10 Films That Won't Change Your Life
Get ready not to have your mind blown.
If the summer of 2016 proved anything, it’s that they don’t make them like they used to – instead, they just grind out a soulless facsimile and cross their fingers. If Independence Day: Resurgence and Ben Hur are anything to go by, then Popcorn movies have been replaced by Hamburger movies, a uniform product that was never meant to offer any real nourishment.
Film buff directors like Joe Dante and John Carpenter appear to have given way to directors from the fields of advertising and music videos and the love of film – all types of film – has given way to branding and franchising. These new guys can’t tell a story to save their lives and probably think that Rio Bravo was a TV cop show, but they really know how to obscure the action with fast edits.
They make the kind of flashy, expensive films that have nothing at their core – no satire, no real-world concerns, no characterization beyond good and evil. Their only concerns are commercial, and because they clearly weren’t made for posterity, the idea that people will still be watching in thirty years seems doubtful.
In short, they’re the kind of films that won’t change lives, and here are 10 examples.
10. The Fog
This reboot purports to be “From the makers of Halloween”, which is a flat-out lie – the director is Rupert Wainwright, who made the video for MC Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This. John Carpenter and Debra Hill are credited as producers, but it’s safe to assume neither had much control over the finished product (Hill died seven months before the film’s release).
Did Carpenter sit down with the producers, listen to their ideas and say, “Go ahead – make me rich”? The end result suggests he did because The Fog is an exploitation movie for the modern era: a cheap rip-off backed by a major studio (Sony) with a demographic-friendly rating, pretty stars from a popular TV show and absolutely nothing at its core.
It’s a machine designed to score big on its opening weekend, making fortunes for its backers despite vanishing from the top ten after three weeks, sunk by negative reviews and poor word of mouth. You can only hope that Carpenter didn’t ask for ten percent of the net.