One thing I’ve noticed with newer movies is they do a lot more “tell, don’t show” than old movies.
For example, compare the live action Disney Cinderella to the original animated version. The live action version is mostly a voiceover telling the story of Cinderella. They literally say “Her stepsisters weren’t very good at art or music” and then have a scene showing them being bad at art and music. The animated version spent the first 20 minutes or so like a Tom & Jerry cartoon.
And this is across movies. I watched Predator recently and there wasn’t a lot of exposition about how they’re there to fight communists or whatever. You pick that up in snippets of dialog in between the action.
It really does feel like movies are dumbing down.
One thing I’ve noticed with newer movies is they do a lot more “tell, don’t show” than old movies.
Main character seeing old friend: Well if it isn’t my old friend Daniel, we used to roam these streets as kids, I used to have dinner at your house every day, you were like my brother, I would have done anything for you, I haven’t seen you since our other old friend Jake died mysteriously, remember when we used to play videogames all night and made that life long pact that if “HE” returns we will do what it takes to send him back to the world where he emerged from when we were kids and lived right next door to each other, our mothers were best friends until the incident but they never stopped us from being life long best friends forever, we used to play in the streets all night, me you Daniel and Chris, the rat Pac they called us, best friends for life.
I feel like Dune was a good outlier to this. It’s the only movie I’ve seen in theater in the last few years and I really enjoyed not having everything explained to me
It’s worth noting that the Lord of the Rings in book form is very long because it goes into so much depth about each character’s history. One of the things that the author intentionally did was world building. If you wanted to get the whole plot line in, you could do so in a third the length.
So then when it was adapted to movie format, you had three things going for it. First, a lot of people read the books and loved them, second, the cast and crew had a lot to work with, and third, there was ample budget.
Idk about “ample budget”. I was watching the director’s commentary on the Two Towers and he mentions one week where the studio was trying to decide whether to green light money for the film and Peter Jackson knew that he had nothing to say that would convince them, in fact he thought it would dissuade them because they wouldn’t see the benefit on the way he was spending the money. So he went out to a remote location to do the filming for several days intentionally to avoid their phone calls lol. I think that was when they were filming the battle for Helm’s Deep. Apparently it worked because after he had the footage from that week to show them, they decided it was good enough to justify the price.
I think the biggest reason is that the actors were allowed to act together. Modern movies use so many digital effects that actors aren’t even on set together sometimes. It’s hard to have the same emotions looking at a green screen and a guy in a morph suit.
Just for the first one, right? I remember Ian Mckellen had a breakdown on set because he was sitting in front of the table at Bag End with nothing around him but green screen and was struggling without any other actors.
IIRC that was on the set of one of the Hobbit movies.
The Lord of the Rings was shot mostly using practical effects.
But Lord of the rings is a modern movie?
Is a movie that came out 23 years ago still modern?
Yes, the word we are searching for is contemporary. Technically all films are modern, but not contemporary. Though modern has expanded definition to include it generally as well but I like to explore language :)
Howard Shore is the answer
This is an answer I’m not seeing here enough. The score for LotR just FORCES you to feel the feelings. Don’t wanna be happy? Too bad, we’re in the Shire bitch.
