Modern Movies

Modern Movies in pop culture suck for various reasons. The Critical Drinker has identified a whole bunch of reasons why and they are listed below.

## Franchises are Being Killed

The Critical Drinker has outlined a pattern for how franchises are killed. The steps are as follows:

1. Choose a Victim. Pick a popular franchise with a loyal fanbase.
2. Totally Ruin It. Update it for "modern audiences", also known as inject wokeness and too much emotionality into it.
3. Do a Rian Johnson. Antagonize the fanbase before the release.
4. Cancellation. Get cancelled due to low ratings. After all, Go Woke Go Broke!
5. Not my fault. Blame the fanbase for the bad reviews and low viewership (usually by attacking them and calling them istaphobes)

Critical Drinker outlines how these steps are followed for Cowboy Bebop. However, many other franchises such as He-Man, Star Wars, and Y The Last Man were subject to this as well.

## Soft Reboot

The emergence of the Soft Reboot is also a major problem in today's media. Due to a lack of creativity in Hollywood, it often feels like we are living in a post-creativity era. Soft reboots emerge because:

1. Direct sequels are difficult. You have to move the story along and break new ground, otherwise it looks like the characters don't learn and there's no point, and at worst that the ending of the first movies are invalidated. In addition, making a sequel so long after the last movie requires a lot of exposition to catch audiences up as to what happened in the last years in-universe, which is often difficult to work into the story without it seeming clunky and like it stops the action of the film.
2. A full on remake comes with other problems. It invites comparisons to the original (which will always be seen as the superior version), but it means you can't make your movie include cameos from the original cast.

The solution is obviously to combine the best of both worlds and create the concept of the Soft Reboot! Here are the elements the Critical Drinker identified:

1. Find an old franchise. Target one a couple decades old and hasn't seen activity for some time. People will be excited to see new blood breathed into such an old franchise. In addition, it is good to do this because our collective memory of the events have begun to fade so nostalgia is increased and people remember the original events less.
2. Loose continuity. Will be marketed as a normal sequel, but will leave continuity vague enough so that the writers can do anything they want to do. The writers hope to get away with this because it has been so long since the last installment occurred.
3. Nostalgia. Will include lots of callbacks and references to the past events.
4. Cameos. Will feature cameos from the original legacy cast. This is to get people excited and also to legitimize the reboot, but more often than not these characters are destroyed in the process.
5. Sequel Bait. The movie is made to launch a new franchise based on the old one after all. This is the passing of the torch to newer and younger (and cheaper) actors.

However, the failing with soft reboots is that they give writers free reign to rehash the exact same story as was played out in the original franchise over again. Just like in Star Wars: The Force Awakens where there is a desert planet (like Tatooine), a young orphan swept up into adventure namely Rey (like Luke), a droid rescue of BB8 (like R2D2) that contains information, a masked antagonist in the form of Kylo (like Darth Vader), a sinister master pulling the strings in Snoke (like Palpatine), and the destruction of a planet killing weapon in Starkiller Base (like the Death Star). Since the movies are usually just retellings, you are not expected to question how artifacts from the franchise keep showing up years later, or why the exact same series of events are repeating themselves and nobody is questioning it.

## Deconstruction and Hero Destruction

Hero destruction is when legacy characters beloved by generations of fans are brought back and systematically degraded and discredited not just in the present, but also retroactively affecting their past. This is usually done to elevate another carbon copy character which misses the point of why the original was so popular in the first place. Traditionally, in woke media, hero destruction is when one legacy character becomes cucked at the cost of making the new (and usually more diverse) character The Bestest Evar!

Deconstruction is a more general process of taking apart legacy franchises and tropes and putting them together under a different lens to show different facets of them. In the case of modern Hollywood, this deconstruction often connotes destruction since in the process of taking apart beloved franchises, Hollywood is trying to rewrite history to fit their narrative of wokeness.

## Written By Children

SJW writers are more focused on injecting emotionality into shows that don't need it, and the end result can appear as a soap opera at best and like a bunch of whiny teenager characters complaining and talking about their feelings all the time at worst. This is mainly due to the emotionality that comes with being woke and rubs off in the media created by woke writers, and also as a result of generally bad writing from modern Hollywood. Many modern movies also feel like constant therapy sessions with the characters due to this.

The characters in today's movies wear their hearts on their sleeves, they run around frantically when in stressful or emergency situations, they openly discuss their personal and private relationships and feelings in inappropriate settings like in front of superiors or in the midst of emergencies, and respond with big emotional outbursts. This is in contrast to films of decades past, where everyone reacts to situations with a more mature, restrained, subdued response.

Interpersonal conflicts are also handled poorly. Even in moments of anger, characters in the past tended to remain in constraint and did not fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. Now, characters do attack each other physically like immature children do in elementary school when they are mad at each other.