Israel Daramola

At some point, the summer movie season became exhausting. Everything about it feels relentless, repetitive and terribly loud. These days the summer movie season no longer exists in what we call summer; it’s seeped its way into all the other seasons with its sequels, prequels, origin stories, remakes, reboots, reboots of sequels and so on. Sometime around the mid-2000s, nerd culture became mainstream and anything related to a comic book, action figure, video game or board game started getting made. Now this is always happening, but what’s different now is that film studios seem to be exclusively in the business of pumping out quantity in order to keep up with a changing media landscape, and the easiest way to produce quantity is to make property that’s already available. Remember that stretch armstrong you love so much? It’s gonna be a movie starring Jon Hamm. That game Jenga? That’ll be out in theaters in 2019, and I know you love Cats! The Musical, well get ready to love it with Anne Hatheway in 2018.

I write this after just getting home from Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, the sequel to the prequel Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes released in 2011. It was fine, I guess (be on the lookout for a review on Friday), but like all the other movies like this, it was just draining. The plots don’t change very much between these movies: there’s a hero who’s battling an inner turmoil, there’s always an origin tale, there’s always long-winded speechifying, there’s always a bad guy who planned to get caught and there’s always a city being completely destroyed.

The worst offense though is that none of these movies ever really end: they’re placeholders for other movies coming soon. These movies are rarely standalone, they end with some sort of tease for the next one and they probably have something at the end of the credits just for the fanboy enthusiasts who will these projects to life. Hollywood doesn’t seem particularly interested in telling stories anymore, they just want to make a product. An easily manufactured product with commercial viability. More and more, as time passes, movies that told new stories were given a chance. Studios would finance smaller fare tailored for a specific crowd. Now those smaller movies are most likely being played on VOD and the majority of romantic or slapstick comedies and dramas are being pushed to the fringes because America needs their movies to play well in China.

Smaller studios like A24 are doing their best by throwing money at more experimental filmmakers and filmmakers with a distinct voice to make their film and release it to theaters. Most recently, they distributed films like Obvious Child, The Rover and my favorite film of the year so far Under The Skin. But a few studios can only do so much. Marvel studios alone has shown no interest in slowing down or even making interesting movies. They’re making product at a high frequency for both movies and television. Michael Bay is having bags of money thrown at him to remake all your favorite 80s products louder and bigger. Go on any film geek site and you’ll see lists upon lists of soon to come films; sometimes just the listing of a movie set to come out in 2017 is more exciting than the actual movie. Everything now is about what’s next, who’ll make it and who’ll be in it. It’s pure fan wish fulfillment, the movie is almost beside the point.

It’s an exhausting task to keep up with all of these movies and an even more frustrating one to sit through them. For every one that tries to have a voice and a real style, there are a million that use the Chris Nolan darkness filter. Speaking of which, at some point around Batman Begins, it was decided that all of these movies have to be so serious and so gritty and drab and full of so much faux-intellectualism. Every movie is a statement on something political or a catastrophic event; none of these movies want to be fun. This is silly. We already have to sit through a movie based on a rare 1980s anime that 5 people were into when it came out, at the very least make a fun movie. And if you’re going to go the serious route, get a real filmmaker and not a gun for hire. There are nights when I wish that Ang Lee’s Hulk had worked, because then maybe you’d have artsier directors using these properties to make something a little more fascinating. Currently, these movies just feel tailored for a short attention span; meant for nothing more than a reaction of “that’s neat. Can’t wait for the next one.”