Asian Movies and Originality

I watched two movies in the theaters this week. One of them was The Transformers: The Movie from 1986, and hearing the music and seeing the animation on the big screen was amazing. The nostalgia was great, but the movie was also just very well-done with defined characters and stakes. The fact that it was all hand drawn was nothing short of amazing as well, and who can forget songs like “The Touch,” which was very much in line with 80’s music.

I also watched a Korean movie called The Negotiation, and while some aspects of the movie force one to suspend their disbelief, it was a good movie. I’ve been watching many U.S.-made movies as of late, and a good amount of them have been mediocre-at-best, in my opinion, as many of the action movies that I’ve seen prefer style over substance. The Negotiation had some level of style, but there was a deeper narrative as well that put the villain into more of a moral gray area. Asian cinema, and foreign cinema in general, does have their mediocre offerings for sure, but I’ve for the most part found their stories to be unique and more substance-based. Over here, we are getting a myriad of remakes, reboots and sequels.

I like originality in stories as much as the next person, but I also acknowledge that pretty much any idea has already been done in some way, shape or form. Because of that, I don’t critique against any story for not being original, but I do assess stories from their actual content and how they are written. Bad writing is still bad writing.