No they are just better. I watched them years later and not as a kid and they're just great.
It's about the pacing, pauses and slower character and world building.
Newer movies are built for second screening and maximising action sequences to not bore the audience which kills all atmosphere and sense of time and place - the worst example of this is the new Avatar movie, absolutely horrible in every sense of the word, while the first one was alright as i remember it.
You simply need to "set the stage", explain why this story is important and why the characters deserve sympathy or hate before you start your 3 hour action sequence - this step has been removed for some reason.
Verhovens old movies were the same - there was a nerve, a seriousness, a reflection beneath the action, now it could just have well been created by an alien algorithm without a sense of the actual human experience.
I wonder if it's a ridiculously extrapolated but misunderstood tic-tokification of cinema to please marketing? Because i've seen 20 second tik-toks with more emotion and character introduction than a lot of newer movies.
For a contrasting movie, I thought “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2019) was the opposite. The movie spends something like 80% of the time with setup. I loved it, my wife hated it. Looks like it’s 70% on Rotten Tomatoes.
One other difference: sounds & soundtracks. I don't mean the foley work per se, but songs you would want to listen to very often written for the movie.
With the explosion of synthesis software and digital audio workstations its easy for a small team to score a sound track on the cheap.
As with everything tough, there's always a few outliers, like (both) of the Tron: Legacy soundtracks.
Tron: Legacy soundtrack was done by Daft Punk. Not exactly your run of the mill movie studio hack job...
Other interesting soundtracks done by musicians not known for soundtrack work you might find interesting:
Fight Club (Dust Brothers)
Event Horizon (Orbital with London Symphony Orchestra)
Chaos Theory: Splinter Cell 3 (game) (Amon Tobin)
> i've seen 20 second tik-toks with more emotion and character introduction than a lot of newer movies.
Sure but this assumes movies are about characters and emotion. Michael Bay gets a lot of shit, but sometimes you just want to see things explode. Sometimes you just want to see robots fighting for two hours. Sometimes you want to see California swallowed by a tidal wave and the emotional character plot lines get in the way.
I would pay to see a movie called “Two Hours Of Giant Rocks Hitting The Earth: No Characters Edition”, and the fact Michael Bay is rich means a lot of people agree.
>Michael Bay gets a lot of shit, but sometimes you just want to see things explode.
That's the truth right here. I once ran across kung-fu movie called Chocolate (iirc). The premise was an autistic girl who was good at fighting. The entire movie was her walking into a room, kicking major but, then walking into a different room to kick more but.
I appreciate action too but i mean, character or world building is not that hard and doesn't really require that much when a 30 second commercial can give you enough backstory to (unwillingly) empathise with someone.
Theres a difference from both Avatar 1 and quite a few of Michael Bay's older movies - they still have have a story arch.
Just a few minutes of character building and a few intermezzos and these movies would be much, much better in my opinion.
But i also hate too much CGI. I don't know what happened to "well dosed", it makes what's dosed so much more valuable.
Watching the Bayhem piece by Every Frame A Painting gave a ton of great context for Michael Bay’s work. Super interesting, ten minutes long, worth a watch. That channel is full of grade A content.
> a movie called “Two Hours Of Giant Rocks Hitting The Earth: No Characters Edition”
But would you go to see Giant Rocks 2?
> the fact Michael Bay is rich means a lot of people agree
This is the argument often made for Avatar against the "no cultural impact" observation. It still doesn't have any quotable lines or memorable characters.
Huh, I had friends complain that it was overly long and focused a lot on its setup and setting up bits and pieces like the kids' relationships and the new culture.
Interesting, I didn't love the new Avatar but I thought it was much better paced and directed than a Marvel or superhero movie. Shots lingered and showed more emotion than the current crop of action / fantasy movies (Star Wars, Marvel, Transformers).
It's about the pacing, pauses and slower character and world building.
Newer movies are built for second screening and maximising action sequences to not bore the audience which kills all atmosphere and sense of time and place - the worst example of this is the new Avatar movie, absolutely horrible in every sense of the word, while the first one was alright as i remember it.
You simply need to "set the stage", explain why this story is important and why the characters deserve sympathy or hate before you start your 3 hour action sequence - this step has been removed for some reason.
Verhovens old movies were the same - there was a nerve, a seriousness, a reflection beneath the action, now it could just have well been created by an alien algorithm without a sense of the actual human experience.
I wonder if it's a ridiculously extrapolated but misunderstood tic-tokification of cinema to please marketing? Because i've seen 20 second tik-toks with more emotion and character introduction than a lot of newer movies.