Leonardo wrote:So, are you saying that 1986 had lower standards than 2007? If so, are you saying that films were worse back then than now? Or were films back then better because even though the standards were lower then, the films actually achieved those standards, whereas today's films don't meet today's standards?
That's awful lots of questions. And complicated ones too.
There are some aspects of films back then that had lower standards than today. Such as graphics, technology, realism, effects, believability and the likes.
It will be too taxing to pick out several aspects to compare, and quite complicated to answer.
So i'm just gonna pick only one aspect out, as an example.
As years move on, we, the people in general, gets to understand more and more things. New discoveries being made. New insights to old theories. New advancement.
So it's easier to do make-belief's back then. Such as... we had scant ideas of what DNA is; space environment was not a very clear picture yet to common folks; deep-space travel was just a fantasy; aerodynamics was not a common subject outside of the aero-engineers circle; the common picture of the solar system was so much out of scale; only a handful even knows about the Oort's Cloud enveloping our own solar system; ... and so on and so forth. Those sorts of things.
In effect, for a sci-fi film, anything goes for these unknowns. Not much effort was needed to cater to certain standards of realism. Hence, lower standards for believability in the olden films.
For example:
You do a Superman, circling around the earth in the opposite direction at a tremendously absurd speed, causing the earth to stop and reverse rotation. And he turns back time! This is a super wow scene for the 70s. Because of the simple logic, "Earth rotates counterclockwise, if you can reverse it into clockwise rotation, you reverse the arrows of time."
Now, most folks know that turning back the arrows of time is scientifically impossible. Even if, you can reverse the earth's rotation! There's simple no logic to it that can hold.
Now you do that kind of scene again in this millenium, and you'd get noisy critics all around. Not to mention, it won't impress many of the audience.