What Happened to the "Darker and Edgier" Trend of the Early 2000's?
The Blind Eternities forum
Posted on April 16, 2023, 4:12 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
People praised Batman Begins and Casino Royale for being much darker and more serious than the previous Batman and James Bond films had been, and those films seemed to start a trend of movies being more serious and "realistic," but that trend seems to have vanished as quickly as it arrived, since far too many major films now have an overbearing amount of humor and one-liners, which really annoys me. Do the filmmakers not remember that that was why many people disliked Batman and Robin? Thankfully, the new Batman film with Robert Pattinson was quite good, so the trend does not seem to have vanished, entirely.
What does everyone else say about this? What happened to the "darker and edgier" trend of the early 2000's?
DemonDragonJ says... #3
Gidgetimer, I can understand the first three of your points, even if I dislike them, but what about the fourth point? Can you name any specific stories where the villain actually had a legitimate point, and why would any story writer willingly write a story such as that?
April 16, 2023 6:21 p.m.
If I may step in, the "villain has a point" story tends to come in when the villain's motivations are based on legitimate grievances that many people have, even if their methods are extreme. It builds in the "moral gray area".
"I lost everything because of the corruption and incompetence of people in power." Pretty much all the criminals in The Wire. If playing by the rules ends up with someone losing everything, it's time to break some rules.
"I'm working against a greater evil." Some incarnations of Magneto from the X-Men series use this question. After surviving the Holocaust, and seeing his family killed, he sees it as a moral responsibility to protect people like him from rampant prejudice.
"I didn't know that would happen!" A character genuinely believes that they are doing the right thing, or at least nothing bad, but end up as the antagonist because of incomplete or incorrect knowledge. Jurassic Park, mostly in the original book/film. While there is deliberate sabotage, and of course dinosaurs eating people, the whole thing is set in motion by naivete and laziness.
"I have the support and respect of my people." This one can show up in gangster movies, where even though a character is directly opposed to the heroes, they genuinely care for and take care of the people who rely on them, providing income and protection for people who might not otherwise have it. In return, they treat the "villain" as a genuine hero. Lots of historical examples, but let's go with Veronica from Fire Emblem Heroes.
There are lots more examples, but these are some of the more common ones.
April 16, 2023 7:01 p.m.
The entire DCEU and other DC films like Joker and the new Batman were based on the whole "edgy" trend and continued to exhibit those traits from Man of Steel (the year after The Dark Knight Rises) up through today. The trend didn't go anywhere--it's still very much alive (even if mostly poorly written). Your entire thesis is based on an incorrect assumption it went anywhere--it simply didn't.
As for why a writer would make the villain seem like they had a legitimate point? Most evil comes from an understandable position--the road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that. A person being evil just because they are evil can be hard to pull off--it almost doesn't feel believable because the viewer cannot understand why they made their choices that made them evil.
So writers give them a reason folks can understand, and twist the ultimate ends. Thanos trying to preserve resources. Bane trying to liberate Gotham from elitism. Ed Harris' character in The Rock trying to ensure soldiers receive recognition. Magneto trying to prevent the mutants from undergoing the kind of holocaust he survived as a child. The vice principal trying to capture truant student Ferris Bueller. The other guy in Liar Liar trying to preserve his happy relationship against Jim Carry's known liar's character. Syndrome in the Incredibles trying to break the dominance of superheroes.
One could go on for hours across all manner of genera listing such examples. It's an extremely common trope and one that attempts to give some dimension to all the film's characters, not just the heroes.
April 16, 2023 7:54 p.m.
FormOverFunction says... #6
Honestly, the most mind-bending one for me was Zootopia. That went about three different directions from where I was expecting. But that aside, I do think that the “it’s the movie Dumb & Dumber, but in a gritty dark-universe reboot” has dropped off some recently. I think it’s mostly just because creative folks are (from what I understand) pushing themselves to make new things that stand out and speak to an aspect of themselves. This leads to oscillations in art, almost assuring that we’ll be hitting the movie mode you’re referring to again in about six years ;p
April 16, 2023 9:49 p.m.
Gidgetimer says... #7
I don't mean to send you down a wiki hole, but here is the TV Tropes page explaining the trope and with links to 9 examples subpages because there are too many examples to do the normal accordian style list of examples for those 9 categories. So they just kept the 10 shorter categories on the main page and made subpages for the longer ones. I haven't reviewed all the pages, though I find saying the villain has a point to be a stretch in some examples. It will give you perspective on the trope though.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VillainHasAPoint
April 16, 2023 11:51 p.m.
I like Batman and Robin, so maybe I don't have a good perspective for this one : )
But one thing that this makes me consider is that a darker, more serious movie can be much more of a flop sometimes. Adding a little levity to a mediocre movie can really improve the watchability, where adding a darker tone to a mediocre movie doesn't really. I mean, when you throw in some intelligent sharks, LL Cool J, and Sam Jackson getting chomped in the middle of a monologue, you get a really fun time watching Deep Blue Sea. If it was dead serious, it would be unbearable.
So, maybe what I mean to say is, darker more serious movies only work for really good movies, and maybe hot take here, but most big budget new movies aren't really trying to be good, or at least good in a thought provoking way.
It's like, Jurassic Park pulled together an amazing cast, committed to inventing new effects, filmed on location in Hawaii, painstakingly built the robot dinos from the ground up, worked with actual paleontologists and the author of the book...and Jurrasic World...hired Chris Pratt and wrote some one liners for him. They are aiming for completely different goals, and if you took that same, "people will watch it once" mentality to a dark movie, you'll get Morbius : )
April 17, 2023 7:57 a.m.
pinecone2k3 says... #9
While everything else mentioned is this thread so far does a pretty solid job of explaining things, there's also an additional fairly simple explanation for why the trend seems to have "vanished". Quite frankly, when the trend started, people went overboard with it, and now that some time has passed, everyone's realizing that "dark and gritty" doesn't work on everything. So, for the sake of better storytelling, they're starting to be more selective about where it's applied.
April 17, 2023 5:47 p.m.
Meh, if any time period seemed to be heavy in noir, grit, & just general anger I would say you'd be looking at the 90's. Everyone was rocking grunge & latchkey kidding it up. Alot of dinos like me who were trying to get into fun comic books, for example, could not find a a fun comic book without just finding a smoking, brokeback-tittie-filled grim snuffbook :) .. Then you had Limp Bizkit & the angry white guy movement.
Anyway, I think a whole lot of people have decided temperance is great instead of "dead dog in the gutter". Levity helps achieve this... BUT what I have noticed is some really REALLY BAD levity lately, which is just brutal in its' own way.
My favorite quotes on bad levity usually come from Hot Fuzz: "Don't go being a twat now!"
Gidgetimer says... #2
So many things in pop culture are going against media being dark and/or edgy that it would be hard to list/explain them all. A short non-exhaustive list with little to no explanation on each point would include.
Being an "Edgelord" is, and has been for the last decade at least, seen in a negative connotation.
A global pandemic happened and people need escapism, not realism.
Corruption and extreme sadism is so rampant among actual politicians across the world that your "big bad" seems much more plausible and therefore uninteresting.
The "the villain has a point, you know" trope is much easier to apply to dark and gritty movies than silly escapist movies and with social and economic tensions where they are currently it would probably be unwise to present anything where the villain is more reasonable than the hero.
April 16, 2023 5:34 p.m.