could have been the complicated brotherly dynamic between the ghostbuster team. It could have been the underlying theme of ridding NY of its negativity in order to release its seedy demons (a theme that was, unfortunately, smashed into our skulls in GB2…to horrible results). But really, I think it boiled down to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man being awesome and hearing the word “ass” on screen. What do you want from a 5 year old?

8.  The Life of Brian

I want to start out by saying it is not obligatory to include a Monty Python film on a nerd site, this movie deserves to be here. What if you were born on the same day as Jesus, right next door, and were constantly mistaken for the messiah? The very idea of having to spend your life in the shadow of Jesus is hilarious and sad. Have Monty Python tackle the subject and you have comedic perfection. After all, “Life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it!”

7. A Beautiful Mind

If any of you have read this (looooong) book, you know what a feat it was to get it turned into a movie. Quite frankly, I can’t come close to understanding how this was pitched to a studio. “Um, we have this antisocial genius who is an expert on game theory. He was a recluse for years due to crippling mental illness, and oh, he won the Nobel Prize in economics. Can we turn his life story into a movie?” John Nash is absolutely a genius, if you’ve read any of his work on game theory you know that already. His recent outspokenness on how Keynesian economics has destroyed the fabric of the US and how we should revert back to the gold standard brought him back into the intellectual mainstream and put this movie back on my top 10 list. Read the book, read his papers, then watch the movie (if you haven’t done the first two, do them and watch it again).

6. Godfather

When family is involved, everything is personal. When my little brother was sniped with a bb gun by the neighborhood bully, I reluctantly went to his door, pulled him out of the house, and told him if he ever bothered my brother again I would make his life unpleasant. That night I crawled into their yard ninja style and shut their power off. In the Godfather, Michael returns from the war intent on living a normal life. His father runs the most influential mafia family in the states, and is intent on having Michael take over the family business. Much like I was happy not interacting with my asswipe bully neighbor, it took the pride-filled defense of my family to get me involved. When Michael’s father was gunned down after refusing to put a hand into the drug racket, Michael had no choice but to take the situation into his own hands and involve himself in the family in order to avenge the attack on his dad. Sometimes you need to readjust your moral scale in order to wage war against the greater of two evils.

5. E.T.

What’s the first thing you think of when you see Reese’s Pieces (ooh, a piece of candy!)? Or when your ancient grandfather points his shaky finger at something he’s cranky about (ouch)? How great was it when you first heard a pint-sized Drew Barrymore utter the words “penisbreath?” This movie made every boy (and probably girl) from my generation ride their bikes (ah, memories of my awesome star wars huffy) off of home made ramps imagining cruising weightlessly across the moon. Aside from this awesomeness, the movie also taught us not to fear aliens, lessons about racism, that feds should be hated (a point reinforced years later when my freaker friends had their towers confiscated, shutting down our BBS), and that sometimes your parents aren’t perfect. In short, E.T. is awesome. A collector’s edition of ET dressed up in a sundress greets you as you walk into my house.

4. Raiders of the Lost Ark

This movie invented the adventurer stereotype, making all re-watchings pale in comparison to that first time in the theater. Adventure bound history nerd, Indy, is hired by the government to find the ark of the covenant…the literal holy grail of archeologists. He has an obligatory arch nemesis who is content to let Indy do all of the footwork so he can steal the ark. If this weren’t enough, there is also a band of Nazis he gets to foil on the way to the ark. Did I mention a hot lady who starts off hating him until the sexual tension boils over? We could replace the ark with the destruction of the Deathstar, the Nazi’s with the Empire, The nemesis with Jaba (or Fett, really), and the leggy blonde with the rebel princess. Whatever, the equation works, the direction works, and Ford works Han without the MF.

3. Fellowship of the Ring

Long ago ZM and I used to run around in the woods located behind each others’ houses. Each were deemed Mirkwood, and we often had to fight dragons, orcs, and spiders. These novels were, and quite possibly still are, one of the greatest series of books ever written. When I first heard they were being made into live action movies I was a bit nervous, but what Peter Jackson did was nothing short of miraculous. Each scene had the perfect feeling. The Shire was happy and cheerful, Rivendell was magical and foreign, and everything felt and looked exactly as it should. Peter Jackson was able to do something Lucas could only dream of, making a movie with CGI feel real. Lucas’s graphics are corny and cartoonish, while Jackson only uses them to enhance the scene, make things look more epic, and draw you further into the picture he is painting. Quit oppositely Lucas pushes the viewer away. Now there are a few scenes I take issue with, the shield skateboard in Two Towers, and sliding down the oliphant’s trunk as it dies in Return of the King, but the rest of the movies are so great that I have chosen to overlook them. Also interestingly I’m not scared of the prequel to this movie, I’m sure Jackson will best Lucas in that respect as well.

2. Empire

“No, there is another.” With these words, spoken by Yoda to Obi-Wan immediately after sending Luke off on a death mission and telling him to sacrifice his friends for the sake of their cause, I was transformed into something new. Why would Yoda, a good guy in my 8 year old mind, tell Luke to let the other good guys die Was Lando a good guy? My boys were just ambushed by the Empire in Bespin! Was Boba Fett bad, or just trying to do the job he was hired to do? It seemed as if no one was all good, and no one was all bad. Even Luke had much anger in him, much to learn he still has as he throws away the rest of his training…at least we know Vader is definitely all bad. For the first time in my young life there was a gray area. Before Empire there were good guys and bad guys. Friends and enemies. Autobots and Decepticons. Professor X and Magneto. You get the point. Now there was something new, people were more complicated. I started to like Han more than Luke because of his relative badness. I went through the awkwardness of puberty for 20 years, but when we learned that Luke was Vader’s son, I knew it had taken me 2 hours to become a man. I went into the kitchen and gave my dad a hug, and then I checked to see if his arm was mechanical.

1. Braveheart

Braveheart is the first and only movie I have openly cried watching with my friends as an adult. It was ok, they were crying too. We didn’t cry when young William’s father was hauled back dead from battle, or when his wife’s throat was slit by the English in the middle of the village. Those events made us William Wallace. They filled us with all of the raw rage, power, and FTM do-or-die that pumped through William Wallace’s veins as he trashed (and mooned) the English in epic bloody broadsword wielding battles. Like watching a football game we all roared at the TV during those fights. We all high-fived when he finally got to toss the beans to Princess Isabelle. But it was the unexpected, heart wrenchingly defiant scream of FREEDOM as he is being publicly disemboweled that we all noticed the streams of tears on each other’s faces. I am 7/8 Swede and 1/8 Scott, that 1/8 was very proud by the end of this movie…burn it.

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10. Tomb Raider

The Tomb Raider game was so obviously written by horny video game nerds that it’s not funny and hardly subtle. At best it was an okay game, and mainly held its audience’s attention because the main character had big boobs. Enter Angelina Jolie. The movie was terrible.  What’s worse is that for the amount of money they spent on it you’d think it would be at least remotely good. The action scenes were boring and predictable, and what I can remember of the plot was terrible. The only redeeming part of the movie is Jolie’s boobs, which have entranced enough gamer nerds to give this movie a minor cult status. What nobody is willing to admit is that the games and the movies are just rip offs of Indiana Jones with a hot chick. I’ve always found it funny that nerds seem to be more blinded by a hot chick than your average dude, and that’s saying a lot. This movie sucks and more people need to admit it.

