Modern film is a hell of referential reboots [View all]
Watching the sci-fi-action film Pacific Rim, which features giant robots punching huge lizards in the face, something made my head spin, and it wasn’t just the special effects, or the fact I couldn’t decide whether I was watching the most awesome dumb movie ever made, or the dumbest awesome movie ever made.
Watching Pacific Rim was like watching Transformers crossed with Godzilla, crossed with Ultra-man crossed with Power Rangers crossed with Hugh Jackman’s Robot boxing movie, crossed with Robocop.
The confounding thing was that most of those referenced film and media franchises have gone through multiple reboots of their own. We are now in an age of reboots with multiple references to multi-referential reboots; a vertiginous age of homage and ever-increasing installments of rehashed source material.
Of the material referenced in Pacific Rim, Robocop was recently brought back to the screen, thirty years after the eighties classic, whilst the Transformers franchise, which this year has produced Transformers: Age of Extinction, the first in a new trilogy of films, succeeding the last trilogy of films, was based off the eighties Transformers cartoon series; and Power Rangers has had two theatrical films, which were developed from the twenty television seasons of seventeen different themed series, stretching back to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in the early nineties.
The Tom Cruise sci-fi fantasy film Oblivion, described by its director (who helmed the reboot of Tron), as an homage to classic seventies films like Logan’s Run, was, aside from those references, a mixture of Blade Runner, Inception and The Matrix with a generous amount of Total Recall thrown in. Again, the references themselves have also been revived. Total Recall received a recent reboot, which took out all the corny charm of the old Total Recall, and replaced it with references to, well, The Matrix and Inception.
Ender’s Game was like watching Harry Potter crossed with Star Wars, crossed with Starship Troopers. The Star Wars reference was strengthened by the casting of Harrison Ford, who had recently reprised his role in the latest reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise, and who is rumoured to be appearing in the latest three-film reboot of the Star Wars franchise, which will follow the three earlier reboot films, which were prequels to the three original films.
There is also, of course, the seemingly endless films based off Marvel superhero comics. Since 2008, there has been Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, Marvel’s The Avengers, Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Marvel also unleashed The Fantastic Four, and its sequel Rise of the Silver Surfer. A reboot of the Fantastic Four franchise is scheduled to be released in 2015. In the next few years, there may be releases such as: Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America 3 and, depressingly enough, Ant-Man.
Multiplexes have also been showing X-Men films since the turn of the millennium. X-men, X2: X-men United, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men: First Class, The Wolverine, and X-Men: Days of Future Past. In the coming years there will be: X-Men: Apocalypse and a sequel to The Wolverine.
The 2013 film Man of Steel was a long, and loud reboot / sequel to the 2006 Superman film, which followed on from the nineties television series, Lois and Clark, which followed on from the Superman film franchise of the eighties.
The recent Star Trek reboot, and its sequel, had to go pre-five-year-mission in order to find a chronological niche on the franchise timeline that hadn’t been occupied. The new films are set prior to the Next Generation films of the mid-nineties, the Next Generation T.V series and the original-cast films in the eighties and early nineties, which followed on from the original T.V series of the sixties.
The Amazing Spider Man 2 came out this year as a sequel to the 2012 film The Amazing Spider Man. That film was a reboot of the 2002-2007 three film Spider Man franchise, which for a time was intended to be extended to Spider Man 4 and Spider Man 5.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is this year’s sequel to the 2011 film Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which began 20th Century Fox’s reboot of the original Planet of the Apes series. It is the eighth film in the franchise, stretching back to the sixties. Prometheus was a prequel / homage to Alien, and its three sequels. The Hobbit films are prequels to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie this year is a continuation / reboot of the previous Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, which followed on from the nineties cartoon.
Add to all this monotony the eight Harry Potter films, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the Twilight saga, The James Bond series, The Batman reboots, and the Hunger Games. This, then, is the repetitive, multi-referential, risk-averse, increasingly-rehashed state of Sci-fi and Fantasy film.
Things aren’t nearly as bad in the drama genre, though it’s sort-of fun to imagine what the studios could come up with, if they thought audiences would go along with it, and there was revenue to be generated: Noah 2: New Flood Rising…Thirteen Years a Slave…Lincoln: Resurrection.
FROM: http://sheppardpost.com/
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