They are questions that have been on everyone’s minds for a while now: why are movies so bad these days? Why can’t they make anything original? Does Disney really have every possible moral to the story copyrighted?
Any time movies are mentioned or talked about at length in day-to-day conversation, the best anyone can come up with are from the ‘80s at the latest with only a few titles from the past 25 years getting an honorable mention. For all its money and the seemingly magical means to create spectacular cinematic masterpieces, Hollywood has managed to paint itself into a creative corner. Sure that corner is gold-plated and quite comfortable, but it has lost the ability to inspire and connect with people.
The problem, however, is hardly a lack of originality. Being original doesn’t necessarily make a good movie. The small group of filmmakers that took a broken Hollywood by storm starting in the late ‘60s—Lucas, Spielberg, Milius, Coppola, etc.—merely retold the stories of mythology, the classics and works of literature that had existed in some cases for thousands of years. They merely told them from a modern perspective and in a visual way. It was there that the originality was found and it is what made the film just as good if not better than its archaic predecessor.
Immediately afterward, Hollywood fell victim to its own success; allowed itself to be blinded by all the money that these filmmakers made for them. All the executive machine took away from that success—upon seeing that the works were never really original, just adaptations of old books or stories ripped out of some obscure religious mythos—was that in order to make money, all they had to do was copy things.
This is fine. It is totally possible to make a great movie using this formula. "Star Wars: A New Hope" is a product of combing and reworking Greek mythology and religious aspects of various Asian cultures, but in space. "Apocalypse Now" is Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness," but in Vietnam.
A film like "Gods of Epypt" or even the "Transformers" series is a descendant of the mentality that birthed these classic movies, but somehow the formula got diluted. They cost a lot and are copies of things that had potential, but the end product has been falling flat lately.
What the executives who came in and took over the reborn film industry quickly forgot after so much success is that the works that gave new life to that industry were conceived in a chaotic, over budget and out of time manner that had their producers losing hair and smoking packs of cigarettes a day. Movies are still made in the same spirit and often run over budget, leaving the lack of a creative madman at their center as the only difference.
Hollywood has ensured that they will never regain that organic genius that broke them out of their mid-Twentieth Century slump. The fact is that creative people don’t have the money to break into the big time. When they do manage to get funding from a large company it comes with so many stipulations that their vision becomes distorted. The risks that they wanted to take are not tolerated by executives who would rather play it safe so that the aforementioned large company can make its money back. Creativity effectively locked outside, Hollywood has become a small community of people who had a few ideas, got rich, and then ran out of them. The creative gene pool dried up. All that is left are half-baked stories, stale dialogue and the incessant drone of a political ideal thrown in here and there. It’s all become too watered down to taste like anything but water.
The classic films that we still love half a century later are the visual equivalent of psychedelic rock—out of place, innovative, revolutionary; in a lot of cases really weird but heavy—now we’re being fed the ‘70s soft rock that followed. It’s just not the same. It’s been dumbed down and declawed. The sex is there because it sells, the violence attempts to add depth, but the ideas at work in the worlds being created and the motivations of characters are no longer compelling or challenging.
Unfortunately, they probably never will be again because you have to take risks to be compelling and challenging. Risks don’t fit into the formula. Risks mean you might not get your money back. Risks are not something the executive machine is willing to bet on. This fact combined with truly creative people being trapped outside the walls of the money-filled keep has ensured that we are only going to get a good movie once in a blue moon. The only thing that can save Hollywood now is another slump. With Disney cranking out the financial successes based on the Marvel Formula, that is something that’s not happening anytime soon.
