I was thinking about the fourth Indiana Jones movie, and why I disliked it so much. Many of the reasons have probably been said time and time again, but I wanted to get some of my issues out before Mr. Plinkett can beat me to it.
#1: Opening Sequence
Each Indiana Jones film has opened with a great sequence. Raiders has the brilliant walk through the jungle, into the cave and the subsequent giant ball chase. There is really no topping Raiders in ANY of the categories I complain about for Crystal Skull. Temple of Doom opens with an old Hollywood style musical number and then moves into an exciting fight and chase scene in which Indy must get the antidote to the poison he's drank. Then Last Crusade has the lovely young Indy gets his hat sequence. All are fun and set the tone for the subsequent films. The most important point to note is that they all reintroduce Indiana Jones as a character as if this is a brand new film...not a sequel. If you never saw Raiders and you see that opening of young Indy in Last Crusade, its like its a fun sequence showing you how the guy you are about to watch came to be the thrill seeking archeologist that he is. The thing I really like is that Indy loses in all three sequences. He struggles in each, and just when he thinks he has won, he loses in some way. Raiders he gets the idol taken away by Belloq. In Temple he gets the antidote and escapes...but onto a plane owned by the man he is trying to escape. Then in Crusade he loses the very artifact he was trying to rescue. These ending moments to the sequences set the tone that our hero is a guy who can't always win. He gets the crap kicked out of him, often losing many battles but winning the war. He's the underdog. Indiana Jones is great character because of this.
So how does Kingdom of the Crystal Skull begin. Well for some reason Indy and some guy names Mac have been forced by the Soviets to find a crate featuring what is not so subtly hinted at to be an alien. Then for some unknown reason Indy ends up on a nuclear test site...and manages to save himself by getting into a fridge. Somehow the fridge is magically shot to safety even though absolutely nothing else is shot out of the explosion, and he survives, and just looks up at the big ol' CG explosion as a CG prairie dog runs into its little hole.
Frankly while the chase within the big storage area was decent, it also used Indy's whip like Spider-Man's web...making you constantly question what the hell it is latching on to. Then the nuclear test site thing is so lame and boring I can't fathom who thought it was going to work. Nothing happens on the site, except Indy running around looking for an out, before finding one that conveniently works. If more things were being shot out, MAYBE I could have suspended my disbelief, but seriously...how lucky he managed to find the ONE item that was going to be shot to safety. You can't break the rules you make within a film, and when everything else was just being destroyed, this magical fridge wasn't. It set a tone that I couldn't really buy anything that was going to follow.
#2: Characters
Indiana Jones - Harrison Ford begged Lucas and Spielberg to return to this role. After wearing both of them down, and he finally gets the chance to be in a movie that he supposedly likes, he looks just as bored and disinterested as he has in almost every film he's been in the past 10 years. What happened to the guy? Ford used to be awesome! Whether it was Indy, Han Solo, Jack Ryan, Richard Kimble...he was a great actor to watch. Lately he chooses projects that are either dull or uninteresting, and whenever I see clips he looks like he has no interest in even acting anymore. I personally felt that he didn't seem to be giving his all to Indy 4. Others seem to disagree, maybe just pleased to see him wear the hat again. I think he's too old for the role now. I felt the same way about Nimoy popping on the old ears for the latest Star Trek. Its best to bow out gracefully.
Now Ford's rather mediocre performance aside, what do we learn about his character in this one. Apparently he was a WWII hero. That seems odd to me. I don't really see him in a military fashion, especially since he'd be in his mid to late 30s, if not 40s by the time World War II rolled around for the US. But he joined up and they must've fast promoted him so he could punch some Nazis.
I don't something about the character seemed off, it didn't feel as much like I was seeing Indiana Jones again, but more like one of those direct to video knock offs made in the 80s.
Mutt Williams - Annoying greaser kid, who unsurprisingly turns out to be Indy's son. Yeah, saw that coming a million miles away, makes me actually want to hit Indy for a couple reasons: first he DIDN'T see it coming, therefore he looks like a moron, and secondly the guy is now a deadbeat dad. Thanks George Lucas.
Marion Ravenwood - Karen Allen hasn't barely acted at all for years, or if she has its been mostly in things I never saw. She clearly couldn't remember what Marion was like at all, as her character is almost nothing like she was in Raiders. It could've been any stand in woman, and it wouldn't have made a bit of difference...but to try and convince more people this is in fact a sequel, they brought back Marion. Too bad Allen had no clue what she was doing.
