Exposition in media

After watching Cloverfield and 28 Weeks Later recently, I thought about my misgivings about SF films, and what's lacking in both film and comic book versions. Namely, the lack of exposition . You look at the height of the film genre, 1945 through 1975 and though most SF films have dubious quality, they often shared a genre formula; The Menace appears, proves it's threat by killing incidental characters, then those who perceive the threat set about learning how to control/destroy the threat. There's usually an exposition lecture explaining how the threat came about, and what it could mean, if unchecked... Films like The Thing from Another World, Forbidden Planet, Earth vs. The Spider, Creature from the Black Lagoon, even The Day the Earth Stood Still shared this common DNA. The time-tested formula extended as far as Phase IV. The first challenge to this formula wasn't Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green,Fahrenhiet 451, or Star Wars, all of which relied on exposition in a modified context. Nor would it properly be considered the movie-as-video-game genre that popped up during the 80s and 90s (though I have more to say about this later...). Instead, you have to look at George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, which turned the formula on it's ear. He stuck to the formula, only to reject it outright as unnecessary. When the audience is given a seeming expositionary moment, it's ultimately saying: "I don't know why this is happening. It just is." This gives us the SF film as disaster flick genre. This approach works well with the modern audience's experience of films as video games; The audience member is "embedded" in the story, a first person "shooter", as it were. Looking at 28 Days Later, Cloverfield, and the remake of Dawn of the Dead gives you the same sort of experience as playing Final Fantasy or Doom. Little or no exposition is necessary. There's the threat, and you either run from it or fight it. Indeed, the only real difference between the three films is Cloverfield's conceit of the entire film being an impossibly long video log of events... Exposition often takes one out of the story, because it usually takes form as a lecture of some sort. In literature, it works fairly well, as you have no real sense of time being spent. But in visual media, it's very different trying to hold the audiences' attention (especially with the ticking clock of a motion picture). Some times, the visual medium uses representations of the exposition to enhance the discussion (as in the film of ant colonies in Them!) with mixed results. It may not be only the audience that is unable to process an exposition, though. In fact, while an audience may be receptive of such moments, the film's director may be the one at fault.I highly suspect that the glaring flaw in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was Kubrick's trying to cover too much ground too fast. He didn't allow room for expositions to make sense of what was presented. Today's directors may just want to stick with the characters and the action, and leave the explanations ambiguous for reasons of their own (either as allegory for current events, or simply due to ADD. And yes, I'm talking to you, Michael Bay...). Comic books and Graphic Novels, though as visually driven as film, are closer to their pure literary cousins. Exposition ought to be easier for them. But, either the creators aren't well informed enough to create believable expositions, or they simply aren't familiar enough with the literary device to make them work. And there are often limitations of panel space to consider...