The Decline of Modern Movies

Thomas Ou ‘24
EE Managing Editor

In the fall of 2019, Martin Scorsese, the director of the critically acclaimed movie, The Irishman, inflamed the internet after an interview with Empire Magazine. When asked for his opinion on the current state of cinema, particularly the popular Marvel Cinematic Universe, Scorsese told the reporters that “superhero movies are [akin] to theme park rides,” a grotesque degradation of a once beautiful media.

In a subsequent article published in the New York Times, Scorsese lamented that movies are no longer “the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being”, but rather shallow entertainment “devoid of genuine revelation, mystery, emotional danger, and risk”.

Amidst the social media cesspool of paradoxical arguments and inflammatory rhetoric that followed in the wake of these interviews, I found myself growing more enamored with Scorsese’s claims. 

In two generations, we have gone from thought-provoking, visual masterpieces like The Godfather Trilogy, Seven Samurai, Citizen Kane, and Raiders of the Lost Ark that each, in their unique way, advanced the cinematic medium and artistic human achievement, to modern garbage like Transformers, Fifty Shades of Grey, Emoji Movie, the live action version of Mulan, and countless others that achieve little more than fueling the already bloated societal indolence.

That is not to say that these movies hold no inherent value; it is as Scorsese had suggested, that modern movies are amusement parks where I can anticipate, laugh, and sometimes shed a tear in good fun with friends. However, I seldom find myself salivating at the prospect of seeing another or deriving any deeper meaning from them. The movie industry has been debased to a deluge of detritus and, by analyzing the economic and social drivers behind movie making, I can pinpoint this problem to the studios’ fraught attempts to appeal to a modern audience. 

In this capitalistic society driven by consumerism, the main objective of movie studios is to generate the greatest net sum between the cost of their investments and the end product. On its own, this is not a cause for concern; healthy competition is the breeding ground for innovation and creativity. However, the profit in film-making does not stem from ingenuity but rather uniformity. Every element of the movie business has been carefully crafted to produce regurgitated recipes rather than something spectacular because people have gotten completely complacent with mediocrity and this mediocrity sells. 

Firstly, movies are frequently made solely to preserve the film rights to their characters. The lucrative industry of mass-produced toys and merchandise depends on movie relevance, giving birth to freakish anomalies like a Hellraiser movie filmed in two weeks, Spiderman reboots comparable to the number of British Prime ministers the past year, and a Jason Bourne movie without Jason Bourne.

These superficial movies forego the notion that characters ultimately operate as artistic apparatus that aid storytelling. Instead, they are treated as monetizable base assets optimized to spawn devout followings. There is no fault in starting recognizable brands with captivating characters; however, the endless bombardment of hastily-made, indistinguishable movies required to maintain public relevancy has left the film industry a desolate wasteland of doppelganger dregs. 

Admittedly, there are exceptions, even superhero ones, to this drought of satisfying media: Spirited Away, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Joker, Logan, and Scorsese’s own The Irishman are all fantastic films in their own rights. However, these gems remain extreme outliers in a deteriorating and oversaturated industry, with most people just not having the time to search for these revolutionary experiences. 

It is also important to acknowledge the changing market resulting from the rise of foreign audiences in the past decade. For a movie to find financial success, it must be translatable across various cultures. Intellectually and morally complex, dialogue-heavy plots like There will be Blood and Dr. Strangelove fail to accomplish this, but over-the-top, CGI-saturated action movies with pronounced themes such as “good guys versus bad guys” will find great success. Character brands already have established images visually translatable across cultures without the need for intricate plots. A Walther PPK, a web shooter, or a red cape can instantly engulf an audience into a fantastical world. This widespread recognition catalyzes an onslaught of animated and superhero franchises that handle unfulfilling sequels, after convoluted prequels, after nonsensical adaptations that amount to barebones images with simple themes understandable to anyone of any culture. 

Largely due to financial constraints of moviemaking and a modern environment where everything competes for consumers’ attention, modern filmmaking has become a wellspring of repetitive trite garbage that pushes whatever talent is in the industry into narrow, predictable storytelling avenues for mass appeal.

There is a silver lining to this: top talents flee to Netflix and HBO where they feel more rewarded and creatively free, leading to an increase of top quality TV series. However, this is a double-edged sword for film lovers because movie studios are left with second stringers making second-rate movies and lowering viewer engagement and profit. Ultimately, the avarice of studios and the slothfulness of audiences to act creates the world of mediocrity we live in today. 

Since mediocrity in originality can be forgiven in an economical sense, the true tragedy of movie-making lies in storytelling, which has societal roots. The emergence of social media has deprived humanity, more specifically youth, of their sense of self, transforming them into gluttons for the rush of adrenaline they get when watching mindless action.

As a generation, we have deteriorated into a sad collection of depressed degenerates and envious perpetual adolescents that are incapable of perceiving, let alone enjoying, the intelligent and complex topics that define meaningful stories. At its core, storytelling has become one-dimensional so it can be digested by this increasingly emotionally-stunted and dopamine-inflated society. 

