"The Hobbit: There And Back Again" To be Renamed "The Battle of the Five Armies"

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

In my opinion the modern, mainstream Western 'culture industry' may currently be at one of its lowest points in terms of anti-intellectualism and fatuousness (yes I know 'fatuous' is one of my favourite words), turning everything into this sort of homogenous cultural gruel of adaptations, reboots and revivals of older texts and properties which are chewed up and regurgitated as identical, generic slop. As a wise man once said, "I guess if you feed humanity flavourless wallpaper paste for decades then you shouldn't be surprised if that's all they want to eat now." But it's a chicken-and-egg problem really, the industry feeding the consumers and vice-versa. That being said, I think a lot of blame lies with the current intensity of the corporatocratic grip on our politics and economics: lazy, stock storytelling feeds the bottom line a lot more readily than, I don't know, dignity or meaning.

And this is precisely the reason I have so little use for the vast majority of films released in the last 15 years or so. I'm only hoping a reboot won't be in the cards for LOTR ever. Noting the trend of such movies, I have no illusion it would be any sort of improvement over PJ, but I fear would instead be an even worse example of hack-and-slash Michael Beyism.