I was ready to love Terminator 3--I went to that theater excited as hell. I didn't expect it to live up to either two originals because I know that those are so above-average that its an unrealistic expectation. But when the credits rolled and i left the theater I realised that the film fucking sucked just because it fucking sucked. Okay, some nice action scenes, and a pretty neat last 10 minutes. But you know what--Wing Commander has redeemable qualities like this. Battlefield Earth has some interesting effects and a cool action scene. Scary Movie 4 has a few jokes I laughed at. Every movie has something good in it, something worth watching. When you get a pool of talent--Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, designer Doug Chiang and Gavin Boucquet, the best special effects wizards in existance, John Williams and hell, even George Lucas--of course there will be elements, scenes and moments that are watchable, good or even excellent. But the reason that people think Wing Commander sucked, Terminator 3 was poor and Phantom Menace was poor was because, for whatever good elements in there, they were swallowed up by ten times as many bad elements. Thats what matters.

And this excuse of "fans were waiting to hate" is total bullshit to excuse poor filmmaking. Lord of the Rings got more successful with each film, and this had almost as much expectation--and more, IMO, challenges to overcome. But LOTR, while not perfect, was done pretty well, and people also embraced Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia--films that are light and whimsical like TPM, appealing to young kids. But people and critics praised them because they were done well. Theres this myth that people wanted to hate TPM--but that makes absolutely no sense. Why the hell would Star Wars fans seek out to dislike what was such a good story?? Yes, the expectations were high, but if the movie was at least done half-way well people would have liked it. Look at ROTS--its not exactly great, its probably worse than ROTJ, but fans are willing to give a little, and this film was embraced by most people as worthwhile and had almost no backlash except by select fans. Phantom Menace was slagged because it wasn't just "not great" but because it was outright bad. It had terrible writing, terrible directing, and even the acting was kind of dull. Sure, the music and effects and costumes and designs were good, but thats just because Lucas had a bunch of talented people around him that he paid to make the film for him. The emotional core of the film--the writing, conveyed by directing and made material by the acting--was a hollow failure for the most part, even if there are some moments that succeed.