Yes, it does feel like Hollywood is no longer the creative powerhouse it once was decades ago. Hollywood has always relied on sequels, reboots, and remakes since the beginning, but there was a healthy mix and sequels rarely got past 3 or 4. Nowadays it's rare to find a non-indie film from the big studios that's big budget but not some kind of existing franchise. That to me is the biggest tragedy.
The next biggest is the abuse of CGI. It's just too easy to do exactly what filmmakers think they want. Practical effects aren't just better because they look more impressive, they're better because they're so fucking hard to make impressive. Filmmakers really had to do it right, think it through, jump through hurdles, or work around limitations to making their effects convincing. Nothing is better for an artist than limitations he must work around. Today's advanced but soulless CGI seems all too detached from the human limitations that foster creativity. It's too omnipotent, the barrier to competence to low. Unchallenging for filmmakers, unchallenging for audiences.
But there are also other factors. I feel like some self reflection is in order for some people in this thread.
Lots of you (me included) were young, in your formative, impressionable years during the 80s and 90s. You are no longer the same person today, and your worldview has changed. Your tastes have changed. For many reason relating to time, no movie will impact you the same way as a movie did when you were young. Movies of today won't ever give you the feeling of movies from yesterday. The taste of your youth, your childhood, your teens. Back when things that made an impression will bond with you for life. You know too much, you've seen too much. You're jaded, old man.
You can use all the external justifications you want, the objective measures, the technical and artistic measures, but that's not what it's really about. It's really more about growing old. It happens to everyone. Every generation is like this. That's what nostalgia is. If you don't think this is true for movies, you should be aware that once upon a time, film critics and movie buffs thumbed their noses at the likes of Jurassic Park, Terminator, and all the "classics" people love today, precisely because of their focus on technological wizardry, abundance of action, and light story. I remember reading the reviews. Reading periodicals. Journals. Critics ranged from dismissive of them as popcorn flicks with no substance, unimpressed, to holding the absurd notion that "no great films were made after the 1970s" (paraphrased). People just can't get over themselves. You are what shaped you. It's in our nature. No matter what reason you come up with for why old films are greater it comes back to what convinced you was great as a kid. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
After all, what are all these 80s/90s blockbusters if not just updated torchbearers of sci fi and fantasty B-movies of the 50s and 60s, and predecessors of today's supposed CGI trash? They most certainly are not the "true cinema" that Scorsese so adamantly defends against superhero movies. He too, is shaped by the things that impressed upon him as a youth, the things he worshipped. It just didn't happen to be the same stuff Spielberg and Zemeckis worshipped. And if it's true for them, it's true for the rest of us.
I love 80s and 90s blockbusters (which is all we're really discussing in this thread since it gets way messier beyond that). It was a rare confluence of greatness when the new wave of genius filmmakers from the 70s at the peak of their powers intersected with peak sfx from over half a century of refinment, at a time when America was at the top of the world and and movies didn't have to compete with social media in the cultural zeitgeist. But that time will only ever be special for me, and perhaps only my generation will understand why or how films of that era are great. I'm sure that many kids today think CGI a respected craft like any other, that using the same franchise name for 10+ entries is no different from slapping on new names for 10 similar genre films, or that hamfisted awkward dialogue is more "approachable" than the witty banter and one liners of our time...
Then one day in their middle age, their old age, in their social circles, their future way of rating movies, they'll reminisce about how the CGI in Avengers was so much more sophisticated, craftsmanlike than the (insert future film sfx technology) used to craft (insert future film sellout megafranchise). And we'll be too dead in our graves to tell them otherwise.
Sorry for the essay. I feel strongly about a lot of things. Politics, the world, America, my heritage... but these days I'm too tired to engage in them or any of you except when it comes to movies. I'll never tire of movies. And I hope you won't too.
