There's a curious essay by Dan Seitz over at Gamma Squad asking "Why We Define The 90s By Bad Movies." Here's Seitz:
Think about it. The ’90s contain a ton of bad movies. There’s the ascendance of, ick, Michael Bay. The only unreservedly good Batman movie during this era was a 1989 release. Devlin and Emmerich crashed and burned with Godzilla in 1998. Alien 3 crashed into theaters followed closely by Alien: Resurrection.
It’s not that there’s a particular lack of good movies from the ’90s, and I’m well aware every movie on this list has its defenders. But why do we talk, incessantly, about the bad ones?
Emphasis mine, because I'm having a bit of a hard time figuring out what he's on about here. I guess part of it is that Seitz works for a nerd-blog and nerd-movies were definitely hit and miss during this time period. It's true, there were, gasp, very few very good comic book films released in this time period. Batman Returns holds up weirdly well as an insane auteurist experiment and the first Blade (1998) flick set the stage for literally the entire Marvel Universe that we all know and love.* But yes, bat nipples and the like.
However, this was also the decade that brought us The Matrix, one of the most influential and best-loved sci-fi flicks of the last 30 years. It was the decade that brought us Being John Malkovich, a trippy pseudo-sci-fi flick still beloved by audiences. It was the decade that brought us The Fifth Element, a movie that has finally found an audience thanks to visionary programmers at HBO and TNT. It's easy to complain about Devlin and Emmerich's big miss, but who talks about Godzilla more than they talk about Independence Day or Stargate? Michael Bay may be a divisive figure, but The Rock and Armageddon were both Criterion-certified flicks and his most hated work, the Transformers films, are far removed from the 1990s. Alien 3 may have been a mess on theatrical release, but it has undergone a definite reappraisal thanks to the release of a pseudo-director's cut. Even if that weren't the case, though, who discusses that film more than, say, Fight Club, a masterpiece from the same director?
This is to say nothing of: Terminator 2: Judgment Day; Jurassic Park; 12 Monkeys; Contact; Starship Troopers; Galaxy Quest; Total Recall; Men in Black; Demolition Man; Star Trek: First Contact; Mars Attacks; Event Horizon; and Dark City. I would argue that all of these films garner more discussion (and certainly more viewings) today than the crap. Any decade that contains T2, Jurassic Park, and The Matrix—four star flicks that are still beloved, still watched, and still discussed today—couldn't have been a total write off.
The elephant in the room, of course, is Star Wars: Episode I. Fine, people hate The Phantom Menace. But it's worth acknowledging that most critics were cautiously optimistic on release and most fans more or less dug it. It wasn't until Episode II that the backlash really kicked in.
Once you venture beyond the nerd ghetto, however, I defy you to find a critic or an audience member who thinks of the 90s as some sort of barren wasteland—who defines the decade solely in terms of its misses. That's absurd. If anything, I've recently seen a ton of retrospectives celebrating the achievements of 1994 and 1999, two amazing years celebrating their 20th and 15th anniversary, respectively. The 1990s were the age of the pseudo-indies, when guys like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith could get a little studio money to make intensely personal flicks. Does anyone really discuss The Phantom Menace more than they discuss Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown? Or The Usual Suspects? Or The Shawshank Redemption or The Professional or Disney's animated renaissance or the ascendance of Paul Thomas Anderson or ...
I could go on. Like every other decade, the 1990s has plenty of dross. And, like every other decade, the 1990s has a legacy of greatness. I simply refuse to believe that there are a large number of people who define that decade by what was terrible rather than what was great.
/rant
*Granted, Blade isn't part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or tied to the X-Men or Spider-Man franchises. But it proved that a studio could spend some money on a property and earn it back. It's an under-appreciated flick, in terms of influence, at least.