Inkheart insults your intelligence August 19, 2009
Posted by James D Hartland in Adaptation, Inkheart, Rants.1 comment so far
I sat down to watch the movie Inkheart last night, and by 45 minutes in I had seen enough of this mess of a movie to know it wasn’t up to much. But as I got to the ending I was utterly amazed at how terrible the story telling was, because the ending completely negates the whole previous 90 minutes.
Let me explain…
(BTW this post is Spoiler heavy, but as you won’t want to ever waste 90 minutes of your time watching this movie it’s OK)
Essentially the film is based on the premise that some people called Silver Tongues have the ability to make books come to life simply by reading them aloud. A baddie has escaped from a book and is now trying to control Silver Tongues to let him take over the real world. The Hero of the story (though I use that term loosely as one of the main problems of the film is it didn’t know who the protagonist was), is trying to get his wife back who was sucked into a book.
The problem with the ending is that once all hope is lost – all the good guys have been captured, the baddies have summoned a foul monster from a book, everything looks to be up shit creek – the girl in film, another Silver Tongue gets a pen and starts scribbling on the back of her arm, words to the effect of “All the bad guys turn to dust, all the bad things they have done in this world go back to normal, and the hero’s wife is returned to him.” She literally just writes that down, reads it out and then it all happens.
WTF??? If all a Silver Tongue needs to do is write on the back of their hand with a biro and then read it out we could have been saved so much trouble.
Scene 1: The Hero writes on a post-it note. “I hear a noise behind me. I turn around, and there standing in front of my very eyes, my darling wife, returned from the book.” The Hero grabs another post-it note “And all the bad guys die instantly cause they suck” The End
How can you have a movie where people are frantically running around trying to save the world and at any moment they could just write whatever they need and have it come to life, but none of them think to do that until the final sequence. As Brendan Fraser has had this ability his whole life then surely he has thought to test if that is a possibility at some point? Why doesn’t one of the other characters ask him if he can do it at any point during the whole movie?
The argument “Well you wouldn’t have a story if you did that” can only take you so far. The story at least needs some effing logic. Man this movie pissed me off by expecting the audience to be brain dead swamp dwellers.
Writing about this now has reminded me about Lord of the Rings and how people questioned why they didn’t just ride the Eagle across Middle Earth like they do on the way back. In a way it is the same problem, except, Inkheart is just 10 magnitudes more retarded. It is actually insulting to your intelligence, it really is. I think even little kids could pick up on this over sight.
The film is adapted from a book, so maybe the book suffers from the same problem, but either way, I could have solved this problem in less than 90 seconds in a development meeting…
The Girl who writes on the back of her arm at the end of the film only discovers she is a Silver Tongue half way through the story. So… You have a scene where you clearly state to the audience what the rules of the magic are, namely you can’t write just anything down and then read it, it has to be something read from a printed book.
Half way through the story the Girl discovers she is a silver tongue, and over the course of the film she begins to use her new found ability, but then at the end, with the shit about to hit the fan she discovers she is able to write the stuff on the back of her arm and read that, and everyone else is astounded as she is clearly the most powerful silver tongue ever to walk the earth. Ie. We set the ending up as a newly seen phenomenon that goes against the normal rules of the magic logic. She is way more powerful than these regular Silver Tongues who can only read from books.
Not only would this make the ending work but it would have finally established once and for all who the proper protagonist of the movie is – The Girl. The rewrites needed to the script to do this would be negligible, but would establish the entire logic which the movie is based on.
But then again -
As Empire’s review of the film points out, why don’t these Silver Tongues just bring James Bond or someone like that to life to help them? Even if we negate the whole “Scene 1 Post-it note” problem by doing what I describe above, you are still left with the problem that these heroes are running around when they could just read a book to summon an army to fight on their behalf.
