10 Recent Movies That Blew Great Concepts

Though movies can be greenlit on the strength of a mere concept, following up that idea with a compelling script acted by a worthy cast and helmed by a talented filmmaker is something else entirely.

A great premise for a movie will only get you so far, and the annals of cinema are unfortunately littered with hundreds of films which couldn't even begin to make the most of their intriguing hooks.

Over the past year-or-so, these are the 10 films which most frustratingly took eye-catching loglines and squandered them amid a wider screenplay that just couldn't do justice to the original idea.

That's not to say that all of these movies were terrible or even outright bad, but each nevertheless failed to take the seed concept and nurture it into a truly gratifying piece of storytelling.

The ambition, the technical crafts, and the performances can still be lauded in many cases, but these films will largely endure as infuriating monuments to unrealised promise, and how damn difficult it is to translate a great idea into a great movie.

It's easy to see why studios were all over these ideas, but they sadly didn't quite land the execution...

On paper, Netflix's The Midnight Sky had major awards potential written all over it, but more to the point, it seemed primed to be a heightened sci-fi riff on the enticingly bleak Viggo Mortensen-starring thriller The Road.

The film stars George Clooney as Augustine Lofthouse, a terminally ill, lonesome scientist who lives alone in an arctic base on a post-apocalyptic Earth, where a disaster has wiped out most of humanity.

When Augustine realises a spaceship is imminently returning home with no knowledge of what has happened, he sets off on a chilly, treacherous journey to another base which will allow him to contact the ship and warn them away.

Though the film is certainly technically accomplished and Clooney gives it his all as both director and star, the script lacks the confidence to simply leave us with Augustine as he conducts his mission.

Instead, as if fearing the audience won't be invested in his struggle, the script is peppered with excessive flashbacks and cutaways to the hokey B-plot concerning the members of the spaceship (Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir).

Naturally the screenplay was constrained by the events of the novel on which it's based, but all in all its more blockbuster-y affectations and sentimental family drama - complete with not one but two obligatory, predictable plot twists - undermine which should've basically been George Clooney's Cast Away.

It's hardly a bad movie, but absolutely fumbled its immense potential regardless.