The Bourne Identity is one of those movies that was so massively influential it gets taken for granted. On the eve of the franchise’s second attempt at rebooting, let’s look back at the movie that shifted action on its axis.
Going back to 2002, the most recent movie to revolutionize action was The Matrix, a very good movie to be sure, but full of hyper-stylized scenes like this-
This scene is an example of how Lights Out plays with its monster. Rebecca sleeps next to a flashing tattoo sign that periodically floods her room with soft red light. That’s the entire mechanic of this scene — it’s on a timer. Also, it’s red. Photos courtesy Warner Bros.
Lights Out is a stellar horror film that walks the line between terrifying and fun, but before that, it’s a happy ending for a genius short.
After a pulse-pounding introduction in which a shadowy woman kills Paul (Billy Burke), Lights Out follows his step daughter, Rebecca (Teresa Palmer). Several years before, Rebecca’s mother and Paul’s widow, Sophie (Maria Bello) was left by her first husband and fell into a deep depression, in which she began communing with said shadow woman, the ghost of her old friend Diana (Alicia Vela-Bailey). Diana haunted Rebecca as a child, driving her to cut ties with her mother. Paul’s death exacerbates Sophie’s condition, and Diana once again begins stalking Rebecca and her young half-brother, Martin (Gabriel Bateman). Though content to simply run away from the situation when it was happening to her, Rebecca is determined to confront her mother and Diana and save Martin from a similar destiny.
Oh no! The Enterprise has been destroyed! Again! Photos courtesy Paramount Pictures!
In 2009, they rolled out Star Trek: The Only Reboot You Ever Wanted. In 2012, they brought us Star Trek Into Darkness: Dark Knight Knockoffs Can’t Melt Steel Beams. Now, from an entirely new writing and directing team after Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman broke up and J.J. Abrams dumped the franchise for its hotter cousin, prepare for Star Trek Beyond: What the Fuck is Going On?
Remember the first trailer that everyone hated that conveyed no information and probably left you asking, “What the fuck is going on?” Well, for the most part, the movie follows it shot for shot. You know that the movie leaves new-Jim Kirk (Chris Pine) and crew stranded on an unknown hostile planet matching wits with a rubber-faced Idris Elba, who clearly has the upper hand because he’s the villain, he’s got a rubber face on AND he’s Idris Elba, but for the most part, the movie is sure to have you asking, “What the fuck is going on?”
Pegg won’t really give us the in-universe reason for new-Sulu to be gay when Prime Sulu isn’t. Any behavior comes down to three options — nature, nurture or choice. We’re pretty sure it’s not a choice, and it’d be weird for it to be nature. Did his upbringing change significantly? Are they pushing the theory that homosexuality is caused by lens flair? Photo courtesy Paramount Pictures.
Representation of minorities and women have always been important, and they’ve become increasingly important to the public over the past few years. For political reasons both flimsy and painfully real — the Black Lives Matter movement and all the death that started and sustains it plays into this — demands for proportional onscreen representation have become louder, and they’ve been heard. Studios are finally beginning to realize that people who aren’t straight white males also see movies and the straight white male crowd is mostly mature enough to handle seeing movies about other kinds of people anyway. The Academy is forcefully diversifying. This is by-and-large a good thing — black actors are getting more work and black children have more characters and action figures who look like them to look up to and grow up playing with.
But with LGBTs, it gets a little more complicated because of the closet. There are far, far more actors in Hollywood who are gay or bisexual than we publicly know about, as confirmed by common sense, anyone who’s ever stepped foot in a drama class and Matt Damon. Additionally, sexuality is a character trait that isn’t always spelled out expressly, so there’s nothing saying Mad Max isn’t gay or James Bond isn’t bisexual. You can’t usually hide an actor or character’s skin color, so black actors need black characters for work and any black character will obviously be black, but none of that applies for LGBT actors and characters.
Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures.
Watching the box office closely, I’ve developed a pet theory that a major studio is going to go under in the next few years. Ticket sales have been declining steadily since 2002, with 2014 actually being the worst year in terms of total tickets sold since 1995. Since ticket prices have also been steadily rising, the bottom line has kept going up, but it isn’t going up quickly, and it’s been hovering around $10.5 billion since 2009. This is what a market bubble looks like — raw purchases are going down and profits are stagnating, but the problem is budgets keep going up. Studios are scheduling movies several years in advance now to try and keep up with Marvel, and when the bubble crashes and dwindling audiences overtake rising ticket prices, they’re not going to be able to pull the brakes. A lot of the money they’ve promised to big-budget tentpole films will have already been spent.
Everyone in the industry will say the depression is the problem, pat themselves on the back and no one will be fired, but the problem isn’t that people are going to the movies less and less — the problem is that people are going to movies less and less, and at the same time studios continue to put colossally stupid amounts of money into the budgets anyway.
Now you probably think this is just a kooky, far-fetched conspiracy that couldn’t possibly happen, and that’s the logical reaction, but here’s the thing — it’s already happening!
Reel Entropy 