Well on a lighter note, you-know-what really started to die off as the decade began? Practical effects in movies. Ever since t2 in 91 and Jurassic Park in 93 cgi kept being used more and more but at least through the 90s and into the early 2000s you still had plenty of animatronics and makeup effects working with cgi, not being replaced by it.
Look at movies that got released in say 2001 up to around 2005. Jurassic Park 3 still had plenty of puppets including the largest animatronic ever with the spinosuarus, while mummy returns lives on in infamy for the cgi rock scorpion king it still used some decent makeup and stunt work. Compared to the Tom Cruise mummy reboot in 2015.
It's hard to say exacty where cgi completely took over to where we see it in every major Hollywood production now to the point where it's dull and boring, some would say it started with the later two star wars prequels, others say it was Micheal bay's first transformers movie. Personally I think it started after 2d animation in movies finally died in 2004-2005, once that was replaced by 3d cgi, practical special effects in live action movies was next.
I think a big transition was the Pirates of The Caribbean sequels, the fact that Davy Jones and his crew were all CGI and in reality just guys in grey suits blew everyone's minds and convinced Hollywood that practical effects were now totally obsolete, what once would have been done with make up effects and costuming was now all CGI and was virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, but this also was thanks to the talent of ILM and the tone that set later led to crap like The Thing reboot where the studio ditched the practical effects and replaced it with terrible looking CGI and that was half a decade later, so clearly it wasn't a universal leap.
But the thing about Pirates of The Caribbean is people still actually cared about the characters or at least Captain Jack, the really bad transition was Michael Bay's Transformers, that was the first time a movie was entirely sold on ogling CGI spectacle, nobody cared about the story, the characters or even the actors, unlike say Armageddon which had big names stars like Bruce Willis, nobody cared about Shia Labeouf in 2007.
Yeah it was a nostalgic property, but none of the actual fans of the old Transformers liked the movie because the robots looked nothing like the old ones, it wasn't the fact that it was called "Transformers" that made it the hit that it was, it was purely the effects and with that the summer blockbuster was effectively killed in a fundamental way, it truly became the "special effects pornography" David Foster Wallace accused them of being after T2.
The great recession is what killed the, "You too can own a little house with a white-picket fence" narrative.
And with that, coupled with the Iraq war being another Vietnam style debacle, the American dream in a fundamental way died, a lot of people deep down inside soured on the US and things only stayed relatively calm for a while longer because the left put all their hopes in Obama and his ability to "save us" but when that didn't happen either now there's an ever growing movement to completely dismantle the US and refashion it into a fundamentally different country by the left, including wiping away any and all respect for the Founding Fathers, the flag, the Constitution, Democracy itself, the US as a very basic concept in any way, shape or form, they want it gone, pulled down, burned down, paved over, you name it, they want it wiped away and the Earth salted on the very idea of "America"
In my opinion America is something that should fixed and not demolished, but not that's Woke enough.
Don't think it'll stop at just tearing down life sized statues, they'll be tearing down the statue of liberty one day if they can, they'll be unironically saying "freedom is racism" one day, the political left is now 100% diametrically opposed to the US, they're a renegade faction now, not just another way of looking at how to run the country.
One thing I ironically miss is Twilight. The hate train on that was the last real moment when everyone could just laugh at something being retarded.
Today they'd play the woman card, the fact that (at least the first movie) was directed by a woman, based on a book by a woman and starring an actress and geared toward a female audience they'd be playing the "it's sexist to say this sucks" card for all that it's worth if Twilight came out today.
At this point, I'm convinced that 2012 really was the end of the world and it's just being done in a mix of slow burn and blueballing.
I unironically think about that idea a lot.
