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It was Morbin' Time back in 2003.
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00:00Movies can get away with being many things, but no studio wants their latest release to
00:05be dismissed as dated and old hat from the moment the first trailer drops.
00:11Hollywood wants to constantly be wowing audiences with the newest hotness, because nothing dense
00:16a movie's box office like the general population thinking it looks quaint, corny, and just plain
00:23old behind the times. But every so often, a series of miscalculations conspire to deliver a film that
00:31feels totally out of time, like it's somehow traveled through a cinematic wormhole and wound
00:37up in cinemas years after its intended bow. 10. The Internship
00:49Remember the Internship? Yeah, this glorified feature-length product placement for Google,
00:55starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as middle-aged salesmen who take internships
01:00at the tech giant, couldn't feel more mid-2000s if it tried. Except it came out in 2013,
01:09a fact The Onion made hilarious light of by dubbing it quote, the biggest comedy of 2005.
01:15Oh, oh, actually, that'll sound even better in the old movie trailer voices we used to get,
01:21the biggest comedy of 2005. Indeed, given that in 2013 the internet wasn't quite the mysterious
01:30dial-up connection beast middle-aged folk that it was in the early to mid-2000s,
01:35the Internship felt like a dusty relic the moment it was announced. Between the poor reviews and mediocre
01:42box office, it's easy to see how this project probably would have done gangbusters had it
01:48released between 2003 and 2006, back when the general population was considerably less tech-literate,
01:55pre-smartphones and all, and Vaughn and Wilson were at the peaks of their fame.
02:009. Black Widow
02:03Ever since Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson, was first introduced to the
02:09Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2010's Iron Man 2, fans assumed it was just a mere matter of time before
02:16the character got her own spin-off. Though it was often suggested that Marvel Studios was anxious
02:21about greenlighting a female-led superhero film given the prior failures of projects like Catwoman
02:28and Elektra, there was certainly considerable fan interest in seeing Black Widow get her own
02:34born-style spy thriller. And it finally happened in 2021, but the big problem? Black Widow had died
02:43two years prior in Avengers Endgame, and so the film was forced to be a prequel side story that took
02:49place primarily after Captain America Civil War. To be clear, Marvel had just released the most
02:56climactic superhero film to date, folded up by going backwards. By 2021, a Black Widow movie felt like
03:05a quaint afterthought, closing the cinematic door after the horse had bolted, or rather yeeted itself
03:12off the Vormir Mountains. Given that Romanoff's fate was already known and Endgame had quite decisively
03:18shut the book on the character, a common criticism of Black Widow was that it should have been made about
03:24five years earlier when Natasha was still, y'know, alive.
03:298. Gemini Man For all of its attempts to push filmmaking
03:35forward by being filmed at 120 frames per second in 3D, Ang Lee's Gemini Man feels like a sci-fi
03:43thriller that tripped and fell straight out of 1997. And that's because, in a sense, it did.
03:51The pitch for Gemini Man first started during the rounds in Hollywood in 1997, after which a number
03:57of actors that were starring in it, including Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage and
04:03Clint Eastwood. It ultimately didn't start shooting until decades later in 2018, with Lee directing
04:10Will Smith in the dual role of an assassin and his younger clone achieved here with cutting-edge
04:15visual effects tech. And yet, despite this, the chintzy assassin-vites-himself premise and the
04:22particulars of the script would have felt right at home in your typical mid-90s bargain bin VHS
04:28rental. This one just happened to have an $138 million budget and no Jean-Claude Van Damme, which
04:35is a huge, huge loss in my opinion. As a fitting addendum to the whole matter though, Lee recently confirmed
04:42that he won't be shooting films in 3D or high framerate ever again. And honestly, thank God.
04:497. Crash
04:52It's incredibly telling that race relations drama Crash had its origins in 1991, when writer and
05:00director Paul Haggis was the victim of a carjacking by two black men in Los Angeles. This prompted
05:07Haggis to develop his film about racial and social tensions in LA, as was eventually released in 2005,
05:15and controversially went on to win the Best Picture Oscar, pipping easy favourite Brokeback Mountain to
05:22the post. While Crash is often derided today as one of the all-time weakest Best Picture winners,
05:29even back in 2005, it felt like a simplistic engagement with its subject matter. The sort of
05:35heavy-handed message movie that regularly won Oscars and tore up the box office throughout the 1980s and 90s.
05:42In a year where Crash was up against not just Brokeback, but terrific films like Capote,
05:48Good Night and Good Luck, and Munich, its award success felt even more like a puzzling throwback to
05:54a bygone era. 6. Clerks 3
05:59Kevin Smith's long-awaited Clerks 3quel didn't merely feel a bit passé because it once again saw the
06:05filmmaker peering back over his shoulder to consider his past, but also because it featured a jokey
06:11subplot centred around NFTs. Yeah, I forgot these things existed again, so I'm not happy with being
06:21reminded that they were a thing. Smith, who is enough of a proponent of NFTs that he even released a
06:26movie,
06:27Kill Roy Was Here, exclusively as one, has Elias, played by Trevor Furman, and his friend
06:34Blockchain, played by Austin Zajur, trying to sell NFT kites throughout Clerks 3. Now, even if the mere
06:42mention of non-fungible tokens doesn't make you groan, this movie came out in September 2022,
06:52at a point where NFTs had already peaked in popularity and were dying on the vine. By 2023,
07:00the majority of them had become totally worthless, which I'm sure is still keeping Seth Green up at
07:06night. Seriously, anyone if you've seen his apes, let him know because he was super upset about that.
