Modern Movie Things That Bug Me

It may surprise you all to know that I watch a lot of movies.

As someone who watches a lot of movies, I can't help but begin to notice the more prevalent clichés/annoying trends that tend to pop up in a lot of modern films, some of which distract me from having a good time, if only momentarily. So today I thought I'd try something a little more fun and just vent about some of these minor annoyances.

Please note that I'm not necessarily bad-mouthing any of the films that may show up on this list (but some of them I definitely am), just pointing out a few things that bug me.

Dialogue That's For The Audience: Few things are more off-putting than when characters speak in a way that is clearly just for the audience, by which I mean they say things that no human person would say in a given situation. Now, granted, this can be done well, but often times it's not.

For a bad example: In 'The Tomorrow War', after a disastrous entrance into the future, the characters rally around a guy who's been on a tour of duty in the future before and mention how bad it looks in the streets below them, to which he replies with something to the effect of "you don't want to see what happens next", and then the scene ends and I guess we're supposed to feel...something, about what he just said? Unfortunately, that is way too vague of a response when you're, you know, entering a warzone, and it really takes me out of the moment, because these are no longer humans in a bad situation that they have to deal with; now they're movie characters telling me how I should feel. If you need to try and manipulate your audience into feeling your intended emotions, then maybe you approached the scene wrong.

And let's not forget the classic "MY NAME...IS...KHAN" from 'Star Trek: Into Darkness', a line that means absolutely nothing to the characters in the movie, but does mean something to the people in the audience who know about Khan's history in the franchise. This line makes no sense in the context of his conversation with Kirk, this name means nothing to him. I remember people in my theater laughing when this happened. I was one of them.

For a good example: Benoit Blanc in 'Knives Out' has many scenes where he essentially tells the audience what's going on, or what is about to happen, in the guise of monologuing, but it works for this movie and this character. Daniel Craig is playing a character who is consistently dramatic and grandiose in everything he does, he's very over-the-top in a way that fits the vibe of the film very well. Thanks to good acting and directing, the twists of the movie still make you feel something when they happen; the dialogue isn't trying to manipulate you into feeling a certain way, it's acting as the exclamation point to what the movie is already making you feel.

On a related note, please stop editing trailers to have the characters say "it's time!" at the end, or something similar. Trailer-hype dialogue is the worst, it makes me experience the exact opposite of excitement. Anti-excitement. Nega-excitement. Stop.

Bad Movie Posters: Alright so this one I'm going to be complaining about from a designer's perspective, and as someone who largely made a living off of design work for most of the last 5 years of my life, I might get a little harsh.

So many good movies have such bad, bad, very bad posters. Overly photoshopped, cobbled together, Frankenstein's monster movie posters. Now granted, this does not in any way have a direct impact on the quality of a movie, but I can't help but think that a boring, uninspired poster is an indication that you might be approaching your movie with the same mentality.

Let's take a look at an infamously bad poster for a not-terrible movie:

So this is a strong contender for worst poster I've ever seen (honestly this entire section of the list could just be posters for Marvel movies, by God are they terrible at making posters), and I'm sure anyone can look at this poster and think to themselves "yeah, this is not good", but let's talk about why.

- First of all, there's waaaaaaaaay too much going on here, and none of it is organized in a way that makes reading it easy. Between the bits of debris, ten main characters, and the gaggle of Ultron drones, this poster is physically hard to look at.

- Why does Tony's face look sharper than everyone else? Especially that shitty jpeg of Nick Fury stuffed into the bottom left of the poster. Also why is only Nick Fury looking directly at the audience?

- Black Widow appears to be in the middle of a flying kick that they've tried to make look like a fighting stance by hiding her leg behind the Avengers logo.

- What is the relative size of anything in this poster? Am I to assume that smaller characters are farther away? The angles in this poster make no sense at all, are The Avengers all standing at 90 degree angles? Are Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch flying?

- There are WAY TOO MANY light sources in this image, and they're so inconsistent (example, half of the people towards the front of the poster are receiving full backlighting from the sun, despite being ostensibly 'under' the Hulk, but then, I can't really tell what angle we're seeing here so who's to say.). I know it's hard to make a bunch of photoshopped people look like they're occupying the same space, but damn, there is nothing at all tying these characters together here.

Everything in this poster feels entirely out of place, it feels like two or three different posters all stitched together. For real though, just google Marvel movie posters and look at them. They're just so very bad (with a few exceptions).

Now let's look at a good poster with similar characteristics (no bias here I promise):

Here we have a poster that also has a ton of characters, and a little bit of action as well, but it's a night and day difference in readability. We have consistent colors, a nice organized grouping of characters, our leads are clearly visible, it's just easy to look at. We know who all the players are, and we get the sense that some intense stuff is going to happen, but the poster isn't trying to pack in an entire fake action scene. Honestly, after dissecting that 'Age of Ultron' poster, I can actually feel my eyes relaxing when looking at this one. Man, it's like everything about this movie was designed to be good...

Overuse of CGI: Right off the bat let me clear something up: VFX artists in Hollywood are underpaid and overworked, and their deadlines are almost always unrealistic. Nothing I say here is an attack on them, but on studios who want to get things done fast as opposed to done right (there's a reason the VFX in 'Lord of the Rings' look better than a lot of VFX today, and I promise it has nothing to do with talent).

