You can always tell what was happening in the world by the movies that flooded its theaters that year. Japan has been wrestling with the Fukushima meltdown for years, and Daiichi rears its head in everything from Shin Godzilla to agitator Sion Sono's The Land of Hope. UK director Ben Wheatley's fractured family drama Happy New Year, Colin Burstead could be read as a Brexit analogy.

The biggest single factor influencing traditional Hollywood blockbusters now is how to guarantee a release in the Chinese mainland. In 2013 Marvel's Iron Man 3 became the first giant film to shamelessly pander to Chinese audiences, which went as well as might be expected. The only people surprised that useless extra characters and scenes with zero narrative impact would be met with scorn were those at Marvel. Nonetheless, pandering reached a fever pitch in 2018. Pacific Rim: Uprising - the sequel made only because the first film proved lucrative in China - failed by desperately trying to find a way to make the Chinese tech industry save the world. It lost sight of basics like storytelling and Chinese audiences didn't fall for it. Escape Plan 2: Hades was a Sylvester Stallone vehicle with no Stallone and cynical amounts of Huang Xiaoming. Slightly better was The Meg, which pandered in a more amusing, goofy way and earned more RMB because of it. The most egregious example of the year was Dwayne Johnson's Skyscraper, whose splashy PR stops in Hong Kong and Beijing couldn't save a bad movie. Its earnings stalled at $98 million, half of which came in the opening weekend.

Notably, James Wan's Aquaman opened in China ahead of most markets, including the United States, and most definitely marches to the beat of its own creative drum. It has no Chinese characters shoehorned into the narrative and no extended sequences set in Shanghai. Aquaman follows its own (nonsense) story logic and stays true to itself, and Chinese audiences recognized that. They were so unconcerned about being pandered to that they bestowed the film with $190 million in a week. Hollywood has yet to learn that its best tactic is respecting Chinese audiences' singular tastes.

Elsewhere the fallout from the Harvey Weinstein scandal continues to rain down, now falling on the South Korean and Indian industries, and #TimesUp and #MeToo are trickling into the final product we see on screens - or don't, as the case may be with the prestigious Venice Film Festival. Earlier this year Venice refused to sign a gender parity protocol, which Cannes and Locarno did, and which events like Toronto and Sundance are actively addressing. Festival director Alberto Barbera told The Hollywood Reporter he would quit before accepting quotas. He blamed the industry for a lack of films by women and added, "It's not up to us to change the situation."

Against this landscape Gary Ross's Ocean's Eight - the Times Up Ocean's film - proceeded to aggressively drop the ball. Cast with three of the world's most powerful actresses, an international pop star and endowed with roughly a dozen Oscars, BAFTAs, Emmys and Golden Globes, Ocean's was so lazy and low energy it was as if the cast and crew didn't even bother with a script. The zeitgeist was on its side, so no one had to try, it seemed. Wrong. December's Widows is about much more than gender politics, but in the grand scheme of things, it's everything Ocean's Eight should have been.

Finally: representation. The idea that there are not enough black, brown, LGBTQ, Asian, female, or old people on screens is as old as the hills. When a movie about black women on vacation (Girls Trip) or a shimmering gay romance (Call Me By Your Name) are hits, Hollywood boardrooms erupt with confusion. Representation isn't just about seeing the self on screen: it's about good business. When Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman earned a truckload of money last year, it was proved that audiences everywhere put story and character first and that the hero didn't have to be a straight white man. Black Panther had Avengers' associations on its side, but it's also one of the Marvel series' most distinct entries. Bland teen rom-coms got a jolt of fresh blood with Love, Simon, which swapped out two boys for the usual boy/girl mechanism. Hong Kong got in on the act with the transgender drama Tracey, a modest success. And love it or hate it, only 40 percent of Crazy Rich Asians' audience was Asian-American on opening weekend, meaning the majority was not. Asian people are not the kiss of death for a movie. Bad filmmaking is.

(HK Edition 12/21/2018 page12)