Has anyone noticed the recent rise of more and more terrible movies that grace the silver screen these days? Yes? No? Well, it doesn't matter. >_> The moment I watched that trailer for The Emoji Movie, I just knew that it's going to be a very bad movie. I don't need to look at the negative scores just to know how bad it is. Sure, it managed to be surprisingly successful during its box office opening, quite close to Dunkirk, but massive ticket sales are not, and should never be, the measure of a movie's quality. If anything, the overall viewer ratings should matter even more.

Well, to be fair, people are also pissed-off against The Emoji Movie because there was going to be another movie before that: a CG adaptation of the popular Popeye series. A test footage of that movie was posted online, and it got rave reviews. People were excited. So when Sony shelved that movie and axed its production just so they could release The Emoji Movie instead, yeah, you can understand the anger. =/

Last Thursday, my parents and I went to watch The Dark Tower. It was... okay-ish, I guess. >_> But that's just it: being okay. Not too great or anything. I don't read the books, but I can tell that the movie changed a lot of stuff from the books, which no doubt would piss-off fans of that Dark Tower novel series. They even changed the focus main character to that little kid, Jake Chamber, when Roland had always been the main character in the book series. I will not question the casting decisions -- Roland Deschain the Gunslinger was clearly described as a white man in the books, which Idris Elba clearly wasn't. But when you deviate the material from its source, then it's easy to see why it got the ratings it gets. Though, I later read that this movie is, in fact, supposed to be a sequel to the last novel, making it technically Dark Tower VIII. (Or maybe it's just a way to justify all these changes from the source novel, considering that the novel series' timeline is already quite disjointed as it is.) I think my head hurts. @_@

But hey, at least it's better than The Emoji Movie. XD

Anyway, it seems that the entertainment industry doesn't even care anymore whether or not a movie is even that good or bad, as long as they gain lots of cash in return from ticket sales. It boggles my mind to see how much we've degraded over the years. Nowadays, you can make the most terrible movie ever and it will still sell -- the directors still get paid, regardless of how bad their movies turn out to be. (See Uwe Boll as an example.)

Or maybe, as viewers, we seemed to no longer able to go "Wow!" with the incredible visuals presented on-screen. Back in the early days, CG used to be quite a breakthrough when they were first used in movies, because it allowed filmmakers to film scenes deemed impossible with practical effects or would've shred the actors to pieces if attempted for real. Nowadays, CG proved to be too common, so common that we're no longer surprised when we see it being used on-screen.

Regardless, the more recent movies these days doesn't seem to put more effort in making the storyline any better, instead relying on the viewers to be attracted by the visuals on-screen. It should be obvious that story should always come first. It doesn't matter how flashy the visuals are; if the story is weak, then your movie will also going to be weak. It's sad that we, as moviegoers these days, walk into the cinema just to watch those giant CG robots from the Transformers movie series, without much thought about the lack of depth to the actual storyline. To be fair, Transformers is a franchise-driven series, so it doesn't matter whether or not that movie sucked, as long as those movies allowed them to sell more Decepticon toys to kids. Same goes with those recent TMNT movies.

Perhaps I'm just rambling about the lack of great movies this year, but after the release of The Emoji Movie, I simply had to speak out my mind regarding this matter. >_>