Kingdom of Heaven—bad script, miscast lead, multiple battle scenes ripped straight from LOTR, virtually no characterization or character development, stupid both-sidesism politics, and also generally complete ahistorical nonsense.
Yet there’s just something about it. The cinematography, design, costumes, supporting actors, and score are all great. Even though the film is basically fantasy, it at least attempts to portray a world that Hollywood rarely approaches. (Agora, kind of a similar movie, is actually probably much better.) Also the Christians are mostly bad or stupid, nearly all of them die violent pointless deaths, it could maybe be argued that the film is anti-colonial, and Saladin wins.
Elysium—white savior film imagines that one dude (with a handful of helpers) can defeat pretty much all space liberals and space fascists. It’s completely absurd. The characters are also one-dimensional. But other than that, it’s a film about “rich people bad” which is otherwise pretty well done and entertaining.
Equilibrium is so fun, and I wrote a big long essay about it in media class in high school about how it could equally be claimed by communists & anti-communists for their purposes and in that sense therefore pays homage to texts like 1984 that it's inspired by.
spoiler
the long and short being that Prozium can be an analogue for the either the unnatural imposition of fascist values on society in order to shape it, or the alienation and oppression generated by capitalist production relations; conversely it could be seen as the denial and abolition of private property (which liberals tend to consider a 'right') or the imposition of socialist values by 'big government' ostensibly in the name of a greater good but at an unworthy cost.
There's also the whole aesthetic of the thing, where it's clear they modelled the power structure, uniforms, architecture, methods etc. after the Nazis, and the overall premise is that rebellion, resistance, and doing terror and sabotage against an unjust hierarchy or social order is good, actually, but it could still be intepreted both ways depending on the agenda you're trying to push.
It kinda whooshed my teacher so I ended up folding it into a wider paper on the depiction and prevalence of dystopia in post-apoc. movies, based on the material conditions of the societies that produce these texts, which ended up predicting the whole YA dystopia trend with films like Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Divergent etc. If I hadn't got full marks I probably would have thrown hands - you can't do historical materialist analysis of society and be wrong