Modern motion pictures are made for people who temporarily or permanently lack the mental capacity to understand deeper plots. The other audience is too small to bother with.
I just watched “While You Were Sleeping” with my wife while we decorated for Christmas. It was still better than 99.9% of movies from this decade and it’s not because the plot is particularly sophisticated.
I don’t think this was a 90s thing. I think it’s been a gradual progression to shorter, shallower attention spans. Contrast 2001 space odyssey to a 90s movie, it feels so slow.
Then contrast a 2000s movie to a modern film and if you want to feel really sad, contrast that to a high budget YouTubers content.
i think your mistaking stuff here. 2001 space odyssey is considered a masterpiece by cinema enthusiasts. tested through short years. who knows if it'll still rank high in 300 years from now like some arts of old mediums; Don Quijote book is a great example
have been watched almost a hundred of hours of the early cinema (1920-1930) i found 2001 space odyssey boring as heck. had to go to a public theater to not sleep through, because the past 2 attempts at my house got me sleeping. cinema is a recent medium. it can go through a lot of stuff. and yet, you can find shallow films since the first era, till today. not every movie was made to be dense, slow or thoughtful. the 90s also had a bunch of shallow stuff
It's the opposite. Modern movies are obsessed with plot. Inception being an example of this. It's everything else, the image and characters that's lacking. You're never going to get something like Tarkovsky's Solaris again that just shows you a highway scene for five minutes.
Villeneuve commented on this a year or two ago in an interview where he pointed out that he hates the extent to which television has infected film with its focus on plot and dialogue at expense of what's visually on the screen.
To me they all seem to be video game plots or soap opera / palace drama plots, which might be intricate yes, but it still doesn't hit the mark. I can't put words on it, but the spell is broken.
