Red Letter Media

[Bush King]

I don't think they're so strongly rooted that they couldn't get taken down, though given how over-the-top some bits from the Plinkett reviews are (the one I see cited the most is Harry's unstoppable ejaculation over the underage Olsen Twins) it would probably take an action rather than a mere joke to make it happen. What protects them isn't their cachet, but the fact they virtually never apologize. The closest thing to an apology I can think of is their follow-up to the Bruce Willis video, and even that was more of an exploration of a breaking story than an apology.

I'm sure they could be, in fact I'm downright surprised they haven't been with how weak the platforms they use are at defending their business partners. My point is that it hasn't been done yet because RLM is popular in elite circles and peasant circles, for different reasons. Most of the goodwill with elites comes from their older videos (every time I've seen some Hollywood mongoloid say they like RLM it always refers to their prequel reviews, at best they may have seen BotW a handful of times). I just don't think they watch enough to actually see the jokes that could get them cancelled, and so the peasant Twitter Tik Tok whore who complains they said Hillary Clinton was a criminal gets nowhere.

 

[IDanceonTrannyGraves]

Yeah, I can understand that. There's a big difference between "shitty Star Trek show" and "shitty Star Trek show starring Patrick Stewart."

Very glad I'm not a Doctor Who fan, which seems to have surpassed either Trek or Wars in its effort to deliberately vandalize the canon.

Don't even get me started.

 

[Mola Ram]

Don't even get me started.

I don't like your show, but good Lord you have my sympathies.

 

[mandatorylurk]

When you don't rely on sponsorship money or anything other than fan support and merchandise, you don't need to change how you feel. It's what made the Nerd Crews so cutting they stopped being satire and just a sad mirror. I just looked up Collider's channels and they're fucking dead. ScreenRant is somehow connected to them but like Escapist and Zero Punctuation it really was just Pitch Meeting keeping it afloat. But with it gone on its own channel things are MovieBlob levels of sad!

Three Wisconsin guys easily pulling in 12k a month when revenue is split up, probably triple that, even without factoring in warehouse upkeep. They're smart enough to know they're living a good life.

 

[Bush King]

Don't even get me started.

I got into Doctor Who as a teen. I really liked Matt Smith, I know others hated him for whatever reasons. People got far too obsessed with which Doctor was better to the point of Lolcowism. Much like Star Wars, Star Trek, Game of Thrones, Total War, Call of Duty, whatever else, I grew out of having an emotional connection to it almost as soon as I hit adulthood, which also conveniently coincided with all these franchises going to the dogs. I remember them saying the old guy from the Pompeii episode would be the Doctor now, Star Wars would be sold to Disney, Game of Thrones dropped in quality by season 3 and after 4 became about ending plots sooner than they started, Total War was going fantasy, Call of Duty was going to space (AGAIN), etc, and thinking "good luck" but I had no real concern about success or failure. I had the old movies, the old games, the old shows. They're still just as good. Some get rereleased in 4K too!

Saying all this, I do feel bad for those who stuck around. I can understand getting sucked in and then either forgiving a lacklustre streak or falling into just wanting to watch the train wreck, but at a certain point Mike and Rich are right (they're just at different ends of the road). Rich gave up early, and he's the better for it. Every single announcement since the prequels for him has been "good luck" and then laughter when it crashes and burns. People just get too attached to these things. That's fair for great programming, but it has to be understood that nothing is certain and everything has it's day.

I don't like your show, but good Lord you have my sympathies.

To be fair, the average Doctor Who viewer actively invited the disabled gender queer black woman Doctor or whatever the fuck they have now. The normal people haven't been the audience since 2010.

When you don't rely on sponsorship money or anything other than fan support and merchandise, you don't need to change how you feel. It's what made the Nerd Crews so cutting they stopped being satire and just a sad mirror. I just looked up Collider's channels and they're fucking dead. ScreenRant is somehow connected to them but like Escapist and Zero Punctuation it really was just Pitch Meeting keeping it afloat. But with it gone on its own channel things are MovieBlob levels of sad!

Three Wisconsin guys easily pulling in 12k a month when revenue is split up, probably triple that, even without factoring in warehouse upkeep. They're smart enough to know they're living a good life.

After Rich has bought all the Star Wars and Star Trek toys Mike needs it's closer to $30 and a slab of IPAs each. Rich gets $40 after trading in his booze.