There are moments in the story where they are locked away and don’t have any books with them which makes sense (One scene involves them sneaking a copy of The Wizard of Oz into the jail so they can use it to escape). But for every scene where they don’t have access to books there is another one where they do, and there’s no reason why they couldn’t just summon people from it to help them, but they never do.
I think to truly make the movie work you would need to solve that problem as well, which is more tricky than the ending because the whole premise of the story involves the books being read aloud and coming to life.
I think I would do it by somehow preventing the heroes from being able to invoke the Silver Tongue ability when they most need it – the Final Act.
As throughout most of the movie Brendan Fraser is the only silver tongue (The girl becomes one much later, and by that point she is already captured) all they would have needed to do is stop him from being able to use his powers at the appropriate moment in the film. Hell maybe he a sore throat and has lost his voice? Maybe it could be as simple as that? How about he cut/damaged his throat during the daring Wizard of Oz jail escape sequence earlier on, and now when they need to go confront the Bad guy they are going to have to do it without his Silver Tongue abilities as he can’t talk ???
Not only does that solve the logic problem but doesn’t that make them all the more heroic? The idea that they are going to try to stop the Bad guys knowing they are going have to do it with their bare hands with no extra help – more or less a suicide mission.
Point is, I don’t think anyone in the entire development process of this film thought about any of this stuff and that is pretty criminal if you ask me. If they use the excuse “Well it’s only a kids film and they won’t think about this stuff” then they are insulting their audience as well as being shit story tellers. With the amount of talent involved in this film someone somewhere should have known better.
/Rant
Shootingpeople missed the mark September 23, 2008
Posted by James D Hartland in Mailing List, Message Boards, Open Source, Rants, Shooting People, Talent Circle.4 comments
When I started this blog many moons ago I had a certain number of initial topics I wanted to blog about, stuff that had been on my mind for a while. One of those topics was how naff shootingpeople seemed to me. For whatever reason I never got around to writing that blog.
Well today I’m finally going to blog about them! Brought about by receiving yet another email from them asking me to stump up cash to join them.
Hello
You’re a part member of Shooting People, the largest international networking organisation dedicated to the support and promotion of independent filmmaking. There’s over 37,000 of us.
But you are missing out on the best we offer: you’re getting the Daily Bulletins late; you can’t post or comment; you can’t upload your films; other Members can’t find you; lots and lots.
For this week, I’m offering you a juicy discount of fifteen pounds if you upgrade today (that’s 50% off).
Click here and you’ll be rebilled for a whole year’s membership for only fifteen quid.
This offer is valid until 30 September 2008 only.
I look forward to welcoming you back.
The reason why I think shooting people is a bit naff is the whole site seemed to revolve around a mailing list and nothing much else. As someone who had been socialising on the internet since the very early days of it going mainstream, a mailing list alone just didn’t do enough for me, especially not when they expected you to pay a fee to post anything on that mailing list.
When I first encountered shootingpeople I had already been used to socialising in large online communities using message boards for many many years and social networking was already really big amongst teenagers. I was used to sites that let me post replies to people in near real time, have proper in depth conversations with other people, view people’s profiles, meet new people, talk to people in private outside of the forum threads, post images and other media, and generally socialise and have a community with people.
Shootingpeople offered nothing like that, it was just an email of plain text with a bunch of classified ads on it. And they wanted to charge £30 for it? Not a chance!
If you knew you were going to shoot X things a year, and that Shootingpeople would basically take care of getting a cast and crew for all those shoots then I guess it is a reasonable sum to pay. But I think they missed the boat entirely to become the de facto website that all film makers spend their days on. It sucks because I would have liked to use a website like that. I’m not saying they should have built some big complex social network, I’m just saying that an email mailing list as their primary community tool frankly isn’t good enough to make a compelling community based website from.
