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There's an over-arching theme in the show Battlestar Galatica that is an apt metaphor for Hollywood: "It happened before and it will happen again."
The "it" in Battlestar is the whole Machines-Become-Sentient-and-Kill-Humans-thing. But the catchy, ominous phrase could be viewed as a metaphor for Hollywood's persistent ability to repeat mind-numbingly badly trends: They're making another Transformers movie. Jason Statham keeps destroying people's tracheas.
In protest, we present 55 trends that we think need to be blown up like every building ever to appear in a Michael Bay film.
1. Characters walking away from explosions, unharmed 2. Characters jumping from moving vehicles, unharmed 3. Characters falling from tremendous heights and bouncing off cars and living 4. Animals that talk using CGI 5. Animal facial expressions that are physically impossible using CGI 6. The smart, worldly 8-year-old 7. Nicolas Cage 8. The Jason Statham-rescues-a-kid storyline 9. The Jason Statham action that leads to him shirtless 10. Third Act battle on historical landmark
11. Two characters finally triumph over adversity so that they can be in love together and then one of them is killed by an errant fruit truck / train / thunderstorm / plane into a building 12. "It was all a dream" 13. Self-reflexiveness 14. The tough female Latina marine 15. White people as every character 16. 3D 17. Movie trailers that rip off The Dark Knight trailer 18. Movie trailers that rip off any other movie trailer 19. Children's Movie as brought to you by Exxon 20. Movie star plays him/herself 21. Shitty American remakes of already great foreign films 22. Star Wars effects tinkering 23. "Bonus endings" 24. Horror hybrids (Zombie werewolves, vampire zombies, vampire werewolves, vampire zombie werewolves, zombie zombies) 25. Scary kids 26. Octilogies 27. Indiana Jones and the Who Gives a Fuck 28. The lack of appreciation for Andy Serkis 29. The lack of appreciation for Gary Oldman
30. Trailers and movies that use songs famously used by earlier better trailers and movies 31. The extremely wealthy Manhattanite as relatable human narrative 32. Self-entitled Gen-Y laughing at my narcissism-makes-everything-OK Shit 33. Reboots of Charles Bronson films 34. Rebooting a beloved franchise only to fuck it up severely and immediately on a fundamental level 35. Rebooting Movies that sucked the first time around 36. Any super hero who does something cool and then expresses surprise at his / her new abilities 37. The inevitable sequels to Battleship 38. Really bad 9/11 films 39. Action films that reference 9/11 40. The formula: "Die Hard in / on a ____" 41. The fact that every new Tom Cruise movie isn't Days of Thunder 2 42. Special effects credits listing 450 People 43. Comedies without Paul Rudd 44. Any plot, problem or conflict that could be solved by one character simply telling another character the information they know 45. Phones that can't get signals 46. Phones that lose battery right when the character needs information 47. Montage of characters researching on Google 48. Torture porn in Horror 49. The trilogy no one asked for 50. Tim Burton casting Johnny Depp / Helena Bonham Carter 51. Aliens are behind every major human achievement in history 52. Shia Lebeouf is tough 53. Happy endings 54. Adam Sandler's Films 55. The Oscars
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