On the one hand, today’s movies have, of course, far better color and visual and special effects than the movies from 1966 or 1916.
On the other hand, today’s movies are often sequels or remakes, and doubtlessly there are a lot of political or social messages that people from 1966 or 1916 would find objectionable.
Overall I would surmise yes - that people from 50 or 100 years ago would be impressed enough that they would like 2016’s movies even if they were considered shallow storytelling or objectionable politically.
While we’re at it, what do you think the movies from the year 2066 will have - special effects or cinematography wise - that today’s movies don’t? Holographic technology? Audio effects with sound waves designed to inspire particular emotions?
People 50-100 years ago were not hung up on colors or special effects. They’d like what was being done, but it wouldn’t make or break a movie for them.
Sequels would only be an issue if they hadn’t seen the original, nor would remakes.
I think the one thing that would disappoint them would be the lack of characterization and the sameness of the stories.
One of the things that I note today, as I watch films (or even TV shows) from the '50s and '60s, is just how slowly they seem to be paced, compared to modern productions. Given that, I suspect that viewers from that era would find modern films (particularly action films) to be extremely frenetic, with action sequences that are difficult to follow (lots of blur and “shaky-cam”).
I also think people from the '60s and before would find the harsh language and visual imagery jarring and unsettling. Especially horror movie effects where nothing is left to the imagination.
My thoughts exactly. I’m 61, and I grew up watching movies made in the '30s, '40s, and '50s (and some even in the '20s). They had things like storylines, plots, characterization, and intelligible dialogue that didn’t go out of its way shock or offend. Neither were cracks in quality papered over with ludicrous computer-generated special effects.
Not every feature was Oscar material, but even the worst were better than most of the crap shown in cinemas today.
Er… you do understand that some of us actually are from “50 years ago” and remember the year 1966? Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins were big-budget effects laden extravaganzas of the era but not exactly deep plots and stories. For that matter Wizard of Oz was the equivalent of its era, too.
And these days there are still movies produced that have no special effects, that rely solely on realistic plots and settings that have “deep” stories. And we still have comedies.
It’s like asking if Shakespeare would be able to appreciate modern TV. Appreciate it? He’d probably be writing scripts for it.
Yes, some of the social stuff they might find objectionable (based on speaking with my parents and grandparents (my paternal grandmother was 16 years old 100 years ago and she was the youngest of my grands), people from 100 years ago were objecting 50 years ago about “modern lack of morals”, just as people from 50 years ago like to bitch about today’s “state of the world” but so what? And some of us weirdly liberal types 50 years ago are now enjoying a world much more in line with what we think it should be than when we were younger.
There were plenty of remakes in the 1960’s. Earliest movies drew from classical literature, Shakespeare, legends like Robin Hood, and so forth for inspiration, remaking old stories.
Basically, some of the details will be different but overall movies - or whatever else comes along - won’t be that different than what we have today.
I think it would have a lot to do with individual people and what they are looking for in the movies in the first place. My dad is a HUGE science and technology person, so the advances in special effects have indeed made a big impact on his enjoyment of films over the years. I’m pretty confident that if you sat my 1966 college sophomore dad down, and showed him this year’s film that best showcased special effects, he’d freak out and love it. Heck, I think he would have still watched Star Wars if the entire 121 minutes was footage of the Star Destroyer slowly filling the screen.
In every era of movies, there have been a few really good ones, and many more bad ones. Decades later, we forget the bad ones, remember the few good ones, and assume that the ones we remembered were representative of the era.
The whole slew of action/special effects movies apparently aimed at teenage boys strikes me as a complete waste of time and money, but then there were plenty of movies from 50 years that would probably have had the same effect on me then.
The audience of the 1930s for movies of that time like His Girl Friday might struggle to find something they like today, perhaps. (Incidentally, maybe that was an outlier in its time, but I was struck not only by the fact that it featured a strong female lead whose professional status wasn’t in question and unrelated to any romantic entanglements, but also by the way the dialogue got faster and faster as the plot became more frenetic but you could still hear every word clearly articulated - naturalistic acting has a lot to answer for).
I’d question that. I think there’s a “test of time” factor - we tend to remember the best movies from decades past. But the reality was the average movie was more formulaic back in the studio days.
This, on the other hand, I fully agree with. If you watch a movie that’s a few decades old, you’ll be struck by how slow paced it seems and how static the camera shots are. So I’m sure somebody from that era seeing a modern movie would have the opposite impression and would find the modern movie too frenetic to watch.
I think another big change that viewers from fifty years ago would notice is the massive expansion of screen credits. I just checked Hawaii, which was one of the top mainstream movies from 1966 - its end credits ran for a total of forty-eight seconds and listed twenty-seven names.
The first thing that came to mind is that movies won’t be the same, important medium in 50 years - they will be a niche offering, competing with VR video games, VR storytelling in a YouTube sort of way (i.e., a content platform where folks can upload their own content); Augmented Reality entertainment pieces; TV serializations and limited series, etc.
I think movies in 50 years will be so specialized to do things that only a movie format can do, that people will only think of movies as being able to do that one thing - i.e., some new form of IMAX or special effects requiring a movie space or something.
When the credits went to the end of the movie, the pressure to keep them short (and avoid boring the audience) mostly went away, since most people don’t bother to watch them.
I bet that in 50 years the format of audio plus 2D visual will still be the standard format for entertainment. No smell-o-vision. No Virtual Reality. No 5D. No strapping yourself into a chair to get shaken around and vibrated.
Sure, movies will look different and people will have different expectations and there won’t be any need to go to a movie theater unless you really need to see the movie with 200 of your closest friends.
But the only major sensory upgrades to movies in the last 100 years were sound and color. All the other things were fads that didn’t work. Sure, things will look sharper and sounds will be clearer. But the other stuff like 3D doesn’t add very much to the movie/TV experience.
I mean, maybe you’ll watch a movie on a headset, or (God forbid) have the image scanned directly onto your retina. But it will still look like a movie.
Yeah, you could have a virtual reality experience. But it would be a game or an environment, not a movie. Sure, you could have a thing where you wander around an environment and interact with the various characters you meet, we have that already, it’s called World of Warcraft.