9. Resident Evil

Oh that T-virus always causing all sorts of trouble with the zombies and what not. Here is another movie that has blinded the audience to it’s terribleness because of the hot chick who shows her hoo-hoo briefly at the end. The only part I liked was when the laser protection system became a grid and cut that dude into little cubes. And I must admit as far as video game movies goes this one isn’t the worst, don’t get me wrong it’s bad, just not the worst. The movie does make a greater than normal effort to make reference to the video game, even if a lot of it is in the wrong order.

8. Doom

The Rock (I know he goes by Dwayne Johnson or something now, but he’ll always be the Rock to me) stars in this wreck, and to be honest, with the popularity of Doom in the early nineties I’m surprised it took until 2005 to be made. So were we rewarded for our long wait? Decidedly no. If we quickly run down the Doom checklist we can see how well things match. In Doom the monsters are demons and the the demons are from Hell. Nope.  In the movie they are just mutations from a virus of some sort that gives them an extra chromosome.  They are definitely not demons, and they certainly are not from Hell. Parts of Doom can be downright scary, the movie on the other hand was only scary bad. The only redeeming part of the movie was the FPS scene at the end of movie in an homage to the original game, but this seems to be the only thing the movie and game really have in common.

7. Mortal Kombat

Everyone remembers the first time you played Mortal Kombat. It did what no fighting game had done previous to it, it let you kill your opponent, often times in a rather gruesome fashion. We here at OW were a little excited about this movie coming out, and boy were we disappointed after seeing it. The plot is stupid, something about the Outland being able to invade Earth, which is known as Earthrealm for some reason, because Earth had lost the Mortal Kombat tournament 9 times in a row. You’d think with the popularity of ultimate fighting, wrestling, and boxing that this tournament would be slightly more popular, maybe even have a pay-per-view special. Most of the fight scenes were terrible and all of the CGI was awful. If anyone could tell me why Scorpion’s spear was a living thing I would love to hear it. Sub zero’s fight was just as stupid.  Since when does he have to focus for two minutes straight to freeze people? And the fact that he gets killed by an ice spear is even dumber, or is that ironic?. This movie was just one big disappointment after another.

6. House of the Dead

My God was this a terrible movie. Its based on the arcade game produced by Sega, and everyone knows how OW feels about all things Sega. In this case, however, we actually like the game. It was fun to play, had good graphics, and we liked the way how some of the zombies made these monkey-like sounds. In all honesty none of us could remember the plot of the game, only that the characters were agents of some sort.  What I’m sure of is that they weren’t teens trying to go to a rave on an island, which turns out to be the plot of the movie. To get to said rave they pay off some ship captain, named Kirk (get it, Captain Kirk?), who is also smuggling a cache of weapons. Well you can predict what happens next, turns out the rave was actually a zombie party, and the only place to hide is a house in the center of the island. A house of the dead, get it? It’s a house, but everyone in it is dead. Ughhhh, anyway just when you think it can’t get worse, well it does. Turns out all of the teens seem to have some sort of advanced weapons training, but they just stand still when their weapons are out of ammo. Other than the name it seems the movie and the game share very little in common.

5. Street Fighter

Generally speaking there is no such thing as a good Van Damme movie, there are only degrees of bad. This one has to be one of the worst. The plot of which, the game had none as far as I know, takes a special forces team into the jungle of a made up country in Africa called Shadaloo, which has a capitol ingeniously named Shadaloo City, to fight the drug lord turned general, M. Bison. To be honest I don’t remember much about this stupid movie. There were some fight scenes, some dialogue which loosely tied things together, and something about M. Bison getting charged with electromagnetic energy and being able to shoot lightening, thus giving a real world explanation to one of Bison’s powers. All of the characters back stories were changed to fit this ridiculous plot further making the movie worse.

4. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

With the popularity of Lord of the Rings it makes sense that the studios would be jumping at all things fantasy. The film has a cast of very recognizable actors who don’t, by any stretch of the imagination, fit in this genre. It suffers from terrible direction of Uwe Boll, who is also responsible for House of the Dead. Jason Statham does not look like a farmer, and should never be placed in this type of movie.  He belongs in modern world action flicks that made him popular. What made me laugh the most was Ray Liotta as a wizard and Burt Reynolds as the king.  Its almost as if the studio had a bunch of contracts running out and decided to just throw these guys in. Neither of them fit these roles and almost everything they say is hilarious because its so bad. This movie is only good to laugh at and doesn’t seem to have anything in common with the Dungeon Siege series other than a few names, Krugs, Ehb, and what have you. If you removed those references and made up anything else it wouldn’t have mattered and it wouldn’t have made the movie any better or any worse. That’s what’s so terrible about the movie, its so generically bad that nothing would fix it. The studio could have called it; Generic Fantast Movie, with the subtitle “Because LOTR is Popular and We Want To Jump on That Bandwagon While it’s Hot”. If you want to laugh and cringe at the terribleness (and you will do both, trust me), then by all means watch this movie.

3. Wing commander

I know what your thinking, how can you go wrong with Freddie Prince Jr.?  Unfortunately not even his incredible acting ability can help this movie. In this case I’m not sure what’s worse, the game or the movie, because they are both terrible. The game could have been called Generic Space Shooter and follows that plot perfectly. A confederated group of planets is fighting off an aggressive warrior race bent on taking over the universe. The only cool thing about the game is that there are two different paths the game takes, depending on how you perform as a pilot. Much like many movies on this list, it is very loosely based on the game which it is named after. You hardly ever see the cat like Kilrathi, and for some reason they lost all their hair and they also change the way the ships look, making the movie look even more generic. Needless to say the movie was a box office flop and failed to even break even (it actually lost close to $20 million) which convinces me there is something still right with the world.

2. Double Dragon

Wow this is bad, well not as bad as the Mario movie, but still that’s not saying much. I mean the Mario movie is so bad that it may actually be the worst movie ever. I wouldn’t be surprised if it makes to number one on this list, no peaking! For some reason Alyssa Milano was in this movie and she looks terrible, almost as if the movie didn’t have a budget. The story revolves around some medallion that makes you invincible and lets you enter other people’s souls and takes place in a post apocalyptic L.A. which apparently suffered an earthquake, leaving only weird eighties clothing for the denizens to wear. No one at OW can remember if that was the plot of the game, or if the game even had a plot. Plus our fact checking kittens are busy working on something else and I’m way to lazy to do anymore work than this. I do remember at the end that a theater blows up and that Scott Wolf plays Billy Lee, but I don’t remember why this was made into a movie. It seems like a bad idea in the first place.   The game was fun but got boring after the first few levels. This is another one of those movies that’s only good to laugh at and I’m not sure it was supposed to be a comedy.

1. Mario Brothers

There are so many things wrong about this movie that I really don’t know where to start. Why was it futuristic? Why is it so dark? Why were they all people? What’s with the fungus? Where are the koopa troopas? Why are the goombas big monsters? Why aren’t there any turtles? Since when was Mario’s last name Mario? Why are all the cars attached to an electric grid? Who authorized this terrible piece of crap? Who ever said Koopa descended from a T-Rex? Why would dinosaurs evolve into Humans? How could you possibly ride Yoshi when he was that small? How is there a whole society of people living under NYC? Why does Koopa need the necklace to leave said city? Why is Toad a dirty hippie with a bad hair cut? Since when is the Princess an paleontologist?

