How did you like the new Avengers movie? Or have you seen King Kong: Skull Island? The budget for those movies goes something like this: Special effects budget: a billion dollars. Storyline budget: hold on, storyline? What storyline? You can’t mean the few lines of dialogue between the drawn-out slow motion battles with many explosions and unrealistic physics. That is what these so-called “blockbuster” movies have degraded to.
Just to be clear, what I most look for in a movie is plot. Acting and character development can also be important. I don’t rate movies by how good their special effects were or how many explosions they had. Maybe at the start of the Marvel series, there were some pretty good movies (I know that I liked them), but Civil War was way over the top. There was a plot, but it was mostly an excuse for the aforementioned “drawn-out slow motion battles with many explosions and unrealistic physics.” Civil War is not by any means the only movie guilty of this. Many recent blockbusters have so many explosions or CGI, you can hardly tell what is going on.
Fortunately, not all recent movies are like this simply because they do not have to be. Even action movies can avoid this phenomenon simply by creating an interesting or engaging plot that makes sense before they start the special effects.