Like You Remember: Are movie reviewers blinded by nostalgia?

I feel as I’ve gotten older, being excited for a movie has felt almost childish. Once, people used to optimistically rush into theatres on the first day of a big movie release. Nowadays, if we even know a movie is coming out at all, we scramble to find it on whichever streaming service it’s on and whine about how they “don’t make movies like they used to”.

In fairness, a lot of what the major studios are putting out are unnecessary sequels, unwanted remakes or shallow stories so predictable you wonder if the actors actually needed scripts. Disney especially comes to mind for the flops they’ve had in recent years. Mufasa was one I went to see in theatres shortly after it came out. I wasn’t expecting much with the story given the online opinions I’d seen, but all I could think about when watching the movie was how much better it would’ve been in the 2D animation style of the original Lion King, even if the story aside.

That train of thought led me down a deep rabbit hole: Are we too blinded by the nostalgia of childhood classics to properly review movies anymore?

This was a question my friend Kacey and I set out to answer uniquely. I was someone who had grown up not seeing many classics. When I was a kid, I would rather do anything than sit down and watch a film. I’m fairly certain I just didn’t have the attention span for anything longer than an hour. Kacey, on the other hand, has seen everything under the sun. She watches hours upon hours of content in her free time, whereas I have to be basically forced into my bean bag chair to watch anything. This collision of worlds made us each half an expert on the two parts of this question. Kacey brought the knowledge of the classics that folks might be nostalgic about, and I brought the blindness. Combined we had ourselves a movie critic.

So we started our show Like You Remember, where each week we look at a piece of media that gets a lot of hype and nostalgia about it, give it a critical investigation and decide if it’s really worth your time, or if it’s just all childhood smoke and mirrors. And for newer movies, we give a good look at all those reviews and see just how many times they can mention a 90s movie before it’s clear we’ve just lost our way with the art of the movie review. The amount of reviews calling things “the next Toy Story” or “The Godfather’s long lost sibling” is astounding.

When we covered the new Conjuring movie on the show earlier this month, I mentioned how so many people had not taken well to it in the first few days in theatres. When I went and saw the film myself, I found that there really wasn’t anything wrong with the movie at all. It was a Conjuring film, it had mainly the same set up as the ones before it, just with more of an emotional plot this time. My conclusion? You don’t wish the film was like the classics, you just miss being young.

You can catch our full discussions on this issue on Like You Remember with Kacey and Sierra live on Thursday from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. here on NR92.com or anytime, anywhere you get your podcasts.

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