this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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One thing I've noticed with newer movies is they do a lot more "tell, don't show" than old movies.
For example, compare the live action Disney Cinderella to the original animated version. The live action version is mostly a voiceover telling the story of Cinderella. They literally say "Her stepsisters weren't very good at art or music" and then have a scene showing them being bad at art and music. The animated version spent the first 20 minutes or so like a Tom & Jerry cartoon.
And this is across movies. I watched Predator recently and there wasn't a lot of exposition about how they're there to fight communists or whatever. You pick that up in snippets of dialog in between the action.
It really does feel like movies are dumbing down.
Main character seeing old friend: Well if it isn't my old friend Daniel, we used to roam these streets as kids, I used to have dinner at your house every day, you were like my brother, I would have done anything for you, I haven't seen you since our other old friend Jake died mysteriously, remember when we used to play videogames all night and made that life long pact that if "HE" returns we will do what it takes to send him back to the world where he emerged from when we were kids and lived right next door to each other, our mothers were best friends until the incident but they never stopped us from being life long best friends forever, we used to play in the streets all night, me you Daniel and Chris, the rat Pac they called us, best friends for life.
Man there's so many loose ends.
What was the incident?
What did the rat pac play in the street? Music? Baseball?
What video games were you guys playing? Nintendo, Sega, Atari, Sony, SNK, NEC, 3DO?? Whose house?
Were there any leads in Jakes death?
How long has it been since you last saw Daniel?
The incident is what shaped them into the adults they are now, it's why they ended up in their chosen professions and is what brings them together at the 20 year high school reunion coming up, but they must never speak of it.
They hustled marbles for cash in the street to anyone willing to lose to them, they ran that rural suburban street untill the incident changed everything.
NBA Jam on the Sega Mega drive, because they were the cool kids and that's how you showed it in the early 90s
The policed ruled it 'natural causes' but the rat Pac know it was Him that killed Jake after they unintentionally released Him.
About 3 hours before that line of text.
I feel like Dune was a good outlier to this. It's the only movie I've seen in theater in the last few years and I really enjoyed not having everything explained to me
That's such a good point. I really appreciated how it wasn't scared to let viewers figure things out.
In comparison, the old Dune film used a lot of voice over
Geez the Netflix Avatar adaptation (a show, not movie, but still) was so bad for this. Despite actually having more runtime and fewer distinct plot points (due to the removal of and consolidation of different side-plots) than the cartoon it was based on, it spent less time showing us why characters think and feel how they do, and straight-up told us every single thing.
I love listening to the original intro 3 times in the first episode.
I would have never known that the 4 nations lived in harmony until the fire nation attacked, or that the Avatar, master of all 4 elements was the only one who could stop them.
I also love learning that Aang wants to eat banana cakes and goof off with his friends instead of being the Avatar by him outright saying it instead of us meeting ANY of these friends in the first place.
Not to lump everything into one pile, but there's definitely some problems with movie planning nowadays.
That's what is pointed out in all those "this movie production literally sacrificed ten VFX studios on a mayan altar" documentaries - some of new directors don't plan shots ahead, require seeing the result and then re-doing it ad nauseam, and as a result waste WAY more vfx team effort and don't get good scenes.
Setting up visual storytelling and using good cinematography is hard - which is why to a lot of people the 3D movies like Spiderverse/Last Wish/Nimona stand out so much, you kinda have to plan ahead for a 3D movie, and even if you don't modifying a scene is easier (if you do it early enough in production).
I'd imagine that it's similar for writing - large monologues like that are probably the outcome of the writing team needing to put all they mean to onto the paper. Maybe also result of focus-testing being passed down directly to writing staff?
I don't know, I'm just a random guy on the internet but those are my two cents.
Part of this is the phone addicted culture. A lot of people listen at best to movies and TV, so they make everything accessible to that audience.
Another related problem is the over reliance on focus groups. The thoughts and opinions of people in LA/NYC/Chicago that are free at 10am on a random Tuesday aren't representative samples of the current American. It's even worse as movies move to target the global audience.
This is my issue with a lot of indie horror games and visual novels. (Whatever manlybadasshero plays). There's just unnecessary details (you open the door). That makes me go this is just shit.
The expressions between the 2 actors in this scene are so great and genuine too...that helps a lot.
I feel like they make movies to appease the hot take internet culture. If a few people don't understand how a guy with magic powers in a room full of cloning tanks could be brought back from the dead, you end up with endless "Somehow Palpatine returned" memes and it becomes a whole thing. So they've compensated (maybe over-compensated) and make sure every detail is explained fully to avoid that kind of reaction. They also have to make sure they make jokes about something being corny before people on the internet make the lame jokes.
Rise of Skywalker was probably the last popcorn movie where there was a lot of "show don't tell" going on and pretty much all of the commentary about it on the internet indicates people think it's wrong to do that. To be sure there were other problems with that movie, but people got very fixated on criticizing the decision made to not over-explain.
Somehow... movies have to explain every little detail now.
Rise of Skywalker neither showed nor telled (told). Supposedly the story behind Palpatine coming back was told in a temporary series of missions in the Star Wars Battlefront video game (and Squadrons had some hints in their too if I recall). Of course that was a big failure so now the TV show writers are filling in the blanks because at least they are fans first and money-makers second.
And of course RoS was a giant overreaction to Disney panicking over a vocal minority of perpetually displeased fans didn't like Star Wars being taken in a new direction in TLJ, so they asked JJ Abrams to take a wet sack of memberberries and turn it into a movie (again).
I think it's because the people put in charge of the films are incompetent
The writing sucks which is why movies seem like stream of consciousness time wasters with no stakes, fake emotions and CGI explosions. When the writers went on a strike in Hollywood I actually laughed. ChatGPT can write better scripts than what Hollywood has been churning out lately.
I think this is a combination of armchair directors in the boardroom trying to actualize their market research and writers actually being less smart and creative. It would explain why everything is a prequel, sequel, soft reboot, universe expansion or some other vehicle for recycled IP.
I think the big reason everything is a reboot these days is that it makes marketing it a lot easier. If you told me there's a new sci fi show coming out I might watch it. But if you told me they rebooted SG1 I'd definitely watch it.
Yeah that's my point. Hollywood has ceased to be a creative industry. It's a rehash, reboot industry with box ticking producers focused on merchandising rights toy sales etc. There's very few interesting ideas tbese days.