I’m not ashamed to admit my favorite movies are action movies. You know the ones. They have a lot of pretty stuff. Pretty stuff = sexy heroes, well choreographed fight and chase scenes, explosions, CGI…mmm…sparkly.
They don’t (typically) have a lot of plot. I should amend. They tend to have plot as in the main character is motivated to do something, a lot of things get blown up in the process, and then that thing is done.
You know what’s the best? Movies that are advertised as action/adventure to draw an audience, but turn out to be some really well-written, intense drama. Like a lot of Matt Damon movies. But…that is so totally a tangent.
They just don’t typically have the most solid or complex plots. If you’re paying attention to the film you might find yourself asking “but why did he/she just…I don’t…but why?”
And I expect that when I watch these movies. The ‘Underworld’ films? Loved them. The Avengers movies? Uh…duh? But every once in a while my expectation for the poorly plotted can still be let down.
The other night we watched Transformers 3. (I know, I just gave away the end of my rambling with that spoiler, I’m sorry). I fell asleep during 1, and I thought 2 met and almost exceeded my expectation for pretty with an almost functional underlying story.
And 3 had everything a story is supposed to have. A solid character arc, human suffering and triumph, a beginning, and a middle, and an…um…what comes last? An explosion, right ^_^. But the way it was pasted together was almost like someone took a series of index cards with different plot elements on them, dropped hundreds of them into a hat, and them picked out fifty and wrote the screenplay in the order they were drawn.
However, if I were to pick the story apart, on a technical level they followed the rules of story telling. There was pacing, and emotion, and pretties, and collagen, and conflict, and struggle, and resolution.
But there was so little logical progression. It was like a patchwork quilt made of fifty different kinds of fabric that didn’t quite hang right after the first time it was washed.
And the other analogy I had? It was like a first draft of a novel.
Which is why, at least I think, that we 1 – get feedback from people who aren’t us and 2 – revise our work. Next time you’re wondering if the pain of revision is worth the reward, just ask yourself if you’d like to be the next Transformers 3. Except without the paycheck 😉
And, if you’re Michael Bay and looking for your next movie idea, feel free to contact me. I have an entire USB drive full of first drafts I’d be happy to option. I’ll even let you add some robots and explosions to them if you’d like. No extra charge.
What was the last thing you either read or saw where the writing, good or bad, really struck a cord with you?
One thing I find with structure very often is that people can get into this thing of ‘you have to hit the structure points to succeed’ and all too often, the result of that is that it becomes obvious they’ve done it, so that nothing flows.
You’re so right about T3. I guess they think enough special effects will distract us from it being a rough draft of a story. Then again, isn’t that why the book is always better than the movie?
I thought the movie Immortals had a silly plot. The hero did nothing but get a lot of people killed including the gods. Very unsatifactory middle and ending.
Worst for me is a movie I once saw that apparently thought they’d save a buck on a consistency checker…a woman was killed in one scene, then sitting at her desk shortly after. And this was not a movie with undead in it. They just forgot which order they shot the scenes in, it seems.
Structure is a tool, a way to realize (for instance) why one’s middle is boring (no tentpole). Imposing structure over a story that just isn’t there won’t magically produce a story.
(“Once there was a boy who was short. He went on a magic quest. Partway through the quest, they had an epic airplane battle. Then, in the pit of despair, he found a magic ruby and defeated an evil sorcerer. And he was still short, but he saved his grandpa’s farm.” That has structure–kinda–but it has no resonance and makes no *sense*, which might be the problem.)