 

[L50LasPak]

I was hoping this ReView would explain the plot of Star Trek Picard but everything they said about the plot is just baffling. None of what they were saying had any connection to each other. It would be fine if it were an episodic series and each episode dealt with one of these plot points in a self contained episode, but they have ten different plots that all need to come together and no rhyme or reason as to how they all fit together.

All that I am getting about Picard is that every single episode is unrelated, but they pretend like its telling one big story, and the only consistent through-line is a bizarre substory involving a time traveler getting in trouble with ICE.

It's a show made by morons, for morons.

They do not want to even attempt a message that is not totally on the nose.

I already did this in the Trek thread, but I think its worth sharing here.

Sunspring is a 2016 experimental short film written purely by an AI (PDF here), one that was trained on a pool of science fiction scripts. Now, this AI was a custom job, and very primitive by modern standards. GPT2, as I recall. It wrote the plot, the character interactions, and the dialogue. It even wrote the lyrics to a song that was adapted by a band and used in the film itself. You will notice that the dialogue is almost beat for beat what occurs in NuTrek, and indeed in a lot of modern television.

Characters saying something that appears to be profound, followed by "I feel like" or otherwise describing a feeling, vague references to the circumstances, character interaction that feels forced and empty, and lots of (seemingly) dramatic pauses and unnatural emphasis on emoting at the wrong time. You will also notice that the actors have very little trouble acting out this nonsensical dialogue/body language they've been given; the fact that they're saying stuff that makes no sense and has no context doesn't interfere with their professional skill at all. The film was shot in a day, by the way.

The resemblance between NuTrek and this short film is no coincidence. This is not a shitpost. I think most modern media is written by robots. The soulless corporate board room writes the outline, the effeminate faggot marketer type does the editing, but the robot does the other 90% of the work by assembling this nonsense.

inb4 "NuTrek can't be written by robots, that short film was way better than anything NuTrek has done!". Its a funny joke, but it falls flat when the short film written by a robot could be effortlessly spliced into Picard or Discovery and nobody would even notice.

The people who adapted the script were clearly fairly talented though, so Sunspring almost feels like a piece of art, just an avant garde one. There is no talent on NuTrek though, so it doesn't even have that going for it.

 

[Retink]

I don't think they're so strongly rooted that they couldn't get taken down, though given how over-the-top some bits from the Plinkett reviews are (the one I see cited the most is Harry's unstoppable ejaculation over the underage Olsen Twins) it would probably take an action rather than a mere joke to make it happen. What protects them isn't their cachet, but the fact they virtually never apologize. The closest thing to an apology I can think of is their follow-up to the Bruce Willis video, and even that was more of an exploration of a breaking story than an apology.

A big part of it is that they don't really acknowledge the outrage, because apologizing makes you a whipping boy and coming out and saying you'll never back down makes you a target for people who want to find any little thing to get you and push you into a corner when you respond. By just not even giving it attention at all they make it die out as something like their "Science Man: Ghost Buster Female Edition" would get most other people in a ton of trouble.

Also as you said, the Bruce Willis thing wasn't an apology, it was just a "This is what we meant, though it's interesting if this other thing is the case which changes the situation." It never really feels like they pander to the youtube rules or the audience, they're just behaving professionally.

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

I was ok with Force Awakens (although I never went back for a second viewing, which was never true of a Star Wars movie before that), but I'm with you on Last Jedi. As I say to everyone who keeps trying to get me to watch The Mandalorian: "You only get to shit in my popcorn once."

It's why Mike's reaction to Picard, while understandable, is also a little odd. You'd think he'd have wised up after Discovery, if not Into Darkness.

Into Darkness deserved a full Plinkett Review. Good lord is that movie stupid as a movie on so many levels. Had he criticized it then, TFA probably wouldn't be as full of holes as it is.

 

[King Dead]

It does hurt to see everything you like turn to shit, but my retarded bullshit senses have been honed over the years to keep me from interacting with modern cancer. As each thing I loved slowly got destroyed, it made it a lot easier to see the warning signs and bail when the time was right.

Spoiler: a saga of butchery

The first time I bailed was actually for something I wasn't terribly familiar with, and that was the Hobbit trilogy. I'd read The Hobbit when I was a kid, but I only vaguely remembered what happened in the story. After the first movie ended and they weren't anywhere close to the Lonely Mountain, I decided I'd had enough and I didn't even bother with the rest (the garbage CGI made the decision easier).