There’s no reason why they couldnt have at very least offered both a mailing list and a message board. That would have certainly stopped there being retarded posts totally unsuitable for a mailing list; such as the one that broke the camel’s back for me; some guy asking how to fix a bug on FCP. I thought why the hell am I willingly having my inbox spammed by some guy asking how to fix his computer, and then in the following days reading a bunch of people try to fix it for him. This is exactly the sort of stuff that message boards were designed to cater for.
Though as much as I am trashing that mailing list it did it seem to get the job done (sometimes). A friend of mine from London had a paid up membership and when he posted he needed crew for a movie in London he got literally 100s of replies, great! but when I needed crew for a shoot in the North East I used his account to post an ad and I got like 3 replies, and to think my friend had warned me I better set up a new email account to deal with the 100s of emails! So it was only any use to people in London it seemed!
Current times
I’ve not checked shootingpeople in years so they may well have a wonderful suite of community tools that allow you to interact with fellow film makers in all kinds of different ways, it might all be web 2.0 amazingness, but given the fact that no one really talks about shootingpeople (least not to me, someone who gave up caring about casts and crews years ago when I decided writing was for me) I’m guessing it hasn’t yet become the de facto site that every film maker checks religiously.
In fact I’m not even sure it’s all that popular at all any more, now you have Talent Circle which does much the same thing for free. TC came along and realised you could have a business model where you could have a mailing list of jobs and could offer that service without charging £30 a year for members. How shootingpeople ever got into a situation where they needed to charge that much I don’t know.
Even so, despite having the advantage of being free Talent Circle also suffers from not really offering enough stuff. Especially when you consider there are a number of free, open source solutions out there that allow just about anyone to create message boards, job boards, and even whole social networks. If you were that way inclined you could set up a website that offered more functionality than Talent Circle in a couple of days. In fact if I was to set up my own rival I would do away with the whole mailing list thing all together and just go with RSS feeds for everything. Anyone wanna be my business parter and do this? 
Actually to be fair, it looks like Talent Circle is currently in the process of introducing a bunch new features.
But yeah, it pains me to think that shooting people had the opportunity to do something truly great and they never really seemed to have the vision to do it. They should have become the de facto website for anyone wanting to get into film work and they blew it. Hopefully they can add more features to the website over time and make it compelling for the next generation of up and coming film makers.
I ain’t no stinking writer August 24, 2008
Posted by James D Hartland in Mastodon, Novels, Old People, Poetry, Prose, Rants, Super Mario, Theatre.add a comment
Whenever I go to writing seminars it seems like a large proportion of the writers there are not like me. They are writers. Like proper writers.
They are the kind of people who tell you how much they love writing and how they have written a few novels and a couple of plays including a radio play that was played on BBC Radio and they are now trying their hand at writing for television. I’m completely not like that.
I don’t write because I have this love of writing, for me it’s not like after finishing my next feature film I’m gunna try my hand at writing a book, or once I get bored of writing books I’ll join a poetry group. Even when I was advised I should try to get some theatre writing experience to improve my career prospects as a screenwriter I wasn’t interested.
I am not a writer. I am someone who makes films and TV shows.
For me a screenplay is a means to an end. It just happens to be the way in which I contribute to the film making process in the same way a cinematographer happens to uses lights to contribute. I am just using words on a piece of paper to describe what happens on the screen rather than filming the scenes or editing them together. I am a film maker.
I don’t get excited about the possibilities of working in other mediums because it’s cinematic story telling that I love. To quote myself from an older blog entry…
As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to realise that film is far more than just cool, it’s the most expressive and expansive medium out there. The way I can utilise elements of photography and theatre and music and story and sound and movement and colour to create meaning and emotion responses frankly leaves me in awe of the possibilities. To me, the best example of this is Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where nothing but white noise is used for several minutes to underscore a particular scene. The idea that white noise can put me on the edge of my seat (as it indeed did) sums up to me the idea that film has infinitely more potential to create emotion and engage directly with an audience than any other art form.
Can these other writers genuinely say they are as passionate about film and TV as they are about books and theatre and all the other mediums they have tried their hand at before hand?
