This is something that started to effect Hollywood long before the rise of woke culture, where they started to forget basic screenwriting rules.
A real light bulb moment for me was reading the how to book "Save The Cat" which was when I realized how many tropes, even basic shit like establishing who a character is and why we should give a shit, were missing from modern movies (that was circa 2010 when I read it I believe)
I don't know if it was laziness or incompetence, but Hollywood has mostly sucked for a long time, "woke" culture just might be the nail in the coffin.
The problem with a lot of modern movies is they are more interested in subverting (TheWineTastingLaugh.mp3) the old tropes, not realizing that trope subversion is its own trope. And really subverting tropes isn't the issue so much as they fact they do so both lazily, uninimagitively, and often as a form of preaching at the audience.
The point of subverting a trope is surprise the audience; when you keep doing it, and often doing it it in stupid ways, the audience is no longer surprised. And if everyone is subverting the same sort of tropes, there is no trope left to subvert. If every disa
It also ignores the reasons tropes came into being; namely to convey information to the audience about characters without needing to spend narrative time doing so, and that some tropes are tropes because they WORK.
King Kong, Jumanji and Rampage surprisingly enough were responsible for a smaller toy company called Lanard Toys to expand after they made enough money off of those movie franchises.
They're now producing new Alien and Aliens toys in the spirit of the Kenner originals(they're making this fuckoff huge Alien Queen figure that comes with a nest and it won't break the bank either). Lanard also puts out The Corps. toyline which was originally a GIJoe knockoff but now is the only toy line standing of it's kind and the vehicles fit Joes perfectly. They've also made spinoffs like Primal Clash which replace military vehicles for armored prehistoric animals.
The queen stand a foot tall so it's a big girl
View attachment 1052164
If Disney would stop meddling, they could easily have made Star Wars a big seller rather than a kiss of death. Kids and collectors want Stormtroopers, Droids, and Aliens of assorted types and vehicles to have the figures ride around in, it's not hard.
I do remember seeing The Corps, and while I thought they looked like GI Joe knocks, they looked like good-quality GI Joe knockoffs that that some effort put in. So good to see someone's sticking to fundamentals and doing good.
Which brings me to my next point: I never argued in favor of the Empire using tracked vehicles in lieu of legged ones (well, I sorta do in this post indirectly), I was talking about hovering ones vs. legged ones. Basically, it's the debate between legged combat vehicle and helicopters.
That's why AT-ATs are awesome and track-speeders aren't, even though both make little sense.
Fair enough; helicopters/hover/repulsor craft come with thier own issues, which is by scifi rules they are less well armored. It would also be very easy to propose they would also be suspectible to some sort of jamming or interference.
Also hover effects way more expensive than walkers that you can build practical models of for shots
But saying legged walkers aren't realistic is incorrect, especially with advanced technology. They've got serious short comings, but tow-cables aside, they probably wouldn't be relevant in the sort of battlefield the Galactic Empire would operate in, where they have supremency (that is, the ability to fire from an elevated position trumps being able to use terrain as protection).
There is though, that's what the LA-AT from the Clone Wars was (kind of), it has a bunch of missiles and some big-ass laser turrets on it and sweeps over the battlefield.
LA-AT is more like an attack helicopter or strafing craft.
I mean a loitering pylon turn aircraft (that is the aircraft puts itself into a turn around its target) because of how incredibly successful & easy to use they are. Strafing attack craft are standard, but an AC-130-type craft is so effective on any sort of realistic ground battle space it would be a near must-exist for a setting (if there are flying craft and unless there are specific reasons the craft can't exist or be effective; such as effectiveness of anti-air defenses or lack of appropriate weapons for a loitering support/suppression platform)
The AC-130 history is fascinating. The predecessor as the AC-47, which was one of those experiments that was a huge success. For the first prototype, they gave the pilot a grease-pencil cross-hair (because they weren't sure if this would work and worth developing a scope for, so 'here's a rough frame of reference, good luck brah') which turned out to be sufficient for nailing fixed targets with accuracy.
