10 Trends That Are Destroying Modern Movies
2. Everything's Reimagined
When Memento director Christopher Nolan chose to deliver a brooding, realistic take on the Dark Knight in Batman Begins, he wasn't doing something totally new for the character. Back in the eighties, comic book writer Frank Miller had revolutionised Bruce Wayne with The Dark Knight Returns and Year One - stories looking at Batman's later and early days respectively with a pitch black tint. Begins and its subsequent sequels worked with the gloomier aesthetic because it was something that had become ingrained with the character. The slew of imitations didn't quite understand that.
Since then we've seen all manner of series twisted into something dark and complex, no matter how bright the original property; Alice In Wonderland, Godzilla, Transformers, Maleficent, Snow White And The Huntsman, Hercules, TMNT, even Batman's brighter counterpart in Man Of Steel - all have gone the way of the gritty reimagining.
And that's just the overt ones; plenty of other films have taken elements of their characters and tried to make it more real. Seeing childhood heroes old and past it, questioning their mortality is fun at first, but begins to wear when it's the only thing they do.
It's a real shame that this has become a big part of The Dark Knight's legacy. Why can't filmmakers pick up on the practical effects and epic-yet-personal scope, instead of a very Batman specific element?