It's not nostalgia. Movies today are mostly hyper-produced, over focused-grouped, effects driven piles of blandness trying to avoid being offensive or take chances because if every critic 51% likes you, you have a 100% on rotten tomatoes.
In reality there's as good or better movies now and a ton of crap from back then, too.
I have to specify blockbuster because otherwise it doesn’t make much sense to compare Terminator to a small indie movie
Also: Top Gun: Maverick
I’d also compare _Everything Everywhere All at Once_ favorably against a lot of old blockbusters.
Modern technology aside, Top Gun: Maverick feels like it could have come out thirty years ago.
> Top Gun: Maverick feels like it could have come out thirty years ago.
I've not seen it, but to what extent is that because it's a remake of a film that came out 30 years ago?
Comparing computing power is a bit handwavey, but former Pixar employee Chris Good estimated that the SPARCstation 20 render farm cluster that rendered Toy Story had only half the power of the 2014 Apple iPhone 6. https://www.quora.com/How-much-faster-would-it-be-to-render-...
I thought Terminator was a relatively low budget movie. Not an indie though.
People like to criticize back-references as a cheap way to entertain the audience knowing the referenced works, but I think it's a legitimate feature. A movie or a show doesn't exist in a vacuum; watching a sequel or a work in the same universe, I expect to see both subtle and direct call-backs.