I recently watched A League of Their Own and Die Hard. In my opinion, these movies are just categorically different from what's being made today, are still totally compelling start to finish, and really capture the magic and the high art of the golden age of cinema. I truly believe movies were just better 30-40 years ago.
That was the era of "every second counts." Every second has meaning and purpose and adds something to the narrative. The Fifth Element is another good example, and almost 30 years old. Now in the age of binging, where a 2 hour plot is stretched into 17 hours of TV, there is SO much filler and downtime and it's honestly just offensive in comparison.
I kind of enjoyed Pluribus, I liked the concept and what they did with it, but there's way too much forgettable filler that dilutes it into a slog. The movies I mentioned are (again, IMO) absolutely gripping and just lean and mean storytelling vehicles.
> I truly believe movies were just better 30-40 years ago.
That's the problem with nostalgia, you don't remember all the bad movies you had to watch just to get those two gems. Someone probably suggested those movies rather than you stumbling onto them. That's pretty much the job of a critic. Siskel and Ebert in the 1980s would often talk about the pain of having to sit through hours of awful movies every week just so that they could find one or two worth recommending.
I'm talking about the best of the best though, the top of the form at the time. Yes those are classics and for good reason. But there were also lots more. Lucas, Kubrick, Spielberg, Lynch...feels like they just don't make 'em like that anymore. It's crazy that in some ways nothing has really eclipsed a movie from 1977 and we're still awash in its glow.
I tried to provide specific examples and contrast with something in the current zeitgest. I'm open to counter-arguments. I liked Barbie and Oppenheimer, both were well-done, but I don't think they'll stand up with the greats. I admit that I don't watch as many movies now but what stands out in the past 10 years? What has captured the zeitgeist like The Matrix or The Lord of the Rings?
Big budget films today don't take risks. They go through focus groups and oscar checklists. They are homogenized to the point of banality. Don't focus on the big budget films. If they spend a lot on marketing, it's reeks of desperation.
Those great directors you just named were nobodies at the time those films were made. You need to find movies made by the current nobodies. Those are indie films. Go find more indie films. Those are the ones you will enjoy. My favorite movie of all time is Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022). I just now had to look up the director and did not recognize the names.
I didn't see that one, I added it to my shortlist.
Part of my point though is that, for a long time, the big-budget Hollywood stuff was actually "the good stuff." Like people can quibble about whether indie art films were better or not but I think it's pretty well agreed that (some set of) the big name directors and actors and blockbusters were pushing the art form. And it required those kinds of budgets to pull off, and it was seen as legitimately elite status to be given the chance to do it. The crazy complicated shit they did with practical effects and elaborate set building, for example. Teams of visionaries coming together to build deeply immersive worlds. It was a bleeding edge of art, and it attracted those types.
Read about the making of Die Hard. They're legitimately blowing up and ramming SWAT vehicles into a huge office tower in Los Angeles. Alan Rickman of all people is doing crazy stuntwork with flying cameras and real explosions and everything needs to be timed to the millisecond and executed by the whole team. There is no "do it in post", there is no CGI. And you can feel it.
Some in this thread have made the point that it was wasteful and excessive, and dangerous, and exploited labor, and that is all true, but...it was art.
I went through the lists. In 1985, of the top 10 movies, you had two direct sequels, two adaptations, leaving six original movies. In 2025, of the top 10 movies, you had two direct sequels, two remakes, three franchises (maybe sequels?), one that is a part II (so sequel?, also an adaptation), one adaptation and it seems one original movie. My, how times have changed.
See my other comment on this, but I'm talking about the top of the form, the movies that have and/or will stand the test of time and be considered notable for some reason. Not the average of all movies made in a given year.
Can you comment further on this? As an American it's kind of hard to see that. Is this just kind of a temporary reaction to the Trump administration or a larger trend? What is taking its place? Are there more localized media pockets (e.g. is there a significant German-language Instagram influencer world)? Geographically which areas are you talking about?
People no longer look up to America like they did 40-50 years ago. It's been a slow decline, really starting I think in the early 2000s with GWB's "war on terror" and stupid invasion of Iraq, and the election of Trump accelerated it, and the re-election of Trump has really put the final nails in the coffin. Instead of a force for good that sometimes screwed up as America was formerly viewed, it's viewed as an empire in rapid decline with a toxic culture. It's not perceived quite as badly as Russia, but it's getting there.
