When it comes to shitty behavior in modern films, there’s few more egregious offenses than bringing back established, well-known, heroic characters — beloved by generations of moviegoers — and systematically degrading, discrediting and destroying not just who they are now, but everything they once were: usually in a desperate attempt to elevate some cheap, soulless carbon copy replacement that lacks everything which made the original so appealing in the first place.
See Why Modern Movies Suck – They’re Destroying Our Heroes.
Also Why Modern Movies Suck: They’re Written by Children
Both those videos are worth watching in their entirety.
Those were interesting. My reaction to the recent Star Trek movies was that I enjoyed them, but there definitely was a somewhat rueful sense of “I guess that’s just how they make movies these days” that I couldn’t put my finger on. I’ve reflected on the loss of mature deportment as a positive value in recent generations (and before someone comments that every generation probably thinks that, maybe so, but that doesn’t make it false, nor do I claim to stand above the phenomenon myself) but I had only thought of it in terms of the general appearance and mannerisms of TV and movie characters, I hadn’t connected it to the overall behavior of those characters. It makes sense, and it makes sense that a bunch of “90s kids” writing the screenplays are just unreflectively writing out of their own experience.
I particularly liked the contrast between old Kirk and old Spock, arguing over the fate of the Klingons, and new Kirk and new Spock screaming. Part of this is “we’re too lazy to write good dialogue,” but part of it is also that we’ve lost the “hide your emotions / stiff upper lip” ethic. Now, a man is thought to be a better man if he can cry in public. (Unless it’s Jordan Peterson, of course.)
Or Kyle Rittenhouse. đ
Yes, that was a very powerful contrast. And it’s not like old Kirk and Spock didn’t get physical, but they didn’t come to blows over disagreements of policy. Spock and McCoy sometimes got a lot more personal with one another, occasionally bordering on the verbally abusive, but never violent. And when the situation did call for one of them to beat up on the other, it was usually one of them taking the other down in about 20 seconds or less, not these extended fight scenes that clearly only exist because adolescents like to watch fight scenes. (Barring, of course, the situations where some alien force compelled them to fight.)
I thought the Data/Worf scene was a great example, too. I hadn’t heard anything before now that made me want to watch Discovery, but even those really brief clips of officers mouthing off to their superior officers the way particularly unpleasant teenagers treat their parents made me sure I never do want to watch it. It’s just a sign of how juvenile and poorly written the whole project apparently is.
I tried to watch Discovery. I’ve watched every show of every Star Trek series (except the animated thing), but I couldn’t take it.
I thought it was just me. Yet, over the last 20 years Iâve noticed that classic heroes have been characterized in unflattering ways. Once they were portrayed as strong, fearless, moral and nearly perfect beings. Albeit, the âperfectâ persona probably needed adjusting (because it sometimes made the character less relatable), it now feels as if the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Many contemporary movies contain cherished heroes that are weak, clumsy, dim witted, immoral, vulgar and fearful. Itâs sometimes hard to tell the hero from the villain. In some cases, it almost feels as if the villain is the more compelling character and routing for them is the expected audience response. For instance, despite finding some aspects of Deadpool ironic and humorous, it left me wondering if he was supposed to be a hero. In some cases, thereâs a subtle sexist agenda playing out where female heroins are portrayed as smart, strong and enlightened as compared to their male counterparts that are wimpy buffoons in need of being rescued or educated by them. Lastly, there seems to be some sense of making heroes overt sex objects. There always been some subtle allusion to sex appeal and flirting with heroes but these days, it seems very little is left to the imagination.
Right. The bad guys are the good guys.
But I don’t think it’s so much that old heroes were perfect. Kirk certainly wasn’t perfect. Luke wasn’t. Han wasn’t. But they grew and got better, and then the new shows make them revert. It’s disappointing.
On the small screen, this is really the case. Who is the hero in Breaking Bad?
I just finished watching Narcos: Mexico (season 3). In it they portray the narco Amado Carillo as some kind of tragic romantic figure. It’s like if you portrayed Al Capone as a tragic romantic figure. Amado was the head of the Juarez cartel and involved in all sorts of bad stuff. They would take the people they kill and hang them off a bridge so that everyone could see (and get the message). I suppose the Godfather movies do that to a certain extent as well. The Italian mafia would at least try to limit damage to “soldiers.” OTOH, the narcos have shootouts in public places and don’t care one whit about the peasants.
