For the past fifty-plus years, science fiction and fantasy and the Box Office blockbuster have gone hand in hand as this genre tends to deliver grand stories with far-reaching themes that lend themselves to spectacle when presented visually. This proved a hindrance to the genre prior to the development of more sophisticated special effects, but as technology improved and as movie-goers flocked to effects-laden spectacles, sci fi/fantasy films became a hot property on the big screen. The Box Office turnaround began in the mid-70’s with blockbuster trend-setters Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977 (and to a lesser extent Logan’s Run in 1976). Prior to that, genre films tended to aim at younger audiences and rarely had sufficient budgets to adequately bring to life their tales of the fantastic. But when lines began to stretch around the block to see Jaws and Star Wars, Hollywood took notice and the course of cinema changed permanently.
Whereas previously the high dollar sci fi film with broad appeal was a rare event on the big screen–with occasional entries like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Andromeda Strain, and Fantastic Voyage–by the early 80s these films started to crowd the theaters and by the mid-90s and into the 21st century they began to dominate the Box Office. Unfortunately, as sci fi and fantasy films started to become more prominent, they also started to lose their sense of awe and wonder as they became less about telling a great story and more the product of a movie producing machine mostly focused on launching a money-making franchise.
The early blockbusters like Jaws and Star Wars were born of inspiration and ingenuity. They did not have the luxury of CGI programmers cranking out any effect needed to fill up the big screen. And while both of those two films had relatively healthy budgets, the production teams still had to cut corners and rely on innovation to create the visuals that these stories demanded. They also had that sense of creating something new, that that audience had never seen before, along with something rare these days in filmmaking: sincerity. These two movies had more to offer than just dazzling special effects. Both contained stories beneath their spectacle that resonated with the audience. Jaws was more than just a movie about a monster shark terrorizing swimmers, it looked more closely at the personal level of terror and also delivered a tale of bonding of the three male leads. With Star Wars, George Lucas managed to tap into the inspiration of the space operas like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers as well as pulp science fiction and used that to deliver a story that resonated with people of all ages.
Unfortunately, Hollywood paid much less attention to how these films touched their audiences and focused more on the unprecedented receipts that they brought in. And as the imitators quickly began to hit the theaters, many took the obvious route of trying to dazzle viewers with on-screen wizardry, leaving story (and sometimes even a coherent plot) as an afterthought. Which leads to the question of whether Hollywood has an obligation to place art over profit when deciding which movies to greenlight. I would say no (though many would disagree) because I understand that movies are a business and they need to make money to stay viable. But it is definitely preferable from my perspective when the studios do not lose sight of the art in film-making and its potential for expression in its unique idiom. Plenty of movies have succeeded with this in the blockbuster era beyond the two mentioned above. Just a few that come to mind are Alien, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner, the first two Terminator films, The Matrix, and more recently, films like Inception and Arrival. These movies did more than just dazzle us, they spoke to us. They resonated with us on some level, thus the reason they have become recognized as classics in the genre.
But so many more have gone the other way, often derailed by a lack of vision that crushes any potential for artistic innovation that the film may hold. The glut of visually stunning but artistically vapid films has become much more prominent in the last few decades or so, but it first began not long after the blockbuster era began. Many of these films still managed to fill seats in the theaters and turn a profit for their studios, but they delivered a product focused on dazzling the audience which ultimately felt derivative and empty. With the Blockbuster Overload column, I will be taking a look at the films like these that have wallowed in the Hollywood excesses and cranked up the budget to epic proportions while ultimately falling short of delivering a satisfying viewing experience. They may have looked good on the big screen while we sat in th seats munching popcorn and guzzling down a bucket of Coke. But they faded from our memories (or we tried to expunge them from our minds) by the time we hit the parking lot. Note that we do not consider all of these to be bad movies (though many will edge toward the lower side of our rating scale). Some of them we liked and maybe even consider them a guilty pleasure. But we acknowledge that they fell short of their potential.
And then there are those that were just bad movies. The ones that cost a gazillion dollars to make and you just sit there and wonder how Hollywood could just throw money away on such a soulless piece of celluloid. Yeah, we know profits are their main motive, but sometimes you have to wonder if just a little bit more heart and soul had been injected into the project, it could have turned out completely different. There are plenty of movies out there that fit that description, and we will be hitting quite a number of them over the coming months. And this will start with one of the films that I believe represented a turning point during the blockbuster era toward a more cynical corporate view of these movies as products rather than artistic expressions. Not to say that this attitude has not permeated Hollywood pretty much since it came into existence, but this particular film seemed to cap off that perspective and it provided the compass that the industry would follow after its release. Which one am I talking about? Check back shortly to find out . . .
