There's a telling moment in Gore Verbinski's "The Lone Ranger" where a boy is playing with an electric train set and deliberately sends a train crashing off the table to the floor. He does this for no other reason than for the fun of it and because he can. When reprimanded by Tom Wilkinson's character, the boy indifferently says, "It's just a toy." It's an act that not only proxies Verbinski (who bookends "The Lone Ranger" with two train crashes of his own because he can, for the fun of it), but captures the child-like destructive fantasies now playing themselves out in the current wave of blockbuster filmmaking.
Mega-budget extravaganzas are now constructed entirely around handing filmmakers the CGI toy box and encouraging them to play smash-em-up. In 2013 in particular, movies like Verbinski's as well as "Fast and Furious 6," "Star Trek Into Darkness," "Man of Steel," "Pacific Rim" and "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" (regardless of their quality) felt like they were little more than extrapolations of child-like activities masquerading as feature films: Hot Wheels flung off ramps, robot and monster actions figures smashed together, cities built out of Lego solely to be stomped through.