Our Culture is Eating Itself

Source: Our Culture is Eating Itself, Solar Sands, 40:00, uploaded 2024-11-02, playlist index 656.

Solar Sands opens with the Ouroboros, the ancient image of a snake eating its own tail. He gives it three readings: the endless cycle of nature and time, renewal as the fresh front replaces the eaten back, and literal destruction when the snake consumes itself. The last reading supplies his view of mainstream film. He calls the present the worst era in film history in artistic terms, whilst leaving financial and critical comparisons aside because he has not checked the numbers.

The claim rests on the last decade of mainstream culture, which he sees filled with films that lack vision, cling to nostalgia, and repeat old material without understanding what made it good. The familiar complaint about too many sequels and remakes misses the sharper problem. Good additions to a franchise would earn less hostility. A culture filled with sequels, remakes, and little else also makes good work harder to expect. Independent and low-budget films still matter, yet mainstream cinema reaches the most people and carries the most money. Its derivative character therefore says something about the limits of its best-paid artists and about the audience that keeps funding it.

The sequel as a damaged inheritance

The Star Wars sequel trilogy gives Solar Sands his first long case. He treats the original trilogy as a large and complicated work that contains ordinary mistakes: a stormtrooper hits his head on a door, Luke’s kick misses its mark, and Luke’s plan to rescue Han Solo from Jabba’s palace becomes harder to justify when its parts are counted. He estimates roughly one hundred problems across the original trilogy, then roughly one thousand across the prequels and thousands across the sequels. These figures are his estimates. His definition of a problem is narrower than a bad performance or a failed emotional effect. He means a detail that does not follow logically, damages the work when someone thinks about it, and could be fixed to improve the story.

The sequel trilogy, in his account, makes such failures unusually visible. A knife is painted out of the background so that Rey can survive a fight. A map to the Death Star wreckage works only from one exact point, whilst the wreckage itself should not remain in such large pieces. Kylo Ren’s damaged fighter rolls across the desert and explodes, then he walks away unharmed. Solar Sands thinks these moments would weaken any film, even for viewers who enjoy the trilogy. Their frequency becomes evidence of a production whose priorities have failed before individual scenes reach the screen.

He then connects the sequel trilogy’s errors to its relation with the older films. The Force Awakens repeats the structure, themes, and imagery of A New Hope, which gave audiences the pleasure of recognition whilst leaving the new film with little substance of its own. The Last Jedi borrows from The Empire Strikes Back and cuts short some of the plot lines that its predecessor established. The Rise of Skywalker brings back Palpatine, a villain who had already exploded twice. Across the trilogy, ships receive black paint or a soft redesign instead of evolving with the galaxy, and the power relations between its factions remain almost unchanged. The final result makes the absence of an overarching plan visible.

Solar Sands reads that absence as a mismatch between Disney’s desire to recover the original trilogy’s success and its lack of planning, care, skill, vision, or originality. The later television shows repeat the same dependence on the past. Ahsoka brings back Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker. The Book of Boba Fett revives Cad Bane from the animated Clone Wars series and kills him after a few scenes. Solo teases Darth Maul, Obi-Wan teases a force-ghost Qui-Gon Jinn, and The Acolyte surrounds its mostly new cast with a Sith mask, a red lightsaber, Darth Plagueis, and Yoda. Solar Sands allows that familiar characters could serve a new story. He sees Disney using them as supports for scripts that cannot stand on their own. Andor becomes the exception because it works without the same character teases, although he finds its pace slow.

The original Star Wars could combine many influences because George Lucas made a new work during a period when innovation was necessary. Solar Sands doubts that Disney can repeat that process whilst its artists keep drawing ideas from the same brand. He finds the problem visible even in the trailer for Skeleton Crew, where alien children attend school, walk on concrete pavements, carry backpacks, and live among pitched roofs. The setting resembles an ordinary Disney suburb with alien details placed on top. A world built from references eventually loses the conditions that made the references interesting.

Marvel supplies a second example. Endgame turns time travel into a tour through the company’s earlier hits. Spider-Man: No Way Home is more successful as a film, in his view, yet it still depends on bringing back villains and earlier Spider-Men. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness introduces recognisable figures such as Professor X, Mr. Fantastic, Captain Carter, Captain Marvel, and Black Bolt so that Wanda can kill them a few minutes later. Solar Sands extends the same complaint to Rings of Power, Deadpool and Wolverine, Alien: Romulus, the Jurassic World and Terminator sequels, Wonder Woman 1984, The Matrix Resurrections, and the later Indiana Jones film.