Even if they can, I still think we are worlds apart.
Why?
Because I grew up on pop culture and weird cult stuff.
I didn’t go to the theatre, I grew up on Schwarzenegger movies and playing Super Mario; and I didn’t read books as I was too busy reading obscure sites on the interwebs. The nearest I’ve ever gotten to literary classic like Moby Dick is listening to Mastodon’s critically acclaimed prog sludgecore album Leviathan, a concept album based around the book.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I am only interested in writing brain-dead genre movies and these people are only interested in writing arty farty arthouse crap, but we do approach art from completely different worlds.
Of course my world is better, because it’s forward thinking and hip, rather than the stuffy old traditionalists who are out of touch with what really defines modern culture
But yeah, I’m not really a writer, I’m a film maker who writes.
Paul Abbott, writing genius and time traveler July 12, 2008
Posted by James D Hartland in BBC Writer's Room, Northern Screenwriter Conference, Paul Abbot, Paul Abbott, Quotes, Rants, Rewriting.1 comment so far
I’ve been to a few BBC Writer’s Room events in the past year and they always quote this thing Paul Abbott said.
Writing is rewriting
Not only is this quote attributed to him up on their website, but it’s also printed on the little postcards and booklets they give you when you go to any of their events, and at the Northern Screenwriters Conference a woman from the Writer’s Room talked about Paul Abbott using this phrase in such a way that if you didn’t know better you would think he invented it.
I don’t want to live up to my reputation as a moaning git, but come on. How can you possibly attribute the oldest quote about writing in the entire universe to Paul Abbott? It always bugs me when I ever see this printed on the Writer’s Room stuff. He did not coin this phrase. OK so he might have said it once, hell he might say it all the freaking time, but does the guy really need his name under the quote? Do the BBC think that unless its attributed to someone we have heard of we wont believe it?
Everytime I see it I just wanna say “Paul Abbott did not coin that phrase!!!”
I did a quick google to find out who was the first person to use this phrase as I’m sure it was Hemingway or some one like that back in the day. I couldnt find a definitive answer, so if someone else knows who said it first please leave a comment.
What I do know though is unless Paul Abbott has a time machine he didn’t say it first!
Of course I’m sure if you actually met Paul Abbott he would be the first to say that this is an age old phrase, which just makes the Writer’s Room quote seem all the more daft.
/End Rant.
A rant by a cynical and bitter writer about the injustices in the world after someone failed to recognise his genius May 10, 2008
Posted by James D Hartland in BBC, BBC Writer's Room, Ensemble, North East Voices, Northern Voices, Rants, Rejection, Shameless, TV, Training.3 comments
Being able to take rejection is one of the best skills you can have as a writer, because if there’s one thing you can be guaranteed it is that you will be rejected a lot.
When ever I hear writers moaning about the rejection they just got I always have serious doubts over their future in the industry, because as much as anything becoming a successful writer is about getting through all the initial rejection without going insane or giving up. One of the best compliments I’ve ever been given is being told that I seemed like the kinda guy who would never get disheartened by rejection.
I guess that is somewhat of a disclaimer because the rest of this blog is about my latest rejection and how lame it seems. I just wanna make it clear that I’m not one to moan about rejection normally, but for some reason I felt compelled to blog about this one and get it off my chest. So given this is a bit of a rant I may well sound a bit bitter and like I am complaining over nothing.
OK, so it goes like this…
I applied for the BBC training scheme called North East Voices. The application process involved writing a short logline for an original TV drama and then writing a one page synopsis of the drama. In addition to this you then had to submit a writing sample of 30 to 60 pages.
The idea I had pitched was an ensemble drama featuring 8 principle characters as well as a whole community of other characters. Think something like Shameless where is has the central family and then also has the neighbours, and the people at the pub and the corner shop, and other families, and the police and and and…. My idea wasn’t quite that big, but it was definitely an ensemble drama set in a certain large community.
