Wonder vs Cool

1. does creating a sense of wonder depend on an innocence or a lack of sophistication on the part of the audience? as per yr star wars example, to people who saw the original star wars as kids it created a sense of wonder - but to older viewers perhaps it inspired a sense of cool (or at least recognition)- as it recalled the "space opera" serial films like buck rogers etc.

2. do filmmakers now aim low by assuming that the audience is sophisticated (is that a paradox?), and that creating a sense of wonder is impossible?

(Or is this 20/20 hindsight: am I now fooling myself into thinking I had that moment of recognition, based on having seen that image so many times since?)

(I'm kind of biased against this approach because I think it basically annihilated everything good in mainstream American comics, which a younger me used to draw a lot of wonder from.)

Maybe 'cool' in my schematic is a parasitic kind of 'wonder'. i.e. wonder is created in part through mystery. The explanation of mystery produces wonder of its own but it's a one-shot, killing part of the original wonder. Superman is exciting because of all the stories that haven't been told about him, not because of the vaguely drab ones that actually are. (This is pretty much what Fritz is saying on the Clones thread, I think).

(I'm really winging it on this thread BTW)

Now this is an interesting example -- having not seen the film (wild horses will not drag me to see a movie with Keanu Reeves as an action hero), this moment has already become sanctified, and doubtless I've run across shameless steals and rip-offs since. But having not seen said moment in and of itself...

This sentence is all style and no substance.

But here's the thing -- there's more than a little pop-cult in the originals as well (consider in the first film where the metal dice hanging from the equivalent of the rear-view mirror, which Chewbacca brushes against sitting in the Falcon's cockpit). LOTR does indeed avoid that mostly, but then again..."Nobody tosses a dwarf!"

Err so "cool" = I think A, B, or C will happen next and would be sort of shocked and confused if D-Z happened instead; "wonder" = I suppose A-M or so seem likely but I've given up thinking about it and am just along for the ride now.

(NB I think this is one the many reasons of why foreign films are popular with art-house crowds: if you're unfamiliar with some of the narrative formulas wherever the film is from, you're more likely to be thrust into that zone of just observing and reacting, as opposed to comfortably thinking out where the time-tested formulas could go next [which I guess I'm arguing here is what art-house audiences tend to want more]. Murder mysteries and "thrillers" actually constitute another response to this issue, insofar as they ask you to engage with the formula -- to be completely conscious and thinking about the connections between things -- and then they promise that they'll be able to surprise you regardless: this is sort of interactive meta- narrative, really!)