12 Ways 2016 Movies Definitely Made You Dumber
Puerile humour, idiotic plot twists and product placement are making you stupid.
Let’s not be too hasty to dismiss every film released in 2016 as brain-smushing drivel. This year has seen its fair share of interesting, inspiring and intellectual movies, but for every good film there’s been a handful more that aren’t so beneficial to our grey matter.
We’ve seen an influx of films purporting to be a hell of a lot more intelligent than they are, a whole host of unoriginal remakes and reboots, and films with product placement so obvious they might as well be an elongated advertisement.
And worst of all? Us moviegoers bought into all of it. Like the mindless fools we often are, we’ve willingly lapped up everything from idiotic plot twists and subpar storylines to blatant political bias and even an Adam Sandler produced film.
We’re only human, of course, but shame on us for swallowing Hollywood’s flagrant idiocy-inducing tricks for another year running. You can redeem some intellect though by reading on for the 12 ways movies made you dumber in 2016, and trying not to repeat the same mistakes next year.
12. An Influx Of Terrible Video Game Movie Adaptations
It’s been said that playing video games makes you dumb. Well if the quality of movies based on video games released this year are anything to go by, the video game to movie genre increases the probability of losing a few braincells tenfold.
Though it’s not a genre known for its quality output, this year really took the biscuit. Duncan Jones’ Warcraft might’ve been able to scrape some profit from the Chinese box office, but its 28% Rotten Tomatoes rating is testament to how good a movie it really was. The boring, out of date adaptation of Ratchet & Clank fared even worse than Warcraft and it’s safe to say that The Angry Birds Movie, based on a mobile phone app game of all things, isn’t exactly an outstanding contribution to cinema.
Only time will tell whether Assassin’s Creed, starring Michael Fassbender and set for a late December release in the US, will flip the trend of awful video game movies this year. We can hold out hope, but given the genre’s bad reputation it doesn’t seem likely.