So basically I had this problem of how on earth do I set that up with just one side of A4 to do it.
I’ll be honest, having never pitched an ensemble TV drama before I was a bit at a loss as to which way to set up all these different people in a way that is both clear to read and still engaging, but to do it on one single page of A4? Ouch!! It would be hard enough if I had as many pages as I needed, but 1 was gunna be hard.
I decided that since my 8 characters were forced together by outside circumstances and forced to live together that the best option would be just to set up all the main character’s and their one or two inherent flaws or quirks which would leave the reader wanting more (or so was the idea).
Eg. A had this super chavy character who was an academic genius to the bemusement of her chavy parents who can’t understand how she ended up so smart, and despite being a genius this girl spends most of her time getting into fights and going shop lifting with the chavy friends she grew up with on her estate. I ended it by saying something like “Her problem is whether she will manage to stay out of trouble long enough to graduate”.
I was kinda aware that I hadn’t really gone into the specifics of how any of these stories might develop over the series, I was instead trying to set up 8 really interesting premises that interweaved with each other that you would want to know more about. I couldnt see any other way to do it on a single side of A4.
So off I sent my application, not entirely happy but quietly confident.
Alas, I ended up only making the “long short list”. One of the perks however of being on this long short list is they gave you written feedback on your idea rather than a stock no thank you letter.
I got the feedback in a letter today and reading it gave me with no surprises over their main criticism…
The synopsis resembles a list of character bios, rather than an outline of how the series might be sustained by developing interviewing and resolving distinct character journeys.
So I guess the flaw I knew I had before I applied was what eventually screwed me??
Well, in the next paragraph of the letter it goes on to say…
If the writer shies from developing the drama inherent in such a colourful ensemble, the series may be steered toward a “sketchier” feel that is likely to run out of steam and be less gripping as a result. How might the odd co-dependence between Jenna and her priest evolve, for example? Does John’s love for Frankie remain unexpressed? [edit - then it goes on to list a question for each of the characters I wrote about]
Bottom line then, I failed to give them what they wanted. What I wrote was too much setting up my really interesting characters and not enough of what then happens to those characters. I can’t expect them to just take a leap of faith and assume that I can write all these stories in a lovely overlapping interesting way just because I can set up some interesting characters…
but at the end of the day I just can’t see how I could have done all that on one side of A4! I filled the page just describing the characters, how am I expected to then tell you how each story progresses as well?
Sure I could have just bunged a sentance at the end of each character’s paragraph that crudely sums up where they are are at the end of the series, but that isn’t going to give you a sense of how the stories evolve either, plus some characters can’t really be summed up like that.
This is where I hold my hands up and say I don’t really know enough about TV show development. Maybe all TV shows are pitched on a single side of A4 and there is just a knack of getting an ensemble drama to fit? I just feel like had it been 2 pages rather than 1then I might have been able to explain some of the developments I have in mind for the things I set up.
Please BBC Writer’s Room, make it at least 2 pages next year. OK?
I guess I’m a bit miffed that my idea seems to have been rejected as much as anything because of the restriction of having to fit an entire TV series and all its developing character arcs on a single side of A4. It seems to be that the application process for North East Voices with its one page synopsis being everything is inherently biased towards shows that have a small selection of characters and more similar content from episode to episode (like a cop show that has the same formula each week), because surely if I had set up a show with 3 characters doing the same thing each week then it would be based purely on its potential rather that what is or isn’t shoehorned into the synopsis.
But then again, maybe I just plain suck and it is entirely possible to do all this on a single side of A4 but my suckyness prevents me? I’m totally open to the idea that maybe I just suck at this. Anyone out there is welcome to leave a comment saying I’m a synopsis writing retard, but if you do then please also tell me how I should have summed up a big ensemble drama on one page in a way that gets across all their individual character developments. I’m eager to learn!
