The 10 worst Steven Spielberg movies
Popularly recognised as the best filmmaker of all time, American director Steven Spielberg is known for a number of iconic 20th-century classics, from 1982s cosmic coming-of-age film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial to the exhilarating animatronic marvel Jurassic Park in 1993. With that being said, his 21st-century flicks have never quite lived up to the filmmaker’s potential, with his recent movie The Fabelmans being his best in decades.
Taking to the industry during the 1970s, Spielberg was responsible for the emergence of the Hollywood blockbuster after his 1975 effort Jaws saw vast queues to catch the $9million shark thriller. Earning $476.5million at the box office, the film became an instant sensation, and Spielberg became a household name, yet, despite being the founder of the modern blockbuster, his recent big-budget films have failed to earn critical acclaim.
Without the storytelling panache and visual spectacle of his earlier films, Spielberg’s latest have fallen as flat as the most generic contemporary cinematic fodder. Dedicating a strange amount of his time to remakes and sequels, making five since the start of the new millennium, from 2005s War of the Worlds to 2021s West Side Story, the director’s latest movies tend to involve a lack of genuine innovation.
His very worst movies are primarily made up of such sequels and remakes, with a few dodgy adaptations thrown in too.
The 10 worst Steven Spielberg movies:
10. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
The original Jurassic Park from 1993, based on the novel by Michael Crichton, is a classic of cinematic science fiction, taking the industry to new heights of visual grandeur. Its sequel, 1997s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, is far different, featuring a dull script from David Koepp and a cast including Julianne Moore, Jeff Goldblum and Vince Vaughn, who seem like they don’t want to be there at all.
It was all downhill from here for the Jurassic Park series, with the third instalment being a critical flop, even if it has its fans, whilst the Jurassic World trilogy resembled a towering pile of diplodocus dung.
9. War Horse (2011)
Based on the novel by Michael Morpurgo, 2011s War Horse was created by Spielberg in light of the successful stage play by Nick Stafford released shortly before. War Horse isn’t a bad film, but it is an exceedingly bland one, telling the story of a young man and his horse who are both dragged into the front-line conflict of WWI. Written by the Love Actually director Richard Curtis, Spielberg’s romantic war tale is as limp as a metre-long hot dog.
Sappy and overly sentimental, War Horse is nobody’s favourite Spielberg movie and, further still, the least-accurate representation of the horrors of WWI.
8. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Quentin Tarantino may be a surprising lover of the latest in Steven Spielberg’s adventure series, but he is in the considerable minority of those that praise the confused cinematic mess. Explicitly referring to the existence of aliens, despite the series having danced around its fantastical elements in the past, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull jumped the shark and took the series to stupid new heights, where the titular character was reduced to a wise-cracking quipper and not much more.
Harrison Ford needs a sparkling ensemble cast to help him through the film, and, unfortunately for him, Shia LaBeouf, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen and Ray Winstone just aren’t up to the task.
7. Amistad (1997)
Often forgotten from Steven Spielberg’s filmography, and for a good reason, Amistad is undoubtedly one of the director’s worst movies. Telling the story of Mende captives revolting aboard a Spanish-owned ship in 1839, the film turns into a political drama where courts in the US must decide whether the Mende are slaves or legally free. The story is a good one, but David Franzoni’s script isn’t up to the task.
Though it features a number of outstanding performances from Morgan Freeman, Djimon Hounsou, Matthew McConaughey and Anthony Hopkins, Amistad is an utterly forgettable watch that fails to do justice to its incredible true story.
6. Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)
There’s a reason you’ve never heard of the movie version of the classic sci-fi series Twilight Zone, with the peculiar movie adaptation being helmed not only by Spielberg but Joe Dante, John Landis and George Miller too. Helming the segment Kick the Can, starring Scatman Crothers, Bill Quinn and Selma Diamond, Spielberg couldn’t muster enough to elevate this limp anthology film.
For classic Twilight Zone, take a return back to the series of the 1960s and leave this uninspiring movie to cinematic obscurity, gathering dust in the corner of Spielberg’s filmography.
5. The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
Hergé created cartoon dynamite with the release of the first Tintin strip on January 10th, 1929, but 82 years later, Spielberg failed to recreate the same creativity and joy with The Adventures of Tintin. Created with a strange mix of animation and live-action filmmaking, Tintin would have served better as a straight-up feature-length cartoon, where the vibrant creativity and colour of the original stories could’ve been properly expressed.
Yet, Spielberg’s film was instead an ugly animation that has already dated a decade after its release. Choosing to combine several Tintin tales rather than stick to the marvellous storytelling of just one book, the 2011 feature film was a massive misfire.
4. Always (1989)
A predecessor to the director’s 21st-century fondness for remakes, Always is based on the classic 1943 romantic film A Guy Named Joe, directed by Victor Fleming and written by Dalton Trumbo. Always tells the same story as the original film, following the spirit of a recently deceased pilot who mentors a young man who takes his place but changes the wartime setting to a commentary on the environment.
Displaying the worst of Spielberg’s soppy sentimentality, Always is a supernatural love story that plays perfectly to the cliché rulebook, refusing to divert from convention.
3. The BFG (2016)
It’s curious why Steven Spielberg even agreed to remake The BFG for Disney whilst the company was in the midst of updating almost each and every classic movie they had. The original 1989 movie was an impressive adaptation of the relatively thin Roald Dahl novel, and Spielberg’s adaptation added nothing to the conversation, merely adding a large number of bells, whistles and pointless visual noise.
The film featured a decent cast that included Mark Rylance, Bill Hader, Rebecca Hall and Ruby Barnhill, but the story was merely a dull retreading of the original.
2. Ready Player One (2018)
Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One, which thrills in the joys of contemporary pop culture, is a fun enough read for any youngster, but any studio should have realised that the bombastic tale is unadaptable. Spielberg gives it a good crack, but it’s difficult to make sense of a story that was only written in the first place to name-drop as many classic movies, TV shows, comic books and iconic characters as possible.
Little works here, with cast members Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke and Ben Mendelsohn working with a staggeringly thin screenplay and Spielberg rooted firmly in cruise control with little interest in making anything reasonably innovative.
1. 1941 (1979)
Steven Spielberg has managed to master the action movie, war epic, and coming-of-age tale, but one genre he’s never been able to tackle is comedy. This became abundantly clear in 1979 with the release of the screwball comedy 1941, starring John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and Ned Beatty, a tale of a group of Californians who prepare for a Japanese invasion in the days after Pearl Harbor.
After success with Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg thought he could do no wrong in cinema, but 1941 is almost unwatchable being a largely unfunny and incredibly uncomfortable film that fails to stand the test of time. What’s worse, the comedy is two hours long, heavily outstaying its welcome.
