Matt Watson is the opinion editor at The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected].Over the weekend, my heart sank as I came to terms with the fact that Moses died on Saturday, April 5. While the cause of his death hasn’t been revealed, I suppose he either finally fell under the weight of God-like artistic greatness or could no longer stand the non-greatness of present blockbuster hits.
There are a lot of things that just ain’t like they used to be, and movies are one of them. Along with actors such as Marlon Brando and Paul Newman, Charlton Heston represents a simple yet profoundly creative time in the film industry.
It’s difficult to judge during which decades the film industry was at its “best,” as it has always been tainted by some cheesy, purely money-making products, and I do not want to say that movies from the mid-20th century are “better” in all respects than what we see in theaters now.
However, the difference is quite noticeable. I remember seeing Heston in a television interview a few years ago deploring the amount of money it takes to produce even miniscule films.
Movies like “Ben-Hur” and “The Godfather,” which only cost $15 million and $6 million respectively, according to www.boxofficemojo.com, were produced on a significantly lower budget than today’s romantic comedies, such as “Hitch,” which cost $70 million. And if you compare “Ben-Hur” to its modern-day equals, the difference is even larger, with movies like the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “Titanic” and the “Star Wars” prequels costing a few hundred million dollars each. “Braveheart” and “Gladiator” both cost about $100 million.
Of course, the costs would seem well worth it if the quality of films actually improved. Though many films in the last two decades are some of my favorite and stand firm in their own right, we often are put through space sagas and epic battles that hurt due to the overuse of computer-generated effects and lacking plots. The effects in the new “Star Wars” episodes never appealed to me. In the first trilogy, the space ships were made with real material and appear more realistic on camera than the cartoons flashed all over the screen in the prequels.
And when I see other films such as “Spider-Man” or “The Mummy” suffering the same fate, I begin to think the industry is simply growing lazy. Films with real objects and real people have something to offer that this decade’s overproduced films just can’t.