Movies in Our Time

Dj vu! Every time, in every place, all the movies give me Dj vu!
And its not even the good kind of Dj vu like getting get two free cookies
instead of one. I look around at the movie posters and see The Avengers
again, I see Terminator, again, Fast and Furious, Hunger Games, and The
Amazing Spider-Man 2 (which no one asked for) again. There is nothing new,
nothing fresh. Everything I see is unoriginal, uninspired, and it seems like the
movie industry has gone sterile. The problem isnt that all the movies are
bad, there is the occasional diamond in the rough such as Christopher
Nolens Dark Knight series, or the Harry Potter series, but this is a rarity at
best. A majority of these Re-imaginings as Tim Burton called them, these
reboots, novels to films, and sequels, are more often than not a slap in the
face of the men and women who created the source material. The movie
industry has fallen into a vicious cycle of repetition by constantly polluting
theaters with reboots, adaptations, and sequels.
Its better! Its newer! We have CGI explosions now! Reboots are the
fill in the blank portion of the film industry. Come see the critically acclaimed
movie _____ (place old movie title here)____, starring the same actors, now 30
years older! The movie franchises are running out of ideas fast, and their
most recent number one solution is to simply take an old movie and do it
again with better CGI. Actor Michael Beck once asked, I often wonder why
people remake movies. Is there just [such] a lack of imagination out there
that they can't come up with an original idea? I sit in the theatres waiting
for my movie and I see the commercials for such movies as Poltergeist,
Terminator, The Amazing Spider-Man, basically nothing original. Even though
these movies try to stay true to the originals, they rarely do them any
justice. In an issue of The Baltimore Sun, Chris Kalitnbach wrote about how
movie remakes can destroy good memories of the originals, and how he can
never enjoy the originals now like he did when he was a kid (Sometimes,
They're Best Left in the Memory). This is all too often the truth of movie
remakes. In the most recent release of Godzilla, Godzilla himself was only a
minor character in his self-titled movie. Instead, all but 15 minutes of it was a
soap opera about human characters and a monster that wasnt even
Godzilla. The so called remake wasnt even about the character in the
original. The movie industry has an onus to continue cranking out films, but
reusing old ideas will only hurt them in the long run. The more I go to the
movies, the more disappointed I become because I leave with only
frustration as the last reboot. While there are people who still pay to see the
duplicate films, they too will eventually tire of the repetition and money
flushed at the movies will (hopefully) start to decline.
Why read books now that you can see its new major motion picture?
Come on, its got special content not relating to the books plot! Its got a
love triangle! AND NOW IN 3D! Can your Kindle do 3D? I thought not.
Novelist Walter Kirn explains more thoroughly Here's how adaptation works
- almost everything in the movie is in the book in some form. But it's as

though the deck has been completely reshuffled and some of the cards have
been assigned different values, some of the fours have been made into
jacks, and some of the jacks have been made into twos. This reshuffling of
plot priorities is one of most original ways that industries are creating movies
today. I still use the term original here very loosely because while the film is
new to the screen, it isnt new to the audience. There tend to be fewer
criticisms regarding movie adaptations. That is until people actually go see
them. These movies are constantly letting down book fans everywhere
because they either patently cant put every glorious moment of a novel into
a movie or they replace those moments with new ones. In a Special to the
times, Mark Olson wrote about how many directors purposefully dont read
the books before turning them into films, and how he did this to give himself
more freedom over what he was writing (And yet will it rise?). If they could
live up to the expectations of the readers they would be worth it, but there
are catastrophic failures such as John Carter, Series of Unfortunate events,
and Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. Some of the characters didnt
look as they were described in the book, large pieces of the story were left
out, and overall it seemed as though the people who made the movie didnt
care how accurately they depicted the story and simply rationalized it with
unnecessary offal. These types of movies will also damage the money intake
of the theatres as diehard novel fans greet them with obloquy, because they
arent ones who are fond of watching their favorite books be put to shame by
ignoble recreations. While it seems like the most straight forward route to
take when there are no original ideas, movies based on books still have a
tendency to disappoint.
Of all the ways to stretch one idea into as much money as possible,
sequels are the worst. As actress Carly Schroeder said, Everyone will always
remember the first movie, and they will always compare it with the second
one. Besides the fact that a lot of movies that get sequels definitely dont
require them, the creators dont ever seem to understand when enough is
enough. They give us threes and fours and so forth to the point where the
audience finds themselves wondering if they should take it seriously, or if the
movies are just parodies. Take Jaws for example. How many times can a
giant, blood thirsty shark get killed off before its too far? According to the
makers of Jaws you can do it three times and throw in one Jaws the Revenge
for good measure, just to make sure that shark is nice and dead. While they
can apparently fabricate four different ways to kill a monster, they dont
seem to understand that people begin to find it ridiculous to pay to watch
the same plot line and shark puppet again and again. The opposite problem
that some creators have is trying to make the sequel too different and
consequently make it into a labyrinth. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 had three
villains all in the same film, making for a movie that dragged until they could
finally reach a good ending point.

The main problem with mainstream movie media today is the

audience. We live among hoi polloi who cannot keep an attention span on a
movie or appreciate an original plot, and the more meaningful movies suffer
from this. While there is clearly a problem with the movies produced, we as
the audience allow those people in Hollywood to make these movies every
time we pay to see one of those remakes. Maybe one day, we will no longer
have movies like Transformers VII (or whatever one theyre on now), but until
then, due to pecuniary motives there will always be unnecessary movies
clogging a theater near you.

Works Cited:
23, December. "And Yet Will It Rise?" Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times,
23 Dec. 2004.
Web. 17 Nov. 2015.
"Famous Quotes." BrainyQuote. Xplore, n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2015.
07, August. "Sometimes, They're Best Left in the Memory." Los Angeles
Times. Los Angeles
Times, 07 Aug. 2001. Web. 17 Nov. 2015.