Blockbuster season is upon us again – and it's bringing a sense of deja vu with it

Published on Monday 19 July 2010 15:32

WHEN The Karate Kid and The A-Team square off against each other in cinemas next week, victory will be determined by whether UK audiences want their naff-but-fondly-remembered 1980s pop culture nostalgia packaged as a star-vehicle for an A-lister's 12-year-old son, or as a series of explosions linked together by smug characters bearing the names and catchphrases of their vaguely remembered television forebears.

If the US results of this bout are anything to go by, the precocious pre-teen posturing of Will Smith's son Jaden in The Karate Kid is likely to deliver a crane kick (or CGI-enhanced cobra kick) to the head of the newly tooled-up A-Team. The real blow, however, is the one being dished out to audiences.

Leaving aside the pain of having rose-tinted memories of the original Karate Kid's signature wax on/wax off training technique forever tarnished by the new film's rubbish jacket on/jacket-off homage, there's just something deadening about the way movie-goers, especially younger movie-goers, are constantly being submitted to a barrage of belated sequels and prequels, reboots and remakes inspired by the first blockbuster generation's pop-culture touchstones.

In addition to The Karate Kid and The A-Team, so far this year we've had a Clash of the Titans remake, A Nightmare on Elm Street rebooted and a sequel to Predator. Next month there's a remake of Piranha due out, and come the end of the year, expect the hype machine to be in overdrive for the Christmas release of Tron Legacy.

And it doesn't end there. Remakes of Reagan-era right-wing fantasy movies Conan and Red Dawn, not to mention a new version of The Thing, should be in cinemas early next year. A fourth Mad Max film is also in the pipeline, as is a two-part prequel to Alien. Remakes of and sequels to The NeverEnding Story, The Dark Crystal and The Black Hole have recently been announced – and Ghostbusters 3 keeps being threatened.

And this is after a decade in which mainstream movie lovers have been force-fed a handful of additional Star Wars films, a fourth Indiana Jones adventure, two additional Terminator movies, plus fresh outings in the Rocky, Rambo and Die Hard franchises.

What's missing from this list? New heroes. New monsters. New set-pieces, new catchphrases and new lines of dialogue that might, over time, filter into and enrich popular culture as much as the original incarnations of some of the aforementioned films have done. You might argue that such things are already well-represented thanks to proliferation of comic book movies, but characters such as Batman, Superman, Spider-Man and Iron Man are all decades old, with several of their movie versions already on their second or third iteration.

It's an odd state of affairs. As Kick-Ass creator Mark Millar is fond of telling interviewers, had Stan Lee simply spent his career writing stories about the comic book characters he grew up loving, he'd never have created the Marvel characters the world now cherishes. In movie terms, however, that's exactly what's happening. The Twilight saga and the Harry Potter films – both based on novels – are about the closest Hollywood has come to giving younger audiences new heroes to root for. Action fans have been slightly luckier thanks to the Bourne trilogy, but The Matrix was the last truly original movie to have a seismic impact on pop culture at large – and that came out more than a decade ago.

How did things get so… familiar? Though Hollywood has been remaking movies for almost as long as movies have been made, the current and ongoing glut of remakes and sequels that can trace their origins back to the ten- or 12-year period following the release of Star Wars in 1977 is partly down to the fact that the kids who grew up watching the films and TV shows of that era are now old enough to make or approve movie projects of their own.

That they've mostly chosen to relive their childhood pop culture loves and obsessions by updating them wholesale or giving a stay of execution to past-their-prime franchises is one of the more depressing aspects of modern movie-making. I used to think the hippies-turned-capitalists who made a mint out of endlessly repackaging Woodstock and The Doors were a ruthless lot, but they're not the ones exploiting their own undiscerning childhood love of shows as formulaic as The A-Team for the purposes of deliberately shlocky movies. Nope, it's the filmmakers of my generation that are responsible for this.

Not that they didn't learn from the best. It was George Lucas who inadvertently showed Hollywood that nostalgia equalled big bucks when his paean to his own teenage years, American Graffiti, struck a chord with baby-boomers to become one of the most profitable movies of all time. As recent documentary The People vs George Lucas shows, it was Lucas again who proved himself remarkably canny at selling the subsequent generation's youth culture back to it by re-issuing the Star Wars trilogy as special editions in 1997 – just in time to remind us how much we loved the films (and we truly did) in order to stoke our interest for the new addition to the series, The Phantom Menace. Forget Generation X, then, Hollywood is currently run by Generation X-Wing: a generation of filmmakers, executives and marketing bods who understand the dollar value of making audiences fall in love with the movies of their childhoods.

Of course, it helps that this development has coincided with the parallel rise of that hall-of-mirrors hype machine known as the internet. Without this, Hollywood wouldn't be able to so easily invoke the Nuremberg defence for all these films: it's what the fans want.

Really? Has there been consistent cry for a sequel to Tron since it flopped at the box office 18 years ago? Or does the current feverish fanboy anticipation stem from the 2008 San Diego Comic Con, where Disney premiered exclusive test footage to a surprised crowd of sci-fi and comic book geeks, something that in movie marketing terms is the equivalent of throwing crack vials into a cell full of junkies? It's certainly significant that prior to this, Tron's cultural penetration amounted to Tron Guy (the overweight computer programmer who became a butt of a million e-mail jokes when he posted pictures of himself in a replica, back-lit Lycra Tron costume he made himself) and an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer's inquiry as to whether anyone has ever seen the movie is met with blank faces.

Tron: Legacy does highlight another reason why so many other movies of the early blockbuster era are being circled for a revamp, though. As part of that first wave of special effects-driven blockbusters, they're viewed as perfect vehicles to showcase both 3D and the advances in performance capture pioneered by James Cameron's Avatar – both of which feature in Tron: Legacy.

At which point you may well ask when all the new stories are going to start rolling in that this technology is supposedly going to liberate filmmakers to tell. Don't hold your breath. As Cameron told Steven Spielberg recently while discussing the advantages of performance capture for ageing actors: "Harrison (Ford] could be making Indiana Jones films as long as you want to direct them." We could be without new heroes for a long time yet.

The A Team and Karate Kid are in cinemas nationwide from 28 July