Tom Hanks just wants Hollywood to focus on stories again
Audiences have had too much of a good thing, according to the Here actor.
Photo: Lester Cohen/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
Tom Hanks knows how to tell a good story. He’s acted in over a hundred of them, not to mention written a handful as well. In a new interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he opined that audiences know a good story (or lack thereof) when they see it too—even if Hollywood plasters it over with seven layers of CGI and VFX laser battles.
“We are now enjoying the luxury of riches and because you can make anything happen on screen now, we are being brought back to the concept of, ‘OK that’s true but what is the story?'” he said. “You can dream Lake Michigan and fill it with cuckoo clocks that form a three-headed dragon that breathes fire and destroys Chicago. You can do that. But to what purpose? What is the story and what is it going to be saying about us?”
While the fire-breathing Lake Michigan dragon does sound sort of awesome, it’s also a pretty clear segway into the blue-screen drivel that the MCU has been spoon-feeding its audiences as of late. Although he’s never personally starred in one, Hanks is, notably, not against comic book adaptations altogether. “There was a period of time, and I felt this way too, where we would see DC and MCU movies in order to see these better versions of ourselves,” he said. “God, I feel like an X-Man sometimes. I am as confused as Spider-Man. I am as angry as Batman is. I love my country as much as Captain America. We’ve been down that road. We’ve had 20 years to explore that kind of thing, and now we’re in an evolution and place where it’s: And the story is what? The theme is what? The point of this movie is what?”
Hanks’ latest movie, Here (directed by Robert Zemeckis) takes this noble concept a little too seriously. The film, which follows one location throughout the years from a fixed point of view, “sledgehammers home the idea that these stories are all of our stories… People do live in homes. They do have money problems. They do argue with their parents about space,” Matt Schimkowitz writes in his review. Unfortunately, “It’s about as deep as a stage show at Disneyland.” Somehow, we need to find some sort of middle ground.