How Marvel took over cinema and TV
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I do however wish that other things were being produced. Heavy Sequel'ization of movies just leaves me bored.
The same can be said of the Star Trek franchises, and quite frankly anything more then "2" has grown tiring.
Game of Thrones* has shown hollywood that there is an appetite for epic storytelling, and that people are willing to sit through 7 season of shows to be entertained by an engaging story. (In my heart Babylon5 pioneered grand-story telling.)
There are thousands of great books that would do well adapted to TV/Movies, I'd like to see some of these instead of another superhero flick.
If anything the abuse of CGI leads to boring fighting scenes where you know everything is 100% fake. I'd rather they use much, much less of it.
If I had to pick a "uses superpowers action scene" from any of these movies over the years, it's probably still Magneto escaping the plastic prison. I like that scene because it shows the character isn't just powerful in a brute force way, but can do amazing things given even the slightest opportunity. Obviously they had an incredible actor in Ian MacKellen to sell it, but they also didn't need to turn him into some cg puppet to make a big impact scene. I feel like that more creative and subtle conception is missing from most of the more recent movies.
Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade said he liked the first Dr. Strange film because the ending was one in which things weren't resolved where one character punches another in face until submission/death. Dr. Strange negotiates.
It may be not superhuman by Marvel standards, but certainly are by real life standards. At the same time in superhero flicks they are often unable to do things they should be able to do, because they did something like it before. Also most humans, that do not posses super strength in those movies are fighting almost like equals with bunch of baddies.
Funny thing about Ethan Hunt from M:i is that his biggest super power is luck, like Rincewind from Discworld.
The director has intentionally decided to not use CGI for anything which can be done with real vehicles and real actors.
And unlike the Marvel superhero snore-fest, it actually looks and feels real, because it is real. And your mind can tell. This makes you actually care.
CGI is instead just used for matte painting, to touch up the scenes or scenery, rather than compose core of the shot. And the result looks brilliant.
So yeah. Less CGI please and more restraint.
Should take away the graphics cards from the film crew.
Before CGI, it was always the "climactic fight in the darkened warehouse" finale. It would go on and on, the machinery would get turned on at some point, the bad guy would have to be killed several times, etc. Oh, for a movie where people don't keep fighting after massive blows to their head, or are little affected by a shot in the shoulder, etc.
1. I like movies with witty dialog
2. I like movies with characters that are ambiguously good and bad, not good vs bad
3. I don't like movies that push an agenda, message, morals or propaganda
4. I don't want to sit through a movie about someone dying of some horrible disease
Same with video games, in Fallout New Vegas you march into the bad guys (they are objectively bad people regardless) camp expecting some boss fight but if you listen he will make a reasoned and historically contextualised argument against democracy and liberalism.
Compare and contrast with a call of duty game where I run around in an "apolitical" simulation (read: simulacra) of war shooting anything that moves.
Hell, the Putty Patrollers had more character than these guys.
On a similar note, I recently decided to watch the Hobbit trilogy after rewatching LOTR for the 20th anniversary. Whereas everything had weight and tension in the original (up to a point), in the Hobbit everything is cranked up to 11 and it suffers from the exact same thing.
Every scene becomes a zergling rush vs 5 units with cheat mode turn on. There's an actual line in the last movie along the lines of "You go, there's only a 100 goblins, we can easily take them."
As an example, I remember how good the original Bourne Identity was!
Um....
Edit: Just to elaborate, I'll note that when the first JJ film came out a lot of people's take was "thank God it's not an awful VFX fest like the prequels", despite it actually being vastly more VFX heavy. It's funny seeing this repeated.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy68UCbcP3o&t=460s
Edit: To be clear this aspect is really about the way the elements are combined, rather than the way they're generated. The way they're generated is with vast amounts of CGI.
ILM video:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/the-mandalorian-was-s...
This is kind of my main beef with the Marvel stuff I've seen - they all end with these boring flying, shooting, punching VFX scenes, even if they started more interestingly (eg. WandaVision). But for me that's a writing choice, if they'd written something better we wouldn't have to sit through it, and if it'd been shot without VFX it'd still be boring. Complaining about the "CGI" is complaining about the wrong thing.
Nobody complained about the VFX in The Wolf of Wall Street. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pocfRVAH9yU
The number of "realistic fight scenes" are incredibly slim. Chinese martial arts are mostly Wuxia: a branch of martial arts that was developed for stage performance (flips, spins, etc. etc.) that has very little practical relevance.
"Kung Fu" films (ie: Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan) reduce the number of filps... but even then, Jackie Chan's use of hilarious stage props is anything but realistic.
I mean: just imagine "Die Hard", no one can sustain that many injuries realistically and keep going. Its fake action, yes with practical effects / non-CGI (blood packs and stunts), but its still fantasy. And "Princess Bride" duel is fully ridiculous: with more flips and gymnastics than actual fighting (arguably the point: it was a comedy film making fun of tropes).
Anyone who has actually been in a fighting-sport (themselves mostly "fake", as duels took place centuries ago), will instantly recognize the bad form most of these older fight scenes had. Enemies charge the protagonist one at a time (yes: even in "practical" Kung Fu movies with few special effects)
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"Fake" is fine. But there's a lack of progression or understanding going on in a lot of the CGI-fight scenes. They're willing to spend tons of money on big explosions or special effects, but they don't always hit home with me.
