The other thing that always strikes me when rewatching Blade Runner, is just how much time to breathe every little scene is given. Maybe a little too much time in some of the longer director's cuts, but it's a really stark contrast to a lot of lesser films, that try and pack as many story beats as they can into their runtime.
I recently watched the Borderlands movie and while it had its obvious faults, the biggest flaw in my opinion was the jarring pace that one scene would switch into the next. That movie had a short runtime so could easily have been extended to let each scene breathe a little more and I think that alone would have drawn people in the world building a lot better.
I do think with SciFi, the world-building aspect needs to be front and centre, otherwise it’s impossible to switch off the “well that couldn’t happen in real life” part of your brain.
Another annoying one is lazy and simplistic morality, which just ruins the story. Arcane had huge potential, great pacing, interesting characters, but failed on that front.
In general, modern media rarely lets the viewer make his own judgement about the morality of the situation. You're usually given a sermon rather than philosophical conundrum for your to think about.
One of the reasons why I liked The Good Place so much was because they did playful treatments on various philosophical points, without spoon feeding a solution.
Star Wars makes it clear The Empire does bad things on the regular, but it never, ever proves that the "state religion" of Resistance's elite warriors is a good thing (beyond opposing the Empire's bad thing).
One of the recent TV spin offs did look to address that nuance. Unfortunately it completely butchered the story line with weird tails of space-witches and one dimensional characters.
The one thing I did think the prequel movies did well, perhaps the only thing, was how it painted a world where absolute greed allowed an environment for space-nazis to thrive. Though real life sadly demonstrates that corruption doesn’t need to happen in the shadows to succeed.
Was the norm in the 70s, and into the early 80s. My memory is that the turning point to quick cuts was after MTV and music videos became popular (1982+). I remember old folks complaining about the “attention span” of young people.
Watching the old movies today, I do think that the 70s films are too slow and 90s+ films too aggressive with cuts. Would be nice to balance, or have important scenes breathe while others get chopped. Most movies are too long these days as well.
The film itself was criticized as “Blade Crawler” back in the day.
I think a lot of the change can be contributed to FX becoming cheaper, easier and better. It created a race to the bottom for the most visually spectacular movie. And when it’s cheaper, you can throw more in at the same budget. Then the next movie has to throw even more in to outdo their predecessor.
Though I’m not disagreeing that culturally we have been on a steep downwards decline with regards to our attention span.
Digital effects also look a lot worse (as in, less believable) than real special effects, pyrotechnics, etc., and I think the quick editing also has to do with that. You have to make a lot of cuts and shaky shots in order to not let viewers' eyes rest on the CGI's uncanny valley for too long and realise how wrong it looks.
I watched the first Rambo very late, only about two years ago, and I was amazed at how much better the explosions look than in any movie I've seen in the past two decades. You can afford to actually show what's happening when it looks that good.
I've noticed a similar thing in martial arts movies. You can save a lot of effort and money with the quick, frantic editing. The alternative is that the choreography and cinematography have to be really on point. If you just shake the camera around a lot and do a cut every second, you can get away with amateurish fighters doing whatever, nobody will really notice.
While trends are that movies are, on average, getting slightly longer, there are as many exceptions to that rule as there are examples of it, not just in the present day but also in the past too. And it can vary from genre to genre.
Also movie serials were actually the norm in early cinema. This isn’t some new trend invented by Jackson.
Examples of how the distribution is actually extremely varied:
Most new sci-fi/action movies are like that. Ones that cater to younger viewers are so bad I've had to walk out of movie theaters because I felt my senses were under assault. Fortunately there are traditional directors like Villeneuve.
It's not just sci-fi/action. There have been many articles written about the increase in edit cadence in all movies. One of the biggest comments about older films is how "slow" movies were.
One of the examples I've seen goes something like: Wide shot of bank of elevators. Man walks up to elevator to push the button. Cut to close up of dial showing which floor the elevator is on showing the indicator moving back to first floor. A ding is heard indicating the elevator has arrived. Cut to wide shot showing doors opening, people exiting, man entering elevator. Cut to interior of elevator to see man choose floor and doors close. Now, you see the man walk to the elevator bank, hit the button, and then cut to the doors opening as man exits.
