History is doomed to repeat itself, just like we're all doomed to turn into some reincarnation of our parents. This is all tied up in the fact that no high-grossing box office hit will escape from some form of sequel or future remake. Don't mistake me, I own Shrek 1 and 2 and plan to buy 3 at some point in the future and the same goes for the Spiderman movies. Superhero movies like Spiderman cry out for a sequel; they are the movie versions of the badly adjusted women in our lives who can't stand to be single for five minutes. I'm as excited as the next guy (unless the next guy is my little sister, who is even more excited) for "Dark Knight" the next Batman movie. I'm thrilled that Hellboy is getting a sequel simply because the main problem with the first one was that the technology wasn't advanced enough to do it justice, so I think that this new one will be much richer and more believable. I am constantly amazed, however, at which movies get sequels and which don't. Thank God that most romantic comedies get to run single. Think of how awful a "you've got mail 2" would be. It makes me want to cry when I go see sequels that make me like the first movie less. The sequels to "Pirates of the Carribbean" have left such a bad taste in my mouth that I have to make a concious choice to forget about them when I rewatch the first one. The same applies to the Matrix so-called trilogy. I can summarize each movie in one sentence. Matrix 2 consists of a car chase scene. Matrix 3 is entirely Neo fighting agent Smith in the rain while some dude shoots an unreal amount of ammo at squidlike robots. That's it. Screw the Matrix trilogy and go watch "Equilibrium," which is a shoot-em-up dystopia starring sexy Christian Bale to boot. Thank God that didn't get a sequel.
Damn Star Wars Special Effects
I can trace the implosion of the Matrix trilogy, and the subsequent failure of most recent Sci-fi movies to the post-apocolyptic-like effects of the ideology behind the special effects departments of the Star Wars prequels. Other people have already addressed this ad nauseum, so I won't bore you with the details except to say that the strength of the original Star Wars movies was not the jaw dropping special effects or the ability to create digital races of aliens and robots. The Star Wars movies, especially New Hope, blew people away with its story and the characters. Yes, the Star Wars universe is pretty awesome and I was pretty obsessed with it for a while (I usually pretended to be a female version of Han Solo when we played Star Wars as kids. Who wants to be a princess when you can be a space pirate?) but the universe would lose its meaning without the flesh and blood people who inhabit it. Thus, the reason why the prequels suck and I lack respect for ANYONE who thinks that they're better than the originals, is because they got so wrapped up in special effects that they lost the story. And by the time they realized what they had done, all they could do was create more special effects to distract us from the lack of story. ("Hey, hey, look over here at this really huge fish!")
Addendum: I am a sucker for the second movie, for which I beat myself regularly.
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