Irina Spalko - From her first bit of dialogue...I had trouble not thinking "MOOSE AND SQUIRREL!" I actually found Blanchett to be a very ineffective villain. She, like most communist Russians, don't come off so much as scary, as they would in the 60s, but more comical. Nazis are far more scarier than any Soviet could ever be. Her motivations also never seemed to clear to me.
#3: Tone, Style, and Effects
The film doesn't stylistically even look like the first three films. Missing is original cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, and the film looks more like the Raiders-inspired Mummy films than Raiders itself. It doesn't evoke the same feeling, and looks too modern at times
Originally Spielberg and Lucas claimed that they would use CGI minimally, and rely more on practical effects. But then they soon decided that would be too hard. This sort of brings me to another tangent: You know how old people tend to be bad with computers, getting excited by accomplishing the simplest tasks? I sort of feel like a lot of older filmmakers from the 70s and 80s sort of work the same way with new film-making tech. James Cameron shows off his blue people but has no story to his film at all. Lucas makes the messes that are the prequels and does so with tons of CG and little to no story. So I feel like all these old folks who used to make great films are over-relying on computers to make their films for them...they don't see the value in the struggles they went through to make great pictures, and now they take the lazy and easy route, overusing CG.
So here is Indiana Jones 4, and by the 10 minute mark we have already seen a CG nuclear explosion, some CG prairie dogs, and some CG boxes in the warehouse. Seriously? CG boxes? You couldn't find some BOXES? I knew from the moment the door to that warehouse opened and I could spot the CG-ness of the the place that we were in trouble.
Later we have the car chase in the Jungle, and instead of just filming a really good sequence that speaks for itself, I can spot the CG backgrounds and plants that zoom by, and I feel like I'm watching some cars on a green screen most of the time. I never felt like they were in the action the same way I do when I see the truck sequence in Raiders, or the tank sequence in Crusade. On top of that we get Mutt (a character I could barely stand anyways) swinging from tree to tree (again like Spider-Man...what the hell was up with this move and evoking Spider-Man) like Tarzan (even bellowing like him I think...and if he didn't I DEFINITELY felt like I heard it) WITH CGI MONKEYS! There wasn't a moment of this sequence I bought. What boggles my mind is often people seem to cite this as an example of one of the good moments of the film.
The thing that really gets me though is that I found the actual adventure to be kind of dull and boring. There's a motorcycle chase, a car chase in the jungle, the ants, and being inside the mountain, but all of it feel so spread out. They tried to have character development in between all that, but the development wasn't nearly as great as when things slowed down in Last Crusade, and they actually used the action TO grow the relationship between Indy and his dad. This time its like they stop the action, have lame conversations between Marion, Indy, and Mutt...and then it takes a while to find the next action sequence. It just doesn't flow as well as Raiders, Temple, or Crusade.
The worst sequence they came up with was the quicksand...in which Indy and Marion get caught in a cliche, and the only thing Mutt can find for them to grab is a big old snake. I think the best way to sum this up is by quoting this guy in a trench coat who came alone to the theater when we saw this "Oh...Indy hates snakes!" Oh that's right...I forgot. Thank god this was thrown in. The actual slipping into the quicksand is slow and dull, while the whole thing is just a set up for a snake gag.
#4: The Creepy Crawlies
So Raiders had a room full of snakes. Following in that tradition Temple had a room filled with bugs. Then Crusade had a tunnel filled with rats. So how do we top it? Speilberg and Lucas landed on the ever dreadful...fire ants! First off, ants are NEVER scary, and barely even creepy. Also they do not DEVOUR PEOPLE WHOLE. The snakes, bugs, and rats were mostly there to just give a character or two (and the audience) the willies. Now they are EATING PEOPLE? And these ants seemed Super organized. Having recently just seen the Brendon Frazer Mummy films i can't help but notice the bug comparison.
In actuality, you want to give folks the willies for a small sequence like the previous films, it can't be that hard to do something in a similar vein. Spiders? I don't know, I think they really did all they could do with rats. Actually I feel that way about Last Crusade altogether...it said everything the series really had left to say. This film is like some unwanted epilogue, that adds little to the saga.
#5: Endings
So Raiders has the ultimate of ultimates in terms of great endings. After the bad guys are destroyed by opening the ark, we get that wonderful final shot of the Ark being boarded up and hidden away in a warehouse. It is one of the most brilliant ending shots of any film ever made.
Temple of Doom is admittedly less thrilling, Indy kissing the annoying girl in the film, while the kids he rescued cheer them. Its alright for that film, but it isn't iconic in any way.