Star Wars tricked me for a bit there with TFA and Rogue One. TFA was more or less what I expected it would be: a by-the-numbers soft reboot that played it completely safe as to not fuck up right out the gate. Rogue One had a different tone to it that interested me, but I could tell that there were definite signs of executive meddling. TLJ, however, pained me with its stupidity and contempt for the fans, and I only went to see Solo because my friend and I were bored and looking for something to do. I had no intention of seeing Plan IX at all, I had written off Star Wars already, but my dad (who got me into Star Wars in the first place) really wanted to, so I did. Big fucking mistake, I was like Rich in this Every Night I Wish I Was in a Grave, suffering a headache from the cacophony of audiovisual vomit by the end.

As for Doctor Who, I wasn't a classic fan, I'd started with the new run, and it was mostly fine for a while there. Kind of like a soap opera at times, but still fun. The Matt Smith years were when things started to waver a bit, and while I loved Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, not even he could salvage a lot of the absolute garbage scripts he was given. He deserved so much better. Once they announced that the next Doctor was going to be a woman, I bailed, not because I'm a sexist pig (I mean I am but that's not the point), but because I knew that ideology was the sole determinant in the writing at that point and it couldn't be salvaged. Judging from what I've heard since then, I definitely made the right choice.

And then there's Star Trek, which I was always more of a passive fan of, but gradually becoming more of one over time. JJ Trek was action schlock that I didn't see much of an issue with at the time, although Into Darkness pained me. It's honestly a good thing that Discovery was put behind a streaming paywall, because otherwise I might have actually watched it. Instead, I found out how terrible it was through RLM, and I wrote all of nu-Trek off entirely. I refuse to engage with even the "less bad" stuff like Lower Decks because it's still objectively worse than classic Trek.

Learning how to cut my losses has kept the classics alive for me. I can still watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Star Wars OT (and even the PT), and classic Doctor Who and Star Trek without feeling the pain Mike described in this episode. Once you realize that these new shows or movies are little more than bad fanfiction adaptations, it's easy enough to separate them in your mind and move on. The hack frauds might be in control of what the "canon" is, but that doesn't mean you have to watch it (something that I keep having to remind my mega Tolkien nerd friend of; he hasn't learned this lesson yet and still feels an obligation to watch Amazon's LOTR abomination).

 

[Bush King]

It does hurt to see everything you like turn to shit, but my retarded bullshit senses have been honed over the years to keep me from interacting with modern cancer. As each thing I loved slowly got destroyed, it made it a lot easier to see the warning signs and bail when the time was right.

Spoiler: a saga of butchery

The first time I bailed was actually for something I wasn't terribly familiar with, and that was the Hobbit trilogy. I'd read The Hobbit when I was a kid, but I only vaguely remembered what happened in the story. After the first movie ended and they weren't anywhere close to the Lonely Mountain, I decided I'd had enough and I didn't even bother with the rest (the garbage CGI made the decision easier).

Star Wars tricked me for a bit there with TFA and Rogue One. TFA was more or less what I expected it would be: a by-the-numbers soft reboot that played it completely safe as to not fuck up right out the gate. Rogue One had a different tone to it that interested me, but I could tell that there were definite signs of executive meddling. TLJ, however, pained me with its stupidity and contempt for the fans, and I only went to see Solo because my friend and I were bored and looking for something to do. I had no intention of seeing Plan IX at all, I had written off Star Wars already, but my dad (who got me into Star Wars in the first place) really wanted to, so I did. Big fucking mistake, I was like Rich in this Every Night I Wish I Was in a Grave, suffering a headache from the cacophony of audiovisual vomit by the end.

As for Doctor Who, I wasn't a classic fan, I'd started with the new run, and it was mostly fine for a while there. Kind of like a soap opera at times, but still fun. The Matt Smith years were when things started to waver a bit, and while I loved Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, not even he could salvage a lot of the absolute garbage scripts he was given. He deserved so much better. Once they announced that the next Doctor was going to be a woman, I bailed, not because I'm a sexist pig (I mean I am but that's not the point), but because I knew that ideology was the sole determinant in the writing at that point and it couldn't be salvaged. Judging from what I've heard since then, I definitely made the right choice.

