• Top 10 Problems with Modern Movies

  

  Written by Zeromage 54 Comments
  Last Updated:: December 13, 2008

  It seems like every year movies are getting worse and worse. I used to go to the movies every week, and now I go once a month. Not only are the movies today worse, but they cost more too. Since I make more money now than I did when I was a kid, I wouldn’t really care about spending a lot of money to go to the movies, but it’s still hard to justify paying $10 to go and see Jumper.  And if you bring your wife or girlfriend with you, plan on spending over $40 (with popcorn and a soda) to see some shitty new movie. I wouldn’t mind if every new movie was as good as Dark Knight, but let’s face it, most new movies usually suck ass. You’re better off spending your $40 buying a full season of the X-Files on DVD. At least you’ll be entertained for a whole week, and you won’t have to sit next to some overweight guy who breathes really hard, or some little girl who sniffs every ten seconds while you watch them. So why do new movies suck? In this next list we’ll go through the top 10 problems with modern movies.

  10. Too many re-makes

  How many times can you re-make Psycho? What can you possibly gain by re-making a movie that is almost perfect to begin with? The answer is “nothing”. Has there ever been a re-make of a good movie that was better than the original? The Invasion? No. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Ha. Don’t make me laugh. Re-makes almost always suck, and the ones that don’t usually aren’t good enough to justify doing it in the first place. Here’s an idea: Why not write a whole new movie instead? Do you see the re-make concept in other forms of media? Has any author ever re-wrote Dune? Or what about Sirens of Titan? Of course not, because real writers would rather create something of their own, rather than ruin something that someone else wrote.

  9. No mystery

  When I say there’s no mystery in modern movies, I don’t mean that there’s not enough crime thrillers out there. I mean that modern day directors have no sense of mystery when they make new movies. The classic example is Steven Spielberg’s classic movie Jaws. We don’t see the shark until the last half hour of the movie. Do you think modern directors have the patience to do something like that today? If they ever re-make Jaws (which I’m sure someone will do eventually) I’d bet money that we would see a big CGI shark in the very first scene of the movie. This was a concept that George Lucas used to understand also, like when we never see the Wompa creature in the original version of Empire, but of course in the special edition of the movie we get to see the entire beast, and after we finally do see it something is lost.

  8. No Patience

  There doesn’t seem to be any pacing anymore in modern day movies. Its nonstop action from beginning to end. There’s no build up. Alfred Hitchcock once said that a bomb under a table goes off, and that’s surprise. But when we know the bomb is under the table but we don’t know when it will go off, that’s suspense. Modern movies depend on surprise. Remember the Star Wars: A New Hope? Nothing happened for the first 30 minutes of the movie! Compare that to The Phantom Menace. Right in the beginning of the movie we see the two Jedi knights using almost every force power that we’ll ever see in throughout entire prequel trilogy. In a sense, after the first fifteen minutes of the movie there’s nothing left to see. I don’t think that it’s all Hollywood’s fault though. I just don’t think that there’s any way that a modern audience would be able to sit through a movie that moved as slow as the original Star Wars.

  7. Too predictable

  The vast majority of movies that come out today are about as a predictable as a new Indie band. The last time a new movie surprised me was the latest Bourne movie. Other than that you can almost tell what’s going to happen before you see the movie. If that wasn’t bad enough, nowadays the previews and commercials give away the entire movie before you even see it anyway. Remember What Lies Beneath? The previews told you that Harrison Ford was the bad guy before you even saw the movie! I can’t tell you how surprised I would have been when he turned out to be the bad guy if I hadn’t known it before I even saw the movie. In the trailers for Cast Away we almost saw the entire movie play out before it was even released. Again, this is apparently what modern audiences want though. They don’t like surprises. That’s why people like McDonald’s. There’s no surprises. You know exactly what it’s going to taste like before you even order. Everybody knows the menu so nobody’s is surprised.

