It’s hard for me to find a movie objectionable. I enjoyed the new Spider-Man movie. The RoboCop reboot was entertaining. I’m even a strong advocate for the entire Star Wars prequel trilogy.

In fact, Curiata.com has gone to bat for many unpopular movies that have been given a bad rap due to high expectations, nostalgia, or simple unfairness. We’ve defended movies as widely panned as X3: The Last Stand and the Transformers trilogy.

But there is one company that places its logo on every movie I have had an issue with for the last few years. That company is Legendary Pictures.

Legendary Pictures has been around since 2000, and, for most of that time, the company has been in partnership with Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers has made plenty of mistakes on its own, but the company’s partnership with Legendary has truly resulted in nothing but wasted opportunities.

Outside of the movies directed by Christopher Nolan (the Dark Knight trilogy of 2005-2012 and Inception), the list of movies released by Legendary reads like a who’s who of terribly underwhelming attempts at cinema. Included on this list are Sucker Punch, Watchmen, Man of Steel, Pacific Rim, and the new Godzilla. And only three of them can be blamed on Zack Snyder.

Essentially, Legendary Pictures is where effects-driven movies go to receive an awful script. Want to make a movie about a daydreaming sex slave and her anime adventures? Sure, Mr. Snyder, have all the money you need. Just make sure you make it look fake and cartoony while talking about the tragedy of lobotomies. The giant robots with claymores will really drive home the point that sex slavery is terrible.

And, obviously, it’s a smart idea to give Snyder free reign with his movies. 300 was great, after all. Of course, I was 15 when I first saw it, but I’m sure there was nothing about being a teenager that made me think an army of men that made Hulk Hogan look tiny slaying monstrous Persians was cool.

Snyder certainly didn’t ruin The Watchmen by completely missing Alan Moore’s point. Sure, Moore was trying to deconstruct the superhero genre by showing how violent the whole thing would look if it were real, while Snyder made a movie with totally badass slow-motion fight scenes and graphic filters that made it look super-cool — but at least the movie was a word-for-word adaptation of the graphic novel.

And I’m glad Warner Brothers and Legendary Pictures were able to learn from the overwhelming fan outrage over the treatment of Watchmen and decided to never use Snyder again. Oh, wait. They handed him the reigns to Superman and all of its sequels, including a Justice League movie.

Nevermind the fact that Man of Steel was awful and, again, completely missed the point. Superman, though he has been a more conflicted character since the 1986 reboot, still does not kill. It is pretty much the only compelling thing about an alien with god-like powers that allow him to do nearly anything he wants. Snyder and his partner in nerd-crime, David S. Goyer, decided it would be better to have Kal-El kill his first opponent ever, as long as he felt really bad about it for seven seconds. Nevermind the thousands, likely millions, of people that he killed when indiscriminately punching General Zod through skyscrapers. I’m sure glad Superman doesn’t value human life or anything.

But Snyder isn’t the only problem with these movies. After all, he had nothing to do with Pacific Rim or the new Godzilla movie. Legendary did, though. You can tell, because all Legendary movies look the same. If a movie has a vague blue-ish or sepia tone, the CGI looks unrealistic, and the plot makes no sense at all — or is completely cliche — it’s a Legendary movie.

Pacific Rim had so much potential to be completely awesome. I am the type of guy who lists Transformers 3 among my favorite movies of all-time, right there with Good Will Hunting. So a movie about giant robots fighting in an insane special-effects spectacle is right up my alley. Pacific Rim was terrible though. The robots looked like cartoons. The kaiju lacked detail. The science made no practical sense. And why did it take two hours of screen time for the heroes to realize their robot could wield a sword that just happened to be able to cut through the skin of the kaiju? You would think the guy from Sons of Anarchy would be a better defender of Earth than that.