The famous "Jackie Chan Ladder Fight" is a good example of a ridiculous fight scene, barely plausible. But its highly imaginative and has a great progression and rhythm. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrRFzwPE0d4). I'm not here because I want to watch a realistic 4-person Bo-staff fight vs a single dude with a ladder (which would almost certainly result in the ladder-user in getting beaten up). I'm here to watch crazy stunts and imaginative fights.
The use of music / rhythm (notice how the fight is on beat to the soundtrack) increases the entertainment value. These little things should be easier in CGI, but somehow aren't being done.
There's fake made with human actors, and there's "f--k it, just cut and paste 1000 zombies or robots in the next scene and make the heroes cut through them like butter" fake.
We've broken new ground.
Heck, I enjoy watching Yu-gi-oh with my nieces. It turns out that full fantasy fights with completely different sets of rules is certainly a genre. Sure, its a cartoon, but the entire point is that the fights progress by a completely different set of rules on purpose.
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> There's fake made with human actors, and there's "f--k it, just cut and paste 1000 zombies or robots in the next scene and make the heroes cut through them like butter" fake.
You mean like Star Wars stormtroopers? In something like 3 movies, they only ever land ~2 or 3-shots off on the main characters (R2D2 and Leia in the 3rd film IIRC).
I think about some older movies I've enjoyed: Star Trek, Flash Gordon, etc. etc. Plenty of "1000-to-1 odds" going on and yet I still enjoyed the film. Or Indiana Jones. The 1000-to-1 odds thing is basically an ancient trope: found in old epics / stories, and even movies from decades ago.
I feel like the script is either intentionally dumbed down or that the script receives a disproportionately small part of the overall budget.
They are not badly written, then are well written, but in tradition that is fundamentally stiff and don't allow complication.
Sure this will end up turning off a bunch of people who have tastes that demand something more authentic, but you don't care about that because most peoples tastes are clustered around the mean.
Look at pop music for comparison. Or imagine the Apple of the 00s announcing Memoji as a feature.
In my opinion, it is essentially a perfect movie. Fantastic music. Gorgeous sets. Great fight scenes. Good story. Interesting characters. Proper science fiction.
Most importantly, it stayed true to the original, while still having a novel story, that nonetheless touched on the theme of the original without being overly repetitive like the latest Disney-made Star Wars movies.
I thought the movie was basically genious, and I will now watch anything Dennis Villeneuve directs.
But if you listen to reviews by typical moviegoers, they panned the movie. "Too slow", "Boring", etc...
Interstellar similarly polarised viewers.
This is why most movies are made the way they are: to avoid negative reviews by the mass market viewers and hence to maximise profits.
Or to put it another way: Their only metric is ticket sales, not the level of your enjoyment. They don't get a cent more if the movie touches your soul.
Subtlety and nuance are not the point. Big Dumb Movies are a theme park ride, and deliberately designed that way.
Nolan tends to do that though, wrapping science words around some magic thing that is needed to drive the plot.
You have to account for actors maybe not being available, scenes getting cut, action scenes being shot early for various reasons which means you have to retrofit them into the story you're writing, some actors being so expensive that any retake you shoot with them has to be justified, etc.
In a book you can afford to write a plot where every little detail matters. In a big budget movie, you need to keep to the broad strokes, because course-correction is expensive.
Hollywood can do better when it wants to. But visual SF is a nostalgic cliche-saturated form now, and original ideas are High Risk and unlikely to get the green light unless they're being pushed hard by a big name director. And sometimes not even then.
Unfortunately I am not kidding. So as long as you have a "passable" story you win.
Prior this, Transformers had a shot but it was overblown and used for extreme wow (apt for a monster-blockbuster movie).
Compare this to Star Wars prequels, which were a massive leap in tech (full blown CGI everything, planets, nature, armies) but was clearly still just a tad too cartoonish.
The CGI "style" seems to rely on battering the viewer into submission by packing as much detail and movement into every frame. But it's exhausting to watch and even if everything is perfectly photorealistic it's still kind of jarring.
If what I'm seeing on the screen cannot exist physically then it doesn't matter how detailed it is - my brain responds with "That's just CGI" and it loses credibility.
My partner works on opera productions and it's been really interesting watching high quality theatrical effects create believable settings on a stage.
Physical objects have a weight and credibility that I suspect 2D CGI can never match. With skilled designers those physical objects can be made to do impossible things, but somehow they're still believable - which actually makes the experience more convincing and magical when they do something extraordinary or uncanny.
There's also an element of sketching and leaving elements to the imagination of the audience. A lot of staged work implies something, and it turns out this makes the experience more engaging. CGI tries to make everything as explicit and busy and huge and detailed and overwhelming as possible, which actually has a distancing effect.
We'll have immersive VR movies soon and we'll see if they work any better than 2D.
Also practical effects often have something else. Probably the fact that they live on atomic scale of complexity. Colors have more depth and diversity, particles too. Also it impacts actors around them a bit more than green screen studios which may influence the final result too.
A slight anecdote, the first time I lit an LED (noob electronics kit) it felt so utterly magical to me. I was 30, did advanced studies, interacted with LEDs all my life, but "creating" light was so soul sucking. Same goes for other experiences. The brain sense when something lies on the plane of "it affect your life, body" rather than "it's only advanced sensory input fooling you". Your gut gets involved I guess.
