Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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The problem with Predator is that they want to expand the lore but went with the "planet of hats" trope where they are a race of hunters.
So when they try to show anything more than the Predator hunting it comes off as lazy and unsatisfying writing.
It'd be better if they started dropping hints that the ones we see are aristocratic safari hunters engaged in illegal poaching. "Dutch the Human" actually has a big fandom on their homeworld for killing one.
Make a movie where a group of Predators comes to earth, then mid movie the authorities show up to try to arrest them, and then the humans are stuck in the middle of the unexplained chaos.
The Terminator series has a similar problem. You can keep going with humanity vs Skynet, but the terminators start feeling shoehorned in. Skynet should have more than one trick.
In general action movies suffered from competition with video games. As the home gaming experience got better movies couldn't compete with the over the top action experience.
This was exacerbated by a push to strictly enforce R ratings and limit the marketing of R films. The fun gunplay and boobs films stopped being made. They became serious adult films or nerfed PG-13 adventures.
The other problem is that in the CGI age filmmakers became convinced that everything had to be frame perfect. But no one who is enjoying a movie is actually going to care about minor visual problems you can see in slow motion. Schwarzenegger movies are a great example of this. In Commando stuntmen are launched into the air when he throws grenades and you can see the catapults launching them if you look closely. In T2 you can clearly tell stunt doubles are doing the bike scenes if you look closely. No one cared.
Hollywood was always the king of big budget action spectacles and they are easy to dub into a new language. Other countries couldn't really compete directly so they went with things with more local flavour. Hong Kong does good action scenes but there are usually some plot points that are harder to understand as a westerner. China has been making some patriotic action movies lately that with some over the top depictions of Americans that end up being hilarious.
Lindsay Ellis did a great review of Showgirls.
Starship Troopers is actually very interesting from a CW standpoint. Verhoven grew up in Nazi occupied Netherlands. He always had a guilty soft spot for the Nazi propaganda aesthetic. After Showgirls bombed he went to the studio to pitch an idea about fascist humans fighting communist bugs. The studio thought it sounded like Starship Troopers and got the rights to Starship Troopers. Verhoven tried to read the book, didn't like it or finish it, and let his screenwriter work on adapting it.
As a result there's a big split where the left thinks that the humans are clearly supposed to be fascist. But the actual movie depicts a functional society with suffrage limited to those who complete military service.
I kind of think of Starship Troopers in the same vein as Fight Club. They are both obviously parodies, and as a matter of actual fact are both intended to be parodies, but accidentally make strong enough points (or present them convincingly enough) in a few respects that some people will watch them and interpret them straight anyways. I would say more but this is the Fun thread :)
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