Well, I guess the Bob-ombs are sort of accurate. I’m not sure about the King being a mushroom though. I’ve heard some people say the reason everything is so bad is because they didn’t have CGI back then and needed to think of alternatives, but this is just terrible. And that’s just considering the story line and the setting.  When you factor in the acting, this train wreck takes on whole new proportions. While Bob Hoskins is generally a good actor, not even his abilities could help save this movie. Though I agree John Leguizamo sort of looks likes Luigi, I don’t think many people would agree he knocked anything out of the park on this one. The only other person of note in this movie is Dennis Hopper, and not even his cult icon status does anything to help fix all the things wrong with this movie. Now we here at OW love Mario but we refuse to endorse this movie.

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10. Too many re-makes

How many times can you re-make Psycho? What can you possibly gain by re-making a movie that is almost perfect to begin with? The answer is “nothing”. Has there ever been a re-make of a good movie that was better than the original? The Invasion? No. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Ha. Don’t make me laugh. Re-makes almost always suck, and the ones that don’t usually aren’t good enough to justify doing it in the first place. Here’s an idea: Why not write a whole new movie instead? Do you see the re-make concept in other forms of media? Has any author ever re-wrote Dune? Or what about Sirens of Titan? Of course not, because real writers would rather create something of their own, rather than ruin something that someone else wrote.

9. No mystery

When I say there’s no mystery in modern movies, I don’t mean that there’s not enough crime thrillers out there. I mean that modern day directors have no sense of mystery when they make new movies. The classic example is Steven Spielberg’s classic movie Jaws. We don’t see the shark until the last half hour of the movie. Do you think modern directors have the patience to do something like that today? If they ever re-make Jaws (which I’m sure someone will do eventually) I’d bet money that we would see a big CGI shark in the very first scene of the movie. This was a concept that George Lucas used to understand also, like when we never see the Wompa creature in the original version of Empire, but of course in the special edition of the movie we get to see the entire beast, and after we finally do see it something is lost.

8. No Patience

There doesn’t seem to be any pacing anymore in modern day movies. Its nonstop action from beginning to end. There’s no build up. Alfred Hitchcock once said that a bomb under a table goes off, and that’s surprise. But when we know the bomb is under the table but we don’t know when it will go off, that’s suspense. Modern movies depend on surprise. Remember the Star Wars: A New Hope? Nothing happened for the first 30 minutes of the movie! Compare that to The Phantom Menace. Right in the beginning of the movie we see the two Jedi knights using almost every force power that we’ll ever see in throughout entire prequel trilogy. In a sense, after the first fifteen minutes of the movie there’s nothing left to see. I don’t think that it’s all Hollywood’s fault though. I just don’t think that there’s any way that a modern audience would be able to sit through a movie that moved as slow as the original Star Wars.

7. Too predictable

The vast majority of movies that come out today are about as a predictable as a new Indie band. The last time a new movie surprised me was the latest Bourne movie. Other than that you can almost tell what’s going to happen before you see the movie. If that wasn’t bad enough, nowadays the previews and commercials give away the entire movie before you even see it anyway. Remember What Lies Beneath? The previews told you that Harrison Ford was the bad guy before you even saw the movie! I can’t tell you how surprised I would have been when he turned out to be the bad guy if I hadn’t known it before I even saw the movie. In the trailers for Cast Away we almost saw the entire movie play out before it was even released. Again, this is apparently what modern audiences want though. They don’t like surprises. That’s why people like McDonald’s. There’s no surprises. You know exactly what it’s going to taste like before you even order. Everybody knows the menu so nobody’s is surprised.

6. Bad Actors

Ten or twenty years ago who didn’t want to see the latest Harrison Ford movie? Every movie he was in turned out to be great. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Bladerunner, and The Fugitive were all great movies, but he was also able to turn otherwise mediocre movies like Patriot Games and Airforce One into good movies as well. We don’t have too many great actors today. It seems like looks, rather than ability, are the reason that most actors and actresses are cast today. Ashton Kutcher, Hayden Christensen, Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, and Jennifer Lopez are all great examples of modern day actors with zero talent. I’m just glad that movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Poltergeist were cast in the 70s and 80s instead of today.

5. Bad Writing

For the most part the writing in modern day movies takes a back seat to the special effects, and it shows. Remember in Episode 2: Attack of the Clones when Anakin says to Princess Amidala “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything’s soft… and smooth…” Who wrote this garbage? This was possibly the worst dialog in any movie I’ve ever seen. Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher must feel embarrassed for these two actors. Bad writing isn’t limited to the Star Wars prequel trilogy though, you see it in any Jennifer Lopez movie, in any Vin Diesel movie, and pretty much 99% of the crap that you’ll see in theaters today.

4. No originality

When’s the last time you saw a good movie that wasn’t based on a short story, a novel or even a comic book? Are the writers in Hollywood the only ones who don’t come up with their own ideas? Its almost like the writers in Hollywood are failed writers from other mediums who couldn’t get their own stuff published so they went into a field where they could ape other people’s stuff and it would be alright. Every movie is a sequel, or a re-make or based on some other work like a novel. Too bad we don’t see good original ideas in new movies anymore like E.T. or Back to the Future.

3. Too much emphasis on special effects

This one almost goes without saying. Can we please have a new movie where something doesn’t have to blow up every five minutes? Its not that I have a problem with special effects per se, but I do have a problem when they are the main focus of the movie instead of the story line. Sometimes it seems like Hollywood writers are writing scripts to try out bigger and bigger special effects, rather than using the special effects to tell the story that they wrote. This is one of the biggest reasons why most modern day movies are crap.

2. No imagination

Where’s the imagination in today’s movies? Has any modern day movie been able to capture the sense of wonder you had when you first saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Has there been a movie released in the last 5-10 years that was as imaginative as Flight of the Navigator, or Dark Crystal? With a few notable exceptions (Pan’s Labyrinth) the answer is “no”. As stated earlier, the no-talent writers and directors of today would much rather focus on making more and more outrageous special effects than trying to come up with an imaginative story.

1. Too much CGI

Does everything have to be computer animated these days? In the first 15 minutes of the new Indiana Jones movie we see a frightened prairie dog with computer generated animated expressions. At this point the movie already doesn’t “feel” like an Indiana Jones movie. Was there really a need to computer animate a prairie dog? Is it so hard to get footage of a real prairie dog? Its not like you’re computer animating a rare or mythical beast like a dragon. It’s a prairie dog! Does everything need to be computer animated? The same can be said of the new Star Wars movies. Why were some of the Clone Troopers computer animated? And why does everyone use CGI when it looks like shit anyway? Give me costumes and puppets any day, at least they look halfway decent unlike the CGI garbage we see in movies today.

5. Street Fighter

Words can’t describe how bad of a movie Street Fighter was. None of the characters looked remotely like the characters of the Street Fighter series. These characters were also some of the worst actors to ever hit the big screen. The story line was abominable, and Van Damme gave one of his worst performances of all time. Van Damme was to be Guile showing off some of the most obviously scripted dialogs in movie history. Of course, dialogs were never a strong point for Van Damme, so maybe we could at least see a fight scene on par with something from Blood Sport. Van Damme was barely in any fight scenes though. Most of the time he was running around talking apolitical gibberish. Street Fighter is almost worth seeing because of how bad it is.