And I agree that modern tools push movie maker to explain too much, logify too much, show too much. A few 80s reboots were mostly trying to add a logical layer onto what was self sufficient already.
Given current technology it’s more a problem of how VFX is being used than anything.
Here's a list of films produced in the US in 2020. I didn't count, but it looks to me like not much of it is superhero-based. And this is just the US, and ignores a lot of low budget / less notable films.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2020
I get a bit frustrated by people complaining everything's a superhero movie or a sequel, when there are so many options they're ignoring.
Edit: If you only watch heavily advertised films, you're basically limiting yourself to films with mass, cross-continental appeal, which is inevitably going to be heavy on culturally-neutral stuff like big CGI fight scenes.
To provide a fuller comparison, you’d need to also incorporate: share of viewing (per title), average box office returns (per studio eg Marvel/Disney), number of articles in mainstream media, etc.
For example, it could be that 10% of the films on that list are produced but never released (studio dumps, legal issues between producers and creatives, etc).
Just look at the USA box office impact of Black Widow, and Shang-Chi. Only two films but a huge proportion of post-covid box office revenue.
If Disney vanished from the world today, the dollars flowing to them wouldn't suddenly filter out to a bunch of niche and avant-garde media. There's some overlap, but people in that overlap are already into both things and funding them. The djent fans who also love a good radio-friendly bop are already buying djent albums on Bandcamp and listening to the radio-friendly bop on Spotify.
Edit: Also the original complaint was about a supposed lack of non-superhero film production.
If you haven't already, check out The Expanse.
The book series is set to be finished with the final (9th) book being released this fall. The final (6th) season of the television series wrapped filming this past spring. (The discrepancy is because of a large time jump between the second and third 'sub-trilogies' in the novels.)
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I wish there was less "plastic" looking CGI though...
I really want to believe this, but I’m afraid Hollywood understood GoT’s success as “people want to see dragons”. Even early TV reviews were focusing on the dragons part, and recommending other shows that had dragons (or Middle Ages fights).
A lot of Hollywood and TV reviewers apparently failed to appreciate that people may just have really like the epic story of a world, rather than a typical story of a couple of main characters. This is also apparent from the evolution the show went through, diverging into a more mainstream story focusing on main characters rather than the story/world itself.
Each episode may not be that great, but the series as a whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.
And like any serialized TV series, you can't really skip episodes without missing key parts of the story, so once you commit to the show you're on the bandwagon.
And given the success of the MCU, it's carved itself a powerful place in popular culture that won't disappear for a long time.
Also, even the Marvel TV shows can be surprisingly high quality (I absolutely loved Loki and Wandavision, but hated Falcon and the Winter Soldier)
There’s a flip side to that, though: once someone is off it’s a lot less likely they’ll jump back on (or even jump on in the first place)
I count myself in that group. I’ve watched Marvel movies here and there (either Thor Ragnarok or Doctor Strange was the most recent) but at this point I’m turned off from watching more because I know there are numerous plot points I won’t get. And I don’t want to commit a week of my life to catching up.
Now don’t get me wrong, clearly Marvel doesn’t need people like me to be an enormous success. But I think it’s a bit of a high wire act that other pretenders to the throne (DC etc) run the risk of failing at.
I'm too old to care about movies much, but that's an interesting point.
I wonder to what extent high-dollar bespoke TV series are hurting the movie business. Streaming and theatres at home were bound to change some habits, but would people prefer to watch a series now rather than a single work?
Personally, I think it's a shame how much movies (a lot them at least) and video games appear to have merged in terms of pacing, volume, general aesthetic, but you can't expect things to always stay the same.
Modern flat panels are so large/cheap that they're a no-brainer in place of most modern theatres. OTOH, the peripheral vision-spanning screens that used to exist were really a spectacle. I remember seeing 'Waterloo' (Rod Steiger) when it came out and that was really something on a giant screen.
This article from HBR does, and I think is particularly insightful: https://hbr.org/2019/07/marvels-blockbuster-machine
They have a podcast epsidoe released around the same time that covers the same content, if you prefer listening.
People like to criticize marvel (mostly closed-minded people who assume all the movies are the same and choose not to watch them because they 'lower the quality of film' somehow by existing) but there's a lot to learn from them.
There is a lot of fantastically original content coming out of marvel. I thought WandaVision was a particularly fun twist on the history of television.
Kevin Feige prevented Marvel movies from getting stale by completely switching the genre every single movie: eg, Winter Soldier (political thriller), Ant-Man (heist movie), Spider-Man Homecoming (high-school drama movie), Thor Ragnarok (Australia/New Zealand comedy), Shang-Chi (mythical Chinese martial arts movie).
Feige has said if a character is ever successful enough to have a third movie, they will always take a very different approach from the prior two movies. Thor Ragnarok is the best example of this: a soft reboot of the personality of a previously dull Shakespearean character into a fan favorite. The success of that soft reboot was enough to give that C-level character his fourth solo movie -- something Marvel has not done before.
None of Marvel's competitors have any producer of Kevin Feige's caliber. Not Warner Bros (DC comics), not Sony (Spiderman-villains universe) and not even Disney's LucasFilm (Star Wars).
Kevin Feige is 48 years old and it's not clear whether he'll retire after the X-Men and Fantastic Four are integrated in the MCU.