Then comes Last Crusade, which ends the series on a high note, and has our hero, his friends and his father riding off into the sunset. It is exactly how you want Indiana Jones, or a film series like Indiana Jones, to end. By sailing off to more unknown adventures. It really brought a sense of closure to the whole thing. I never wanted them to make a fourth film, purely because I felt that final shot would be tainted, and that after so many years it could only be a disappointment, especially having seen Lucas' prequels to Star Wars.
How does Indy 4 end? Well first we get our characters finding the aliens, which are so generic it hurts, and the aliens loading up the villain with knowledge until she becomes a CGI gas (which is exactly how George Lucas is going to die)...then they decide to go home or something, and the mountain they reside in, turns into a spaceship and flies away. Let me get something straight: I am annoyed by anyone who uses the argument that this series has always had a supernatural element, thus you can't complain about the aliens here. I disagree, yes there has always been a supernatural element to the Indy series, but it was never quite as obnoxious and overwhelming as the CG aliens were. I also prefer ghosts and mystical things with this particular series. I know they were going for a more 50s B-movie style with this one, and not so much with the 30s serial style...but I love Indiana Jones PURELY because it evokes this 30s style. I don't feel like 50s B-movie Sci-Fi meshes well with Indy, and its jarring to say the least. It just took the series in a direction it never needed to go, and doesn't quite make sense to go.
I also feel like the Ark of the Covenant, Sankara Stones, and Holy Grail had a bit more mysticism to them, where the Crystal Skull and aliens seem less magic and more practical...like the explanation is they come from another world, whereas the other items require more mysticism. Aliens were also just tons of less interesting.
Then the final end...in which Indiana Jones getting marries Marion Ravenwood. Its like some bad fan fiction. This is that kind of ending that gives people closure they never asked for or wanted or needed. It also feels forced and not in line with the series as a whole...and who else wants to HIT Shia for trying to pop on Indiana Jones' hat. Screw you kid.
#6: Conclusion
The fourth film should not have been made. I hate that we just keep getting these fraudulent sequels and remakes these days. Like no one has any original ideas for films. In the past decade I can think of so few films of the sci-fi/fantasy/adventure/horror genre that was purely original. A long time ago, one of the first purely original fantasy films (meaning not even based on a book) was King Kong. In the 70s/80s we had Raiders of the Lost Ark, Alien, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Star Wars, Predator, Terminator, Robocop, E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Beetlejuice. There are more I'm sure...but the point is, despite there being some decent film franchises cropping up in the last decade, most had to be based on something...an old film, a book (or book series), a game, a ride, a comic, or just continuing a film series that has already died.
So basically I was just watching the good movies, and they made me think about all the problems I have with Indy 4, and really the problems are with all those good old filmmakers. Speilberg, Lucas, Carpenter, Scott, Cameron, Zemeckis, Landis...have any made a really good film lately? In the Mid to late 70s and throughout the 80s, and tapering off in the mid 90s, these guys were constantly making great entertaining films. Now if they continue to work at all, they make lame crap that uses CGI too much.
On top of that barely any young filmmakers have stepped up to take their place. Those guys grew up watching movies and serials, and wanted to make films inspired by them. They created franchises and instant classics. For the most part it seems like Hollywood is filled with people who are like me, who loved watching the films the aforementioned filmmakers made...but instead of trying to make films inspired by those filmmakers...they seem to just want to remake them, with shiny new effects and less story and character and heart.
There are a few filmmakers I really like these days. Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Edgar Wright, The Coen Bros, and Christopher Nolan. But fun-filled sci-fi/fantasy/action/adventure films like the ones made by that group from the 80s? I'm not sure anyone these days are going to step up to the plate.
#7: For the Record
Here's a list of films/franchises that I did enjoy from the past ten or fifteen years, I'll indicate which ACTUALLY were original to film, so you can see how pathetic Hollywood is when it comes to completely new ideas.
Lord of the Rings Series (books)
The Matrix Series (original)
Pirates of the Caribbean Series (Ride, but mostly Original since it has little to do with the ride)
Spider-Man Series (comics)
Nolan's Batman Series (comics)
Inception (original)
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (comic)
Star Trek (TV series)
Where the Wild Things Are (book)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (book)
Wall-E (original)
Up (original)
The Incredibles (original)
Sadly, the most original guys in Hollywood right now are Pixar, and of their 3 announced next projects, only one called "Brave" is original, the other to are sequels. That kind of disappoints me, because their track record of brilliant original work has been so great...I'd hate for them to devolve into a sle of sequels like all other companies.
