[Puma Cat]

Originally Posted by 2fastdriving

There are two things about most of today's action movies that bother me.

1. Nostalgia. Almost everything is a reboot or a prequel or something, and they always rely on nostalgia to get you to the theater. They bring back old characters rather than blow you away with new characters. The new characters are usually pretty superficial in nature.

2. Desire to "one-up" everything else. If you have a really well written movie, you don't need to use LFE that shakes the entire block, or give you a seizure trying to keep up with the action. Those capabilities should be used to enhance a film, not MAKE the film. Everything is so over the top these days that movies have become less about stoking your imagination and more about insane effects and explosions and characters that are like "Gods".

The latest SW trilogy exploits those things to the hilt. I guess the nostalgia does work on me, but I kind of resent it!

Agreed and excellent points, Marc. Specifically about superficial level of character development in most characters these days. The most resonant characters in recent years that I can relate to 1) is Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark in the Iron Man series, in particular the first film, and 2)Christian Bale in the Christopher Nolan series of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight series, and Matt Damon in the Jason Bourne series.

I've also found the first film in a trilogy of movies to be usually be the most compelling as the sequels often fall prey to the usual panoply of special effects over story line and the ongoing development of engaging characters. A good example is The Transformers series; the first film was fantastic, the others...um, not so much. Bumblebee is the first Transformers film I've found since the very first film that was compelling and engaging.