Pop Culture at Nadir III: Turning on the Eighties

Over the weekend the movie vloggers in my Youtube subscription feed weighted in on the latest big movie release. 

True movie releases are rare these days. Any movie release is a big deal. So much has the output dwindled. Hollywood is making motion pictures at the same rate as the early Silent Era.

This new movie is the first sequel to a superhero franchise that started a couple years back by a major studio, spinning off a popular superhero character into her own movie. 

That first movie, which came out before the shutdown, was a rousing success. It made the studio lots of money in worldwide theatrical release. The characters were compelling and the acting was excellent. The making of a sequel, if not multiple sequels, was a given.

The movie was actually made in 2019, and was supposed to be released last spring. Production delays and theater closures delayed the release until last week. It went to the theaters in China, and perhaps in limited theatrical release in the U.S., but mostly the U.S. release will be an on demand offering through a streaming service. There is plenty of talk that theaters will never come back in the U.S. as we knew them.

What did my favorite movie Youtubers think of this sequel?  

Here is one opinion. 

Here is another

(The titles of these videos express the sentiment of the reviews. You'll have to click on them to see).

The story is a disaster and full of plot holes. The pacing is boring. The movie is way too long. The characters are ridiculous. They have trashed the character equity they built up in the first movie.  The CGI special effects (the one thing they should have nailed) was shoddy and laughable.

The movie tanked in Chinese theaters after a week.

We knew that Hollywood was dead even before the Shutdown. Disney had destroyed its flagship Star Wars franchise, for which it had paid so much money. The streaming services would take years to recoup the initial investment and become profitable.. There was talk that Hollywood had realized it had gone too far with Wokeness. They were pulling back from the brink.

Then came Black Lives Matter, which blew away any resistance left to a complete Revolutionary takeover of Hollywood, Hollywood is past dead. It is undead.

One of the reviews in this links I posted---I think the one byCritical Drinker--pointed out something funny about the movie, namely that it trashed the America of the 1980's as a dystopia. 

The Eighties in America were a lot of things, but they were not a dystopia. The Eighties were awesome. 

Personally I had the most wonderful of times in the Eighties,  while complaining about America in the heaviest of ways and thinking American politics was awful. 

Being young, I had painful episodes, heartbreaks and set-backs. I was lucky to be sure. but I can assert that for a normal chap like me, the Eighties were great time to young.

Among other things, it was way easier to meet people back then, and develop friendships. We are way more broken apart, on so many levels.

If you want to understand what made the Eighties so great, just consider this truth: America in the Eighties was the most advanced state achieved by Western Civilization without the Internet.