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| IGN.com |
10 years ago, the theater experience was one of the things
that I looked forward to the absolute most out of summer vacation. Today, all
I’ve learned is that eventually, we all truly do have to grow up.
Hollywood is now on roughly in its 3 summer rut in a row and
while the agony of blockbuster hollowness and the desperation of the
creatively bankrupt didn’t dominate quite as painfully as the last 2 summers, the
perception of 2017’s lackluster season was bolstered by a surprisingly robust
spring quarter that delivered worthwhile features for every audience under the
sun, full of the sort of bold, daring, risk taking, crowd pleasing, creator
driven, filmmaking magic that once made
the summer so great to begin with.
What was more fascinating to watch this summer were not so
much the hits and misses as the phenomena that rose to prominence. So rather
than take a straight forward look at what individual movies worked and didn’t
work this year, I thought it’d be fun to roast and revere trends that appear to
be set into motion for better or worse.
Fall of the Cinematic Universe
5 years after “The Avengers” came in and changed the face of
Hollywood marketing forever, the industry at large has made the decision to
play follow the leader and thus far it hasn’t been panning out well.
While Fox’s handling of the “X-Men” franchise and Warner
Bros. Godzilla and Kong fueled “Monsterverse” have proven worthwhile hits with
audiences beyond the realm of standard cinematic superhero flair, many studios
attempts to replicate that success seem to finally be nailing home that
audiences don’t give a shit about grander scopes and settings if they don’t
give a shit about the characters and stories that inhabit that said settings.
Universal’s “Dark Universe” experiment has come out of the
starting gate in flames thanks to the critically lambasted “The Mummy”
struggling to break even with a hackneyed laughably bad production that comes
off as an unintentional parody of the shared continuity trope.
Yet as bad as that film most certainly was, perhaps the most
egregious victim of this turning point in audience sensibilities is the Michael
Bay helmed “Transformers: The Last Knight,” featuring revelations regarding the
historical relationship between Transformers and human society as a means of
kickstarting a slew of spinoffs that can feed back into the longer branching
“narrative” of the movie’s own foregone slew of never ending sequels.
By this point, the critic proof franchise would have
appeared to have had this on lock but apparently Bay’s line of nonsensical and
ludicrously insulting idiocy has been officially crossed as the film only made
half the amount of its similarly panned predecessor, with reports of the
worldwide audiences that it was most banking on walking out of the film before
ending in laughter.
With Sony’s determination to never learn its lessons and
Warner Bros. desperate to make the DC Extended Universe to mixed results, only
time will tell when the clock runs out on the pretenders to the throne of the format
but for now, audiences are speaking with their wallets and telling the industry
that the gimmicks alone aren’t going to be enough... for now.
Fall of Sony
Speaking of the endeavors of Sony, years of watching the
growing seams have come to fruition, revealing a company that has gradually
decayed into a brainless money pit helmed where creative passions go to die, helmed
by executives given clear warning of the incoming ship sinking iceberg yet
childishly choosing embrace their own closed off reality until the consequences
of failure are very much in sight and in mind.
Financially saved only by its uncharacteristically low
budget for a Hollywood animated film, “The Emoji Movie” received a critical thrashing
much harsher than anything even its most vocal critics were actually expecting
for being hollow, passionless, calculated, and a general waste of effort, time
and resources combined with a mildly insidious marketing campaign that’s tone
deaf to the social needs of the audience that it commercially preys upon.
This is slowly becoming the key production characteristic of
a company that seems more obsessed with making expensive commercials rather
than palatable stories, while missing what should be the obvious idiocy and lunacy
of pumping tens to hundreds of millions of dollars into advertisement for a 2
hour advertisement that cost tens to hundreds of millions to produce.
The real tragedy in this however, is all of the good
material they’re wasting along the way.
After trying and failing to ride high on the allegedly
progressive casting of Idris Elba as The Gunslinger in their high profile
adaptation of “The Dark Tower” (never mind the substantial weight behind the
man as a means to simply sell the picture), when faced with a box office dud
that clearly lacked any sort of understanding or respect of the complex source
material resulting in a film with no viable audience, Sony opted to deflect criticism
in favor of promoting a sequel standing on questionable footing and a
television project on equally weak foundation to promote the film that nobody’s
watching.
That utter waste of material that could easily lend itself
well to visual media with the right sensibilities is what makes the repeated
failure of this studio so much more painful than karmically enjoyable to watch
but with a Spider-Man spinoff over the horizon, about a villain historically
tied to the character’s identity to be set in a production completely divorced
from the character in question, for a franchise film that they don’t have any
merchandising rights to that’s already behind its rushed production schedule,
things are unlikely to change anytime soon.
As several people have been quick to point out about Sony’s
recent track record, the best movie they’ve made in the last couple of years is
a film that they paid outsiders to make for them; a movie that said outsiders actually
have the merchandising rights to.
Authentic Feminism
Last year, the 2016 reboot of “Ghostbusters” twisted its ill
conceived marketing campaign around gender identity politics that failed to
contain an iota of the complexity that discussion of its subject matter
properly deserved in a childishly opportunistic political play that utilized
legitimate issues of background representation in the arts as a shield for critical
deflection of a bloated and misguided production with lukewarm audience
reception that only succeeded in putting an unlikely franchise at the heart of conflict
between polarizing sociological commentators with inflated egos, who now have a
permanent food source to fuel their nuance lacking us vs. them mentality.
Once more, Sony’s insidious marketing of an inferior product
managed to not only hurt a beloved franchise and damage a noble cause but bust
wide open an ugly can of worms that no culture with an internet connection will
ever escape.
It’s especially cringe worthy to see such a backfire when
the following summer would carry a much more sincere crop of blockbusters.
Excellent cast chemistry, a tight screenplay and strong visionary
direction, “Wonder Woman” not only presents a strong story centered on a
definitively female icon free of pedantic heavy handed finger wagging that all
audiences can rally behind and offers the DCEU with its first bonafide hit but
succeeds in pulling off the misguided “god walking amongst humanity” narrative
bungled in “Man of Steel” and is a sincere, imaginative, and refreshing reminder
of the themes superheroes stand for, what makes them so inspiring and endurant
and how that inspiration led the genre to evolve in the first place.
Furthermore, although I wasn’t the hugest fan of “Atomic
Blonde,” it’s undeniable cleverness and misleading marketing, leaning on the
exploitation side, made for a potentially entertaining espionage action flick
that would have been a pleasure to see soar had it carried itself with just a
little bit more self confidence in its ambitions.
The cinematic output of 2017 across the board has been
something of a mixed bag but as painful as the same hollow blockbusters can
get, I can at least give the year credit thus far for not being a total bore
like the last 2 years have been.
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