The film industry has lost its charm. Writers and directors are too far down the rabbit hole of trying to please what society thinks is “relevant,” but that’s the problem. Film is supposed to be expressive and subjective. Movies today are losing the effect of having a story that stands against the test of time. 

Writing in films has been lacking originality. Everything seems so lazy and half thought out. Instead of writing a creative storyline, audiences are subjected to watching COVID storylines or something that is going on in the world today. Those things are important, but when people watch a movie they want to escape from things that connect us to reality. In twenty years, nobody will want to rewatch something miserable that they already lived through. 

Not only is modern story writing lacking, but also cinematography. The other day I was watching one of the greatest movies of all time, “Spider-Man 2” (2004). I think this film is a great example of good use of cinematography, whether in the “Horror Hospital” scene, or the scene right before Doc Ock takes Mary Jane. Superhero movies in general have stopped caring about the details in scenes and just let CGI take the wheel. There’s nothing wrong with CGI, but when all movies rely on it doesn’t make the watcher feel in the moment. Oddly enough, after my reference to “Spider-Man 2” (2004), movies that are over using the CGI would be the MCU. It’s been harder not to notice how dark the movies are in some of the scenes just to hide the special effects. With a franchise that big, and with that much money, they should use the freedom to create sets and scenes that the audience can analyze. 

 I don’t think this applies to all movies, considering the CGI work done in “Avatar: The Way of Water” was incredible. I think that they did a great job of making the audience feel like they were on the planet of Pandora.

Something that social media constantly makes fun of is the dialogue that “caters” to young audiences. It’s almost impossible to disagree due to the watered down humor within things that teenagers or young adults are supposed to relate too. A common theme that writers use that taints the image of a movie would be mentioning certain social media apps like TikTok or Snapchat. In 20 years, how is that going to hold up? Everything about it is so forceful and cringey that people aren’t going to gravitate towards it in future years. 

If you pay attention to anything going to theaters, then it would be pretty hard to miss the amount of reboots being produced. There is less and less originality every single year. The saying “don’t fix something that isn’t broken” needs to be taken into account. Instead of remaking a terrible Scooby Doo spin off with forced diversity, make a new mystery crew of iconic characters. In 50 years we’ll still be referencing the same characters instead of new original ones because nobody has any creativity anymore. 

In the end I would hope to see the film industry escape this mold of unoriginality. On the bright side, there have been some recent movies that did exceptionally well in my opinion: “The Black Phone,” “Prey,” “Pearl,” “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” and “The Menu.”