Audio By Carbonatix
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