4. Double Team

Van Damme and Dennis Rodman; Surely this movie was destined for cinematic greatness. Along with Braveheart and Star Wars, you could put Double Team next to those as the greatest movies of all time. For what it’s worth, there are plenty of action scenes. Most of the scenes in the movie are actions scenes with gaps with some of the worst acting of all time. We can’t blame Rodman though. He probably knows he’s a poor actor and decided to have some half-baked fun making a movie he knew was going to be bad. Van Damme, as a professional actor, should have known better though, but as always, the “action side” of him (The only side of him thus far) got the best of him and decided to do this joke of a movie.

3. Knock Off

If anyone has the ambition to write screenplays, they need to watch Knock Off as guidance to arguably the worst story of all time. The lessons that can be learned here will go a long way in learning what not to do when making a movie. Knock Off tries to win over the viewer by ostensibly “artsy” camera shots that move quick and try to show some style. This doesn’t work because it makes the viewer dizzy most of the time. Even if they did work, the plot was so bad that not even 28th century graphic technology could save it. The beginning of the movie starts off with Van Damme selling some products that are “knocks offs”, and then the rest of the movie is him running around a city beating up people screaming “You Lied to Me”. Like most Van Damme movies, if you can get by the abominable acting and plots, you can actually enjoy the absurdity of it all knowing that you’re watching one of the worst movies of all time.

2. Wake of Death

1. The Order

The Order tried to take the Indian Jones theme and modernize it for JCVD! As with all of Van Damme’s movies though, the plot is irrelevant and just a vehicle from one action scene to another. Seeking to find coherent plot lines in any Van Damme movie is like seeking the Holy Grail. So from the start, you can forget any modernization of a decent plot from a past movie. You’re left to the action scenes. How would The Order do in action scenes? The film starts off with some action scene promise but soon falls off into repetitive explosions with Van Damme jumping around these explosions. He does some high-kicks in between the explosions. At one point, it looks like he’s trying to high kick an explosion itself. Smoke a pound of hash and you will think this is the best comedy ever put to film.

10. ET

What’s the first thing you think of when you see Reese’s Pieces (ooh, a piece of candy!)? Or when your ancient grandfather points his shaky finger at something he’s cranky about (ouch)? How great was it when you first heard a pint-sized Drew Barrymore utter the words “penisbreath?” This movie made every boy (and probably girl) from my generation ride their bikes (ah, memories of my awesome starwars huffy) off of home made ramps imagining cruising weightlessly across the moon. Aside from this awesomeness, the movie als taught us not to fear aliens, lessons about racism, that feds should be hated (a point reinforced years later when my freaker friends had their towers confiscated, shutting down our BBS), and that sometimes your parents aren’t perfect. In short, E.T. is awesome. A collector’s edition of ET dressed up in a sundress greets you as you walk into my house.

9. Blade Runner

I don’t think I can say that I’ve ever been disappointed by a Harrison Ford movie. Okay, maybe Hollywood Homicide. That was pretty bad. And then there was the new Indiana Jones movie. Let me back track…its my fookin’ blog….really I can do anything I want! While the aforementioned movies might have been bad, most of the Harrison movies that came out before the 2000’s were great, and Blade Runner is obviously no exception. This movie is a true classic, based on the novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep” by none other than Philip K. Dick himself. Much like science fiction books at the time, Blade Runner was the classic thinking man’s movie. It attempted to tackle the big questions that science fiction authors, like Isaac Asimov, have grappled with for a long time. It was a huge movie that asked questions like “What are the implications of building intelligent machines?” and “What does it mean to really be human?” Combine this with awesome special effects and a compelling story, and you have the makings of one of the best science fiction movies ever made.

8. Aliens

Unlike in mainstream movies, oftentimes in science fiction a sequel will surpass its predcessor. Empire Strikes Back is clearly a better movie than A New Hope, Wrath of Khan was better than Star Trek the Motion Picture, and Aliens continues that trend as it was a much better movie than Alien. As Weaver stated in an interview: “Aliens made the first Alien look like a cucumber sandwich.” Although I’m not sure what her problem is with cucumbers, I have to agree. Aliens was definitely a much better movie than the first one (not taking anything away from the first movie), so much so that it makes our top 10 science fiction movies of all time list. The story this time around takes place nearly sixty years after the conclusion of Alien, Ellen Ripley and Jonesy the cat are still quite happily sleeping away in their cryo-freeze compartment aboard the shuttle after having sent the first alien out the airlock. The film opens with a salvage crew opening up the shuttle and finding her and the cat. After she’s awoken, she learns that she’s been floating around for fifty seven years and the company she works for isn’t very sympathetic to her cause, basically blackballing her. Unbeknownst to her, the “company” sends someone out to investigate her story and not too long thereafter nobody from the planetoid is heard from again. This of course prompts the company to send the space marines and Ripley as an advisor to find out what happened to the terraformers, and what follows from there is one of the best and most intense Sci-Fi action thrillers to have ever been made.

7. Terminator 2

Terminator 2: Judgement Day was the follow up to Terminator, and once again it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, although this time he plays a replica of the original Terminator model T-800 which dominated the first movie. Although the story is unimaginative, this is one of those movies that didn’t really need a groundbreaking story to be good. In a future, war-ravaged Los Angeles, human rebels led by an adult John Connor do battle with silvery, skeletal robots. Two “intelligent machines” have been dispatched to the past, one to protect the young Connor, the other to kill him. On late 20th-century Earth, the young John Connor finds himself pursued by two androids. The machine sent to kill him (T-1000) is a newer model than the one sent to save him (which is the T-800), and its one of the best movie villains of all time. It takes on the appearance of a young policeman – the first human it dispatches after arriving on Earth. This “bad” Terminator sent by the machines is far more sophisticated than Arnold’s T-800, constructed from liquid steel so that it can adopt the appearance of anyone or anything it comes in contact with. The film is more or less the same as its predecessor, except that this time around the effects are more spectacular. The script’s good-natured wit is undercut by the sentimentality of Arnold’s Terminator becoming a caring cyborg, and although he is the nominal star of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the show is stolen by the extraordinary ground-breaking special effects, particularly the “morphing” in which the liquid metal T-1000 transforms itself into a multitude of organic and inorganic forms.

6. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a Stephen Spielberg classic, is more than worthy of it’s weight in alien gold as one of Old-Wizard’s top 10 Sci-Fi classics. Taking place in a time when McDonalds had only served 24 billion, Close Encounters is one of the rare movies whose storyline centers around a benevolent alien/human association. Unlike most sci-fi movies of its time, the agenda of the alien visitors in Close Encounters didn’t involve the mass destruction of humans or the desire to take over the planet. Instead it seemed like all that these intergalactic guests wanted to do was say “hello”, play a few tunes, give back the hundreds of abductees they borrowed and ..well…maybe take Richard Dreyfus back to outer space with them as a souvenir; but who cares, they didn’t destroy any humans or blow up the Earth. It was the least we could do. Although one must question the intelligence of a species which traveled thousands of light years through the vastness of space, plucked a squadron of torpedo bombers out of the sky only to drop them into the Mexican desert 30 years later, disappeared a freighter from the middle of the ocean and proceeded to drop it in into the Gobi desert in Mongolia, sang to an entire population of remote town in India and implanted images of Devil’s tower in Wyoming into a bunch of random humans only to kidnap Richard Dreyfus.