That's not really about media though. While it does factor into the overall sentiment, a think a lot of people can enjoy America's cultural exports regardless of how they feel about the geopolitical side of things (certainly we can).
I'm just curious because, for better or worse, American movies, music, and TV still seem globally dominant from my POV and it'd be interesting to know if and how that is changing. There's kind of a huge moat, other countries haven't built out these global powerhouse media industries.
Another layer of the moat is how much that media and tech hegemony has entrenched English as the global language. Any culture based on a different language is going to have a really hard time getting beyond their borders.
When someone says that the relevance of American media is in decline, that implies that something else is becoming more relevant. There has to be something there beyond "America sucks now."
I think the issue is that content creation and distribution has already been fully democratized. How many hours do people spend watching videos shot by individuals on their phones in their apartments?
Combined with streaming, there's just an overabundance of "good enough" content at everyone's fingertips. The moat that protected big-budget feature films is gone. You don't see a trailer for a movie and salivate and wait for it to come out, it just blends in to the stream of 5000 other things you can watch right now.
Like I said elsewhere, I think people still want to watch 1+ hour fiction stories that are compelling. This is a broad category that I think people still want that's differentiated from 30sec vertical video, and that should exist in the cultural conversation.
It doesn't feel fully democratized because if it was, you'd see more indie things in this same format competing with "big budget" movies on the same playing field.
Creating a good story, getting good actors and getting it all to come together is hard and still costs millions. At the end you may also not get your money back
Take 'I Swear', a very good recent film. It's well worth a watch.
It's made 8.3M. Has it made the money back?
It's not going to compete with 'The Mandalorian and Sidekick'.
That's likely to make several hundred million and still be fairly poor.
> I think people still want to watch 1+ hour fiction stories that are compelling
Might be an anecdote, but I've noticed several friends and family unable to focus on a movie and lately even on a tv show without pulling their phones every few minutes.
> I think people still want to watch 1+ hour fiction stories that are compelling.
I mean, "want to" is one thing, but the numbers show what they end up doing. Instagram and TikTok, like video games as someone else mentioned, have taken a significant share of the "entertainment hours" budget. I feel like the impact of the low-to-no-budget content creator is undeniable (this traces back to ebaumsworld and early YouTube, it was just internet dorks then, now it's been industrialized. Gen Z probably wholeheartedly prefers this type of content).
My point was that content creation has been democratized -- unfunded individuals can now compete -- not that making traditional Hollywood-style movies has been. It's gone so far they've been phased out, the entire premise is largely untenable at this point. That specific sector was actually somewhat more democratized in the late stages of the heyday, when a Hollywood movie called Dude, Where's My Car was made, and indie films did flourish because the industry was healthy enough to support them.
True but I think a lot of them would be in the "I totally want to watch feature films" camp. By wholeheartedly I meant that the kids don't even have that pretense.
It's just the sad truth that these things are motivated first and foremost by violence and aggression towards other people. We're a little more civilized than some but really no different from any other bloodthirsty maniacs. There's just no need to be expending significant resources on killing people in other countries. Politicians run on platforms of fixing things at home and then do this shit. It's insane.
You have to have working knowledge of StarCraft and the RTS genre of games to understand what they're getting at.
One area is "micromanagement." Hundreds of individual units moving and acting independently is very difficult for one human general to track, let alone react and give orders to quickly. Think more about rapid data analysis and surfacing supporting information than it being the singular mastermind behind the operation.
As the article says, it's not a huge quantum leap where it just obliterates everything. It's about just being a little bit smarter, a little bit faster, having that little edge that tips everything in their favor.
essentially, the interface discussed in the pdf is automated on the backend via AI, various JBOSS functions, etc.
the other piece is automated target recognition via arial and satellite images. imagery analysis has been a thing since WWI and with satellites you can get visibility to the point you can see license plates at the correct angle. scanning that level of detail 24/7 is very hard... but not with strong AI tools...
