Matt Damon's Take: Is Netflix Making Movies Dumber?

So how does this affect the movies we watch? Damon’s next, less persuasive point, was about how action scenes are spaced out. “You usually have three set pieces. One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third,” he said, with the big one in the third act. “Now, [Netflix is] like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes?’ We want people to stay tuned in.” Sorry Matt, this isn’t a new trick — Bond and Mission: Impossible have been kicking off with stunt-heavy blow-outs for decades. Even before smartphones, the audiences of action movies were not renowned for their powers of deep concentration. • Read film reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews Damon’s next point, though, was on the money. He talked about the sense, when making a film for Netflix, that “it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching”. This certainly feels like a new thing in films, although it’s reminiscent of the way that TV documentaries tell you what you are about to see, remind you what you have just seen and then remind you again after the ad break. And this is the crucial thing: when we watch films on streaming services, they battle for our attention with other screens and rival channels — and now adverts — in the same way as TV shows do. Hence the cack-handed exposition of many streaming movies, which are often scripted for “casual” viewers or “second-screen” viewers. The Keira Knightley thriller The Woman in Cabin 10 features a scene in which the boss of Knightley’s character asks her: “Are we talking about stealing NGO funds from starving children, or your chequered romantic history?” Subtly done, guys. Just to recap, if you were scrolling through Instagram, this is a piece about how digital culture has shortened attention spans. Hopefully, I won’t need to remind you again. Another culprit is Murder Mystery, which stars Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston as a sleuthing couple and did well enough to warrant a sequel, Murder Mystery 2. These are films with Netflix written all over them, from their 90-minute running time and on-the-nose titles to the way they triangulate different demographics: Sandler fans, Aniston fans and fans of murder mysteries. And we can expect them to remind us every 15 minutes why that MacGuffin was stolen and who is under suspicion. Even award-worthy films aren’t immune. A House of Dynamite, nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, has repetition built in, viewing the lead-up to nuclear armageddon from several perspectives. You could be poncy and say that was a nod to Kurosawa’s Rashomon, but it also keeps you up to speed if you were checking the score of Aston Villa v Everton. • Noughties dramas reign supreme on streaming services Some Netflix films buck this trend — Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman was three and a half hours long, but that was OK because everyone was within easy reach of the loo. Ironically, this week Clare Binns, the creative director of Picturehouse Cinemas, criticised the trend for movies of three hours plus — such as The Brutalist. “There’s no need for films to be that long,” she said, partly because it makes programming hard. Maybe in the future the goliaths will migrate to streaming services. Another noble exception is Adolescence, which Affleck namechecked on Rogan’s podcast. “It didn’t do any of that shit,” Affleck said, referring to the front-loading of action and exposition-heavy dialogue. “And it was f***ing great.” A big reason why that mini-series engaged us so powerfully was its one-shot, real-time format — the events unfolded before our eyes, as they might in a play or a football match. So, a plea to Netflix, Amazon and the rest: we understand why you cater for the terminally distracted, but let’s have more stories that are so engrossing we just have to put our phones down.