So, bad CGI is EVERYWHERE these days. We all know it. We've all seen it. CGI is used for everything from bringing back dead actors (which is creepy and off-putting) to realizing whole environments (instead of shooting on location, which I have mixed feelings about), and the results have been....mixed. Sometimes you get amazing CGI vistas like Arrakeen in 'Dune', sometimes you get near flawless CGI characters like Thanos or Davey Jones, but a lot of the time you get things like this:

Here we have Legolas, and he's just completely surrounded by CGI. If this were a 100% animated film, this scene probably would not bother me at all, and I'd even think it looks good. See that's the thing about CGI in movies: even when it's "bad", it's usually not actually bad. On a technical level, all of the VFX here actually look pretty good. The problem is that we have nothing to latch onto in this scene because it's very obviously a real actor surrounded by a bunch of nothing, it's very distracting. This is supposed to be a pretty climactic moment for our character, but it's just Orlando Bloom on a giant blue set fighting a video game character. I'm sure it doesn't help that the artists working on this film had, quite literally, double the workload thank to the films gimmick of being shot in 48fps. Corners had to be cut due to decisions that were out of the VFX artists hands. Mind you, this is the same studio that gave us some of the most well realized VFX of all time when they were allowed to do their jobs correctly. I could make an entire list here of VFX shots from just the first 'Lord of the Rings' film that still hold up today.

This is why CGI is so hit and miss these days, and why I've seen a lot of arguments around the internet regarding how CGI is getting "worse". It's not getting worse, it's getting rushed, and it's getting shoved into every movie to replace things that should just be done practically. Until studios understand that you simply have to take the time to do this right, especially if you're going to rely on it heavily like the above film ('The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies') did, we're going to keep getting movies that just don't look all that great, and that blows, man. At it's best, CGI can help to create fantastical elements that can make a scene so much more exciting.

At its worst, however, it creates hollow, empty replacements for real-life that make it hard to feel anything about what's happening on screen. Like that baby in 'Twilight', which made me feel nothing but horror and confusion.

Few things are worse for a movie than when you have no connection to the thing(s) on screen because of some awkward, unnecessary CGI.

Cinematic Universes: We all knew this one had to be on here. How many studios have tried to create cinematic universes since Marvel nailed it? And how many have been successful? Lets briefly examine our two highest profile failures: The DC Extended Universe (which I was really excited about), and Universal's Dark Universe.

With Marvel having paved the way, showing everyone exactly how to do this right on their first try, it was incredible to see Warner Brothers and Universal stumble and fall off of the nearest cliff right out of the gate, with 'Batman V. Superman' and 'The Mummy' (2017) both receiving widespread negative reviews from critics and audiences alike, and generally being overstuffed, heavy handed attempts to kickstart cinematic universes. BvS attempted to shove two or three movies worth of stuff into two and a half hours of runtime without doing any of the requisite legwork (and also did not understand the characters of Batman or Superman, like, at all), and 'The Mummy' was just a bad movie from the ground up, filled with contrivances, plot holes, and dialogue so distracting, even Russel Crowe's Jekyll/Hyde falls kinda flat (and that man really tries his hardest to have fun here).

Every attempt we've seen outside of the MCU has tried so desperately to copy their working formula, but has never put in the time or effort required to make it work just as well. This kind of lazy trend chasing is the same mentality we see ruining the AAA game industry, and it's lead to some hilariously bad movies (the aforementioned 'Mummy', 'Dracula Untold', 'Suicide Squad', Joss Whedon's 'Justice League', 'The Dark Tower', 'The Amazing Spiderman 2' to name a few). I don't mind the idea of cinematic universes inherently, what bothers me is when studios try to make a universe first, and a decent movie second. It's hard to get invested in a possible universe when your lead movie sucks.

Honorable Mentions for Annoying Things:

- Shaky Cam. It's done, stop it. Unless you're making a found footage movie, you better hold that camera reasonably steady.

- Story beats based on misunderstandings, because the characters didn't talk to each other like humans. How am I supposed to feel anything but annoyance for characters who are fighting just to fight?

- Live action game/anime adaptations. They don't work, film is clearly not a good medium for these stories. Try TV shows, 'The Witcher' was not bad and 'Arcane' is a masterpiece.

- Assuming the audience is stupid. This goes for both over-explaining things to the audience, and also for assuming that your audience won't ask questions about your messy plot because you gave some half-assed justification for something (or tried to distract us). A lot of movies get by on hoping we won't ask questions (looking at you, 'Avengers: Endgame').

- Referencing older movies in sequels, specifically iconic lines. I get that you're trying to weaponize nostalgia with this, but maybe try just making a good movie first before reminding me how much better the original was. This is especially egregious in low-effort sequels like the recent 'Die Hard' or 'Terminator' movies.

- Letting JJ Abrams make movies.

You may be asking yourself: what's the bottom line here? Honestly I just wanted to vent about some annoying trends in film, nothing too serious. None of these have stopped me from enjoying otherwise fun movies (although a couple movies mentioned above are just bad, like 'The Tomorrow War', which was ass. Sorry not sorry).

No real big takeaway here, except maybe keep an eye out for low effort entertainment, and ask for better? We deserve more unique, exciting, creative experiences? Please support talented and creative film makers like Rian Johnson and Denis Villeneuve, while also still chillaxin with some fun popcorn blockbusters? Don't let JJ Abrams near my precious Star Wars franchise ever again? Yeah let's go with those I suppose.

I'd love to know what kind of modern day movie trends bug you!