I have long hated the found-footage genre. To me, found-footage is one of the most dreadful trends in cinema.

The style became popular with release of “The Blair Witch Project”, a movie I definitely didn’t care for. A major reason why I didn’t like it was because of the style. It’s so nauseating to watch shake violently from side to side and you never really get a good look at anything. For example, the movie “Cloverfield” prevents you from ever getting a good look at the giant monster attacking the city. You don’t have this problem with the “King Kong” or “Godzilla” films because they are not found-footage pictures.

Also, frequently, the visual quality is much lower than that of a normal film as they seek to make it look like it was shot on a camera that an average person might actually own. This presents a big problem as camera technology has advanced. The average smartphone now can shoot something that looks much better than the expensive video camera that rich families in previous decades may have owned. This means that more is done to artificially affect the image quality and make it look as amateurish as possible. I go to the movies to see professionalism; I don’t want to see something that looks like I could have filmed it with my camera or phone.

It’s not just found-footage that I have a problem with. The first-person action movie “Hardcore Henry” as well as the first-person sequence in Dwayne Johnson’s “Doom” were plagued by many of the problems present in found-footage films. Again, I felt really sick watching the camera jerking around and I didn’t feel I got a good look at anything. The brilliant thing about films is unlike theatre, you can put the camera anywhere to always give the audience the best view of what is going on.

I hope that the found-footage style dies out pretty soon because I think it is spoiling some movies that actually have the potential to be very entertaining.