07:125. The Little Things
07:14Despite starring three Oscar winners in Denzel Washington, Jared Leto, and Rami Malek,
07:20only one of whom actually deserves to have any Oscars, The Little Things came and went in 2021
07:26without much of a peep, and it can't solely be blamed on Warner Bros decision to send it to HBO
07:31Max
07:32the very same day it hit cinemas. Also, for clarity's sake, I'm talking about Denzel Washington. He
07:37deserves all the Oscars in the world, but Jared Leto and Rami Malek? No.
07:43Anyway, one common sentiment among reviews of The Little Things was that the crime thriller felt like
07:48a straight face throwback to the 1990s, where modest thrillers about serial killers routinely made
07:54bank at the box office off the back of their lead actors. Think of something like Kiss the Girls,
07:59or Along Came a Spider, that kind of thing. As such, it's a little surprise to learn that writer and
08:05director John Lee Hancock penned the first draft of the script way back in 1993, shortly after The
08:12Silence of the Lambs' astronomical success prompted everyone in Hollywood to get to work on their own
08:17copycat projects. Though Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty, and Danny DeVito all
08:24considered directing at various points, it ultimately fell to Hancock himself to resurrect the project,
08:29almost 30 years later, and get it made. It's certainly not a bad movie, all things considered,
08:36it's just one that fails to stand out in an era where commanding audience interest is more
08:41challenging than ever before, and star power has never meant less to the general moviegoer.
08:47If you saw The Little Things airing on cable while channel surfing in 1998 though,
08:52you probably would have had a great time.
08:534. Jason Bourne The Bourne movies came along and redefined the
08:58spy genre in the early 2000s, starting with Doug Liman's The Bourne Identity before the series was
09:04passed to Paul's shaky cam is my true love Greengrass with The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum.
09:11Soon enough, the Matt Damon-led series spawned a host of imitators, clearly providing the visual and
09:17tonal blueprint for Martin Campbell's brilliant James Bond reboot, Casino Royale.
09:22Bourne had concluded pretty definitively in 2007 with Ultimatum. We watched as Jason uncovered his
09:29past and took down Treadstone and left the cinema to the sounds of Moby, well, and truly satisfied
09:34with the film as a trilogy capper. And then there was a spin-off. A fairly decent film in and
09:40of itself,
09:41directed by Michael Clayton's Tony Gilroy, with attempts at franchising Bourne still felt contrived.
09:47A feeling that wasn't shaking when it was announced that Greengrass and Damon would be returning for
09:52a follow-up to Ultimatum called Jason Bourne, which released in 2016, almost a full decade after the
10:00previous film. The fourth mainline Bourne film stood out as dated as soon as it dropped, with Greengrass
10:07deploying all the same tools from the preceding efforts, but with no thematic or emotional impetus
10:12for it to land. It felt like an unnecessary addition when it was announced and remained that way when
10:17it was released.
10:183. Morbius
10:20Oh, Morbius. Even accepting that every entry into Sony's Spider-Man universe to date has given off
10:27a pronounced whiff of the early 2000s, none of them feel quite as aggressively instaraged as Morbius.
10:35Morbius feels like it comes from a small pocket of time for superhero movies between 2003 and 2005,
10:43a daredevil adjacent kind of film where they could still be thoroughly naff and yet still have something
10:49of a pop culture imprint. And beyond this, its slick vampiric action seemed of a piece with the
10:56Underworld franchise, which itself launched back in 2003. Toss in Tyrese Gibson as a wisecracking
11:03comic relief cop and it's easy to look at the film, released in 2022 as it was, and twice,
11:10and ask yourself what year is it?
11:132. The Core
11:14Without checking, just try and guess what year sci-fi disaster film The Core came out in. 1995? 1996?
11:23Maybe 1997? Nope. 2003.
11:26With its hilariously loony premise of a drill team racing to detonate nuclear weapons to restart the
11:33rotation of the Earth's core, hell yeah, this is a film that in its very bones feels like it's
11:39riding the coattails of countless 1990s disaster flicks like Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact,
11:47Daylight, Dante's Peak, Volcano, and so on. Oh, and also let me know which one of those movies is
11:52your favorite down in the comments below. I'm always going to be riding or dying for Independence Day
11:57because that thing, oh, that is a real movie. But back to the core, and with the most late 90s
12:03slash early 2000s cast imaginable, including Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo, Stanley Tucci,
12:11DJ Qualls, Richard Jenkins, Bruce Greenwood, and Alfred Woodward, accompanied by some hilariously
12:18wretched CGI, even for its release year, The Core felt like a film Paramount just left in their
12:24studio vault for a few years by accident. And yeah, though the disaster genre was still
12:30incredibly popular at this point in time, The Day After Tomorrow grossed over $500 million in 2004,
12:37just a year later, The Core was a colossal box office flop, its innate datedness seemingly
12:43deterring paying moviegoers from checking it out. 1. Bloodshot
12:48It feels like Vin Diesel's superhero flick Bloodshot came out at least a decade ago,
12:54when in fact, it was released just four years back in 2020. Now, we can't solely blame this on
13:01Bloodshot being one of the last major Hollywood movies to release before the time-warping pandemic,
13:07but also because it seems precisely like the sort of high-concept nonsense Diesel would have
13:11starred in from the early 2000s through to the 2010s. Take Diesel's schlockiest star vehicles from that
13:18era, The Chronicles of Riddick, Babylon AD, and more recently The Last Witch Hunter, and Bloodshot
13:25sits very comfortably among them, perhaps fitting given that the comic source material launched all
13:30the way back in 1992. Except this movie was filmed in 2018 and released with visual effects which looked
13:38at least a solid decade behind the times, if not even more. Bloodshot feels like it comes from a time
13:44when Hollywood was still embarrassed of superhero movies. And so, in light of the huge artistic strides
13:50the genre has made over the last 15 years, it's almost hilariously quaint to sit through.
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