That said, this was not the only reason my application failed. The other criticism was the fact my writing sample was a feature film aimed at the US Market and thus
it’s difficult to tell whether the writer will make the adjustment to a series that specifically targets British mores and humour
Yeah because being a gruff Northerner I can only write stuff for people in California!
I wonder if the tone was really any different or whether it was more that my feature is set in a US High School which is such an intrinsically American thing that he or she assumed there was no way it could be similar to something shown on British TV.
But hey, even though I disagree with their assumption that despite being a British writer I can’t write for a British audience, the point is the writing sample was different enough that it put doubts in their mind, and perhaps ultimately they would have given me the benefit of the doubt over my 1 page synopsis had my writing sample been a similar 60 minute TV show script to the one I was pitching.
I think in order to effectively pitch TV ideas I’m gunna have to develop some TV scripts to show people, because I can only see myself running into this problem again, even if the next feature film I use is set in England! So with this in mind I might actually continue developing this idea off my own back anyways.
Also, I guess if they run the scheme again next year I will be way more concious to make sure what ever I hand in gives some indication of how the stories will progress over time!
Anyways, rant over.
About Me – I used to mug old ladies – Film classifications October 22, 2007
Posted by James D Hartland in 80s Movies, About Me, Film Classification, Personal, Rants, Site News.1 comment so far
I had some time to kill this morning before leaving for a business meeting today so I decided I would finally do the About Me page on the blog. It’s not really that I’ve not had time to do it before now, but more that I didn’t know what to write.
I’ve decided to go for a very brief summery of how I got from being born to where I am now. I dunno if that’s the best way to tell things, but between the profile on the right hand side of my blog and my CV I felt like to do anything else would just be going over the same details again. It is what it is, if it’s crap I might change it some other time. Writing the little summery of my life did get me thinking though…
When I was a child I was allowed to watch many films regardless of their age classification so long as they weren’t exploitative or trashy. So like I could watch violent and gory movies, and movies with some sexual content, so long as they were part of a story; but where my parents would put their foot down would be a movie where the gore or sex was there purely to titillate.
When I inform people nowadays that my parents not only let me, but encouraged me to watch films which sometimes contained adult themes they are shocked. The idea that someone might let their 6 year old watch Robocop or something like that makes them think I had terribly irresponsible parents, and that I was probably running around a council estate mugging old ladies.
Fact is I come from a middle class family and I’ve never mugged an old lady in my life. And actually I consider myself lucky to have parents that encouraged me to take an interest in cinema rather than them just using films as a babysitter to get some piece and quiet.
Also what I find weird is that I can remember talking to my friends in the playground and on the way to school about these sorts of movies. My next door neighbour loved Robocop and Terminator, and my best friend thought Jean Claude van Damme movies were the greatest thing ever, and this was like when we 7 years old. I think pretty much everyone was watching these movies when I was a kid, cept for the kids who went to Sunday school.
So what has changed?
Are people way more educated about film classifications these days? Maybe it’s just the Nanny state syndrome kicking in?
Or has nothing changed, and it’s always been seen as bad parenting; it just so happens my world view is distorted by the fact all my friends at school came from equally debauched households? All I can say is my expriences growing up is worlds apart from this idea that showing kids 18 certificates is terrible and those who do it should be locked up.
Although perhaps this whole issue is a lot more complicated than we appreciate, because in some cases movies which didn’t affect me at all as a child now seem way more violent seeing them as an adult. So maybe to judge a film by our adult perspective is wrong?
One interesting example of someone else stating this same phenomena is with Jurrasic Park. The BBFC got quite a bit of controversy at the time over the rating of that movie as some felt that it was too scary for kids, and the BBFC basically said that kids see the movie differently from adults and thus we cant judge it from an adult perspective. It certainly never crossed my mind as an 8 year old that a T-Rex eating people was anything other than good wholesome adventure.
So maybe the reason I’m not screwed in the head after seeing all these movies is because kids don’t attach the same meaning to the images as adults?
