10 Things Everyone Hates About Modern Movies
1. Blockbuster Cinema's Obsession With Family
Sure, everybody has a family and can relate to familial themes in one way or another, but it sure is sappy and pandering that cinema - blockbuster movies in particular - are so utterly obsessed with milking the theme for every drop.
If any big-budget movie can't rustle up a compelling central theme, they just have to make the villain related to the hero, or put the hero on a quest to find their long lost sibling or parent. Then you've got a cinematic stew going.
Star Wars proves that the theme has been around as long as blockbusters have, but by 2021 doesn't it feel so blandly unimaginative to rely on such corny, elemental ideas?
Can't characters just be people rather than everyone needing to be inexplicably related to everybody else in a movie IP?
In more recent years we've seen an increasing glut of films go the "soft reboot" route by having legacy characters pass the torch to a younger generation, despite these familial connections often feeling forced and unconvincing.
Star Wars, Marvel, and the Fast and the Furious are obviously the most egregious culprits for exploiting cheap emotion where family is concerned, but look around the blockbuster landscape and you'll see it everywhere. Hell, it even crept into the Bad Boys franchise last year.
It is a thematic both totally universal and utterly tedious at this point, but because it's easily understood across cultures and language barriers, it's probably not going to let up any time soon where global box office is the endgame.