The lessons found in the vast majority of modern blockbusters can be boiled down to a couple of simple, self-evident, and worthless messages: “a team is stronger than an individual” (Avengers) and “if you believe in yourself, you will succeed” (Justice League). While there is diversity in themes and context between releases, movies fundamentally repeat the same messages that we have been repeatedly told and have internalized since childhood. We already know these axioms to be true; there is no need for twenty movies a year to remind us. 

These overarching themes follow predictable, three-act structures that are all largely rewritten and simplified versions of Aristotle’s Poetics and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. They lack inspiration and utterly fail at challenging existing preconceptions.

Instead, as Scorsese says: “the pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands and are designed as variations on a finite number of themes”.

The point is made clearer when breakout movies, such as Black Panther, come along and are heralded as some sort of empyrean, seminal achievement. Representation aside, it follows the same simple structure and is completely devoid of potentially interesting concepts such as the responsibilities of those in power to their brothers without. These movies are simply icing on a bland cake: hinting at complexity but offering nothing even approaching substance. The sad thing is, a hero’s journey arc can have nuance when depth through intelligent dialogue and unexpected plot devices are added in. Fight Club, for example, takes the hero’s journey and flips it completely, turning the protagonist into a schizophrenic terrorist leader. 

The worst thing to come out of modern storywriting is the excessive use of bathos to appeal to the audience. Eighteenth century poet Alexander Pope coined the phrase bathos in his essay Peri Bathous or the Art of Sinking in Poetry. He describes this technique as going from a serious event to something trivial for the sake of making readers laugh. Pope believed that this debases poetry and prevents the art form from becoming something exceptional and transcendent.

I find it poetic, then, that he did not live to see the state of modern cinema. Today’s movies, varying in subject, matter, and function, contain an amount of jokes equal to or even more so than those found in dedicated comedies. These bits of humor appear as easily translatable, visual gags, as if the writers and directors are terrified at the prospects of an audience actually taking their story seriously. 

Marvel movies seem to have mastered this art of unsatisfying subversions; we are often placed in outlandish situations such as when Bruce Banner, a world renowned scientist and hardened superhero, trips over into true Looney Tunes fashion during the buildup to a deciding battle (see: Avengers-Infinity War).

That is like having Michael Corleone finishing his satanic journey into becoming the new Godfather by loudly breaking wind as he renounces the devil. The popularity and prominence of bathos is due to humor being held at a higher regard than art for most viewers. The sad truth is that a majority of people are much more likely to go see a film if I were to highlight all the jokes, laughs, and dumb fun I had while watching it, as opposed to the appraise I would have given to its cinematography, acting, and story. 

Bathos is used at the expense of pathos; however, the appeal to genuine emotions is no longer the breadwinner of moviemaking because most people have grown too weak to properly handle sophisticated storytelling. When the television gets turned on, our minds get turned off. Stories are told and retold again under the same delusions of complexity caused by the hunger of a disconnected society for meaningless media. Our strive for progression has only caused us to regress.

Not only are modern movies simplistic and repetitive, they lack the necessary resonance to achieve any kind of meaning or engagement. There is little more damaging to the art of cinema than the push for mediocrity, the reliance on repetitive themes and structures, and the excessive use of Bathos. There are also other arguments and aspects to consider; I can go on for ages discussing how politically minded executives are cramming “progressive” political agendas into modern movies, but sadly, this commentary must be saved for a future essay. Ricky Gervais is already doing a sterling job of making a laughingstock out of the “woke” Hollywood elites. As for now, all I can say is that agendas should not be shoehorned in at the expense of a good story.

One might look at the improvements in CGI and camera quality over the years, but in the end, the story comes first. The orcs in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit may have looked like a low budget Game of Thrones reject, but it was redeemed by Tolkien’s timeless story and Martin Freeman’s acting.

Stories are a form of communication and they are, in some way, shape, or form, edifying. Modern movies have become as far removed from ideal stories as one can be; they are a shell that ultimately amount to nothing. They are shallow fun that goes nowhere and leaves you with nothing of value. Sure, I still feel the rush to see the Avengers band together to defeat Thanos as Alan Silvestri’s music swells, but ultimately there is little more than the fleeting high of fast-paced action. 

This is not to say that large budget blockbusters cannot be interesting. The Dark Knight is about resolving who you think you are versus who you need to be. The Empire Strikes Back centers around how the evil we see in others is just as much inside us. The Lord of the Rings is about how meekness, sacrifice, and brotherly fellowship can overcome the vices of power and greed.

I cannot help but be affected by these themes when they are expertly presented, but most modern movies simply do not attempt to do that. They are just commercials for the next revenue-generating, generic adventure. Movies just promote a brand that, once enough people have been to the cinema and experienced, as Scorsese said, a “visual theme park ride,” can be turned into an actual theme park somewhere in Orlando, Florida. So it is about time to skip your next Netflix binge of Avengers Part Nine: The Secret Age of Infinite Multiversus and go and read War and Peace instead.