  6. Bad Actors

  Ten or twenty years ago who didn’t want to see the latest Harrison Ford movie? Every movie he was in turned out to be great. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Bladerunner, and The Fugitive were all great movies, but he was also able to turn otherwise mediocre movies like Patriot Games and Airforce One into good movies as well. We don’t have too many great actors today. It seems like looks, rather than ability, are the reason that most actors and actresses are cast today. Ashton Kutcher, Hayden Christensen, Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, and Jennifer Lopez are all great examples of modern day actors with zero talent. I’m just glad that movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Poltergeist were cast in the 70s and 80s instead of today.

  5. Bad Writing

  For the most part the writing in modern day movies takes a back seat to the special effects, and it shows. Remember in Episode 2: Attack of the Clones when Anakin says to Princess Amidala “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything’s soft… and smooth…” Who wrote this garbage? This was possibly the worst dialog in any movie I’ve ever seen. Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher must feel embarrassed for these two actors. Bad writing isn’t limited to the Star Wars prequel trilogy though, you see it in any Jennifer Lopez movie, in any Vin Diesel movie, and pretty much 99% of the crap that you’ll see in theaters today.

  4. No originality

  When’s the last time you saw a good movie that wasn’t based on a short story, a novel or even a comic book? Are the writers in Hollywood the only ones who don’t come up with their own ideas? Its almost like the writers in Hollywood are failed writers from other mediums who couldn’t get their own stuff published so they went into a field where they could ape other people’s stuff and it would be alright. Every movie is a sequel, or a re-make or based on some other work like a novel. Too bad we don’t see good original ideas in new movies anymore like E.T. or Back to the Future.

  3. Too much emphasis on special effects

  This one almost goes without saying. Can we please have a new movie where something doesn’t have to blow up every five minutes? Its not that I have a problem with special effects per se, but I do have a problem when they are the main focus of the movie instead of the story line. Sometimes it seems like Hollywood writers are writing scripts to try out bigger and bigger special effects, rather than using the special effects to tell the story that they wrote. This is one of the biggest reasons why most modern day movies are crap.

  2. No imagination

  Where’s the imagination in today’s movies? Has any modern day movie been able to capture the sense of wonder you had when you first saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Has there been a movie released in the last 5-10 years that was as imaginative as Flight of the Navigator, or Dark Crystal? With a few notable exceptions (Pan’s Labyrinth) the answer is “no”. As stated earlier, the no-talent writers and directors of today would much rather focus on making more and more outrageous special effects than trying to come up with an imaginative story.

  1. Too much CGI

  Does everything have to be computer animated these days? In the first 15 minutes of the new Indiana Jones movie we see a frightened prairie dog with computer generated animated expressions. At this point the movie already doesn’t “feel” like an Indiana Jones movie. Was there really a need to computer animate a prairie dog? Is it so hard to get footage of a real prairie dog? Its not like you’re computer animating a rare or mythical beast like a dragon. It’s a prairie dog! Does everything need to be computer animated? The same can be said of the new Star Wars movies. Why were some of the Clone Troopers computer animated? And why does everyone use CGI when it looks like shit anyway? Give me costumes and puppets any day, at least they look halfway decent unlike the CGI garbage we see in movies today.

54 Comments

1. #1 jason ward says:
   March 15th, 2010 at 11:02 pm

   amen to this whole list
2. #2 curiousbystander says:
   March 15th, 2010 at 6:52 am

   try 500 days of summer and adam
3. #3 tim says:
   March 15th, 2010 at 12:37 am

   Everything about modern life sucks. It all revolves around computers and shallow pop culture. All of the movies that are being made today would have looked better if they were made 15 or 20 years ago (or even earlier). I don’t care how much time or talent or whatever it takes to put into making CGI, IT SUCKS. IT SUCK, SUCK, SUCKS. SUCK CITY. It looks fake and cartoonish. There isn’t even any cartoon movies anymore. It’s all computer animated.
   Even if there was, it would be considered oldschool or something. I hate CGI. I didn’t like it when it first started getting really popular either, in the late 90s and into the 00s. It’s an eyesore. But, I know hollywood will continue making these movies because it’s all about the money. Is it really wrong to live in the past? No.