4 near-perfect adventure movies ruined by the main character

There is a special kind of frustration reserved for movies that get almost everything right, and then stumble at the most fundamental hurdle: the protagonist. It is, unfortunately, a more common phenomenon than most would like to admit, with main characters like Bella Swan ruining blockbusters like Twilight, but it hurts just a little more when adventure movies face this, because a great genre film lives or dies on its lead.

The audience follows this particular person through danger, wants to see them succeed, and sympathizes with them when the stakes are the highest -- but that's difficult to do if the character just doesn't click with them. World-building, set design, choreography, score... nothing matters if the person at the center is a void that the viewer turns to, but finds nothing there. The four adventure movies in this list contain extraordinary elements like staggering creature design, immersive worlds, and sequences of genuine wonder, but each one is undone, to varying degrees, by the protagonist.

Newt Scamander Was Lifeless In Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them

The world J.K Rowling built for Fantastic Beasts is wonderful: a magical 1920s New York, MACUSA, the Blind Pig speakeasy, and the sprawling menagerie inside Newt's impossibly large suitcase are the most visually stunning corners of the Wizarding World Franchise since Diagon Alley. It earned the movie an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, but Eddie Redmayne's Newt Scamander was one-dimensional for the entire franchise's run.

Redmayne plays Newt as a mumbling, eye-contact-avoiding oddity who never develops beyond his love of creatures, which is charming for 20 minutes but becomes boring for the rest of the 90 minutes. A franchise protagonist needs to generate energy that carries the narrative forward, but Newt absorbs most of it. He couldn't make the audience really care for what happened to him, and audiences were drawn more to the warm and funny Jacob Kowalski, or Colin Farrell's menacing Percival Graves.

Owen Grady Suffered From Flatness In Jurassic World

Jurassic World is a $150 million theme park of a film, and it delivers all the visceral, spectacular dinosaur entertainment it promises. The Indominus Rex is a great villain, and the pterosaur attack on the park's main street is the kind of pure blockbuster chaos the franchise hadn't produced since the original. The movie was a crowd-pleaser in every sense of the word, but Owen Grady, the man who was supposed to lead the movie, came up short on expectations in every way possible.

Played by Chris Pratt, who is one of the most naturally charismatic performers of his generation (making Star-Lord magnetic in Guardians of the Galaxy the year before), Grady was a collection of competent-man traits rather than an actual human being. Owen had backstory, but no personality. He trains raptors, dispenses wisdom, and rescues people, but does so without suggesting that it costs him anything. Jurassic World makes Pratt boring, which should be impossible, and the dinosaurs seem to have more screen presence than him.

Sam Witwicky's Behavior Became Annoying In Transformers

Michael Bay's Transformerscontains some of the most thrilling large-scale action sequences in blockbuster cinema of the 2000s, be it the highway chase, the Mission City battle, or the arrival of Optimus Prime on Earth. Even the Autobots had compelling personalities, against all logic, but Sam Witwicky did not. Played by Shia LaBeouf, Sam was a screeching, perpetually panicked teenage boy whose primary function across the film was to run, yell, and implausibly find himself at the center of a conflict between ancient alien races.

The script asks LaBeouf to be a surrogate for the audience in the film instead of being his own character, who should grab eyeballs, and even Bay understood that it wasn't working. This is why he jettisoned Sam entirely from Age of Extinction and started afresh with new main characters. The original movie endures despite its bumbling protagonist, not because of him.

Jake Sully Was Too Blank Of A Slate In Avatar

James Cameron built the most expensive, the most technically extraordinary, and the most visually immersive film ever made at the time of its release, and the level of detail was unmatched. Avatar had a fully realized alien ecosystem that was uniquely beautiful, and placed at its center was a character so generic that he essentially disappears into his own story. Jake Sully is not a bad character, but he is a non-character -- the most archetypal version of the outsider-goes-native narrative who hits every beat mechanically but precisely.

Jake arrives, gets dazzled, falls in love, switches sides, and leads an uprising, but Sam Worthington plays him with a flat competence that never finds an interiority in the character beneath the action. The result is that Avatar, the highest-grossing film in history at $2.92 billion worldwide, is a film in which the most interesting thing is CGI aliens, but not the main character himself.