And then there's Star Trek, which I was always more of a passive fan of, but gradually becoming more of one over time. JJ Trek was action schlock that I didn't see much of an issue with at the time, although Into Darkness pained me. It's honestly a good thing that Discovery was put behind a streaming paywall, because otherwise I might have actually watched it. Instead, I found out how terrible it was through RLM, and I wrote all of nu-Trek off entirely. I refuse to engage with even the "less bad" stuff like Lower Decks because it's still objectively worse than classic Trek.

Learning how to cut my losses has kept the classics alive for me. I can still watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Star Wars OT (and even the PT), and classic Doctor Who and Star Trek without feeling the pain Mike described in this episode. Once you realize that these new shows or movies are little more than bad fanfiction adaptations, it's easy enough to separate them in your mind and move on. The hack frauds might be in control of what the "canon" is, but that doesn't mean you have to watch it (something that I keep having to remind my mega Tolkien nerd friend of; he hasn't learned this lesson yet and still feels an obligation to watch Amazon's LOTR abomination).

I actually liked the first Hobbit film, even knowing it turned a light read into a fantasy epic war series. It had those moments of LotR greatness, PJ is still a great director, but it's obvious he was tired and did not want to be working on another massive trilogy. It's schizophrenic at times. You go from a fairly fantastical Warg chase in the rolling plains on the way to meet the mystical Elves, to going on a trollop through crazy razy CGI goblin land. The scene that really turned me off can be pin-pointed- Gandalf shoves a round boulder and the music swells into a cacaphony only to see hundreds of orcs slaughtered in a ninja/samurai film coreography way next to rock perfectly rolling down ramshackle bridges to no effect than killing goblins. It's just cartoony, which is fine in Rankin-Bass but not Peter Jackson. The ending is overly long but the visual and thematic ending would be perfect for a two-parter, they've been through hell and lost a few along the way, but the Lonely Mountain is in view and Smaug has awoken from hibernation. The second film is completely forgettable, I saw it years after and do not remember a single thing. The third is just Helm's Deep for three hours with none of the effort, you don't feel immersed in endless CGI battles, Sauron is a pointless addition, the primary villain of Smaug is suddenly defeated at the start of the film and Azog's motivation is literally just kill little people.

@L50LasPak hit the nail on the head of most of American media's issues. Producers, writers, directors, these have all either been subsumed by the executive board running the company or are managed by a quisling of the board (eg: Feige). The result is people who do not have the knowledge of how or why dictating that a film needs an emotional element which crescendos at the end of the film ("Luke, I am your father"). It doesn't help that basically every big IP outside of Star Trek right now is owned by Disney. The board bought a million IPs, made a couple successes and had an ad hoc plan for Marvel that worked, and now they fancy themselves the king of film production. You need an emotional element, you need a female lead to appeal to a wider audience, you need mass market appeal for toys. Star Wars, Marvel, Pirates of the Caribbean, these are all cursed by Frozen. Disney is chasing the success of Frozen by trying to replicate it in IPs that have no business in that sphere because they want both Frozen's appeal for children, the action appeal for men, and the emotional appeal for adult women. It is inherently schizophrenic. You cannot create a good product by feature creep. You cannot create a comprehensible story by writing specific scenes for audience appeal and then building from there. You cannot create marketable toys with characters that look as schlubby or as dark skinned or as fuck ugly shrews as your audience, you do so by making characters with characterisation. No one wanted to be Luke or Jack Sparrow because they were white men, it was because Luke was a common guy who grew into the conqueror of an empire and Sparrow was a thief with a heart of gold.

If I were to trace the origin of this issue it was probably not the studios but Nolan. Every single film he has done past Batman Begins is about calculating a select few scenes to get the audience under your thumb combined with messianic-level music alongside it. Interstellar is probably the pinnacle of this idea. Studios and writers figured out you could get a massive revenue stream from huge budget films again, and all you had to do was construct a script like a mathematician rather than an artist. "'It's impossible!'- 'No, it's neccessary!'" is a meaningless line in the context of the scene it takes place but it gets a reaction and the audience knows that is the point where they're supposed to go wow and cheer.

 

[Flexo]

I already did this in the Trek thread, but I think its worth sharing here.

Sunspring - A Sci-Fi Short Film Starring Thomas Middleditch.mp4

Sunspring is a 2016 experimental short film written purely by an AI (PDF here), one that was trained on a pool of science fiction scripts. Now, this AI was a custom job, and very primitive by modern standards. GPT2, as I recall. It wrote the plot, the character interactions, and the dialogue. It even wrote the lyrics to a song that was adapted by a band and used in the film itself. You will notice that the dialogue is almost beat for beat what occurs in NuTrek, and indeed in a lot of modern television.