I think the "you" they refer to there is the hypothetical other skilled human, not a computer. The wording is confusing but I think they're just saying that the human players will reach a ceiling with each other (they then contrast this with real life where the ceiling is always moving). That whole paragraph is a bit muddy with the point it's trying to make.
This behavior predates Trump. He's just an accelerationist of where this sort of behavior was always bound to go.
But he does perfectly demonstrate that you can't have operational efficiency if you're ignorant about your enemies because you're being advised by religious fanatics, if your goals are constantly shifting and your motives are purely selfish.
> This behavior predates Trump. He's just an accelerationist of where this sort of behavior was always bound to go.
Idk if I agree with this. First off, your initial verbiage is distinctly Trumpian. Second, I think Trump, like Hitler, activates latent sentiments that are largely kept at bay with "normal" post-WWII world leader politics. I think it's anomalous and once we get out of it things will normalize.
But really, my main point was that the politics and the "whys" of these decisions (capture Maduro, bomb Iran) are outside the scope of the article. It assumes that the decisions have been made and is looking only at the impact of specific technology on the operational outcomes.
It seems like a lot of the commenters are responding as if the article is making the point that "the US is like the Culture" but it's much more narrow and specific than that.
Yeah, I emotionally disagreed with this article, because I like the Culture, mostly.
That being said, it's possible that AI is helping here.
Mind you, given the sycophancy of current models, it's also possible that commanders are making worse decisions based on the results of these AI outputs.
Finally, if the US manage to get what they want without completely destroying the balance of power in the Middle East or sending oil to 150 a barrel, then I'd be much more likely to accept the authors speculation.
I think it's safe to say that whatever products the military is using are vastly different from what's available to and designed for everyday consumers. DARPA may be past its heyday and certainly the private sector has caught up in a lot of ways but I don't doubt for a second that they have been investing heavily in weaponizing AI for some time.
> It seems like a lot of the commenters are responding as if the article is making the point that "the US is like the Culture" but it's much more narrow and specific than that.
Right, however that narrow point of essentially (overwhelming) technological superiority and 'efficiency' can be made using a very large number of science fiction. The Culture explores specific themes that make it what it is.
If you completely dismiss them, I am not sure you are left with even a whiff of Iain Banks' Culture.
And to be clear, the point I am specifically making is that a lot of what the US is currently doing is not exactly rational, or even a supper efficient way to achieve their stated goals and a lot of it seems to be made up as they go along.
I don't know if it demonstrates anything, but I do think it's somewhat natural for people to want to interact with tools that feel like they make sense.
If I'm going to trust a model to summarize things, go out and do research for me, etc, I'd be worried if it made what looks like comprehension or math mistakes.
I get that it feels like a big deal to some people if some models give wrong answers to questions like this one, "how many rs are in strawberry" (yes: I know models get this right, now, but it was a good example at the time), or "are we in the year 2026?"
In my experience the tools feel like they make sense when I use them properly, or at least I have a hard time relating the failure modes to this walk/drive thing with bizarre adversarial input. It just feels a little bit like garbage in, garbage out.
Okay, but when you're asking a model to do things like summarizing documents, analyzing data, or reading docs and producing code, etc, you don't necessarily have a lot of control over the quality of the input.
Someone that makes vibe coding tools would presumably want to have vibe coders on staff? If you're just not into the whole enterprise that's one thing but I'm not understanding what's fishy about that.
It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success". Maybe I should network better to get "successful". I shouldn't be focusing on writing good code or good enough agents.
All of this is true and none of it is new. If your primary goal is to make lots of money then yes you should do exactly that. If you want to be a craftsman then you'll have to accept a more modest fortune and stop looking at the relative handful of growth hacker exits.
That was the era of "every second counts." Every second has meaning and purpose and adds something to the narrative. The Fifth Element is another good example, and almost 30 years old. Now in the age of binging, where a 2 hour plot is stretched into 17 hours of TV, there is SO much filler and downtime and it's honestly just offensive in comparison.
I kind of enjoyed Pluribus, I liked the concept and what they did with it, but there's way too much forgettable filler that dilutes it into a slog. The movies I mentioned are (again, IMO) absolutely gripping and just lean and mean storytelling vehicles.
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