#1: Opening Sequence
Each Indiana Jones film has opened with a great sequence. Raiders has the brilliant walk through the jungle, into the cave and the subsequent giant ball chase. There is really no topping Raiders in ANY of the categories I complain about for Crystal Skull. Temple of Doom opens with an old Hollywood style musical number and then moves into an exciting fight and chase scene in which Indy must get the antidote to the poison he's drank. Then Last Crusade has the lovely young Indy gets his hat sequence. All are fun and set the tone for the subsequent films. The most important point to note is that they all reintroduce Indiana Jones as a character as if this is a brand new film...not a sequel. If you never saw Raiders and you see that opening of young Indy in Last Crusade, its like its a fun sequence showing you how the guy you are about to watch came to be the thrill seeking archeologist that he is. The thing I really like is that Indy loses in all three sequences. He struggles in each, and just when he thinks he has won, he loses in some way. Raiders he gets the idol taken away by Belloq. In Temple he gets the antidote and escapes...but onto a plane owned by the man he is trying to escape. Then in Crusade he loses the very artifact he was trying to rescue. These ending moments to the sequences set the tone that our hero is a guy who can't always win. He gets the crap kicked out of him, often losing many battles but winning the war. He's the underdog. Indiana Jones is great character because of this.
So how does Kingdom of the Crystal Skull begin. Well for some reason Indy and some guy names Mac have been forced by the Soviets to find a crate featuring what is not so subtly hinted at to be an alien. Then for some unknown reason Indy ends up on a nuclear test site...and manages to save himself by getting into a fridge. Somehow the fridge is magically shot to safety even though absolutely nothing else is shot out of the explosion, and he survives, and just looks up at the big ol' CG explosion as a CG prairie dog runs into its little hole.
Frankly while the chase within the big storage area was decent, it also used Indy's whip like Spider-Man's web...making you constantly question what the hell it is latching on to. Then the nuclear test site thing is so lame and boring I can't fathom who thought it was going to work. Nothing happens on the site, except Indy running around looking for an out, before finding one that conveniently works. If more things were being shot out, MAYBE I could have suspended my disbelief, but seriously...how lucky he managed to find the ONE item that was going to be shot to safety. You can't break the rules you make within a film, and when everything else was just being destroyed, this magical fridge wasn't. It set a tone that I couldn't really buy anything that was going to follow.
#2: Characters
Indiana Jones - Harrison Ford begged Lucas and Spielberg to return to this role. After wearing both of them down, and he finally gets the chance to be in a movie that he supposedly likes, he looks just as bored and disinterested as he has in almost every film he's been in the past 10 years. What happened to the guy? Ford used to be awesome! Whether it was Indy, Han Solo, Jack Ryan, Richard Kimble...he was a great actor to watch. Lately he chooses projects that are either dull or uninteresting, and whenever I see clips he looks like he has no interest in even acting anymore. I personally felt that he didn't seem to be giving his all to Indy 4. Others seem to disagree, maybe just pleased to see him wear the hat again. I think he's too old for the role now. I felt the same way about Nimoy popping on the old ears for the latest Star Trek. Its best to bow out gracefully.
Now Ford's rather mediocre performance aside, what do we learn about his character in this one. Apparently he was a WWII hero. That seems odd to me. I don't really see him in a military fashion, especially since he'd be in his mid to late 30s, if not 40s by the time World War II rolled around for the US. But he joined up and they must've fast promoted him so he could punch some Nazis.
I don't something about the character seemed off, it didn't feel as much like I was seeing Indiana Jones again, but more like one of those direct to video knock offs made in the 80s.
Mutt Williams - Annoying greaser kid, who unsurprisingly turns out to be Indy's son. Yeah, saw that coming a million miles away, makes me actually want to hit Indy for a couple reasons: first he DIDN'T see it coming, therefore he looks like a moron, and secondly the guy is now a deadbeat dad. Thanks George Lucas.
Marion Ravenwood - Karen Allen hasn't barely acted at all for years, or if she has its been mostly in things I never saw. She clearly couldn't remember what Marion was like at all, as her character is almost nothing like she was in Raiders. It could've been any stand in woman, and it wouldn't have made a bit of difference...but to try and convince more people this is in fact a sequel, they brought back Marion. Too bad Allen had no clue what she was doing.