Indeed, I said ânearly perfectâ. No, they werenât âperfectâ but sometimes they had a larger than life âunattainable idealisticâ persona that likely wasnât true to reality. So, in some cases, a slight move towards âaspirationalâ would have been greatâŚit motivates us all to be better without the pressure of feeling one needs to be âperfectâ. Yet, it seems the industry has blown right by that idea to create heroes that are our âworse demonsâ vs our âbetter angelsâ.
Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Avatar: The Last Airbender — it’s happened to them all.
And it was so unnecessary, because in each case you could tell fresh, new stories in the same universe without needing to burn down everything that came before and salt the earth so nothing could grow again.
Off the top of my head:
Let’s have a young woman, early twenties, on a distantish planet outside the New Republic, toward the Unknown Regions. Set in about the same timeframe as the new movie series, where the New Republic has been keeping the known galaxy at peace for decades. Pleasant place, kind of like Switzerland. A country on the rise. We see her leaving her family on the planet (mother, father, older sister, and younger brother) who she’s been visiting: no overdone orphan history here, but maybe a dose of overlooked-middle-child syndrome. She’s heading back up to her job on a main survey station that she works at– maybe she’s a tech analyst, maybe she’s a grad student doing research, whatever, but she’s in the thick of it. We get some happy workplace scenes with her and her friends, including the crusty retired commissionaire who handled security for the station (don’t know if you have them down south: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Corps_of_Commissionaires).
And then they arrive in the system. No warning, no explanation, just a handful of very large, strangely-shaped but ominous ships which don’t look like anything we’ve seen before. They don’t seem to be destroying anything per se at first, but they’re definitely trying to break through the shields of an inhabited moon. They succeed, but instead of blowing the place up they send off a bunch of smaller craft toward it and set up their own shield, trapping everyone inside. A different team does the same thing to their homeworld, and all they can do is watch as the invaders separate them from their home.
The invaders have destroyed some ships that tried to attack them, but mostly they’ve just ignored everything else, even the many fleeing ships. Whatever their goal is, it doesn’t appear to be Alderaan-level destruction. But they apparently don’t care much for the sensor net, and start systematically blowing them up the stations across the system, moving toward the main HQ.
Everyone in sensor HQ has been using the net to gather as much information as possible about the attackers, who are unusually hard to get readings from, but sensors are what our team does and they improvise some tricks to get better information.
The guard takes over once the sensor net starts getting destroyed and starts evacuating everyone, except for our hero Roi. He explains to her that she has to take the data they’ve gathered to the New Republic because they need to know what’s happened, and they’re the only ones who can help. She doesn’t want to leave her family, and it’s not like the New Republic is going to be able to do anything, and they’re not even members, anyway. He smiles, and reminds her with a hint of nostalgia that there was a time when the New Republic didn’t even exist, and most of the Rebellion was hiding in the cold, with some dialogue that makes it clear that our retiree had been on Hoth. But they fought for everyone anyway. That’s what heroes are for. That’s what _knights_ are for.
He tells her that if he has to, he’ll toss her in a pod and lock the autopilot, but if he has to force her to go, it’s just another thing which happened _to_ her today. If she decides to carry the data herself, it’s the start of her fight. She thinks about it, and agrees. So she heads off alone in her small superluminal pod to the New Republic, with nothing but a data cylinder, some access codes from her Commissionaire friend, and determination in her eyes.
End of the first twelve minutes.
We have a likeable character; justifiable skills that are going to come in handy, without her being a supergenius who’s better than everyone at everything; a clear and concrete goal– save her family, save the planet; a deep mystery to solve (who are the invaders and what are they doing); a new and different type of threat, so we don’t have to repeat what we’ve done before but bigger this time; a viable plan in which she’s already taking concrete actions to achieve her goals; and we get a perfect excuse to see an outsider’s perspective on the world our original heroes have built over the last few decades as she tries to get help from them.
Came up with this as I was writing it, and I already like Roi more than Rei.
Interesting beginning.
It’s weird how Star Wars decided they had to make each movie have so many parallels. I generally agree with the idea of finding something that works and going with it, but … they took that concept a bit far.