An almost obtuse amount of explosions, 45-minute action sequences and characters as flat as a piece of printer paper — these three traits seem to be consistent in most major movies today. One thing they're lacking? An actual story.
Take recent big-bucks space odyssey "Interstellar" for instance. The movie possessed the roots for success with an interesting concept, an epic cast and a solid amount of intrigue, but it never actually let them grow. And while the movie might cause a thrill in theaters, it didn’t have that stick that made it memorable. Describe any character in that movie and they'll be reminiscent of some other Christopher Nolan character. Really the only spectacular thing about it was the special effects, and that’s just not enough.
But, it doesn’t take a Michael Bay-grade budget to make a great movie— what it takes is a sense of originality, humanity and a plot that isn’t completely dependent on the multi-million dollar budget it has.
Granted, action movies tend to require a bigger budget, but if we learned anything from last summer’s spectacular crash-and-burn, "The Lone Ranger," it’s that deeper pockets don’t necessarily make for better movies.
Here's the problem: Hollywood is getting lazy. With an already established idea of what works and what doesn’t and modern-day technologies allowing companies to virtually build a movie out of thin air and blow up basically whatever they want to, directors are taking the alternative to a good plot — dazzling and stereotyping the audience out of their money.
You can throw as much money as you want at a pile of garbage, but in the end, it’s just a pile of garbage. Granted, it may rake in a epic profit, but look back in 10 years and it will be forgotten.
That’s not to say that all major movies today are garbage, but a movie's quality depends where the creative energy feeding the film is geared.
For instance, "Avatar," the highest-grossing movie to this day and arguably one of the most creative and epic big-budget movies, cost approximately $230 million. It was a hit primarily because the money put into the movie was not used to create car chases or flashy effects used to distract the viewer into forgetting the lack of complexity, but rather to fuel the film's creative energy and develop a thoroughly well-thought-out world. Basically, they put actual substance first and used the the stunning effects to back it up.
This “money over everything” mentality used by movie-makers is slowly leeching the excellence out of Hollywood. Instead of developing unique stories, Hollywood is riddled with over-used tropes, explosions, remakes and sequels.
Five copycats seem to rush in to take every successful movie's place and profit off its success. And yet, despite the fact that every Nicholas Sparks movie actually look and feel virtually the same, movies like this still keep pulling in the cash. It poses the question: Is creativity dead?
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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