5. Back to the Future Part 2

When asked what the best movie of the Back to the Future Trilogy is, most fans will answer “Part 1″. After all, Part 2 is nothing but a rehash of the first movie, and Part 3 barely had any time traveling. What these people fail to realize is just how unique the second installment of the Back to the Future Trilogy really is. As the movie was originally conceived, it would have been nothing more than a simple rehash of the the first movie, as old Biff was originally going to bring the sports almanac back to 1965 to give it to his younger self. But then the movie’s writers stumbled upon a brilliant idea: have the old Biff deliver the almanac back to the same day in 1955 that the first movie took place. This idea was simply genius, and turned what could have been an average sequel into a great movie. In what other movie sequel do you literally go back to the original movie during the new one?The eighties were a magic time for movie making, and Back to the Future Part 2 was made at a time when special effects were created to advance a story, as opposed to today where the story is written in order to facilitate more and more outrageous special effects. But that’s not to say the movie didn’t have great special effects. Anyone who saw this movie when it first came out who says they didn’t want a hover board is simply lying. Another great thing about eighties movies is that they didn’t have to make any scientific sense. Can you really imagine a movie being made today where the heroes travel back in time in a De Lorean? This is what made the eighties so great in terms of both movies and video games. In Timeline, for instance we are bored with all the endless scientific techno-babble which aims at making time travel seem plausible to a “modern” audience. The seemingly endless trend of making movies more and more realistic has robbed modern audiences of the sense of fantasy and whimsy which older audiences still remember and look back upon with a sense of nostalgia. Perhaps if we had known what movie making would be like in the future, we wouldn’t have wanted to go there so bad.

4. Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes was a groundbreaking movie that illustrates just how bad it would suck to crash your spaceship on a future earth, only to discover it’s now governed by a class system of monochromatically dressed talking apes with a penchant for hunting, caging and conducting torturous scientific experiments on lowly mute humans before killing them. There’s nothing worse than breaking down on the wrong side of time and utopia. But all monkey business aside, this movie is a true Sci-Fi classic complete with social commentary, caged romance amongst humans and one of the most renowned surprise movie endings in history. And how great was Nova? Possibly the perfect girl, she’s a hot, scantily clad, mute woman who will follow you around anywhere you go and do anything you want. She’s every science fiction nerd’s wet dream. And although it can always be slightly disconcerting to observe a couple of chimpanzee scientists as they discuss the finer points of human castration, it’s well worth the watch and well deserving of it’s placement on the Old-Wizard best Sci-Fi movie list.

3. Strek Trek: Wrath of Khan

KHAAAN!!!! Undoubtedly the greatest Star Trek movie ever made, Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan is top-notch filming making. It has heroic characters, a nasty villain and a sweeping adventure that is both engaging and entertaining. Wrath of Khan is a sequel to the “Space Seed” episode from the original 1967 show, in which Kirk had banished the evil Khan to the edge of the universe. Now Khan is back and looking for revenge, via a device capable of reversing creation dubbed “Project Genesis”. Project Genesis is a device that reorganizes molecular matter on a sub-atomic level, turning barren environments into life-sustaining ones. Described by Spock as “life from lifelessness,” it was perfectly named after the first book of the Bible. To put it in the words of Dr. McCoy, “According to myth, the Earth was created in 6 days. Now, watch out. Here comes Genesis. We’ll do it for you in 6 minutes.” Of course, when used on an inhabited planet, it has the opposite effect, and thus our villain wants nothing more than to get his hands on it. In the process we get one of the best ship to ship battles in science fiction history when the USS Enterprise, commanded by none other than Captain James T. Kirk takes on Khan in the stolen Federation vessel the USS Reliant. Not only is the story great, but the special effects are also well-done. In this age of CGI it is refreshing to see the ingenuity and creativity of old-style model effects being used so effectively. In short, this is a great movie, and the best science fiction movie without “Star Wars” in its title, which leads us to our number two movie of all time…

2. Star Wars: A New Hope

This comes with a few stipulations; first it only applies before the creation of the new movies, which effectively ruined an otherwise perfect creation. To this day I can’t watch any of the old Star Wars movies because of them, why George Lucas would choose to make those travesties is beyond my comprehension. Was it money? I doubt that, he has a ranch and lots of money from merchandising the old movies. It couldn’t be fame, I mean who doesn’t know George Lucas? I was perfectly happy with the three movies just as they were, the special effects were just bad enough to be absolutely amazing. All those new fancy computer graphics really took the personality right out of the new movies. Phantom might as well have been a cartoon it was so cheesy. Now I know what you’re saying, what about Natalie Portman and Samuel L. Jackson? I agree. I love both them, each in very different ways, but they, being great actors, are actually a testament to how terrible the movies are. Even they can’t save the train wreck that is the prequel trilogy. So before the release of the prequels this was a great movie. Now its just a reminder of what was…

1. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

“No, there is another.” With these words, spoken by Yoda to Obi Wan immediately after sending Luke off on a death mission and telling him to sacrifice his friends for the sake of their cause, I was transformed into something new. Why would Yoda, a good guy in my 8 year old mind, tell Luke to let the other good guys die? Was Lando a good guy? My boys were just ambushed by the Empire in Bespin! Was Boba Fett bad, or just trying to do the job he was hired to do? It seemed as if no one was all good, and no one was all bad. Even Luke had much anger in him, much to learn he still has as he throws away the rest of his training…at least we know Vader is definitely all bad. For the first time in my young life there was a gray area. Before Empire there were good guys and bad guys. Friends and enemies. Autobots and Decepticons. Professor X and Magneto.  You get the point. Now there was something new, people were more complicated. I started to like Han more than Luke because of his relative badness. I went through the awkwardness of puberty for 20 years, but when we learned that Luke was Vader’s son, I knew it had taken me 2 hours to become a man. I went into the kitchen and gave my dad a hug, and then I checked to see if his arm was mechanical.

20. Wicket

We meet Wicket in “Return of the Jedi” on the forest moon of Endor. Wicket is certainly one of the most lovable creatures in the Star Wars series from the first moment we see him when he is afraid of Leia trying to give him food. Leia who had been knocked off a speeder is left alone on the forest moon of Endor, only to find the moon’s indigenous species hiding in the trees. Wicket approaches her first with an arrow, making you wonder what this little creature could actually do for damage. After this bashful sequence with each other, Wicket warms up to Leia plopping himself on the branch she is on, and eats the food she is offering him. He ends up saving the rest of the rebel alliance from becoming food for the other Ewoks when he takes Leia back to their village. Wicket comes across as the leader of his specific Ewok group at times, and at other times, a clumsy novice at organization and war craft. We all remember when he tried to knock a storm trooper off his transporter with a rock tied to a rope, only to swing it in his own face! Ouch…We also remember the sonorous noise he made when trying to quietly walk around trespassed areas. These characteristics make Wicket into a remembered character in the Star Wars series and one of the most hotly purchased action figures in the Star Wars toy market. Trying to have fuzzy little creatures declare war on species 4 times their size and far more technologically advanced proved to be an ingenious paradox in Return of the Jedi, that made for laughter along with sympathy at the site of these David and Goliath scenes.

