It’s “passable” movies that are slowly but surely killing the medium

So what goes into making a passable movie? Puschak says part of it is “a lack of tonal control.” The average movie is an inconclusive jumble of themes, characters, moods, and ideas, anything to keep the plot moving and the audience satisfied. These films don’t really add up to anything. But Puschak says he’s noticed something else happening with passable movies: They’re drawing not from real life but just from other movies. “Great stories are the ones that observe people truthfully,” he says. But there’s almost nothing truthful in passable movies. The characters are simply archetypes, and the plots are cobbled together from secondhand story beats. In fact, the people in these movies have a weird habit of explaining the plot to each other in a way that feels really stilted and unnatural. But audiences are now so used to this that they let it slide. That’s the real long-term danger, Puschak says.