Characters saying something that appears to be profound, followed by "I feel like" or otherwise describing a feeling, vague references to the circumstances, character interaction that feels forced and empty, and lots of (seemingly) dramatic pauses and unnatural emphasis on emoting at the wrong time. You will also notice that the actors have very little trouble acting out this nonsensical dialogue/body language they've been given; the fact that they're saying stuff that makes no sense and has no context doesn't interfere with their professional skill at all. The film was shot in a day, by the way.

The resemblance between NuTrek and this short film is no coincidence. This is not a shitpost. I think most modern media is written by robots. The soulless corporate board room writes the outline, the effeminate faggot marketer type does the editing, but the robot does the other 90% of the work by assembling this nonsense.

inb4 "NuTrek can't be written by robots, that short film was way better than anything NuTrek has done!". Its a funny joke, but it falls flat when the short film written by a robot could be effortlessly spliced into Picard or Discovery and nobody would even notice.

The people who adapted the script were clearly fairly talented though, so Sunspring almost feels like a piece of art, just an avant garde one. There is no talent on NuTrek though, so it doesn't even have that going for it.

Hey now!

Don't forget the robot writing Picard may also be drunk!

If I were to trace the origin of this issue it was probably not the studios but Nolan. Every single film he has done past Batman Begins is about calculating a select few scenes to get the audience under your thumb combined with messianic-level music alongside it. Interstellar is probably the pinnacle of this idea. Studios and writers figured out you could get a massive revenue stream from huge budget films again, and all you had to do was construct a script like a mathematician rather than an artist. "'It's impossible!'- 'No, it's neccessary!'" is a meaningless line in the context of the scene it takes place but it gets a reaction and the audience knows that is the point where they're supposed to go wow and cheer.

Was with you up until this point.

I mean you're literally wrong. "It's necessary" is completely accurate and full of meaning because as far as the character is aware, the spinning, out of control ship is literally all that remains of humanity. If he doesn’t save it, the entire species is done for.

It's also a direct answer to earlier in the film where Brand asked Cooper of he would sacrifice humanity in theory (the embryos) to see his daughter again. That line and scene is an answer and refutation of her belief of his character. Burning the fuel needed to save the out of control endeavor is expressly Cooper giving up any hope of seeing his daughter again to save the fragment of humanity left.

I mean seriously. Half of the time when I come across someone critiquing Interstellar I have to ask if they actually watched the movie. This isn't even some "blank canvas" or "my interpretation" bullshit either. This is relating to expressed lines, scenes, etc that are all about as blatant to the film as possible.

 

[byuu]

It's why Mike's reaction to Picard, while understandable, is also a little odd. You'd think he'd have wised up after Discovery, if not Into Darkness.

Mike is pretty used to the movies being shit. Plinkett was born because of the awful TNG movies.

 

[Drdinnermint]

I'm not watching it but someone I know is and has no idea what is happening at the end of ep 9 in a 10 part series. That's special

 

[Idiot Asshole]

Don't even get me started.

I don't like your show, but good Lord you have my sympathies.

It's honestly not that bad. One good thing about being a Doctor Who fan is that there is a clear delineation between the old series (which ended in 1989 barring a one-off in 1996) and the new series (which started in 2005) which makes it far easier to compartmentalize them and think of them as completely different shows. Star Trek has a similar thing going with a decade between Enterprise and Discovery but the gap between the two series is lesser because a) there's a smaller gap between them, especially when you factor in the JJ Abrams films, b) Doctor Who went out on a high note, whereas Enterprise is regarded as the worst Star Trek series even if it was picking up towards the end, and c) the visual differences between 1980s/2000s series as opposed to 2000s/2010s series are far greater making it easier to disassociate the two DW eras than it is with ST.

So basically don't feel that bad for us. Feel free to watch our old 60s stories and mock them for their crappy acting and special effects any time. We've suffered through worse (i.e. Michael Grade) before.

