by Christopher Barratt

Created on: January 03, 2010   Last Updated: January 04, 2010

I am not going to take this question as literally as it is asked and make pointless comparisons to athletes, although I have to agree that filmmakers or directors do tend to peak even though they do show brief glimpses of former glories in later life. As with many media productions, filmmakers or writers simply run out of ideas. And the fact that a director will always do the best work of their career with their first five or six movies proves this theory. Lets have a blast at the big boys from popular memory first shall we? Take Steven Spielberg, His early career was less than colourful with such duds as Firelight, Duel and the dreadful 1941, even though these films became cult classics, they were pretty rough and ready and lacked that Spielberg magic we have all come to know and love. That is until we arrive on Amity Island  fed to Jaws in 1975.

This film was genesis as far as the summer blockbuster was concerned and catapulted Spielberg to directorial stardom. This led to a run of movies that were his peak in the business. Starting with the very imaginative but slightly limp Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the initial Indiana Jones Trilogy, E.T. The Extraterrestrial, The Goonies, Jurassic Parks one and two, tackling racial debates in Armistad, and The Colour Purple, the brave use of black and white film in Shindlers List, the children’s classic Hook and the creation of magnificent battle realism for the war epic Saving private Ryan, to name but a few. These were great movies all, and a period where every great movie being released was directed by Steven Spielberg. However this marked, what I believe to be the end of a brilliant series of movies and therefore the pinnacle of his career.

Even though he had developed many movie making firsts, including mass use of CGI or computer generated imagery, in live action films, he was now playing catch up to newer, fresher and quicker directors who were using this technology better. Even so, he still shows flashes of brilliance with such movie gems as The Terminal and Munich. Here he continues to show his ability to tackle real events and still capture the essence of cinema. For me he is now a better producer of movies than a director as his last few outings in the directors chair such as A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the totally butt numbing Minority Report and the truly woeful War of the Worlds testify. These are works that are far from his best. Even the newest

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• Next Page >>