The monsters of Pacific Rim looked so fake that I was unsure whether I was watching a new movie or an early cut of Jurassic Park before Spielberg found out what actual dinosaurs looked like. And, of course, it rained the whole time. Just like it does in every Legendary Pictures movie — as if the sheen of the rain will hide the fact that the company put no time into detailing their monsters.

But Legendary has made some progress. The new Godzilla doesn’t look as fake as the kaiju of Pacific Rim. They clearly put time into detailing his scales and grotesque appearance. Too bad they didn’t put the same effort into the enemy M.U.T.O. monsters Godzilla fought. Not that it matters in the end. Even if they all looked like masterpieces out of the Avatar movie, the plot was still terribly cliched and boring.

If you’ve seen one movie about a white military guy fighting some unheard of, existential threat, you’ve seen them all. At least the Transformers movies had Shia LaBeouf, annoying as he is, to balance out all of the one-dimensional military characters. Godzilla does not.

Early on, you’re left with the impression that the human story of Godzilla is going to be about the conflict between the military character and his father, played by Bryan Cranston. Cranston steals the show, making the human element of the movie relatable and tragic. That lasts about 20 minutes. The rest of the movie is about the future Quicksilver trying to stop the monsters so that he can return to his wife, the future Scarlet Witch, and their obligatory military child. Of course, his wife is also a nurse so that she can be vaguely heroic during the giant fight scenes so as to avoid charges of sexism.

And all of this would be fine if we were at least getting an epic monster battle in San Francisco, but we hardly got that. The movie kept cutting away whenever the fight started getting good. What we got instead were a few scenes of Godzilla growling at us. Wow. It makes me long for the days when Ferris Bueller tried to stop the monster from laying eggs in Madison Square Garden. It would certainly be better than watching Kick-Ass fail as much as he did in the actual Kick-Ass movie.

Legendary Pictures, I want to know what’s up. Watchmen, Man of Steel, Pacific Rim, and Godzilla had unlimited potential to be great movies. And I am certainly easy to please. So what went wrong? Why is it that your movies are all about popcorn and explosions when Marvel and Lucasfilm have been able to release much more compelling action-adventure flicks? Do you still subscribe to the idea that big budget movies can’t be smart?

I resent that idea. And I resent your company for your failure to live up to your potential.

I will give Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice a chance to change my mind, but if you somehow manage to make Joel Schumacher’s movies look good by comparison, I promise I will do everything I can to make sure no one ever sees another Legendary movie.

There is a tendency among film critics to scoff at blockbusters, action flicks, and movies with copious amounts of CGI. They complain at the direction Hollywood has been taking, which sees more and more action-heavy movies each year. But their complaints are misplaced, and at times, seem a bit snobbish to movie fans like me, who love Oscar winners and blockbusters with equal passion.

Movies such as Lincoln, Schindler’s List, and Good Will Hunting tell tremendous stories about history or the human condition and allow us to look inward. But movies heavy with special effects and action aren’t necessarily bad movies. Often, they allow us to look outward, challenging our ideas of right and wrong in new and powerful ways, while pushing us to think of where we could be and where we could go. Others just offer us unique stories which look incredible in IMAX 3D.

There are movies, however, which deserve their criticism. They are films that ignore basic storytelling, choosing instead to focus only on action, violence, and explosions.

The first Transformers trilogy offers a good example of both types of big-budget blockbusters. Transformers has long been used by film critics as the example of everything wrong with Hollywood today, but I am inclined to disagree in two out of three cases. Transformers 1 and Transformers 3 both tell good stories with heart and humor, while Transformers 2 falls into the same trap as some of the less popular action-heavy movies.

So what is it that Transformers 1 and 3 got right? It is important to remember that a movie should be judged for what it is and not what it isn’t. The Transformers movies were never intended to earn an Academy Award for Best Picture. They weren’t made to question the human condition, and they weren’t made to raise awareness of a disease or illness. The Transformers movies were meant to bring children of the ’80s and ’90s back to their childhoods in ways that would still appeal to their adult sensibilities. They were made to be fun and to push the boundaries of what computer animation could do. In these ways, the Transformers movies were very successful.