He says that at least one infamous sequel has appeared every year since 2015. The description’s chapter covers the video’s 2024 context, when Solar Sands points to Disney’s D23 announcements: four of seventeen films were neither sequels nor remakes, and only three seemed original. He expects more failures from an expensive Snow White, a Toy Story series that ended well with its third film, a Lion King prequel without the original’s writing or nostalgia, and Marvel projects released after Endgame. The future remains uncertain, yet a culture built from derivative work puts a limit on the creative minds working inside it.

Adaptation and the loss of a work’s rules

The adaptation chapter changes the question. Solar Sands says he used to believe that every idea could work if someone executed it well. A live-action Harold and the Purple Crayon makes him doubt the first half of that belief. The children’s book gains its meaning from Harold drawing a two-dimensional world into existence. A live-action film spends its first five minutes animating that premise before moving Harold into a glossy real world, where a grown man creates hyper-realistic objects from his drawings. Solar Sands thinks a two-dimensional animated film, or a Roger Rabbit-style meeting of animation and live action, would preserve the book’s form and its joke about a crayon creating wavy water.

He makes the same case against a feature film of The Giving Tree. Shel Silverstein’s book keeps its message concise and leaves information out on purpose. A conventional screenplay would expand the boy’s life, give the tree more scenes, and make the tree speak so that the adaptation could fill a feature length. Those additions would change the silence that carries the book’s meaning. Solar Sands allows that a good film could exist, yet he sees a film better than the book as nearly impossible unless the filmmaker creates an original story from the beginning.

Some adaptations succeed by taking the source seriously. Joker works as a film about mental illness and a culture without empathy, with its connection to the DC universe kept loose. Solar Sands expected its success to produce more original stories that used a large franchise as a surface, although he cannot recall another example. The Lego Movie also exceeds its premise because it first makes an enjoyable story and treats LEGO with sincerity. Its ending connects the toy world to a real child in order to explain what building with LEGO is for.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie receives a more mixed judgement. Solar Sands calls it one of the safest children’s films he has seen, with every major beat visible in the trailer. Its reception still benefits from an earnest treatment of the Mushroom Kingdom. The film treats platforming and power-ups with awe, which makes audiences more generous towards its generic story. The trailer for The Minecraft Movie gives him the opposite impression. Steve becomes a joke, the block animals become a joke, and the world exists to announce how strange it is. The source material’s rules receive no serious attention.

During editing, the trailer for The Electric State gives Solar Sands another example. Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel has quiet, atmospheric artwork, whilst the film trailer appears to fill that atmosphere with loud action, familiar actors, and jokes. He reads the result as a failure to understand what the adaptation contains. A work based on an existing property has to grasp the property on its own terms. A generic plot about a fictional character entering the real world can suit one story and flatten another. Adaptation therefore requires an unconventional response to the rules and tone of the cultural object being used.

Remakes, improvement, and the market for familiarity

Solar Sands turns to Disney’s live-action remakes. Their financial success troubles him because audiences keep paying for films he sees as worse versions of beloved animations. He points to The Lion King, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid. The 2019 Aladdin runs long, looks grey, adds songs that interrupt the story, and repeats Robin Williams’s Genie with less personality. Abu touches treasure in the Cave of Wonders before the forbidden gem appears, yet the cave does not react. Will Smith’s blue CGI body and the live-action version of “Friend Like Me” spend great resources reproducing the animated film’s energy without matching the freedom of its drawings.

The other remakes add small material that he can tolerate, much material that changes nothing, and material that makes the old story worse. Beauty and the Beast remains more bearable, although it grows bloated. The Little Mermaid improves on Aladdin whilst adding forgettable songs and reducing the “Under the Sea” sequence’s visual imagination. Solar Sands says these films disappear from his mind because their main artistic effect is boredom. The public continues to fund that result because recognition and spectacle provide a reliable reason to buy a ticket.

The video then interrupts itself with a segment from Solar Sands’s roommate, Kino Corner, who rejects the claim that every remake fails. He names The Maltese Falcon, His Girl Friday, Ben-Hur, The Magnificent Seven, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Fly, The Thing, and Sorcerer as classic remakes. Michael Mann’s Heat remakes his television film L.A. Takedown, and its second attempt at the story has almost completely replaced the earlier film in public memory.

Two examples show how the process can work. Brian De Palma’s Scarface shares the 1932 Howard Hawks film’s gangster rise and fall and the line “the world is yours”, yet it moves the story from early-1930s New York to South Florida during the 1980s drug trade and Cuban immigration. The remake takes the older film as a starting point and rebuilds it for a different time. Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars follows Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo almost beat for beat, then changes samurai aesthetics to cowboy aesthetics and brings the story into colour. The remake was made without permission, so Toho sued for royalties and credits. Solar Sands still loves both films and sees them as complementary works.

