Down to earth is the key I think. So many action films these days are "save the world" or some sort of incredibly over the top world-changing maguffin. Just a guy trying to escape going to prison for a crime he didn't commit is infinitely more relatable that it makes a massive train derailment seem down to earth.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent just came out this year. The plot was a bit over the top, but that was the point, and it was thoroughly enjoyable. Blackkklansman came out the same year as this article, and even though it was more comedy drive then most action movies, it had a down to earth plot of a black policeman infiltrating the KKK organization.
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).
> Down to earth is the key I think. So many action films these days are "save the world" or some sort of incredibly over the top world-changing maguffin.
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.
I thought the one with Jeremy Irons as Hans Gruber's brother in it (don't remember which part of the series this was) wasn't too bad either. TBH, I'd watch that one more for Irons' performance than anything else, so your point probably still stands.
That makes me realize another aspect I hate about modern movies. In the first Die Hard, McClain was suffering. That scene where he walks across broken glass, and then limps around the rest of the movie. It might not have been realistic, but at least it conveyed how hard and tiring it is to fight. That is totally absent from modern action movies.
Oh absolutely! This has been a major annoyance in, mostly, superhero movies. The first movie they're growing up, maybe getting rid of a city's villain. The next movie they're saving the universe. (And in the third they're traveling back through time.)
This was my EXACT thought seeing the second Captain America. Taking down all of Shield/Hydra should have been an Avengers movie, not the job of a single dude.
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.
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.”
Some scholars would argue that this began with the era of the phonograph, the telephone, and the airplane. I tend to agree - we've been in this for a long time.
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.
I blame comic book movies and a generation raised on them.
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 really don’t think this is a coincident either. But I think it is more nefarious then you suggest. I blame the USA military. Too many movies that come out today are paper thin propaganda/recruitment tool for the USA military. If your story involves the military in some way, includes some military tools in the set design, etc. and you want the military to help you with that, then you must hand over editorial rights to the military (i.e. you must opt into censoring).
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).
IMO a bigger aspect is just the exhaustion of the artistic medium itself and exhaustion of creative talent.
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.
You know, that's a really great point. In some cases it seems to be cyclic with some artistic mediums falling into and out of fashion as major canvases for artists to express themselves.
Maybe music and movies are just on a downswing for a while, having been thoroughly explored by previous artists.
I don’t think movies and music are on a downswing currently. I think they the consumption is just transitioning into more and more pulp. If you compare literature and pick a new novel completely by random you will most likely pick a dumb romance novel written in less then a day (perhaps mostly by AI). However that is hardly an indicator of the state of the art. I think movies and music is undergoing a similar transition that books went through in the 1950s. Consumption is getting easier and cheaper with streaming service, and the market is being flooded with cheap and easy productions. However—just like literature—great works are still being made, and will continue to be made into the foreseeable future. It just won’t be as prominently displayed as during the heyday of these mediums.