Irina Spalko - From her first bit of dialogue...I had trouble not thinking "MOOSE AND SQUIRREL!" I actually found Blanchett to be a very ineffective villain. She, like most communist Russians, don't come off so much as scary, as they would in the 60s, but more comical. Nazis are far more scarier than any Soviet could ever be. Her motivations also never seemed to clear to me.
#3: Tone, Style, and Effects
The film doesn't stylistically even look like the first three films. Missing is original cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, and the film looks more like the Raiders-inspired Mummy films than Raiders itself. It doesn't evoke the same feeling, and looks too modern at times
Originally Spielberg and Lucas claimed that they would use CGI minimally, and rely more on practical effects. But then they soon decided that would be too hard. This sort of brings me to another tangent: You know how old people tend to be bad with computers, getting excited by accomplishing the simplest tasks? I sort of feel like a lot of older filmmakers from the 70s and 80s sort of work the same way with new film-making tech. James Cameron shows off his blue people but has no story to his film at all. Lucas makes the messes that are the prequels and does so with tons of CG and little to no story. So I feel like all these old folks who used to make great films are over-relying on computers to make their films for them...they don't see the value in the struggles they went through to make great pictures, and now they take the lazy and easy route, overusing CG.
So here is Indiana Jones 4, and by the 10 minute mark we have already seen a CG nuclear explosion, some CG prairie dogs, and some CG boxes in the warehouse. Seriously? CG boxes? You couldn't find some BOXES? I knew from the moment the door to that warehouse opened and I could spot the CG-ness of the the place that we were in trouble.
Later we have the car chase in the Jungle, and instead of just filming a really good sequence that speaks for itself, I can spot the CG backgrounds and plants that zoom by, and I feel like I'm watching some cars on a green screen most of the time. I never felt like they were in the action the same way I do when I see the truck sequence in Raiders, or the tank sequence in Crusade. On top of that we get Mutt (a character I could barely stand anyways) swinging from tree to tree (again like Spider-Man...what the hell was up with this move and evoking Spider-Man) like Tarzan (even bellowing like him I think...and if he didn't I DEFINITELY felt like I heard it) WITH CGI MONKEYS! There wasn't a moment of this sequence I bought. What boggles my mind is often people seem to cite this as an example of one of the good moments of the film.
The thing that really gets me though is that I found the actual adventure to be kind of dull and boring. There's a motorcycle chase, a car chase in the jungle, the ants, and being inside the mountain, but all of it feel so spread out. They tried to have character development in between all that, but the development wasn't nearly as great as when things slowed down in Last Crusade, and they actually used the action TO grow the relationship between Indy and his dad. This time its like they stop the action, have lame conversations between Marion, Indy, and Mutt...and then it takes a while to find the next action sequence. It just doesn't flow as well as Raiders, Temple, or Crusade.
The worst sequence they came up with was the quicksand...in which Indy and Marion get caught in a cliche, and the only thing Mutt can find for them to grab is a big old snake. I think the best way to sum this up is by quoting this guy in a trench coat who came alone to the theater when we saw this "Oh...Indy hates snakes!" Oh that's right...I forgot. Thank god this was thrown in. The actual slipping into the quicksand is slow and dull, while the whole thing is just a set up for a snake gag.
#4: The Creepy Crawlies
So Raiders had a room full of snakes. Following in that tradition Temple had a room filled with bugs. Then Crusade had a tunnel filled with rats. So how do we top it? Speilberg and Lucas landed on the ever dreadful...fire ants! First off, ants are NEVER scary, and barely even creepy. Also they do not DEVOUR PEOPLE WHOLE. The snakes, bugs, and rats were mostly there to just give a character or two (and the audience) the willies. Now they are EATING PEOPLE? And these ants seemed Super organized. Having recently just seen the Brendon Frazer Mummy films i can't help but notice the bug comparison.
In actuality, you want to give folks the willies for a small sequence like the previous films, it can't be that hard to do something in a similar vein. Spiders? I don't know, I think they really did all they could do with rats. Actually I feel that way about Last Crusade altogether...it said everything the series really had left to say. This film is like some unwanted epilogue, that adds little to the saga.
#5: Endings
So Raiders has the ultimate of ultimates in terms of great endings. After the bad guys are destroyed by opening the ark, we get that wonderful final shot of the Ark being boarded up and hidden away in a warehouse. It is one of the most brilliant ending shots of any film ever made.
Temple of Doom is admittedly less thrilling, Indy kissing the annoying girl in the film, while the kids he rescued cheer them. Its alright for that film, but it isn't iconic in any way.