Fans of the 1980s cartoon show were thrilled when the first movie began and the voice of the original Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen, could be heard again. They were fascinated by a movie that honored their childhood fantasy without talking down to them. And people new to the franchise got to enjoy watching high-octane battles and explosions in a simple good versus evil story. The movie was escapism at its best.

But there are plenty of escapist movies out there that fail the test of a good movie, including Transformers 2. So why is it that I feel the first and third succeeded where the second failed? Put simply, there is a fair way to measure blockbuster films within the range of what can be expected. Look at the good blockbuster movies: Star Wars, The Avengers, The Dark Knight, The Winter Soldier. What stands out about these movies as opposed to the bad blockbuster films?

The late Roger Ebert put it this way: “The very best films in this genre, like Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, had compelling characters, depended on strong human performances, told great stories, and skillfully integrated the live-action and the CGI.”

Man of Steel, Godzilla, and Transformers 2 lack what all movies need: heart. The characters are cliched, with only minimal development. Transformers 1 and 3 have heart. Yes, Shia LeBeouf is annoying. Yes, Megan Fox is not the best actor. Yes, the explosions and battles are ridiculous. And yes, Michael Bay is probably a misogynist. But these movies took time to get to the action-heavy payoffs and built up the relationships and personalities of the characters first.

The slow buildup to the big action scene is a great idea, but it requires characters who can carry the story while we wait. Our concern for these characters then increases our interest in the big payoff, because we care about their safety. In poor blockbusters, like Man of Steel and Godzilla, we are given one-dimensional characters while waiting two hours for the big payoff in which an entire city is leveled with little concern for the humans who died.

Transformers 2 lacks the discipline of its predecessor and falls into another common trap of the blockbuster. Revenge of the Fallen cost an exorbitant amount of money and spent all of it on explosions and destruction, without any sense of pacing or character development. It gives away too much action and keeps the big scenes from feeling special. It also fails to live up to the expectations of a good movie in a plethora of other ways.

The first movie was about first contact with heroic and not-so-heroic alien races who were bringing their war to Earth, but it was also about a boy and his car — and a boy trying to score with a girl who was way out of his league. We can relate to Sam Witwicky, who is seen as a slacker in school and a loser to most people. He is the everyman who rises to the occasion and saves the Earth.

But what is the plot of Transformers 2? Robots are killing each other and Sam is afraid to tell his smoking-hot girlfriend that he loves her. Sure, he’s starting college, but his personal difficulties are hardly even addressed in the movie.

The movie instead plods along with poorly designed robots continually propositioning Fox, while we have to see robot testicles and, at times, pretty blatant racism. It’s Bay at his worst, relying far too heavily on the robots and explosions while lacking the heart that makes the other films so fun.

Transformers 1 and 3 do things right by starting in reality and slowly building to the absurd. They start by showing the problems of the young Sam, whose world is about to be shaken. He faces the same difficulties that most young men face — problems in school, trying to impress a pretty girl, troubles finding a job, and more. It just so happens that his new car turns out to be a sentient alien robot.

And that’s what the movies do so well: they take this absurd concept that was created specifically to sell toys and make it at least somewhat believable, not to mention fun to watch, just like when we were children who found the cartoons so fascinating. The movies will never be in contention for any acting awards, but they are fun, decent movies for the audience that loves to see giant robot fights.

Going forward, before Hollywood invests millions of dollars into a movie, it should use the Transformers films as a litmus test. Build to the big moment, like Godzilla did, but make the human characters compelling so that we can enjoy the ride, like Godzilla was unable to do. Don’t sacrifice story for spectacle, like Transformers 2, but make sure the spectacle holds even more power, because we care about the characters, like in Transformers 3. Explosions and good CGI may guarantee you a triple, but why settle for that when you can hit a homerun?