19. Wuher “The Bartender”

Wuher was “The Bartender” who worked on Tatooine who we meet when Luke and Obi-Wan look to have a couple minutes of repose in the local slimy bar. This bar was full of the worst of the planetary thugs smoking their outer space haze and drinking only the most average alcohol from Wuher. Wuher had a strong command of his bar which we see when Luke and Obi try to enter into the bar with R2D2 and C3PO. We all remember the fastidious roar of Wuher when he says “Hey! We don’t serve their kind here!”, referring to his inexorable rules of having no droids in his bar. Even the Jedi and the Jedi in training follow the rules of the supreme bartender. Wuher, also showed a blithe placidity, when he witnessed a fight between Luke and a Patron where the Patron carpingly bothered Luke by saying “I don’t like you!”, “He doesn’t like you!” “NOBODY LIKES YOU!” eventually much to the dismay and life of the patron. All this happened without any attrition to Wuher. After the fight scene, Wuher continues making drinks and the bar follows suit in their voluptuous activities. On that same day, Han kills a bounty hunter who is after him in Wuher’s bar, without the slightest disturbance in the mood of the bar. Wuher owned this bar. People would face threats argue and fight throughout the long hours of the bar’s work week. For Wuher, there was only one rule for his bar. NO DROIDS ALLOWED!

18. Chewbacca

Chewbacca is always a favorite among younger Star Wars fans. He’s not for us. Throughout the movies he’s often moaning at the smallest of perceived slights, and crying at the tasks handed to him by Han. Nonetheless, Chewbacca defines much of what Star Wars is about; A character of pure imagination with more hair than a girl from Woodstock and more personality than a late night TV show host. In other words, an always unique character that would be remembered for a long time to come. Chewbacca is always a main character throughout the Star Wars series, most of the time as the sidekick of Han Solo. While Chewbacca seems to bitch at everything that Han wants him to do, he eventually finishes his tasks set to him. Chewbacca while not being the most efficient of Star Wars creatures, makes up for his laziness in his momentary anger where he’s always willing to defend his master to the death, and even pick up the broken parts of an annoying droid, exemplifying a big inner heart to match the actual physical size of this beast. Chewbacca’s trademark roar has been parodied by everything in modern TV culture from Peter in “Family Guy”, to the late infamous “Tourettes Guy” which you can find on Youtube when in need of a laugh at the expense of others. Love him or loathe him, Star Wars would not be Star Wars without Chewbacca. For a time, he is everyone’s favorite character, until the time when one has to prove his Star Wars nerdhood by appreciating much smaller, lesser-known characters, like Wuhr the bartender.

17. Porkins “Red Six”

Porkins, also known as “Belly Runner”, and “Piggy”, was the hefty hero of A New Hope shadowing Luke and Wedge in the dogfight near the first Death Star. We only witness the brave heavyweight in a small section of A New Hope as his valence led him to stay in the battle at the Death Star even when his ship’s stabilizers were damaged and his shields were about to break. There is often speculation concerning other reasons for his Y-Wing’s failure in battle revolving around his being too heavy for the craft itself. Fat jokes aside, Porkins knew his ship couldn’t stand any more damage but stayed in the battle anyways, proving his dauntless fortitude in the face of death. Porkins is most well known to the Star Wars nerd for his persistence in battle, solidified in the dictum often mistakenly attributed to him, “Stay on target…Stay on target…”. Unfortunately, Porkins became the target of a gunner on the Death Star and was the first of the many pilots in the rebel alliance to suffer at the hands of the Empire in the final battle of A New Hope. We at Old-Wizard salute Porkins for his intrepidness and would never stereotype the quality of character of someone who is obese after witnessing Porkins in this Star Wars installment.

16. Greedo

Greedo, like Boba Fett, was a bounty hunter after Han Solo’s life who we meet for approximately 1 minute in A New Hope. So why is he in our top 20 list of Star Wars characters of all time? Is it because he looks like squalid space alien that would best serve as the worst Halloween costume on the block? No. Is it because his suction cup fingers prove once again to be an overpowering afflatus on the Star Wars maker’s parts? Wrong again. Greedo is in our list because he is the first character to make Han Solo look cool. We all remember Greedo telling Han to pay up…or else, much to Hans chagrin, and eventually to Greedo’s life as Han pulls out his blaster from underneath the table and shoots Greedo causing a state of calamity, just for a moment (remember, we’re in Wuher’s bar now where this stuff happens all the time). Greedo gives Han his first appearance as a swarthy outer space thug who would not put up with all the bounty hunters after his life. Han will eventually pay Jabba, but if you try to rush him, you’ll suffer Greedo’s fate. Much controversy would follow this scene as we see from the 1997 re-release of the film where Greedo shoots a missed shot at Han first, much to the dismay of Star Wars nerds around the world. Cries of “sell out” could be heard on Star Wars message boards across the web. The SW nerds liked their Han as he was, which means a once licentious thug who would slowly become much more affable and good natured throughout the series. Greedo was the character to start Han’s development from his abject roots.

15. Uncle Owen

Uncle Owen, or Owen Lars, which we never hear him named, was Luke’s foster father. Owen was a highly important moisture farmer on Tatooine who we meet from the beginning of episode 4 before the Empire destroys the area in hopes of finding information stored in the brave little R2 unit. Uncle Owen did not approve much of Luke’s lifestyle, from his want to see other planets, to his more simple wants of “going to the Tashi station to pick up power converters”. Of course, we know that Owen was just looking out for his wide-eyed nephew, trying to keep him from getting into too much danger with the knowledge of old Ben Kenobi around the corner and a recent outerspace war occurring just some years ago involving some of his own family. Owen was stern and efficient, having his mind on the quality of farming seasons over and above any puerile desires for galactic adventure games that may have been in his own blood. No viewers of Star Wars ever liked Uncle Owen because he reminded them of their own parent’s authority. What type of contumacy must have evolved in anyone who was stopped from picking up power converters is unquestionably certain. Luke however, needed to be raised somewhere, for sometime, in the confines of solitude and repose, so he could eventually become the Jedi he became. With this in mind, Uncle Owen has to be on the top 20 list regardless of Star Wars fans obstinacy for authority.

14. Admiral Akbar

Admiral Akbar was another impressive character only possible in the imagination of Lucas and the Star Wars creators. We first meet this heroic fish in “Return of the Jedi” as the commander of the allied forces in their fight to extirpate the almost-rebuilt Death Star. Akbar embodied the leadership qualities and spirited rhetoric of a Winston Churchill, while maintaining a uniqueness only reserved to a “fish out of the water”. Akbar is clearly most popular in the obsessive Star Wars fan circles, especially with his unforgettable quotes throughout Return of Jedi like “Our cruisers can’t repel firepower of that magnitude!” said with the type of urgency that made viewers believe that they were in the battle themselves. Akbar, while seeming overtly intense in the actual battle itself, proved to be equally placid in times before and after the battle where we witness the erudite fish in modes of absolute philosophical repose. Admiral Akbar, like many characters in the Star Wars series epitomized someone that everyone could aspire too, regardless of species and respitory systems. He would go on to have his fame augmented in subsequent novels in the Star Wars series, but more than anywhere, Akbar was first and foremost known for his quality of character shown in The Return of the Jedi. “All craft, prepare to jump into hyperspace on my mark!”

