What Was the Last Original Movie You Saw?

Captain America: Civil War (2016)

Film is a beautiful medium of story telling which opens paths to communicating ideas and tales in ways that other forms of art could never accomplish, through the blending of sights and sounds and the addition of new computer generated effects film is able to tell stories which have never been told before. So, why is it that this beautiful and fascinating form of art is being used to tell the same stories time after time? Over and over again we see the same stories, borrowed from books, comics, or even older films being updated in the name of adding special effects or somehow bettering something which was already made the way the artist originally envisioned it. Is this use of film truly the best we can accomplish?

Please don't misinterpret this article as a call for putting a stop to the films in the marvel franchise, or the next installment in Star Wars (believe me, I'm as excited for Rogue One as you are), but as a plea to filmmakers that they stretch themselves a little more and put forth an effort into creating more original pieces of art. Let's stop reading novels and thinking "this would be a fantastic film!" and instead leave these works of writing to be exactly what they were originally intended to be, because just as writers don't go into writing novels with visions of their book being a film, filmmakers shouldn't be looking at other works of art and thinking about how they can transform it into something which serves them. Of course, I understand that this is a deeper problem within the film industry and the driving need for profit, rather than earnest filmmakers hoping to make the art they've always longed to create.

While I am a fan of many movies based off of other source material, I also have a great fondness for movies which exist only as movies. Films such as Swiss Army Man are delightfully strange and take advantage of the medium in a way that a book translated to the screen never could, because that book's story was always written to work best in the form of the written word. While there are some stories which translate well to film, and perhaps even work better in the movie format than they did on a page (take Lord of the Rings for example, which transformed something that read like a history textbook into a sweeping and beautiful piece of art about adventure and love), there are a great deal of books which would never properly work as films because they were not meant to be mutilated and compressed into a two to three hour viewing experience, especially with the nuances in the English language and the writing style giving each book a flair of its own which will be lost in the process of changing the writing to something visual.

Admittedly, I don't want to put a stop to films based on books, but I would like to see less. It's disheartening to look at the list of upcoming releases and see nothing but adaptations and sequels when you know that there is so much more to do with such a beautiful form of storytelling. So, I humbly ask that we expect more from film, and seek out those who attempt to create that which is completely new and unheard of.