Good film making is never regressive. But then again, you don't actually seem to have things to complain about with the new Star Wars films in terms of quality, so time to complain about them being nostalgic.
Because it's a legitimate complaint and not enough people are talking about it. These things are linked to movie making now. Nostalgia is very in right now in pop culture. And there's a danger to this. Look at the election. "Make America Great Again." It can grow to a very harmful extent. That thread of thinking continues in movies now. Audiences are continuing to be fed this stuff with no other choice and are going to normalize it, making the studios pump out more of it. Because it's harmless entertainment means we're okay with it, unlike the election which has an opposite reaction from half the country.
Which is pretty much another way of complaining that they are giving people what they want. Good Star Wars, that emphasizes the genre that made people fall in love with the franchise in the first place. But that is somehow a bad thing...
That's not a bad thing, but the problem is, that seems to be the only thing that's making up these movies. And it's very superficial and they're only doing the bare minimum to do that. James Cameron said it best when talking about TFA. It was a reaffirmation. Its central function seemed to make us remember why something was so good. Not making just a great, new, inspired story first. If we're just going to get movies with stormtroopers, X-Wings, TIE fighters and things we've already seen, then I don't care how good it is. Apparently SW just makes up those things to people. When people complained about the prequels, I always thought it was because the storytelling wasn't as good. But from what I can see now, it seems people just missed OT imagery and characters more than anything. When it was actually the storytelling that made those things iconic in the first place. That makes me sad. TFA gets away with everything because it's a well directed movie with great, new characters. The fact this was all better than the prequels puts it in a box that makes everything seem better when the story was just passable.
Episode 8 I'm hopeful about and will be the decider of how this will go, which is why I'm not out yet. And most likely I'll enjoy Rogue One. Maybe one day it'll get to something new. Maybe these are a rough few years where they're finding their barrings. But it still could/should be happening now. There's no reason why they can't. Right now SW looks to be expensive fan fiction.
Well there's the whole bad writing thing but that's not the topic at hand.
If anything, a lot of the Fantastic Beasts praise I've heard comes from how it doesn't pander for cheap nostalgia and tells it's own story.
It panders more to known stuff a few times. Unnecessary mention of Dumbledore, even Grindelwald being in this is eh and this whole, "There's a war coming" ********. The problem is it was just a fine movie that didn't do much. It had everything there, but it came up short. It just felt like another Harry Potter universe film. Which is most likely how the next ones will go. The more event driven these movies will become the more numb we will be to them. Even the filmmakers. And Rowling will stretch this **** out.
Again, the whole "As long as they're good" doesn't cut it for me anymore. Good is relative now in the movie studio system now now that they're starting to get getting these things down to a science. There's no restraint anymore. They're taking things, whether big or small, that we knew from the past and making full movies out of them. Studios are just jumping on the bandwagon. They've always been like this. They see trends and they make that. But this is worse because they want to make quadruple those bandwagon films. They're not leaving any room to find the next new thing.
To quote Mr. Plinkett, "Am I losing my mind?"