Who knows. All I know is that if I had only been exposed to Disney movies as a child and I wasn’t encouraged to watch good movies regardless of their age limit then I probably wouldn’t be working in the film industry today.
Plus, I’d like to think that I’m a well rounded person who hasn’t been adversely affected by all these movies. Although I’ve got plenty time yet to go mug an old lady.
Spectacle over suspense September 14, 2007
Posted by James D Hartland in Horror, Rants, Suspense, Theory, Thriller.2 comments
I have this theory about summer blockbusters that I wanted to share with you guys and see if you agree.
People often talk about the sorry state of Hollywood blockbusters as evidence that movies are getting worse and while I would agree that the blockbusters are pretty crap at the moment, I wouldn’t say that movies in general are getting worse.
But lets address this specific point… why are the big action movies getting worse?
I think it can be summed up in one line… “Spectacle over suspense”
I believe that basically we have gone through a shift in the past few years where suspense and thrills which were once the dominant story tool in action movies has been replaced with a more less powerful one… spectacle.
Take Die Hard for example. That movie might have had the spectacle of the Nakatomi plaza blowing up, but it also has comedy, it has drama, and most importantly it has edge of your seat suspense. It has actual proper engaging story telling in other words. I’d like to be able to say I’ve seen the new Die Hard out this summer so I can give you a definite before and after, but I’ve not seen the movie. Would I find more suspense than spectacle though? I doubt it.
Nowadays its all about spectacle. It’s how many things will blow up and fly across the screen in front of you. It’s how how many guys you can take out with one mid-air kung fu kick. It’s how close the CGI car can land next to the hero.And there in lies the problem I think. CGI.
Special effects have always been a driving force in marketing films and getting bums on seats, but with the advent of CGI film-makers now found themselves in a situation for the first time where apecial effects were so advanced they could do anything they wanted. The result of this was these effects sequences became even more pushed to the forefront of a films main selling points, while the aspects of traditional story telling that the film makers had previously relied on to engage an audience to the point that they would ignore the ropey model effects and guys in rubber suits was no longer needed.
And hence we find ourselves in a situation now where going to a big summer action movie like Transformers is basically akin to going to a firework display. It looks cool and it makes a bunch of noise and then you come home.
I’m not saying that every action movie that used to be made was great, a lot of them weren’t, and similarly I wouldn’t expect every action movie to come today to be great either. But there has definitely been a shift in the tone of action movies from thrills and suspense to pure spectacle, and there has also been a general lowering of the number of watchable action movies each year, and these factors are hardly unlinked.
The good news is I think audiences are already beginning to cotton onto the same fact that the film makers cottoned onto a few years back, which is that you can do anything with CGI, to the point that they becoming desensitised to all this stuff. “Big woop if something flies across the screen, its not even real”. So hopefully in a couple of years from now we find big action movies that rely on slow pacing and suspense rather than lots of thing going crash bang.
The reason I chose to write about this now though is not because I’ve just gotten back from a bunch of terrible action movies however, but rather because I am writing a horror feature film at the moment.
I have deliberately decided to think of my horror film almost as a thriller/edge of your seat suspense movie since I believe the days of ‘the masked killer’s POV shot looking through a window at the unbeknownst girl’ are behind us, and really what an audience would get a big kick out is a horror film which spends 90 minutes showing someone struggling to stay alive. And in that respect I have actually been studying movies like Die Hard just as much as I have been looking at 80s Slasher movies. Doing so really made me appreciate just what a powerful tool suspense can be. When John Maclaine is sneaking around desperate not to be discovered by the terrorists that film is infinitely more engaging than when he has to confront them with a gun or make something blow up.
Like I say, I think approaching a horror film with none stop suspense in mind is where its at; seeing someone desperate not to be discovered and to survive is way more engaging that seeing a monster stalk someone or someone having to fight the monster off.
