I was watching the 1930s King Kong movie yesterday and thought, \u201cThat was a damn good idea for a motion picture.\u201d\u00a0 It had a love story, a damsel in distress, prehistoric monsters, an ocean voyage to a tropical island, a battle scene involving the latest weapons technology of the time, a strange culture, a scantily clad pretty woman and the capitol city of the world as a backdrop.\u00a0 It was a fantastic story and considering the special effects technology of the time it must have been a truly exciting movie to watch.<\/p>\n
Now I compare this to what passes for adventure movies today and what have we got?\u00a0 Most of what is out there are superhero movies.\u00a0 One or more characters dressed up in spandex running or flying around battling each other to cause or prevent mayhem to the human population around them.\u00a0 And after two hours of this, usually nothing much has happened.\u00a0 Some space jewel or other has been found or lost and some bad guys have been captured or chased off.\u00a0 But to all intents and purposes nothing substantive has been achieved or lost.\u00a0 For the most part no one even dies.\u00a0 It seems rather pointless.<\/p>\n
I think something has been lost from the art of storytelling.\u00a0 Now this isn\u2019t completely the case.\u00a0 There are still movies with a beginning, middle and end.\u00a0 I guess a decent example would be Christopher Nolan\u2019s Dark Knight trilogy.\u00a0 Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises; beginning, middle and end.\u00a0 We see why Bruce Wayne became Batman.\u00a0 We see him defeat his greatest adversary and we see him walk away when he can do no more.\u00a0 It\u2019s not Shakespeare but it is decent story-telling and effective spectacle.<\/p>\n
Now compare this to the Marvel \u201cAvengers\u201d series.\u00a0 There have been dozens of these movies if you count all of the sequels, spin-offs and television productions.\u00a0 Each \u201chero\u201d has a sequence of movies and then there are the ensemble films and basically nothing meaningful happens.\u00a0 And now they\u2019ve gotten to the point where they want to swap out the older white male heroes with black and female successor heroes.\u00a0 The most laughable one I\u2019d say is \u201cShe-Hulk: Attorney at Law.\u201d\u00a0 I have to assume that if she loses a case she hulks out and rampages through the court building until her client can escape the pulverized masonry.\u00a0 Basically, these people have no conception of story-telling and are just building boring envelopes that they can fill with CGI effects.<\/p>\n
Even something as absurd as the John Wick movies is better than this.\u00a0 At least it started with an original movie that had a character and a plot.\u00a0 Granted the character is a cartoon and the plot is as simple minded as any imaginable but there is an arc to the story and things definitely happen; mostly flying bullets and dead Russian mobsters but within the confines of the story it keeps your interest mostly.\u00a0 Now it is almost unbelievable that they\u2019ve been able to turn this into a series.\u00a0 The body count in the first movie was in the high two figures.\u00a0 In the second movie, which was the last one I watched, the action was so frenetic I couldn\u2019t even tell how many people he killed.\u00a0 The automatic weapons fire was almost continuous for ten minutes at a time.\u00a0 I don\u2019t even know how we\u2019re supposed to believe that the guns don\u2019t start to melt from the heat.\u00a0 But even this absurdity is preferable to the boring Marvel movies.<\/p>\n
I understand that Hollywood is solely driven by return on investment and pumping out sequels to existing intellectual property like the comic book characters is one of the only allowed pathways to getting a film made.\u00a0 The exception is someone like Christopher Nolan whose reputation for success will allow him to make a movie like Oppenheimer.\u00a0 But you can count those trusted movie-makers on the fingers of one hand.\u00a0 And they\u2019re getting old.\u00a0 What happens when they\u2019re gone?\u00a0 She-Hulk II or III or X?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was watching the 1930s King Kong movie yesterday and thought, \u201cThat was a damn good idea for a motion picture.\u201d\u00a0 It had a love<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,239,238,237,4,243],"tags":[335,175,1082,1631],"class_list":["post-32912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-movie-reviews","category-classic-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-movie-reviews","tag-hollywood","tag-king-kong","tag-marvel","tag-superhero"],"yoast_head":"\n