Asklemmy

Mortal Kombat (2021) opened with a great "feudal China with elemental magic" clan story that could have been an amazing movie, but then they jumped forward in time and everything after that was a let down.

In Time (2011). Time is currency in the dystopia in the film - paying for something decreases your lifespan, earning wages increases it.

The movie sets up a really cool class structure, wherein there are rich people born with/inheriting hundreds of thousands of years of life, and poor people barely managing to scrape enough hours to stay alive until they can earn more the next day. There are segmented areas of the city that cost years to get into.

Overall incredible premise, but the story wasn't exceptional beyond a couple of the cool mechanics you might expect based on said premise.

Hot take, “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”. The radio play, books and 80s bbc show were not represented very well at all. They missed well over 75% of the jokes, Mos Def and Zooey Deschanel added nothing to it, and they added plots and scenes, I think just to get more “blockbuster actors” in, that ruin the original story of the radio play. Sam Rockwell, Alan Rickman/Warwick Davis and Bill Nightly were the highlights. One of the few movies I wish they would remake.

The movie In Time (2011). The premise was interesting but I can't even remember the plot because it was so meh.

I also think Idiocracy could have been better. It had good moments, and that's what most people remember, but the overall cohesiveness falls flat. Great moments, iconic scenes, but could have been a better film.

Jupiter Ascending

They seed the galaxy and harvest whole planets to create an immortality serum. Fantastic world concept ... but a subpar story to make a movie about within that world.

Not a film, but a TV series? It's called Jericho, and the synopsis in the Wikipedia reads:

Jericho is an American post-apocalyptic action drama television series, which centers on the residents of the fictional city of Jericho, Kansas, in the aftermath of a nuclear attack on 23 major cities in the contiguous United States.

But yeah, the execution is mediocre at best. Both the action and the drama are unbearably flimsy and cliche, even the argument flops as metal.

Tusk

Not a movie, but a TV show. Revolution.

A sci-fi post-apocalypse show where the premise is that all of a sudden all technology (specifically anything that uses electricity) just stops working and nobody knows why. The show takes place 15 years into the apocalypse. The US has Balkanized into various regional states (although you don't learn this until later). Some regions have devolved into chaos while others have basically reverted to a steam-punk type of society. Since all modern ships use electricity, they've begun to revive large ships from the age of sail. The remnants of the US military at Guantanamo Bay eventually return to the mainland and try to reestablish a much more explicitly authoritarian control over the US. You eventually learn that what caused the global blackout was the creation of a self-replication nanotech which rapidly spread across the planet and shut off all electricity.

Great premise, but it got too much into the soap-opera CW-style of writing and didn't last more than 2 seasons.

Basically every Terminator movie after T2. They have some great "what if" premises that could add so much depth to the world, but then struggle to see the vision through is a satisfying way.

T3: Let's actually show Judement Day

T4: Let's show the turning point in the war against the machines (edit: and why people follow John Connor as leader of the resistance)

T5: Exists

T6: What if all this time travel actually branched the timeline? What would it look like if one of Skynet's terminators succeeded?

Mickey 17 is the latest one for me.

I feel like the last 30 years of Star Wars movies could qualify here

The punisher 2004. It's fun.

Battlefield Earth. It's a get drunk and veg kinda movie for me. It fucking sucks. But I like it.

Eragon.

There is a reason that most fans pretend the film never happened

Interstellar is like Neo-Posadism minus Marxism. The premise was awesome. Climate apocalypse and space travel. But the movie doesn't have humanity solve either of those problems. Instead it pops it's collar and says *don't worry bro, ~~the market~~ ~~Marxist space aliens~~ ~~some scientists~~ ~~a famous shirtless hot actor guy~~ fuck you who cares the green guy behind a curtain made a worm hole or something".