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Friday Fun Thread for July 14, 2023

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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I’ll join you in not being nearly so into action movies as I used to be. TBH I suspect it’s that these movies are simply bad: illogical, no real coherent plot, terrible character development, and really, what exists of plot and characters is barely brought up in transit between highly choreographed and improbable CGI heavy fight scenes that make no sense.

I am sick of all modern media in general. Music, movies, tv, comics etc everything feels worse than before and I enjoy reading older things more now it seems. We have an overabundance of entertainment at this point, that alongwith internet surfing probably just raises ones expectations enormously.

I think because of the CGI available and the ability to do showstopper stunts, more action movies seem to skimp on writing. Star Wars: A New Hope really had no choice but to be well written simply because the special effects available in 1977 were not all that great and were much more expensive (because they were all practical effects requiring miniatures and matte painting and sets that actually blew up. If you didn’t have a strong plot and interesting characters, rotoscoped swords and miniature ships weren’t going to save it. Leía, Luke, and Han made it. The characters came alive, and you wanted them to escape, you wanted the Death Star to explode. The writing was tight enough to give everyone stakes in the outcome and to make you care. What forced that was that you had no choice but to tell a story. If you’d take Rise of Skywalker and redid it with film technology available in the 1970s it would be a complete failure because without the ability to do crazy things in cgi, there’s nothing to sell. No stakes, no redemption arc, no real, fleshed out villain to boo and hiss.