Then comes Last Crusade, which ends the series on a high note, and has our hero, his friends and his father riding off into the sunset. It is exactly how you want Indiana Jones, or a film series like Indiana Jones, to end. By sailing off to more unknown adventures. It really brought a sense of closure to the whole thing. I never wanted them to make a fourth film, purely because I felt that final shot would be tainted, and that after so many years it could only be a disappointment, especially having seen Lucas' prequels to Star Wars.
How does Indy 4 end? Well first we get our characters finding the aliens, which are so generic it hurts, and the aliens loading up the villain with knowledge until she becomes a CGI gas (which is exactly how George Lucas is going to die)...then they decide to go home or something, and the mountain they reside in, turns into a spaceship and flies away. Let me get something straight: I am annoyed by anyone who uses the argument that this series has always had a supernatural element, thus you can't complain about the aliens here. I disagree, yes there has always been a supernatural element to the Indy series, but it was never quite as obnoxious and overwhelming as the CG aliens were. I also prefer ghosts and mystical things with this particular series. I know they were going for a more 50s B-movie style with this one, and not so much with the 30s serial style...but I love Indiana Jones PURELY because it evokes this 30s style. I don't feel like 50s B-movie Sci-Fi meshes well with Indy, and its jarring to say the least. It just took the series in a direction it never needed to go, and doesn't quite make sense to go.
I also feel like the Ark of the Covenant, Sankara Stones, and Holy Grail had a bit more mysticism to them, where the Crystal Skull and aliens seem less magic and more practical...like the explanation is they come from another world, whereas the other items require more mysticism. Aliens were also just tons of less interesting.
Then the final end...in which Indiana Jones getting marries Marion Ravenwood. Its like some bad fan fiction. This is that kind of ending that gives people closure they never asked for or wanted or needed. It also feels forced and not in line with the series as a whole...and who else wants to HIT Shia for trying to pop on Indiana Jones' hat. Screw you kid.
#6: Conclusion
The fourth film should not have been made. I hate that we just keep getting these fraudulent sequels and remakes these days. Like no one has any original ideas for films. In the past decade I can think of so few films of the sci-fi/fantasy/adventure/horror genre that was purely original. A long time ago, one of the first purely original fantasy films (meaning not even based on a book) was King Kong. In the 70s/80s we had Raiders of the Lost Ark, Alien, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Star Wars, Predator, Terminator, Robocop, E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Beetlejuice. There are more I'm sure...but the point is, despite there being some decent film franchises cropping up in the last decade, most had to be based on something...an old film, a book (or book series), a game, a ride, a comic, or just continuing a film series that has already died.
So basically I was just watching the good movies, and they made me think about all the problems I have with Indy 4, and really the problems are with all those good old filmmakers. Speilberg, Lucas, Carpenter, Scott, Cameron, Zemeckis, Landis...have any made a really good film lately? In the Mid to late 70s and throughout the 80s, and tapering off in the mid 90s, these guys were constantly making great entertaining films. Now if they continue to work at all, they make lame crap that uses CGI too much.
On top of that barely any young filmmakers have stepped up to take their place. Those guys grew up watching movies and serials, and wanted to make films inspired by them. They created franchises and instant classics. For the most part it seems like Hollywood is filled with people who are like me, who loved watching the films the aforementioned filmmakers made...but instead of trying to make films inspired by those filmmakers...they seem to just want to remake them, with shiny new effects and less story and character and heart.
There are a few filmmakers I really like these days. Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Edgar Wright, The Coen Bros, and Christopher Nolan. But fun-filled sci-fi/fantasy/action/adventure films like the ones made by that group from the 80s? I'm not sure anyone these days are going to step up to the plate.
#7: For the Record
Here's a list of films/franchises that I did enjoy from the past ten or fifteen years, I'll indicate which ACTUALLY were original to film, so you can see how pathetic Hollywood is when it comes to completely new ideas.
Lord of the Rings Series (books)
The Matrix Series (original)
Pirates of the Caribbean Series (Ride, but mostly Original since it has little to do with the ride)
Spider-Man Series (comics)
Nolan's Batman Series (comics)
Inception (original)
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (comic)
Star Trek (TV series)
Where the Wild Things Are (book)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (book)
Wall-E (original)
Up (original)
The Incredibles (original)
Sadly, the most original guys in Hollywood right now are Pixar, and of their 3 announced next projects, only one called "Brave" is original, the other to are sequels. That kind of disappoints me, because their track record of brilliant original work has been so great...I'd hate for them to devolve into a sle of sequels like all other companies.
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