His distinction is about the makers’ relationship to the source. A filmmaker can love a work, recognise where its execution failed, and bring a new interpretation to it. A studio can also treat a recognisable property as a cheap route to nostalgia. Solar Sands thinks the first intention can produce a good remake and the second produces a hollow one. The film’s origin therefore matters as much as the inherited plot.

Cultural cannibalism and the refusal of death

The final chapter begins with Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One. Solar Sands’s first reaction was that the CGI looked artificial. He now sees the appearance as an early sign of a larger practice: films increasingly use CGI, AI, and old footage to simulate actors who have died. Harold Ramis appears as Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Christopher Reeve and other actors appear in The Flash. Ian Holm’s likeness appears in several scenes of Alien: Romulus as the android Rook.

The description links a Los Angeles Times interview in which director Fede Álvarez says that he contacted Holm’s widow and received approval from Holm’s family. The interview describes a production that used an animatronic body, puppeteers for most of the performance, CGI work around the eyes and mouth, an actor named Daniel Betts for facial capture, and generative processing that made Betts’s voice resemble Holm’s. Álvarez frames Rook as a distinct character and an act of respect towards Holm’s place in the franchise. Solar Sands accepts family approval as better than its absence whilst keeping his objection intact. He thinks a film that could use any actor has no artistic need to reproduce a dead person’s face and voice.

He draws a line between completing the scenes of an actor who dies during production and designing a project around a dead actor’s likeness. Archival footage preserves a real performance. Another living actor can portray a dead person whilst remaining separate from the person being portrayed. A digital recreation attempts to restore the old person’s living likeness and aura for a new performance. Solar Sands calls this a refusal of death and a denial of its sacredness. Franchises are expected to continue after their stories end, and actors remain available for profit after their lives end.

That practice makes him fear the wider use of AI in filmmaking. He points to the AI-generated opening of Secret Invasion and imagines Disney asking whether it can recreate James Earl Jones’s voice after his death. The underlying system already depends on intellectual property, whilst the star-based system that once allowed an actor to carry an unusual script has weakened. Solar Sands asks whether new actors will still receive space to make new characters when studios can resurrect familiar faces to play familiar roles.

The audience remains part of the problem. Solar Sands avoids many of these releases because he hears little good about them and watches public attention leave them within weeks. The description links Box Office Mojo’s 2024 domestic table, where Kung Fu Panda 4 ranks tenth and Wonka twenty-seventh. Solar Sands asks when anyone last discussed either film. He also mentions the Netflix Avatar remake, a Pinocchio remake, and another Ghostbusters film that he had forgotten. Dune: Part Two receives a different place in his account. It is another adaptation of an existing work, yet its quality gave it a month of widely shared memes and a longer cultural life.

He sees a limited consolation in the industry’s dependence on a finite catalogue of familiar films. Disney can eventually exhaust the properties that carry its remakes, and an attempt at an original project can still fail. Solar Sands would rather see fewer films than an abundance of films that keep reducing the culture’s past into weaker products. If these releases continue to succeed, he expects studios to restart the same handful of franchises, spend billions on resurrecting the past, and eventually place the same faces in the same stale roles.

Limits

This note reconstructs Solar Sands’s commentary from the complete English caption track, its metadata, chapters, description, and the linked references supplied there. The captions include automatic-transcription errors, which I have corrected where the intended words are clear. The source’s counts of Star Wars problems, D23 announcements, and future releases remain estimates or predictions from the video. Its judgements about artistic quality and audience behaviour are arguments rather than measured findings.

The description supplies links to an IMDb list of Disney films, a BBC Future article about AI recreating film stars, the Los Angeles Times interview about Ian Holm, a ScreenRant list of dead actors brought back with CGI, and Box Office Mojo’s 2024 domestic table. The accessible references support the video’s context around Alien: Romulus and 2024 box office. The note keeps the underlying claims attached to Solar Sands because the video does not build a complete method for measuring the artistic decline he describes.

Further reading / references

• Disney films, an IMDb list supplied in the video description.
• How AI is bringing film stars back from the dead, a BBC Future article supplied in the video description.
• The makers of ‘Alien: Romulus’ defend their AI-resurrected Ian Holm, the Los Angeles Times interview supplied in the video description.
• Dead Actors Brought Back With CGI, a ScreenRant list supplied in the video description.
• Domestic Box Office For 2024, the Box Office Mojo table supplied in the video description.
• Solar Sands also mentions YMS’s video about the Lion King remake without giving its title or a link.