 

[Mola Ram]

One good thing about being a Doctor Who fan is that there is a clear delineation between the old series (which ended in 1989 barring a one-off in 1996) and the new series (which started in 2005) which makes it far easier to compartmentalize them and think of them as completely different shows

Sure, there's a massive visual distinctiveness, among other things, and I suppose you can mentally check out after Tennant or Capaldi or whoever. But even as someone who's not all that familiar with the series I was aghast that they'd retcon the original protagonist's entire origin to say, "All that stuff you thought you knew from 50 years ago? It was bullshit. Enjoy your Strong Blek Wammen Doctor and your child-torturing Time Lords. Also, their signature ability was colonization, huwites!" Still, if you can roll with it, more power to you.

So basically don't feel that bad for us. Feel free to watch our old 60s stories and mock them for their crappy acting and special effects any time.

What do you mean? I adore the classic episode "Invasion of the Potato Men."

 

[Idiot Asshole]

Sure, there's a massive visual distinctiveness, among other things, and I suppose you can mentally check out after Tennant or Capaldi or whoever. But even as someone who's not all that familiar with the series I was aghast that they'd retcon the original protagonist's entire origin to say, "All that stuff you thought you knew from 50 years ago? It was bullshit. Enjoy your Strong Blek Wammen Doctor and your child-torturing Time Lords. Also, their signature ability was colonization, huwites!" Still, if you can roll with it, more power to you.



What do you mean? I adore the classic episode "Invasion of the Potato Men."

View attachment 3247303

Mocking the Sontarans will be your gravest mistake.

 

[Mola Ram]

Mocking the Sontarans will be your gravest mistake.
7UgD.mp4

Joke's on him, I've got a deep fryer and a whole garbage can of sour cream and chives just waiting for him.

 

[L50LasPak]

Was with you up until this point.

I mean you're literally wrong. "It's necessary" is completely accurate and full of meaning because as far as the character is aware, the spinning, out of control ship is literally all that remains of humanity. If he doesn’t save it, the entire species is done for.

It's also a direct answer to earlier in the film where Brand asked Cooper of he would sacrifice humanity in theory (the embryos) to see his daughter again. That line and scene is an answer and refutation of her belief of his character. Burning the fuel needed to save the out of control endeavor is expressly Cooper giving up any hope of seeing his daughter again to save the fragment of humanity left.

I mean seriously. Half of the time when I come across someone critiquing Interstellar I have to ask if they actually watched the movie. This isn't even some "blank canvas" or "my interpretation" bullshit either. This is relating to expressed lines, scenes, etc that are all about as blatant to the film as possible.

I concur that Nolan started a lot of the industry's trends, though most of the time he would execute them in a way that would still make the movie be mostly satisfying. His contemporaries are absolutely nowhere near as competent as he is, for sure. Nolan only managed to lose me as recently as Tenet, but that movie is a microcosm of everything wrong with modern story writing that *isn't* written by robots. Mainly, being too convoluted for its own good in a desperate attempt to break new ground. At least I feel like Nolan actually wrote Tenet himself, though. It cannot be denied that he started a trend that Hollywood still tries to ape to this day.

 

[Starscreams Cape]

They're vaguely uncomfortable because Wil Wheaton is them. They're just fanboys who justify their entire existence by being fanboys. And they want to imagine that RLM is like them and this gets too deep into the "wait, my heroes don't like people like me?" zone.

Absolutely this. 75% of RLM fans are complete fucking faggots. And I'd say a large portion of them are VERY sympathetic to Wil's childish views on ICE, Trump, etc.

 

[Flexo]

I concur that Nolan started a lot of the industry's trends, though most of the time he would execute them in a way that would still make the movie be mostly satisfying. His contemporaries are absolutely nowhere near as competent as he is, for sure. Nolan only managed to lose me as recently as Tenet, but that movie is a microcosm of everything wrong with modern story writing that *isn't* written by robots. Mainly, being too convoluted for its own good in a desperate attempt to break new ground. At least I feel like Nolan actually wrote Tenet himself, though. It cannot be denied that he started a trend that Hollywood still tries to ape to this day.

That's why I call it cargo cult writing. They see the form of the stories written, and think if they ape that it will work, never realizing that there is a function at the heart they are missing. Nolan does have function to his stuff (save that damned issue with sound balancing - seriously TENET is so much better with subtitles on) but the hacks (for I won't tolerate this use of robots as a slur) don't seem to see this. "Oh if we just put trailer shots in the film and have bombastic music it'll be epic, right?"

Or to steal from SFDebris and butcher a quote: the difference is that Nolan's films encourage you to think. For the hack films, thinking is the enemy.