The most annoying trope? There are so many that most movie plots are predictable to me. Even if I figure a movie out, I can still enjoy parts of it as there are a lot of different pieces that I get entertainment from. Plot is a big one, but dialogue can also make or break a movie. Tarantino has made a career on memorable lines.
If a movie is too trope heavy it can feel like a movie we’ve all ready seen.
I guess the most annoying for me would be the white savior trope. The white outsider comes into a different culture and single handedly saves them from other outsiders, or themselves, or the military. Dances with Wolves is a good example, Avatar, obviously comes to mind. One could argue Daenerys from Game of Thrones starts off that way. One could argue that she doesn’t really save the societies she takes over, but she thinks she does.
It has been done to death. It is a colonialist point of view that certain cultures need to help others that they feel are further behind. The other cultures are always portrayed as being simpler, more into nature, less technology and innocent. Sometimes this is portrayed as a good thing. But what makes one better or worse, behind or ahead is subject to ones viewpoint.
What if the simpler people are cutting down the rainforest and putting cattle there to survive? Now, who is the villain? They are victims of circumstance, forced to join a global economy that prizes one thing over another, and they may not be able to survive or want to survive like they used to.
I am not saying one culture is better or worse. I am saying the whole conversation around it as if one needs to be saved, or not, reformed or not, is ludicrous. Lawrence of Arabia did this when it was still fresh, but it was based on a real man who really thought he was helping a people out. In the end like Daenerys a fictional character, he in a lot of ways made it worse.
We can’t really say if the Ottoman Empire continuing would have been a good or a bad thing, as that is for an alternate universe to find out. We only know what happens here and how it affects things. The entire middle eastern mess can be traced back to the British using the Arabs and making promises they never intended to keep to a people they considered less than, and uncivilized. Honor is only upheld among equals, and Great Britain was still an empire, or thought itself one.
Certain stories do echo down and repeat, almost like a warning. I heard that Frank Herbert was influenced by DH Lawrence’s book. I can see a bit of Lawrence in Muad’dib, for sure. The savior complex, the outsider joining what others may consider an inferior culture.
In the end he creates more chaos and death, he has nightmares about it in Dune. So, whether he saves these people or merely changes their position in their universe can be debated. I would say he didn’t save them so much as change their status. After a few of these stories, they start to lose the darker aspects of the warning and become more saccharine and simple. A lot of the complexities get stripped away.It isn’t about saving, or bettering, it is about moving pieces on a board.
The Infamous Jennisfora Strikes Again...or something like that 