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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

When you go see an Anderson film, you have a pretty solid idea of what you’re going to get. The mood, character development, cinematography, quirkiness, and pretty much everything else is largely the same across his films. I think this is obvious (?) to most people. Yes, there are individual differences between films, but I don’t think my opinion is an uncommon one.

There are more genres than action and superhero. A whole world of cinema, in fact. So it would be great if Anderson took his formidable skills and tried something new. A selfish request from a viewer, sure, but I just never feel like he’s trying to improve as a filmmaker and is merely doing what is comfortable to him.

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Just to add to your sentiment, I agree with you. The setup of his films became so similar to each other in many ways, same quirky (slightly insane) characters, same pastel colors, same textures. All subjective of course, but I found his later movies soulless and hard to watch.

>The mood, character development, cinematography, quirkiness

Other than character development those are all part of the aesthetic and in his last two he mostly extended that aesthetic directly to the characters, dropped the essentially realistic relatable characters and turned them into caricatures who don't really develop; devices of the story and theme instead of what drives the story and develops theme. I would say he was doing things uncomfortable for him with The French Dispatch, which is why he did not quite pull off the meta aspect. I think his interests are in improving on story and narrative and exploring what can be done with them within the medium and his aesthetic is a means to those ends, a way to push things out of the normal perspectives and give him more room to do things like make highly metafictional films without going all out experimental.

I am perfectly aware there are other genres.

Agreed. He’s like those amazing musicians who keep using the same chords, instruments, arrangement, and lyrical content over and over.

What I wouldn’t give to see Anderson tackle something really novel (for him). A period-piece tragedy; a college road trip; a horror film.

Same for Nolan's movies.

I liked that in Oppenheimer, even though the plot of the movie was a similar sort of high stakes mystery heist movie, instead of the macguffin being a random piece of metal like it was in tenet, its the literal atom bomb. For that reason I enjoyed it more than some of his other movies.

I would enjoy a Wes Anderson movie that just moved the whole aesthetic over to something new. It can still be a Wes Anderson movie but just different in one important new dimension.

The Dark Knight Rises also had an atom bomb. Nolan has a thing for nuclear detonations.

also, timers. What absolutely killed Nolan for me was when someone pointed out that he's virtually unable to create tension without a literal timer, be that bombs, watches, countdowns, what have you. Ever single damn movie. There's even a tick-tock sound from Nolan's stopwatch in the soundtrack of Dunkirk.

For some reason, this made me think of the countdown timer in Galaxy Quest that counts down but stops before getting to zero because the ship's design is based on a TV show.

"Spoiler alert", I guess, if you've not seen Galaxy Quest in the quarter century since it was released.

Which, if you haven't, you absolutely should!

You can edit your comments. I didn't reply to your second one so you can delete it if you want.

It was sarcasm. 25 year old movies don't need spoiler alerts.

But also, in a meta way, it wasn't a spoiler anyway because countdowns never reach zero anyway.

Except in Oppenheimer he was like, I'll just do the actual atom bomb instead. I'm glad that he knows himself well enough that he went right to the source.

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