13. C-3PO

C-3PO was always conspicuously homoerotic (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). C-3PO was also excessively worrisome and carping at times. But C-3PO was more tolerably annoying, and even sometimes more welcomingly annoying, than the kind of annoying that embodied playing Dreamcast for example. Many Star Wars fans love to hate 3PO, but they often forget the intellectual and technical skill of this protocol droid who knew “over 6 million forms of communication” and served over 40 masters in all discursive tasks put to him. Even with all of 3PO’s technical proficiencies, he never boasted himself as highly important, often being heard by his masters as saying “I do not overrate my importance! I daresay I am the most humble droid I know!”. Surely, what one of us, who knew over 6 million languages, would not be overtly prideful of this exorbitant skill. Some of the more entertaining dialogues throughout Star Wars came from 3PO and R2-D2, where all we knew of what R2-D2 was saying were 3PO’s interpretations. What we gathered from the substance of their conversations was mostly R2-D2 making fun of 3P0, much to 3PO’s chagrin, as he was commonly taken back by R2-D2’s apparent impertinence. Love him or hate him, C-3PO was absolutely an essential figure throughout Star Wars, even if his character played the role of someone you would commonly be piqued by in real life. Star Wars could never limit itself to ideal characters, making Star Wars ascend beyond what’s normally understood as “ideal”. Accept that the world will be full of 3PO’s, and you’ll start to see their importance too.

12. Jabba the Hutt

What a character Jabba the Hutt was. Only in the imagination of George Lukas could something so bawdy and amorphous manifest itself. This slimy massive behemoth of Tatooine was the king of the desert, offering rich bounties to all those who wanted to make money by capturing debtors of Jabba’s. Jabba could barely move, could barely talk with out drooling, and was about as attractive as Rosie O’Donnel. Nonetheless, Jabba commanded a respect like no other, running a successful black market establishment with visiting players as cool and surreptitious as Boba Fett and Han Solo. When Jabba spoke, everyone became silent. His sonorous voice echoed over the chambers of his palace, keeping the slaves and gamblers in line, demonstrating who the real count of Tatooine was. It was quite a scene seeing Leia ineluctably chained to the tumultuous beast. It was an even more somber scene when she strangled him to death with her own fetters, making the rats and low life of the palace cry for the resurrection of their master. Jabba the Hutt is what happens when you have creator with an imagination as vast as the infinite universe. No one could dream up this type of character until it was actually seen in reality. Jabba is a testament to the perennial uniqueness of the Star Wars saga.

11. R2-D2

Unless you have been living underneath a rock for the past thirty some odd years, you have heard this voice broadcast to you by some sort of medium, and it sounds rather familiar. The beep-birk-bonk-sqwark-beep-ding is the noise that R2-D2 makes throughout his career in the Star Wars movies. R2-D2 is the most popular Droid in the Star Wars Saga. The reason being you may ask? Is it his lovable character that draws people in? His often rambunctious escapades with C-3PO? All very good guesses. But it’s probably just because he is a lucky little robot that hasn’t gotten blasted by Storm Troopers or bashed into bytes by Wookies. Give the bot some credit though. R2 has been through a lot in the series. Traveling from planet to planet on the outside of a fighter ship is taxing on the clear coat. But R2 often manages to take a lickin’ and keep on kickin’. Or should I say shockin’? It always tickles Star Wars fans when he extends his prod-device arm and shocks critters.R2 served as a good friend to C-3PO, having helped to rebuild him several times, and probably having to continually wax that golden case C-3PO sports. Even though he can be made into interpretive trash can art when he is decommissioned, R2 has saved Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon so many times that it is doubtful he would receive anything less than a full Rebel military funeral. It can be quite moving when the Wookie’s belt out the tune of “Taps” to the setting Endor sun. R2 has helped make Star Wars into what Star Wars really is…one of the greatest sci-fi movie series ever created. The spirit of R2-D2 will live long and prosper (I know, wrong franchise) far into the future because of his impact in saving the galaxy.

5. Dex

I honestly don’t know if I even really have to explain our #5 worst Star Wars character of all time. The scene in Dex’s diner in Episode II: Attack of the Clones is a perfect example of how lazy of a story teller George Lucas has become ever since The Empire Strikes Back. Basically, Lucas needed to find a way for Obi-Wan to find the planet Kamino, even though the Jedi Archives themselves couldn’t find it. So the obvious answer, of course, would be to ask a short order cook at a 1950’s Earth Diner. How this repulsive creature could know that the saber dart that Obi-Wan retrieved from a bounty hunter must have come from the planet Kamino (one of fifty MILLION planets in the Star Wars universe) just by looking at it is beyond me. And Dex’s line after he “figures out” which planet this dart was made on is even more ridiculous. “I should think you Jedi would have more respect for the difference between knowledge and wisdom.” What? What the hell does that even mean? And why did Obi-Wan consult a cook at a diner to get this “wisdom” anyway? Isn’t there a better source of information on Coruscant than a diner? This is the capital of a galaxy wide empire. There must libraries, universities, and countless other places to get information from. Why a diner? Yeah, its cool that Lucas wanted to give a shout out to American Graffiti in a STAR WARS movie, but couldn’t he have found a more subtle way that this? And considering the fact that the entire prequel trilogy is pretty much nothing more than a six hour long shout out to the original trilogy anyway, I’d say the shout outs have gone a little too far at this point.

4. Yaddle

Was there really any need to add a female version of Yoda into the prequel trilogy? Not only that, but does she also have to be a Jedi Master on the Jedi council along with Yoda? What George Lucas has done with the prequel trilogy is to make each character in the original trilogy a cliche of themselves. Any member of Yoda’s species we see has to be a powerful Jedi, just because in the original movies Yoda is a powerful Jedi. (in the same line of thought, any bounty hunters we encounter in the new movies would have to be like Boba Fett, but more on that later). We see this theme again and again in the prequel trilogy. I could have gone the rest of my life never seeing another member of Yoda’s race. When I was a kid one of the coolest things about Yoda was that he was unique. Yeah, deep down I knew there must have been more of his species out there in the galaxy, but it still didn’t mean I ever wanted to see another member of it in a Star Wars movie. I liked the mystery a whole hell of a lot more. Sometimes I imagined that he was the last of his race. Other times I imagined that maybe he was once a human, but after 900 years of using the force he became a twisted little green creature. Either way, it was a nice little mystery. But, as would happen many more times to many more of my favorite Star Wars characters, in the new movies, any sense of mystery Yoda might have held for me though disappeared immediately after seeing Yaddle in the Phantom Menace.

3. General Grievous

Where to start with General Grievous? It was really hard to place General Grievous at #3 on our list. Everything was telling me to put him at number one. The only thing stopping me was that by the time General Grievous made his appearance it the Star Wars saga in Episode III: Revenge of Sith, all hope had already been lost for the prequel trilogy. This alone saves General Grievous from otherwise dominating our number one spot as the worst Star Wars character of all time. The villain of a movie is usually supposed to inspire some fear in you, as the movie goer. Darth Vader and the Emperor, and even Grand Moff Tarkin accomplish this feat rather well in the original trilogy. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of General Grievous. Sure, he looks scary…At first. But then he starts hacking and wheezing and any sense of dread you might have had soon vanishes. As a matter of fact, during the scenes in which he is on the screen for longer periods of time, the dread quickly turns into annoyance. You just want him to shut up. Its like watching a movie while sitting next to someone with a really bad cough. As if a coughing robot weren’t dumb enough, the guy is basically a professional Jedi assassin. What? Is it really that easy to kill a Jedi? You just need to hire a robot with a really bad cough? Why the hell was the emperor so afraid of Luke becoming a Jedi in the original trilogy? Shouldn’t he have been more afraid of someone building another robot with Asthma? This guy has a collection of lightsabers from all the Jedi he killed. Throughout the entire prequel trilogy our reverence for the Jedi knights, reverence that was built to epic proportions by the time we saw Luke take down all of Jabba’s henchmen almost single-handedly in the Return of the Jedi, has slowly evaporated. In Episode II we see Jedi falling by the hundreds on Geonosis at the hands of battle droids, we see a bounty hunter casually shoot one down of a balcony, and now we find out an Asthmatic robot has been killing them one by one and collecting their lightsabers. Where will it end?

