Rules: explain why
Ready player one.
That has to be one of the cringiest movies I’ve seen, is tries so hard, too hard with it’s “WE LOVE YOU NERD, YOU’RE SO COOL FOR PLAYING GAMES AND GETTING THIS 80S REFERENCE” message and the whole “corporation bad, the people good” narrative seems written for toddlers… The fan service feels cheap and adds nothing to the story.
Finally, they trying to make the people believe that very attractive girl with a barely visible red tint spot on her face is “ugly”… Like wtf?
Yet it received decent reviews plus being one of the most successful movies of that year.
I didn’t see it, but IMO based on your description the appropriate thing to do would be to make the best movie she could, or to have refused, even if that meant them making it without her. Taking up the offer of making the movie and then deliberately doing a bad job is a giant “fuck you” to everyone who bought tickets.
(If they did make it without her, it might still have been bad or even undermined her intentions with the franchise, but at least her name would be clear. And fans are very good at saying “yeah no we don’t consider these corporate-made extensions of the auteur’s world to be very good. We consider it a separate canon.” Look at Star Wars, or the Dune novels after Frank Herbert’s death, or how people were reacting to Netflix’s Avatar after Mike & Brian left the production even before it released.)
There’s a whole story to this movie. I’m sure someone’s made a 3 hour deep dive into it explaining why she did it and what the studio was doing, but I think she saw the script they were pushing and just couldn’t let them make it. I don’t think the movie is bad bad, it just doesn’t make any gd sense unless you watch it through the lense of this wachowski sister going through transitioning and dealing with the loss of several close people. She’s just slapping random shit together because it made her feel good.
I completely understand why huge matrix fans wouldn’t like it though. They didn’t sign up for a meta commentary on Hollywood and trans people. But as more of these completely shit super hero movies come out the more I can appreciate what she did.