Comment Re:I guess the people have spoken (Score 5, Interesting) 215
What you see as "woke" I see as pop. "Woke" gives you a convenient political lens in which to criticize film, but it forces you to look exclusively through that lens.
"Pop" is just writing to the times. It's what the majority of film projects have always been and they have always sucked. White hat/black hat westerns sucked because the writers tried too hard to write what people wanted, what studios wanted, etc. Everyone in Hollywood is looking for a formula and the producers and executives who get the final say have always been there to make bad decisions based on what they perceive to be the correct formula.
Making the main characters black or trans or whatever may be part of the current formula, but that's not what makes the formula bad. The formula is bad because it's a formula. Even when you escape the bean counters, there are tons of Hollywood jackasses who believe in the monomyth (it is to literature what Freud is to psychology–influential bullshit). Pop film usually sucks.
I watched episode 7 of Star Wars in theaters and before the film was half way over I decided to never watch another film or show in the Star Wars franchise. But it had nothing to do with "woke." It was just redundant and pointless. It was Disney-fied. It's like they focus grouped the shit out of the original Star Wars films and just copied everything that made the uber-nerds cheer. But if you ask me, the greatest filmmaker of our time is Jordan Peele, and you can't get more "woke" than his films. He doesn't take crappy formulas and insert minorities into them. He makes spectacular genre films with original twists and allegories.