A requiem for spectacle

Do you know what makes me sad? The thought that no movie is ever going to wow me the way Star Wars did. And by ‘wow’, I’m talking about that jaw-on-the-floor, I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing! kind of wow. The kind that can only come from spectacle. Of course a good film never relies on spectacle to carry it. It is certainly one of the least admirable tools in a movie makers tool box. (slightly more admirable than sex) But it has always been my favorite one. And now it seems to have been used so much that it’s completely useless. I think, as a medium, film has shown us every possible form of spectacle at it’s fullest, loudest, and most heavy-handed. You just can’t put any more spaceships, warriors, explosions, robots, horses, or Brad Pitt buttocks on the screen at one time. Battles can never be more epic than they are in Lord of the Rings. Armadas can never have more boats than there were in Troy. Sweeping idyllic vistas can’t have more waterfalls and beautiful buildings than Rivendell.

I saw Hero and Sky Captain this weekend. Both of them with beautiful cinematography, gorgeous landscapes, huge, amazing battles… the works. And I was duly impressed. But there was something lacking. I think I will always date films by B.LOTR, and A.LOTR. Because I was still blown away by movies before Lord of the Rings came out. Now? No. Not really. I’ve liked movies. I appreciate the amount of work and artistry put into them. But nothing even comes close to comparing. And the weird part is… When I was watching Lord of the Rings I had an unsettling feeling in the back of brain telling me I should be more impressed than I was. I mean, this movie was custom made for me. I love it at least 10 times more than any other movies. But still, one of it’s best features, spectacle, had already been pushed so far by other films. By the time LOTR came out, it had lost most of its teeth. So while I knew this was the most amazing thing I had ever seen, I also knew I would never see anything more amazing. (Until I die that is.) So a sadness tinged my view throughout the epic masterpiece. It’s especially sad to me as a prospective movie maker. My favorite tool is ruined before I even get a chance to use it! I guess, like the rest of the film industry will eventually figure out, I’ll have to start relying on those boring old tricks like ‘good acting’, ‘great story’, ‘interesting dialog’, nuanced characters’, etc.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Epic Weekend

Image
Wow… I am worn out.  My team’s big project at work is live now, and we just released a big patch to fix some terrible difficulty spikes.  The last time we released Super Adventure Box: World 1 it got pretty universal praise.  (Which I put up here back in April)  Since then our founder/president has used it (Along with the Mad King Clock Tower I designed and built back in October 2012) as examples of content we release that raises retention rate, and therefore revenue.  So expectations were high for this World 2 release which came out on Tuesday.  The day after Labor Day and the Penny Arcade Expo.     Saturday (3 days before SAB World 2 launched) my company held a party at a hotel near PAX for fans, and my project, Super Adventure Box was the main feature.  We were running speed run competitions all night where players tried to be the first to get to the end of the new zones.  I ended up MCing the whole night.  I guess there’s a first time for everything.  Seems like people had a re
Read more

Coming of Age Ceremony

Image
I read this book a couple of years ago about how almost every culture in the history of mankind has had a coming of age ceremony for their boys. The point of these ceremonies was, the author argues, to communicate clearly to the young man that their station in life is different from a certain point onward. To present them with a clear image of what it means to be a man. To imbue values and give them a vision for their future. In a society that lacks these ceremonies you have many young men who mostly lack these things, adrift in a narcissistic quest for finding them in all the wrong places. Well, needless to say, I don't want that for my sons, and being one who over thinks everything I set to work designing a ceremony of my own since my oldest son, Justin, was fast approaching 13, the standard age for this sort of thing. The book included several ideas for ceremonies of this type, and I mulled them over. One issue I have is that I do not fit many of the manly cliché's.
Read more

Book Musings: The Righteous Mind - Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Image
Reflections on the book, The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt.  (Don’t be frightened by the word Righteous in the title: this is not about religion!)   I just finished a book that is now on my top 5 books of all time list.  Maybe top 3.  (Time will tell.) In my wildest fantasy, I would strap every human into a chair, pull their eyelids open with a terrifying machine and force to them read it.   This book basically reinforces with (what I find to be) very good arguments, a message that I’ve been trying to articulate and spread for a long time.  It has to do with how we relate to those with radically different worldviews, politics, religions (or lack thereof), etc.  Like many in my generation and after, I’m a child of two ideological worlds.  I was raised in a conservative, evangelical Christian subculture.  Most of my world revolved around a church of people with with a very homogenous worldview.  Everybody read the same evangelical Christian books, listened to the same evange
Read more