His magic touch and keen understanding of the characters have been a key part of the Marvel Studio's success, and it's not at all clear whether it will survive when he leaves.
Marvel Studios could become like LucasFilm after George Lucas sold it. It's a shell of its former self that can barely produce anything passable: Mandalorian and Rogue One just make the cut as being acceptable Star Wars, but very little else.
And the main guy behind it? Jon Favreau, the man who effectively invented the MCU formula (fights and laughs) with the first Iron Man.
Feige is good, but I'd bet more on Favreau to deliver than on any producer.
(also, Thor a "C-level" character? He's had a dedicated monthly comic-book basically uninterrupted for more than 50 years, and features an entire cast of dedicated supporting characters and locations in Asgard... He's definitely an A-lister. IronMan, on the other hand, could absolutely be called a B-lister, since he spent large parts of his publication history effectively as little more than support for the Captain America / Avengers ecosystem, with very bad stories and artists. I would absolutely call "C-listers" Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, or the Guardians of the Galaxy - definitely not Thor.)
But there are so many lower-quality episodes in that series from less experienced directors with bad acting and weaker storylines. I believe things like bringing back Ahsoka Tano weakens the storyline of the Star Wars original trilogy as much as bringing back Palpatine in the sequel trilogy did. It reduces the impact of sacrifices that were made and raises questions that may never be answered.
I agree the new technique of using "virtual sets" with Unreal Engine rather than green screen [1] is great innovation that helps make way more immersive TV shows with less budget (the first time I saw reflections of CGI characters on Mando's metallic helmet I was awestruck).
I just hope Mandalorian and the other Star Wars series maintain a high quality that we've seen brief flashes of. I'm disappointed when the franchise doesn't live up to my high expectations. Many episodes of Mandalorian are not quite there for me. Some definitely are "perfect Star Wars" though.
> But there are so many lower-quality episodes in that series from less experienced directors with bad acting and weaker storylines.
I feel the same way with “pre-Disney Star Wars films” in place of “Mandalorian” and “Irvin Kershner” in place of “Jon Favreau”.
It was unbearable to watch from a story perspective so I stopped about 3/4 of the way through season 1. being "ok star wars" seems to be the very best it can aspire to.
It's just a pastiche of star wars with some mixed in memberberries.
But so much is wasted on bad character decisions, bad dialogue, bad acting and more. Just overall bad writing.
There's so much potential, but it doesn't live up to what I expect from Star Wars. And that's so disappointing.
I hope Disney/LucasFilm does better, because Star Wars continues to be a very important franchise to me and many others.
clone wars was more sophisticated than mandalorian, and its a cartoon.
I've given up on star wars - I don't bother to even check out new stuff. It's dead and disney is wearing its corpse.
That's pretty good for an animated kid's cartoon.
The character is dumb because the writers are bad.
I know there are weak episodes, some almost on purpose (like the village defense, a homage to samurai films from a simpler era), but I don't agree about The Mandalorian being bad overall because it just isn't. It delivers worldbuilding, ambience, and characters (ironically, the ones under helmets end up being more memorable than the others...); the soundtrack is insanely good, the production art alone is fantastic, and it's a miracle that it's a tv-series at all. My kids just love it in a way they've not loved any other SW material.
The only thing I would change is Gina Carano (bad actor, bad casting, and turns out she's a bad person too), but that's it.
You have to overwhelm them.
bad writing does not require suspension of disbelief to handle, that requires poor critical faculties. Luckily kids tend to have both.
Also, architectural flaws in a government project are more believable than revolving lists of characters being inexplicably stupid at just the right plot moments for their stupidity to have maximum effect, and then going back to competence once the twist of their stupidity has done its work, which most dramatic series rely on for their momentum.
I think there is a lot of revisionism around, about how "good" the original StarWars movies were. Yes they were fun, did worldbuilding very well and all that, but they weren't exactly particularly clever cinematic masterpieces. What followed them in many cases was much worse (the prequels are atrocious), but still, I don't see them as particularly better than stuff like The Mandalorian.
It's definitely the best thing to happen to Star Wars in a long time, but amazing? It isn't. It just goes to show how low Star Wars has fallen that boring drivel that is Rogue One and unassuming adventure for kids like Mandalorian are praised as the best thing since sliced cheese.
There are also more subjective criteria which can nonetheless employed like character development and character complexity in general, plot lines and plot wholes, number of literary and narrative devices employed etc.
Mandalorian is a simple linear narrative with an episodic structure with a rather thin plot, little to no character development, and the only "arc" serving as the single motivation for the plot to advance.
This especially evident in Season 2 Episode 7, where they tried to cram a series worth of a character's redemption arc and world building into a single episode.
This doesn't make Mandalorian bad. It's a very enjoyable well executed show with surprisingly few really weak points. This also doesn't make Mandalorian great, or amazing.
In 14 episodes Firefly had more character development, better dialog, working jokes and better acting than 16 episodes of Mandalorian.
As to boring drivel, that's my view of Rogue One: thin plot full of plot holes. The only narrative structure in the entire film is "15 minutes of static talking heads followed by rather uninspired and badly edited CGI action"
I mean, I started with my reply to a comment that literally said this: "Every adult I've introduced Mandalorian to loves it." :D
Of course everything is subjective. We can still say about something "something is enjoyable, even if something is simple and is mostly aimed at kids", or "despite apparent complexity and serious themes something is boring and unimaginative".
For example, basically all of Marvel is based on the formula of "simple but enjoyable". Ain't nothing wrong with that :)
Star Wars is my biggest cinematic disappointment. Empire will always rate as one of the best movies I've ever seen. But making I to III look like a Lego set and making 7, 8 and 9 rehashes of 3, 4 and 5 was... disaster.
Glad it’s not superhero movie style, where every character has to explain out loud what he is going to do and why.
He deserves plenty of credit for his work on Iron Man and launching the MCU (and the MCU's film making formula). Favreau has contributed to the MCU's continued market success with the Avengers films.
In my view Favreau's contribution ends there: the MCU is far more than just the Iron Man character, and Kevin Feige seems to me to be the one who has been pushing the MCU forward and keep it relevant.
It was a well-regarded run, and one of my favorites, but without the movie that team may have never come together again.
I no longer watch that dreck.
But still if you didn't like the first 8 movies, you probably won't like the next 14 movies.
But I still highly recommend Thor Ragnarok. Even as a standalone movie. Especially if you didn't like the first two Thor movies.
All of them are a steep drop in quality from The Dark Knight and there certainly isn't enough material there for twenty something 3hr films and half a dozen TV shows. Just like The Empire Strikes Back is a legitimately great movie while everything else Star Wars themed asymptotically approaches zero.
The whole idea of world building with dozens of movies is a scourge on story telling and a complete dead end imho.
The Dark Knight and the rest of its trilogy are just so ... blah. I just re-watched the 3rd and still find it so tepid and uninspired. I mean, Bane is kinda cool, but the rest is just bad. The story was insipid and hacked.
The multi movie story and world building is the best thing that has happened in cinema in a long time.
So you and I apparently have quite different tastes.
All four are made by Marvel Studios (not Marvel Television like Daredevil and Agents of Shield) with actual Marvel actors and firmly take place in the MCU.
It's worth checking out What If. If you don't like the show, I still recommend watching the fourth episode (Dr Strange).
While Infinity War can work as an almost standalone movie, if there ever was a movie made for the hardcore fans, it's Endgame. Unless you've absorbed all the lore that came before, 80% of the call-backs and references that the whole movie is built on won't mean anything to you.
I mean the scene in the climax the all the fans lose their shit over and considers the most powerful and pivotal scene in the movie is a character picking up a weapon and saying a word. Nothing within that movie gives any indication as to why any of that is a Really Big Deal.
I enjoyed Dare Devil, Punisher, and Jessica Jones, but I really cannot get into /any/ of the marvel shows that are on Disney+... Production quality is high but they are just so boring to me.
But these days no one seems to care for such products. What makes the big bucks seems to be super heroes made by disney. Would have been fine had they not have completely taken over the market now.
Yes, I'm an old fart and movies/TV is targeting the young population. Totally normal. But am I just old and bitter, or is this superhero trend just marketing? I think it's mainly the latter.
I also am not a big fan of marvel formulaic movies.
It also really doesn’t help that the subject matter of American comics is so narrow - at the end of the day it’s superhero vs supervillain.
The TV has kinda become the new medium for SF/fantasy, but it too has started to become flooded with superhero shows, superhero deconstruction and more Star Wars.
what about under the skin? edge of tomorrow? ex machina? arrival? bladerunner 2049? tenet?
but maybe you mean that they were flops, ie not huge box office hits, or that you didn't enjoy them
Under the skin and edge of tomorrow were pre-Interstellar.
I see a studio that consistently produces content with excellent visual quality, excellent audio quality, consistently high quality acting, decent plot twists, cross-film synergy (even working across studios), and even morally ambiguous characters.
I don't see what's missing, aside from a failure to play to elitist tendencies that assume mainstream=bad. The reflexive assumption that something is popular is automatically trash (I see this with pop music a lot, too) seems like it is predicated on a fundamentally bizarre conception of 'good'-ness or quality.
I don't have proof, just an opinion. The storylines and plot lines are all formulaic and one dimensional, the characters have basically no depth to them, the name of the game is throw a budget at graphics and rake in the money, and finally, lots of expressive elements are off the table if they want the Chinese market, which they do.
I don't know how many times people can watch the good guy fire laser beams at the bad guy and win and still enjoy it, maybe one day they'll have to mix it up and have the good guys lose until the sequel comes out in which they undo the loss and still win, predictably.
I get that you don't like the genera of action films, and that's fine. But there are moments of the film between the laser beams firing. Sometimes long moments. Sometimes the majority of the film.
Are there any films that aren't formulaic? Or are original in some way? As far as I can tell, the trend is: human or human surrogate faces challenge or complication that is resolved. Often following a heroes journey pattern. Sometimes the enemy is nature. Sometimes man itself (I would interpret as another form of nature, but not so useful). Sometimes the challenge is loss. Sometimes the challenge is fear. Sometimes it's fear of loss. Sometimes it's a mating attempt. Sometimes it's an existential risk.
Of course you can dress up the underlying formula a variety of ways. If your a french or whatever filmmaker and want to pander to artsy types you add lots of long slow scenes where nothing happens. Sometimes you spice it up with a gay kid or something. Maybe throw in a racial aspect to make a statement.
I don't know how many times people can look at any human endeavor and not realize it is all bullshit. But if it is all meaningless bullshit (in a meaningless universe) then perhaps none of it is? Perhaps many MCU entries are technical achievements with interesting twists that are exemplary specimens of exactly the type of film they are meant to be.
I'm not asking for proof, I'm asking for evidence of anything beyond a facile, intellectually lazy approach to media criticism. And believe me, there are a lot of flaws in modern Hollywood, but action movies being too well produced isn't really one of them.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/movies/the-invisible-man-...
Perhaps I'm too much of a child to understand your point, but this seems like a straw man.
I think the original contention was that MCU content is low quality (and no one has provided anything to support that claim beyond hand wavey "it's for children" nonsense). The other contention was that MCU films reduce the quality of the cinema industry overall, which is a similarly baseless claim.
Independent films still exist. Dramatic films still exist. Artistic production still exists. I haven't seen stats, but I would be shocked if the market for such content is smaller now than it was in 2008.
There's the possible claim that MCU sucks the oxygen out of the room for more artistic productions. I think the idea is that the world would be better if popular content didn't exist, so that we'd all have only "artistic" content available. I think that is a world in which fewer people watch movies at all, not a world in which everyone is driven to only appreciate high art. Thus the claims that MCU reduce the quality of cinema overall seems hard to defend.
I'm curious about the other perspective, so any perspective or analysis that better explains the thinking would be helpful. Otherwise I have to assume folks are just coming up with stories to justify their elitism.
BTW: "theme, meaning, film making craft, and artistic merit"
- craft was addressed in all of the sub-categories listed: performance, visual art, music, audio, effects
- theme/meaning: varies by film (because they aren't all the same). Sometimes it's loss and grief. Sometime's it's managing conflicts. Sometimes its reckoning with the inherent conflicts in heroism. Sometimes it's displacement after war. Sometimes it's about the forces that drive people to extremism. IDK humans aren't that complicated.
- artistic merit: a bullshit concept and I think you know it. Literal urinals have artistic merit. Canvases painted red have artistic merit. "Artistic merit" is elitism in distilled form.
Edit: I will concede that the performances in "Black Widow" were particularly weak.
I was never the target audience for this stuff but I was willing to be dragged along to Iron Man and Captain America because at that time “October Movies” still existed. That is mid budget Hollywood dramas and thrillers targeted towards adults, typically with an edgier tone, released in October after the summer tent pole season has run down but before Oscar candidate season has fully started. Basically everything David Fincher directed prior to being scooped up by Netflix fell into this category. Nightcrawler, All is Lost, and Captain Philips, are other “recent” examples, but of course they’re from the first half of the 2010s because Hollywood no longer green lights projects like these in the cinematic universe era. When MCU critics talk about crowding out better films, this is the sort of thing they’re referring to.
Look I apologize for not containing my scorn, but the fact is that the typical 9 year old can understand everything there is to understand in an MCU film modulo the punchline of a couple jokes. These are thematically simple films with no point of view and nothing to say for fear of shrinking the size of the big tent. The sad thing is that films targeted at children don’t have to be dumb; Bambi for example is a shockingly grownup film that sensitively deals with the passage of time and seasons, death and grief, coming of age, the hardness of life, and the cycle of generations, all within a runtime of under 70 minutes. There’s a lot going on there for the story of a fawn who does stuff in the woods. Yet that kind of depth does not exist in the children’s cinema of our times, ie the MCU, and the popular audience doesn’t even know to ask for it anymore.
We’re a stupid people and we get served correspondingly stupid culture. Sorry to rant and be rude, but in my view the MCU’s popularity is one of the leading indicators of our cultural decline, right up there with Trumpism and social media.
> Bambi for example is a shockingly grownup film that sensitively deals with the passage of time and seasons, death and grief, coming of age, the hardness of life, and the cycle of generations, all within a runtime of under 70 minutes.
I'm not going to defend MCU as being a pinnacle of meaning or depth, because honestly I tend to see _all_ of art as being fundamentally bullshit. However, all of what you wrote can describe one MCU entry or another. Literally every single one. I get media criticism, but ffs you should probably actually watch a recent entry before you pass judgment. Ideally with an open mind - if you go in assuming a work is trash, you will find it is trash. Even bubble gum pop has artistic value; I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find intellectually interesting themes in MCU.
I recommend you take a moment to watch Captain America and the Winter Soldier. It has (for a child's movie at a nine-year-old level) sophisticated treatment of the security-vs-liberty tradeoff, the politics of mass surveillance, adapting to societal change, dealing with loss, and more. https://ew.com/article/2014/04/06/captain-america-the-winter...
Unrelated to above points, but I think you should reflect on your arguments and whether things like the production schedule are actually part of a coherent framework to evaluate film, or just another fact pulled out of a hat to prop up your prejudice.
If you're willing to call everyone else stupid, I hope you won't mind me saying I expect better from someone on HN.
Take every criticism of MCU here (which I am not defending) and it applies just as well to one bit of art or another.
The difference is the art house filmmaker either is lying to himself and the world or is simply deluded. That's fine, there's a lot of awards authorities who will award bullshit! It's kind of the point; the market rewards everything else.
It sort of reminds me of ice cream. Not particularly meaningful, but very meaningful to the person it brings joy to. Thousands of vendors make boring, trash ice cream that is formulaic: ice, cream, sugar, and a mix of flavorings and sometimes chunks of sweet and salty things.
But for Salt and Straw, the artsy/edgy types who are too self-obsessed to realize how basic they are, the formula isn't enough. They say, "ice cream isn't art unless it has anchovies". And unless it does something weird, it isn't _really_ anything but trash. It doesn't matter how premium the caramel, how many thousands of hours that went into perfecting the syrup recipes, how polished the flavor balance is, it isn't good unless you add something to make it unpopular.
Because if the hoi polloi can understand, then it isn't art. The sophisticated people who bitch about how formulaic cinema is these days say, "I want anchovies! I want garlic-gruyere-gumdrop ice cream! I hate vanilla and caramel because I resent the common people for liking that, I am better! Formulaic ice cream literally makes people stupid and degrades intellectual discourse! Too many people like vanilla so it is bad! If only no one made vanilla ice cream, the dumb people would be forced to love garlic-chocolate-pine needle ice cream!"
Art is a tool. People who want to use 'artistic merit' as a cudgel against art products they don't like should probably take a step back and reflect on art history. I won't argue any particular way, but if you zoom out far enough to see a whole, the only common pattern is it is all bullshit.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-duchamps-urina...
Barely. There's no money left in the industry. Everyone is trying to make the next universe, and failing.
5 years ago Birdman was very close to not being a thing because they couldn't find money. How many Birdmans of today can't?
They both tried to create universes from the outset, Universal IIRC even announced their Dark Universe before the first movie was released.
The Conjuring Universe on the other hand started the same as the MCU, and seems to have been a success: Make a good movie or two, then sequels and spinoffs, expanding organically until there's nothing else to call it but a "universe". It seems to be going well, with the 8th movie released this year, 2 more planned, 5 short films, and a comic book [0].
The acting isn't high quality across the board -- it's average. The plots and their twists are, frankly, banal in every aspect apart from being vehicles of spectacle. There's no real moral gray-ness to the characters, Wenwu from Shang Chi being an obvious exception to the rule.
The shows, which were supposed to come in with a fresh, long-form perspective on main characters and their struggles start out with interesting premises and then quickly falter because of their adherence to the MCU mythos. Wandavision and Loki completely fail in the latter half of their seasons to pay off any of the character beats in favor of big spectacle and exposition dumps.
For risks:
1) Casting unknown or washed up actors in leading roles
2) Switching up the genre with every movie. Iron Man was a classic super hero movie, Thor was fish out of water, Captain America was a spy movie, Ant Man was a heist movie, Guardians a space comedy, etc.
3) Forcing people to watch past movies to understand new ones. Accepted wisdom before Marvel was no one would do that so you have to dumb it down.
Sure they take some risk with casting, but they take very few risks in other areas. How many of the plots are basically quipy selfish hero learns to stop acting in selfish self-interest long enough to save the world, well still being a little bit of a dick so as not to be boring? Half. Don't get me wrong, its a good groove, but it doesn't scream taking risks.
Similarly with 2- sure they switch out the genere,but its always using the trappings superficially. Capt may be a spy movie, but just barely and not a very good one. Its a good super hero movie, but i wouldn't watch it if i wanted a good spy movie, and similar for all the others.
In the end, they manage to make it different enough to not feel repetitive, well still being similar enough that the risk of making something that doesn't work is low.
Versus DC that went with two gorillas and a hot chick formula. They got props for a fish movie after floundering about. Marvel is vertically integrated all the latest social memes.
Comics have a long history of taking life seriously and being socially aware; Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Green Arrows sidekick Speedy being a dope fiend was written in 1971; really all they had to do was a detailed translation of the material rather than treat it like camp.
“Hollywood has taken notice that younger generations are spending less time consuming movies and television. A recent study by Deloitte said that Gen Zers—defined as ages 14 to 24—prefer playing videogames, listening to music, browsing the internet and scrolling through social media in their leisure time over watching movies and TV at home. Every older generation ranked movies and TV as their top entertainment option.”
[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/hollywood-embraces-tiktok-stars...
It will be interesting to see how that generation will develop in the next decades...when they settle in their life, understand the bad sides of social media better, focus on new things.
Large video games like Skyrim or Fallout or GTA are no different from a Hollywood production except for visual quality. The story telling is not far removed from minor and some major movies, but instead of passively observing the story you can actively take part in it. There are artsy games for those who would watch complex cinema, there are games that can be played as a sequence of action scenes, there are comedy games, the list goes on. Previously, everyone who'd much rather interact with their fiction would be stuck in the cinema, but these days that's no longer relevant.
Memes on social media show that you don't need an epic story to get fiction or a shared perspective among a large group of people. People can get the same joy out of a drawing of a green frog or a hidden "Loss" that they'd previously get out of a Monty Python reference. Cross-cultural borders have been opened by the internet the same way movies and TV did many decades ago.
There's also the specificity that the internet brings us. If you were living in a small town and had a passion for building wooden crossbows, there'd be nobody to discuss your hobby with and no way to find them. You could run classifieds, but there's no way you'd reach someone in Canada about this stuff. Now with YouTube you're one search query away from a world of people who share the exact same niche. Mass media is made for the masses, and designed to resonate at least a little with as many people as possible. Social media allows media to be made for a tiny subset while still gaining attention. Sure, it won't make millions or billions, but it'll connect people who'd otherwise thought they were the only people who'd enjoy a certain type of thing.
