I agree that most action movies today have a pretty seen-it-before grandiose plot. But movies with down-to-earth original plots still come out (occasionally).
Jesus, have some pacing.
Should have been a much more down to earth story about him adjusting to modern day, getting his groove back and taking on some minor baddie.
Comic book movies are also "ur fascism." They feature utterly paper thin heroes who are just good and paper thin villains that are either just bad or have caricatured motives. Thanos with his genocidal malthusianism is about as high-brow as this stuff gets.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the generation raised on these has been softened up for puerile political zealotry (of various stripes) in adulthood.
Go back and watch an action flick like Die Hard. Such movies were considered lowbrow when they were made but that film contains some extremely complex characterization and nuance compared to 90% of comic book films.
I think we tend to view the major artistic mediums that we are born into as something eternal when in reality they get stale.
Whatever can be said about movies I am sure people were saying 50-100 years ago about paintings.
Or think about the last great sculpture?
The same thing with movies has happened with music. The LP was nothing until the 1950s but it feels like something eternal. Creative people move on to newer mediums that are a blank canvas so to speak. Youtube, Tiktok, podcasts, long series TV.
I think as you age obviously it becomes harder to impress just from having consumed so many masterpieces of artistic expression. You have a much higher tolerance for amazement.
I think superhero movies are totally unwatchable but I am sure this would be different if I was starting closer to a blank slate when it comes to movie expectations. I love mob movies but there is no grand comment on society that caused all these mob movies to have been made outside a type of fashion trend.
Maybe music and movies are just on a downswing for a while, having been thoroughly explored by previous artists.
This creates an interesting phenomena where you are either more creative with your screenplay (and restrictive with your budget) or you cave in to censorship. I feel like most of the time Hollywood picks the latter.
That said, Hollywood is still making good original action movies (the most recent being The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), they are just really scarce among a plethora of military propaganda and/or superhero sequels (e.g. Top Gun: Maverick).
Authenticity and 'the genuine' were discussed obsessively by (all?) early 20th Century thinkers in response to the first signs of the beginning of our modern social experience.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/381440.The_Society_of_th...
And Johnny Rotten: “Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Cheated?”
J.G, Ballard talked about it a lot. See his interviews in Extreme Metaphors, rather than his novels.
“I feel that the 1960s represent a marked turning point. For the first time, with the end of the Cold War, I suppose, for the first time the outside world, so-called reality, is now almost completely a fiction. It’s a media landscape, if you like. It’s almost completely dominated by advertising, TV, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as advertising. People’s lives, even their individual private lives, are getting more and more controlled by what I call fiction. By fiction I mean anything invented for imaginative purposes. For example, you don’t buy an airline ticket, you don’t just buy transportation, let’s say, to the south of France or Spain. What you buy is the image of a particular airline, the kind of miniskirts the hostesses are wearing on that airline. In fact, airlines in America are selling themselves on this sort of thing.
"Also the sort of homes people buy for themselves, the way they furnish their houses, even the way they talk, the friends they have, everything is becoming fictionalised. Therefore, given that reality is now a fiction, it’s not necessary for the writer to invent the fiction. The writer’s relationship with reality is completely the other way around. It’s the writer’s job to find the reality, to invent the reality, not to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there. The greatest fictional characters of the twentieth century are people like the Kennedys. They’re a twentieth-century House of Atreus.”
From a 1968 interview with Jannick Storm
Ran across this observation with regards to Die Hard: the first two movies had McClain as basically a beat cop who gets in over his head. The latter movies he's almost a superhero.
You know that dream most people have had, where they're running down the hallway that never ends, or running away from something they can't escape, or swimming up through endless water, or any of a dozen variations on the theme of reality no longer being composed of length and distance and height but instead being just a geometrically featureless abstraction of whatever experiential idea is currently stuck in your head?
Modern Hollywood action feels like that to me. There's no geography. Nothing changes because no matter how hard you punch the superheros (whether or not this is formally a superhero movie) they don't even so much as get their hair mussed. Things break and fall down, people get flung into concrete walls and break the concrete walls and pop back up so often it has lost all impact, you can't get your bearings on anything, you can't figure out where things are, nobody's winning or losing, it's not in any particular place, it's just never ending inescapable abstraction of fighting ideation, until the director or writer just decides it's over for basically no reason and we go on to the next thing, no different than a nightmare finally breaking not because you got away from the thing (you can't, it's in your head with you) but just because it is later.
Modern Hollywood action feels like that sort of nightmare you can't escape from for me... not the one that has you waking up drenched in sweat and terror, not the night terror nightmare, but the nightmare that drones on and on and doesn't let you go and makes no particular sense and you just can't get out of, with no real place or concrete events or anything else to hook your attention on to and break out of the loop.
Needless to say, I'm not particularly excited about throwing my money at them to produce this feeling in me.
(The last fight I really remember was the last on in Serenity. It sure isn't an action extravaganza like a Marvel movie, but that fight impacts everything and everybody. As Malcolm Reynolds hobbles away from that confrontation, there is no question. Something has happened. It happened in a place, and there was a sequence of events, that followed logic and biology. Events logically led up to it and consequences radiated out from it. Serenity isn't the greatest action movie in history or anything, the fight in the bar of the same movie also feels like the nightmare I describe above, it's just the last scene is the last fight I remember that impacted me.)
- Black Coal, Thin Ice
- Ash Is Purest White