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Now, this is the first time, since the Good movie / bad movie boards were created, that I regret having to place a movie in the Bad movie board.
"Slipstream", a 1989 sci-fi movie starring Mark Hamill, Bill Paxton and Bob Peck, is one of those movies that could have been great but nobody knows exactly why ended up being ho-hum at best. It was produced by Gary Kurtz, one of the minds behind "Star Wars", and you can tell by Hamill's work that he was putting a lot of faith in his role to overcome the Luke Skywalker typecasting.
It also features an intriguing post-apocalyptic world in which everybody travels by plane, for fear of extreme winds they call "the slipstream", and live inside caves, forming isolated clans.
And it even has a decent direction by "Tron" helmer Steven Lisberger, who approaches the material with the right touch of naivety to make it enjoyable and who also seems to have a fascination for all things airborne not that different from that of Hayao Miyazaki.
Then, why is it that bad? Because of many things. Like that the film seems to have been shot on zero budget (some of the FX work with models has to be seen to be believed), or that the bombastic score by Elmer Bernstein tries too hard to exploit an epic quality that's just not there.
Or how incredibly awful the dialogue is, so bad that it actually manages to undermine a quite decent turn by Bob Peck as an android. Or the editing, which is so jawdroppingly awful that it's hard to believe it was done by professionals. There's a moment, just after the main characters have met, when they try to alternate dialog with aerial vistas so clumsily you wouldn't believe it, and another when a shootout cuts abruptly to its aftermath. Or an ending that comes out of nowhere, and where all characters behave so differently than they did before that you could think the previous fade to black hid their alien abduction and subsequent brainwash.
Now you start getting it, right? And considering how the movie seems to have ruined both the careers of Hamill, who survives doing voice work for animated TV series, and Lisberger, who has not directed another movie in 20 years... That's the type of thing that should make fans go postal.
You must have seen a different movie than I did. Not that there were not problems with this, mainly in the pacing and editing, but I don't recall all of the problems you mentioned.
Perhaps I need to watch this again.