The internet and the age of interactive media has brought us a culture in which we can participate in rather than be a passive observer of. I think this is part of reason for all of the friction against copyright laws that exists these days; covers, re-enactment, let's plays and other such content is being claimed as copyright violation by the big media companies while the people participating in them see them as ways to express themselves and add to the worldwide culture that's grown around certain media.
I think the next generation will grow up with a mindset completely foreign to my own, accepting being recorded at all time, accepting that anything you say as a teenager can cost you your job fifty years down the line. The omnipresence of tracking and other invasions of privacy as well as the fact that a few large, American tech companies have unopposed control over your life will shape young generations in an interesting but kind of scary way.
I recently started dating a Gen-Zer. This guy is all about TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and any other similar social media you can think of. A lot (most) of it is pure garbage, but there are some real gems out there (especially music). I still think it's a bunch of narcissistic nonsense and there's too much garbage to wade through to make it worth it. But over time it might not be that way.
Warner Bros can and should rival Marvel and should definitely be ahead of what Star Wars has become.
Bonus points if Warner Bros invests more in video games than Disney does. Video games are a huge market Disney doesn't do a great job with. The golden age of LucasArts (not to be confused with LucasFilm) did much better with their Star Wars games than they have since under Disney management.
Disney probably got a better deal when they licensed Epic to put the characters in Fortnite with an entire 3-month season (Chapter 2 Season 4) dedicated to Marvel and Galactus[1].
0: https://www.gamesradar.com/marvels-avengers-still-needs-to-r....
1: https://fortnite.fandom.com/wiki/Chapter_2:_Season_4#Rewards
a) streaming does not pay per viewer as well as DVDs used to do (which is a commercial issue and relatively easy to fix: just force streamers to pay more, or invest in a dedicated "alt-films" service), or
b) current streaming services fail at surfacing non-blockbusters. This is hard to fix (it's a problem common to basically everything on the web - there is only so much space on a screen, winner-takes-all, and people don't like going to multiple sites to do one thing).
I’d counter and say that neither of those things are particularly easy to achieve.
Matt Damon forgets that non-blockbuster films were popular before DVDs were invented.
In the 1950s people went to the movies often, sometimes more than once a week, just to hang out with their friends and be entertained. Today there's so many more ways and venues to achieve that goal, movies get a smaller and smaller slice of that pie. DVDs weren't the solution, they just put off the inevitable for a little longer.
Big franchise like this rarely ends well, especially if you're juggling so many different characters.
It is shocking how well they delivered.
I don't think sophisticated adults should be into spiderman. i only see them when I'm with my nephews and always fall asleep. give me a bad story with bad characters any day, over 98 minutes of nonstop cgi action scenes
Shang Chi just came out, and while there are some familiar Marvel beats, it still manages to feel moderately different from any of the previous MCU films. People go to see even an obscure character like Shang Chi because Marvel has done a good job of building trust that even their crappy movies are still okay.
It's apparent that many of the critics only watched the early movies that were more same-y -- by the time you hit phase 3 they're doing a much better job on average differentiating the films. Thor 1/2 vs Thor 3 is a perfect example of this, with the first two being competent but rote, and then Ragnarok being wildly different (and simply better).
Then again, I think it's why people go see them massively. These movies can be consumed with zero intellectual effort and are built to give you a dopamine rush while never challenging your world view in any way.
I personally believe this is where cinema goes to die but both the indie scene and foreign industries are producing more movies than ever so I don't really care.
"I haven't seen the movies you're talking about, but I'm not gonna let that stop me from getting up on my high horse and telling you how it is."
When you consider that Hollywood produced movies like The Deer Hunter, Chinatown or even the first Jurassic Park if you want to talk about blockbusters (not the new ones they could be Marvel movies), it makes me a bit sad.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I enjoy going from McDonald's from time to time. Nothing like a bunch nuggets when you had too much to drink. I just don't go around pretending it's good food.
Another writer who uses similar techniques? Shakespeare.
Of course, Shakespeare plays also tackle issues which had never been tackled before, throw unconventional elements into conventional structures and use literary devices which are ahead of their time. All things I wish could be said of Marvel movies.
When action scene starts its time to go to kitchen to take more snacks, because directing is so low quality and standardized. It's more emoting, posturing, and short bad ass sounding phrases. Everything is achieved using fast cuts. Nothing really happens. Production quality is high, but making action movies boring is achievement in itself.
I own Disney stock, because I think they are doing movies exactly right from business perspective. They do what large customer groups wants. Marvel is like McDonalds and Coke. You sell what sells and they can endlessly milk the franchise.
It was a far superior movie than all the Marvel formulaic pieces combined.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/martin-scorsese-m...
The MCU is a true rocket ship now (pun not intended).
Click into each director of the phase 1 films. They were all multi-decade successes, with their biggest films fitting well with what they’re after.
Rudy, Swingers -> Iron Man
Transporter movies -> Hulk
OG Jumanji, October Sky -> Cpt America
They made big bets up front and it’s paid dividends, and then some.
So any Marvel movie that works in the America will be good anywhere.
Hollywood comedies however struggle in the new system, good humour is site specific. Unless you take it off site like Pixar does.
Throw in sequels help people who are not immersed in Hollywood/West, and you have a profitable formula which allows you to invest more in each movie.
Like everything today the answer is the Internet, but it's how Marvel are using the globalisation, as it stands.
Really, to be relatable, all you need to do is tell a human story.