2. Jango Fett

How many lives were ruined when it was revealed in Episode 2: The Attack of the Clones that Boba Fett was in fact the clone of Jango Fett, and not only that, he was raised as his son? Boba Fett was in like three scenes in the original trilogy, and had maybe two lines. Why was he even included in the prequel trilogy at all? Couldn’t George Lucas have come up with a new bounty hunter? The only reason I can come up with is because Boba Fett’s action figures fly off the shelves. It’s like George Lucas had to find a way to fit every character from the original trilogy into the new movies. (C-3PO, R2-D2, Jabba the Hutt, even Chewbacca made an appearance in Episode 3!) Boba Fett himself was cool before we knew what he looked like and where he came from, and now that we know, he’s lost all of his original appeal (especially after we see what an annoying brat he was as a kid). Jango Fett’s inclusion in the prequel trilogy in and of itself would be enough to warrant his place on his list, but to make matters worse it is with Jango Fett that all of our ideas we had about how bad ass the Jedi Knights were when we were kids were shattered. During the Coliseum battle between the Jedi and the droids on the planet Geonosis, a Jedi knight lands on the balcony with Count Dooku and Jango Fett. Jango simply pulls out his blaster and shoots the Jedi in the chest, after which he falls off the balcony to his death. I’m sorry, but I simply refuse to believe that a Jedi knight (remember these are the guys who spend their free time deflecting laser blasts with their lightsabers) could possibly be dispatched this easily. And how humiliating would it be for a Jedi knight to die at the hands of a lowly bounty hunter like that after a lifetime of training? Let’s face it, the only reason Jango was able to dispatch a Jedi so easily is because he is “cool” ( and the only reason he is cool because he was the progenitor of Boba Fett). In putting Jango Fett in the prequel trilogy, George Lucas made both Boba Fett and Jedi Knights less cool.

1. Jar Jar Binks

Jar Jar Binks was the worst character in all of Star Wars lore, and it’s fitting that like the other four characters on this list he came from the new series. The character of Jar Jar Binks was unbecomingly puerile, coming across as annoying to anyone above the age of 3. His voice was grating, his lines were superfluous, and the way he walked was vexing. Every time Binks came on the screen, the viewer was overcome with a sense of embarrassment that they had to watch this character who was supposed to be comic relief, but failed in all instances. While trying to adapt the Star Wars enterprise to a younger market, they lost their core audience who first fell in love with episodes 4-6 for their mettle and rigor in production. While C3PO was explicitly annoying, Jar Jar Binks would try to cajole the audience into placid acceptance. Jar Jar Binks was supposed to be accepted as a “fun” and “laughable”. Instead, he came across as the ultimate sell out move by George Lukas who was obviously trying to adapt to an audience he thought was dumb enough to fall for the lackluster comedic appeal of Binks. His clumsiness is never entertaining. One wonders how he survived past episode 1 into Episodes 2 and 3. The Star Wars series won its success from its unabashed forays into aggrandized space war themes. It’s toughness made the viewer believe in what he was watching. That Lucas thought the series would improve by adding this unctuous and mawkishly cute character was beyond fans of the original Star War series. Clearly, Lucas was taking the Star Wars series to a place the original fans wanted nothing to do with.

With the coolness of the trailer, as well as the title character, I thought there was no way this movie could possibly go wrong. Boy was I wrong. Leaving the theater after the movie the only thing I could think about was how mad I was that I’d spent ten bucks to watch that crap. For non-comic book fans, this movie was a tedious, incoherent bore. For comic book fans it is simply an atrocity.

Easily one of the worst comic book inspired movies ever made (right up there with the first Fantastic Four movie and Batman Forever) Rise of the Silver Surfer is 89 minutes of tedium. The movie, like its predecessor, seemed needlessly rushed. Why not make this a 2 hour plus movie and take the time to slowly and thoroughly introduce the characters, especially for the myriads of movie-goers who have no clue about the origin of the Fantastic Four, or who are clueless about who the Silver Surfer is?

The main reason the movie won’t sit well with fans of the comics is the numerous pointless changes the producers make to the comic book storyline. Why is Sue the one that helps the Surfer decide to save humanity instead of Alicia? One of the coolest parts of the comics was when the surfer beat up the Thing and stole his blind girlfriend right out from under him. Alicia seems to have “a thing” for bizarre looking characters. She is the only character in comicdom (or anywhere for that matter) who would leave a giant rock man for a silvery bald space surfer. It also created some great tension between the surfer and the Thing, who would later have to team up to find a way to stop Galactus.

And don’t even get me started on Doctor Doom. Here’s a villain who wears a mask because his face is damaged (one scar) and in the comics we only see his real face twice. Twice in almost 50 years! But in this movie we see him without his mask more than we see him with it! And no longer is Doom the dictator of Latveria, but a billionaire industrialist (Lex Luthor?). Do these people know what movie they’re making?

The Silver Surfer was portrayed as being much weaker than he is in the comics. Why the hell are his powers tied to his surfboard? Where does this concept come from? Just read Silver Surfer vol. 3, issue #1 if you want proof that his powers aren’t tied to his board. In that issue his board is damaged and the surfer is able to repair it. He has even been shown to re-create his board after it is completely destroyed! He can remotely convert his board to energy, he can recall it to himself, hell, with the power cosmic the surfer can do pretty much anything. Its sad to see him in a movie where the writers have little or no understanding of the character or his abilities. If they didn’t want to read the comics, a simple wikipedia search or a five minute interview with a fan could have told them everything they needed to know about the surfer. Enough to make a bad ass movie.

In any event, another issue with the movie is Galactus, or rather, the absence of Galactus. I realize that the producers felt that Galactus was a little too “cartoonish” to be included in a modern day, cutting edge movie, but isn’t that the main problem with movies these days? What happened to a little imagination? Why does everything have to be so realistic these days? Gone are the golden days of the movies (namely the eighties), where one could time through travel in a Delorian, or fly into space in homemade spacecraft built out of a seat from an amusement park ride, a washing machine window and a television. Nowadays every movie has to be “realistic” with corresponding “scientific” explanations as to why one can travel in time, or through space. No longer is it acceptable to have a giant space man in a purple suit flying around in space eating planets. Its simply not realistic enough. Hence, we are left with a vague cloud with an object the shape of Galactus’s helmet as the final bad guy in the movie. And just how is the surfer able to stop the world devourer anyway? He flew into him? What?

Let me just say, the Silver Surfer and Galactus are two of the greatest characters that the incredible team of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee ever came up with together. The noble hero who was forced to serve a giant, purple clad, planet-munching space traveler by leading him to countless other inhabited worlds to feed on in order to keep him from eating his own planet (where the love of his life, Shalla Bal lived as empress). This movie completely ruined the chance the bring these characters to life and tell the story of how the super powerful Silver Surfer is moved into sparing a planet simply because of the heroes who help him find the nobility he has lost in the ages that he had traveled from planet to planet seeking out his master’s next meal. With all that said, the movie is worth seeing if only to see the surfer snuff out Johnny Storm and drop him into the earth’s atmosphere from outer space.

Our Rating: